Chapter 7examines the trope of the ephemeral image, transcended on
the journey to truth. Examples include stories of identifying portraits of
Alexander and the Prophet Muhammad, portraits which identify the
beloved as in Nizami’sShirin and Khosrau, the visionary journeys of
the Prophet Muhammad, the dream in the Cave of the Seven Sleepers,
and the story of the three princes and the gallery of paintings in the
Fortress of Form,first related by Jalal al-Din Rumi. These stories articu-
late the theme of the image as both structuring and limiting our concep-
tions of the world.
In contrast to the transcendent image that elides idolatry by disappear-
ing, the transgressive image enables the believer to transcend the self
through sinful peril. Through the Abrahamic romance of the Prophet
Joseph and Zuleikha transformed from Judaic and Islamic exegesis to
poetry, and Attar’s tale of Shaykh San’an inLanguage of the Birds,
Chapter 8explores the transgressive image. It then contrasts the mystical,
humanizing interpretation embodied in these tales with a sociosexual
interpretation of the same romance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Europe.
Often conceived as the abstract counterpoint to the supposedly absent
representational image, geometry suffuses visual cultures of the Islamic
world.Chapter 9examines its theorization in relation to legacies of Sufi
cosmology and music. While often contrasted with European representa-
tional traditions, the geometry of Islamic pattern is, like perspective, an
optical device structuring surface treatment. Yet far from being merely
a representational tool, perspective has become a dominant metaphor for
many aspects of modern subjectivity, including rationalism, mastery, and
domination. What, then, does it mean to lack perspective? To answer this
question,Chapter 10reevaluates European perspectivalism by tracing the
distinction between perspective as a painting technique and its philoso-
phical association with subjectivity from the Renaissance to modernity.
Using the paradigms developed in thefirst ten chapters, the Conclusion
imagines an art history that relinquishes the perspectival paradigm of art
history in favor of a multifocal approach. Subjective, interested, transme-
dial, decentered, and atemporal, it offers an alternative paradigm through
which to apprehend the world. It suggests how the study of perceptual
cultures in Islamic thought can contribute not only to the study of Islamic
arts and cultures, but also to a more egalitarian epistemic configuration of
global art histories.
Any study of‘another’culture necessarily produces a mirror for that
conceived as our own. My hope is that the counterpoint that emerges
Islam, Poetry, and Perceptual Culture 31