inadvertently perpetuates rather than disavows the persistent and troublesome
generalizations made by others. Such reviews suggest that the presentation of
artasametonymforcultureatlargefailswhensupplementedonlybyhistory.
Viewers need a lexicon of intrinsic meanings through which to engage with,
and not simply observe, worlds illegible to the modern viewer.
This book pursues a tactical alternative to integration, suggesting that it
is perfectly acceptable–perhaps even liberating –to be foreign and
heterogeneous. Or rather, it may ultimately be less alienating to enable
an apparent foreignness to undermine the norms that we take for granted
than to hold onto those norms even when the hegemonic powers they
uphold, such as the secularism of the nation-state, erode. Art cannot be
Islamic if the idea of art, and all the concepts associated with it, emerge
from a framework that excludes Islam.
But what is Islam? It would be futile to claim to represent an authentic
Islamic voice in contrast to a colonial one, pitting one modern essentialism
against another. Rather, this book aims to dethrone the modern legitima-
tion of certain types of knowledge governing these definitions. Excavating
past texts, it unearths traces of an episteme distinct from that of modernity.
Historical Islam is informed by and informs the episteme explored in this
book, but their limits are not congruent. Each exceeds the other. Informed
by numerous interacting discourses, the episteme exceeds the boundaries
of any particular faith. Diverse in its interpretations and ultimately
reframed through modernity, Islam likewise exceeds the episteme. Rather
than describing an Islamic essence, the episteme explored in this book
offers a window to the premodern. In doing so, it critiques modern
empiricism as the most reliable paradigm of knowledge as applied to any
extra-modern framework, including the pasts the West has appropriated as
its own. Regardless of nation, gender, or creed, we are all moderns now.^29
0.3 The Paradox of Islamic Art
The need to fashion an‘Islamic’art history emerges against the backdrop of
a longstanding discomfort with thefield’s name, frequently expressed by its
practitioners. Regardless of how much it develops new arenas of investiga-
tion, the overview remains uneasy, and often avoided, in favor of in-depth
studies. As Jas Elsner points out, without a governing narrative even the
most accurate specialist studies can fall into a methodological fallacy in
(^29) Akkach,2005a: xxiii.
The Paradox of Islamic Art 15