Contrary to Blair and Bloom’s assertion that meaning depends on homo-
geneity, traditions function in the intersections between diverse forms. Of
course Java and Baghdad are not interchangeable. Neither are ancient
Athens, Helsinki, and Naples, and yet we have no trouble understanding
them as part of a single‘Western’tradition.
These authors contrast the presumed deficiency of Islamic art against
a paradigmatic Western narrative. Yet this narrative only emerged through
modern theorizations teleologically projecting a cohesive Christian West.
Relationships of subject, representation, and taste became normalized in
the late eighteenth century, progress and positivism in the nineteenth,
perspective in the twentieth. If the Islamic world appears to lack compar-
able cohesion, it is not the failure of history so much as its narration.
Islamic art history has avoided thekind of overarching narration and
theorization necessary for a comparable grand narrative through recourse to
increasing empiricism and avoidance of the relationship between philosophy
and art.^38 Even as contemporary scholarship provides excitingly nuanced
clarityinitsscholarlyengagements,no essential revision to the overview has
emerged. One rationale for this void has been the risk of essentialism inherent
in defining Islam and Islamic culture despite its vast temporal, geographical,
and ethnic diversities. Grabar warns of a“denial of concrete scholarship which
has tended to break away from the idea of an‘Islamic’art and to dwell on
specific themes, countries, and periods, feeling that no generalization should
come before many studies of details.”^39 Four decades later, Islamic art histor-
ians still seem not to have amassed enough details to justify a broad cultural
basis unifying Islamic arts. Gülru Necipoğlu indicates that
there is little justification for positing a typical Islamic‘mindset,’transcending time
and space, that left its imprint on the modalities of the gaze. The predilection for
abstraction in the pictorial arts may have responded in part to religious constraints.
However,...this predilection was generally theorized as a matter of aesthetic
preference in the early modern literature on the visual arts, where the abstractive
inner gaze reigns supreme.^40
While she aims to avoid generalization by restricting discourse of the gaze
to“early modern literature”rather than to‘Islam,’she does not suggest
how such literature gains categorical cohesion. Warning that trans-
temporal projection runs the risk of conceiving of non-Western histories
as ahistorical, like Grabar she promotes specificity.^41 In the face of growing(^38) Necipoğlu, 2015 :56n. 35. (^39) Grabar, 1977 : 205. (^40) Necipoğlu, 2015 : 23.
(^41) Necipoğlu, 2015 : 28.
18 From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture