of situating them in a cosmology in which our mundane physical world is
but a small cross-section of creation.
Setting research in Islamic studies, literature, and art history in conver-
sation, this book attempts such theorization. Rather than understanding
objects as historical, this study renders them as suprahistorical, engaging
with the world not only in the physicality of their creation but within
a textuality transcending linear time and place. Rather than understanding
texts through their histories as manuscripts and translations, this approach
explores meanings reverberating across texts. Expanding the analyticfield
from the material to the immaterial, including musical, poetic, and dream
images, it shifts emphasis from production to reception. It encourages an
empirical engagement with sources that acknowledge not only the mean-
ings in, but also the emotional relationship with worlds of parable, imagi-
nation, and belief. It gives priority to a context of intellectual over political
history, and recognizes what we call religion as indivisible from intellectual
life preceding modern notions of secularism. It argues that there would be
no paradox to‘Islamic art’if both‘Islam’and‘art’were conceived with
greater nuance. The problem is not the poorfit of categories claiming their
own natural and innocent truth, but failure to recognize that the game of
categorize and conquer becomes an a priori affirmation of difference and
hierarchy.
Despite efforts to secularize Islamic art through nationalized, linguistic,
ethnic, and political parameters, I see no clearer way of comprehending the
connections within its vast diversity than through Islam. This should not
be understood as a claim that everything Islamic necessarily pertains to
religion, so much as that religion always pertains to how people engage
with the world and beyond. Rather than reifying an essential Islam, these
discourses expand and complicate our modern definitions of Islam in its
multiple interactions between the human, the worldly, and the divine. In
an era that pits increasingly global Islamic puritanism against increasingly
racialized Islamophobia, the legacy of Islamic art offers material signs for
Islam’s diverse and multivocal expressions.
Chapter 1discusses the supposed‘prohibition of the image’in Islam.
Explaining the logic of Islamic law through the history of its development
during thefirst centuries of Islam, it traces contemporary Islamic asser-
tions of the prohibition against an abridged history of Islamic legal inter-
pretation. It then examines how the sources through which European
scholars describe this ban conceive of images. Far from expressing the
same concerns about iconoclasm as in Abrahamic scripture, Islamic
sources reflect an understanding of mimesis deeply intertwined with
Islam, Poetry, and Perceptual Culture 29