From the Prophet to postmodernism? New world orders and the end of Islamic art

AbstractThis article addresses the peculiar fact that in most historical surveys the narrative Islamic history ends around 1800 CE. It considers the roots this idiosyncrasy and its implications for attempts to coopt or instrumentalize the objects Islamic in the decade after 2001 in discourses liberalism and tolerance in which an originary Islam was contrasted with modern more 'fundamentalist' understandings religious belief and practice. It explores contradictions inherent in related attempts to locate models for Muslim religious subjectivity in medieval artifacts secularized as objects.KeywordsIslamic art, museum, canon, nineteenth century, postcolonialism, Qajar artWhen I read Islam in the papers these days, I often feel I am reading museumized peoples. I feel I am reading people who are said not to make culture, except at the beginning creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic, act.Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim-an African PerspectiveThe breach between two kinds history, which treat either historical or modern art, and do this under different paradigms, no longer makes sense. We are just as poorly served by a rigid hermeneutic framework perpetuating a dogmatic strategy interpretation. It is perhaps more appropriate to regard the interrogation the medium art, historical man and his images the world, as a permanent experiment.Hans Belting, The End the History Art?Ever since its inception as a sub-field history, no one has been quite sure where to locate Islamic and architecture within its master narratives. In Sir Banister Fletcher's History Architecture (first published in 1896) Saracenic architecture belongs with the non-historical styles, branching (along with Byzantium) from the trunk a decidedly Eurocentric family tree somewhere between Rome and Romanesque.1 While (generally speaking) the century since Fletcher's tree was drafted has seen Islamic admitted into the exclusive club historical styles, the problem where to house it is no less current, a point reflected in its treatment within universal surveys art. In the eleventh edition Gardner's Art Through the Ages (2001), for example, the chapter on Islamic is located between Byzantium and Ancient America, whereas the subject is entirely absent from the sixth edition H.W. Janson's magisterial History Art published in the same year.2 The enquiring reader who, seeking even a trace Islamic culture in Janson's narrative, turns to the index will find only two entries there under the heading Islam: art of and threat to Europe from.3 The juxtaposition has a disquietingly contemporary resonance, although the Europe in question turns out to be that the ninth-century Carolingians. Nevertheless, the clear distinction between Europe/not Europe within which this single reference to Islam occurs reflects the frisson alterity upon which the reception and accommodation Islamic has been predicated historically.The problem where to locate Islamic stems, at least in part, from the peculiarities the term itself, an invented rubric that must accommodate a vast array artistic production stemming almost 1,400 years and spanning every continent.4 If artistic appreciation fulfills some the cultural functions religious adulation, then the position Islamic is particularly fraught, with the qualifying adjective caught between a religious identity and cultural identification. The resulting ambivalence is reflected not only in the lengthy apologias that accompany its use, but also in the tendency to oscillate between media-based and dynastic taxonomies, and in the appearance ethnically or regionally based surveys.5Many these qualities were manifest in a myriad new survey books on Islamic and architecture published in the United States and Europe in the decade between 1991 and 2001. …