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Chapter 1. Art Historical Scholarship
is not one that can be confined to the art museum.6 Through this argument, he implies that the museum is an institution that draws this distinction by consciously housing high art, and thereby relegating low art to the mundane world (or perhaps a museum of natural history). This lack of distinction between practical art and art for art’s sake in Islamic art is important because it is a product of the theory that all art is a creative manifestation of remembrance of God; thus, all art is for God’s sake and, in that sense, “practical.” A piece of art, then, is not understood in the context of other artworks that might share similar formal qualities, but it is understood in the context of an idealized understanding of a materialized Islamic essence. It is this “Islamic essence” that the perennialists take to be timeless. ‘Ali explains how Islamic art particularly achieves this relationship with spirituality, arguing, “Accordingly, Islamic aesthetics seek to represent the spiritual and nonphysical qualities of what is depicted while taking into account the natural harmony and balance within and without the art work. Thus by totally ignoring the imitation of nature, art is freed from the confines of its period and is rendered timeless.”7 This conception of artwork is removes considerations of motive, intention and patronage from the realm of the study of Islamic art. Again, unlike Western-concieved notions of art, the perennialist notion resists identifying influences or formal movements of art; this is justified by not only the lack of differentiation in perennialist art historical discourse, but also here by the notion of timelessness. The implications of ahistorical art are far reaching in that sociopolitical history becomes a story that could be told alongside an artwork or building, but it is a story that does not affect the artwork in any significant way. As such, art becomes proof of the sacred, a “hierophany” in Eliade’s terms.8 Problems such as the sociopolitical reasons that an architect chose particular Qur’anic quotations for mosque epigraphy become irrelevant, except insofar as Qur’anic epigraphy is understood, in general, to be a remembrance of God. “The primordial creative act was at once the Primordial Word which is the origin of all sound and of the Noble Quran as a sonoral universe, the primal Point which is the origin of the sacred calligraphy that is the visual embodiment of the Sacred Word,” Nasr states.9 Nasr argues that the Qur’an was a moment of connection to the “Primordial Word,” which is to say a return to the timeless sacred. The art of calligraphy, then, is in its every iteration, a re-Creation. Emphasis, then, is placed not on the formal qualities (such as color, line quality, and composition) of calligraphy as an art form, but on the reflection, the hierophany, of a perfect, primordial form. In a separate essay, Nasr states, 6
Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality, 64. ‘Ali, What is Islamic Art?, 35. 8 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 12. 9 Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality, 17. 7