What is Islamic Art?

with Wendy M. K. Shaw

hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan

| What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine.

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What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine.

Stream via SoundCloud 

Contributor Bios

Wendy M. K. Shaw (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) has served as a professor in the United States, Turkey, Switzerland, and Germany. She researches postcolonial art historiography and decolonial art history of the Islamic world and the modern Middle East. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Osmanlı Müzeleri (İletişim Yayınları, 2006), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), Osmanlı Resmi (Bozlu Sanat, 2022). What is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2019, Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 Iran Book Award), and Loving Writing (Routledge, 2021).

Zeinab Azarbadegan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the intersection of inter-imperial relations and history of science, technology, and medicine, in nineteenth century Ottoman Iraq

Credits

Episode No. 533
Release Date: 3 November 2022
Sound production by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: Nima JanMohammadi - Dastgah-i Shur, The Sounds of Tarab - Bowmazan Ya Mahaba Bi Kidude, Kamancha Sayat - Nova
Images and bibliography courtesy of Wendy M. K. Shaw

Further Listening

	Emine Fetvacı	222 1/27/16	Picturing History at the Ottoman Court
	Massumeh Farhad & Simon Rettig	297 2/10/ 17	Exploring the Art of the Qur'an
	Joshua White, Neelam Khoja, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Maryam Patton	482 12/10/20	Rumi's World The Making of the Islamic World
	Marina Rustow	522 3/1/22	Locating the Lost Islamic Archive
	Nir Shafir	400 2/2/19	Forging Islamic Science

Images

Madhi Khazanad, Plato Puts the Animals to Sleep with the Music of the Spheres, from the Khamsa by Nizami of Ganj, 1593-1595, The British Library, OR 12208, f.298r. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Joann Jacob von Sandrart, (Above) Zeuxis painting the portrait of Juno from the features of five different women; (below) Parrhasius deceives onlookers with a painting of a veil over a painting, and birds with a painting of grapes. Public Domain via Wellcome Collection
Anonymous, The Byzantine and Chinese Painters Vie in a Trial of Skill, from the Khamsa by Nizami of Ganj, Shiraz, Iran, 1449-50. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.228.3. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Select Bibliography

Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam?. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Graves, Margaret S. Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Gruber, Christiane J. The praiseworthy one: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic texts and images. Indiana University Press, 2018.

Puzon, Katarzyna, Sharon Macdonald, and Mirjam Shatanawi. Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities. Taylor and Francis, 2021.

Shaw, Wendy. "Islam and Art: An Overview." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2021). Open Access

Shaw, W.M.K. Islamic Geometries: Spiritual Affects Against a Secularist Grid. SOPHIA 61, 41–59 (2022). Open Access