220 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
and of subsequent Muslim empires down to the Ottomans. He penned a
surprisingly positive assessment of both Muhammad and the Qurʾān. This
latter part of Gibbon’s masterpiece is remarkably little read or appreciated,
even by John Pocock in his monumental survey of Gibbon’s thought world,
Barbarism and religion. The sources, purpose, and repercussions of the treat-
ment of Islam in Decline and fall are in need of examination.
Chapter 2
Along with the work of Pourshariati, another major attempt to draw the Sa-
sanids into the wider picture is Matthew Canepa’s The two eyes of the earth:
Art and ritual of kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley 2009),
examining the impact of Sasanid art on East Rome from the third to the
seventh centuries, and the mechanisms—commercial, diplomatic, and mili-
tary—by which artistic motifs and styles were transmitted. Raised awareness
of the artistic cross- pollination that existed between these two pre- Islamic
empires ought to help Islamic art historians understand better the highly di-
verse origins of Umayyad art in particular. My own discussion of Umayyad
style in chapter 10 of Qusayr ʿAmra (2004) treated its Roman and Iranian
antecedents too much as separate strands and took insufficiently into ac-
count the interactions Canepa has now described.
As I argue in chapter 2, art historians have played a leading role in foster-
ing contacts between late antique and early Islamic studies. It is important,
though, to understand the tensions between formalism and cultural, intel-
lectual, and literary approaches to art and architecture. A major figure on the
formalist side was Josef Strzygowski, and my engagement with him has made
me aware how little we understand his controversial career and thought. Re-
jection of Strzygowski’s racial theories has developed into a damnatio memo-
riae extremely damaging to the study of art historiography. There are signs
this is lifting, which offers an opportunity to a courageous researcher.
Strzygowski’s highlighting of the vigor of Oriental traditions called in
question the “decline” that dominated Romanocentric perceptions of late
Antiquity. There we see of course the influence of Gibbon—but, by contrast,
one is struck how little Gibbon treats the Muslim world in terms of decline.
The eclipse of the Abbasids is forgotten amid the magnificence of the Seljuks
and the Ottomans’ aspiration to deck themselves “with the trophies of the
new and the ancient Rome” (68:3.976). Still, decline is the dominant theme
in subsequent European histories of Islam, and is only now beginning to be
questioned. The habit of “setting up” classical Islam by making it a Golden
Age, and then writing off the next millennium of its history, conveys a rather
obvious political subtext ripe for more systematic and incisive exposure than
it has yet received (even by Edward Said).