Islamic art perceptual culture can do much more than indicate a shared
humanity that any non-racist never should have doubted in thefirst place.
It can represent the many ways in which the material world has interacted
with faith in cultures of Islam, and the difficulties of drawing boundaries
between faiths. It can do more than describe a culture; it can break through
the preconceptions conditioning a boundary between‘us’and‘them.’It
can communicate how people of faith engage with the world, and why this
has been important in the objects that we identify as Islamic art. It can
speak for an Islam with conceptual cohesion underlying diverse material
and ethereal manifestations. Above and beyond enhancing our under-
standing of an Islamic other, it can enable the sharing of ideas across
times and cultures, enriching the possibilities through which we moderns
apprehend our world.
The theorization of Islamic perceptual culture demonstrates the limita-
tions of the study of‘art’through the lens of‘history’not because Islam is
lacking in relation to disciplinary norms, but because these norms are
lacking in relation to Islam. Recognizing this, Necipoğlu points to the
possibility of discovering intrinsic terms through the study of metaphysical
discussions.
As in medieval Europe, which did not have an aesthetics independent of scholastic
philosophy, in the Islamic world concepts of beauty often were embedded in
metaphysical discussions. The relevance of such philosophical texts for architec-
tural and artisanal production has not yet been explored systematically.
Conceptual categories provided by Islamic intellectual history have been ignored
by art historians who focus on the hard date of archaeology, epigraphy, historical
sources, and standard religious texts. The positivist formal studies that dominate
thefield of Islamic art and architecture (which ultimately grew out of nineteenth-
century Orientalist archaeology and museology) treat buildings and objects as
items to be cataloged in terms of geographic regions, style, typology, inscriptions,
decorative techniques, and factual data on artists and patrons. The few interpretive
studies emphasize the political and ideological contexts of art and architecture,
largely overlooking more elusive questions about aesthetic philosophy.^74
Similarly recognizing the insufficiencies of post-Enlightenment empiri-
cism, Persis Berlekamp suggests that“in the medieval Islamic milieu,
ancient images, whether replicas or originals, were conceptually linked
with mutability–not just of time, but of cosmic space and hierarchy.”^75
This does not mean that objects lacked a physical history, but that this
history was not necessarily understood as the only or most meaningful way(^74) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 185–186. (^75) Berlekamp, 2011 : 76.
28 From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture