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Chapter 1. Art Historical Scholarship
fundamentally different.19 Close readings of cultural relativist scholarship will reveal that the very premises of their definitions of Islamic art have assumed a definition of Islam; a definition that asserts that Islam is a consistent, pre-formed means of structuring identity and that Islam is “other” because of its supposed anti-secular and community-oriented nature. The question, ‘what makes Islamic art Islamic?’, assumes that Islam is an unchanging structure present in lives of people that causes them to act, think, and produce in a certain way. The assumptions leading to this question, however, are flawed and have not been critically addressed, causing the field of Islamic art to endlessly debate categorization without critically engaging content. While reacting to the old school of Orientalism, scholars like Ettinghausen, Hillenbrand, Grabar, Blair and Bloom engage in what I will call “cultural relativism.” These scholars are all Western-trained art historians who have studied with each other and have published together; they make up the bulk of contemporary Islamic art scholarship. While there are any number of scholars engaged in very narrow, specific fields, this group of scholars have published extensively and are engaged in the type of larger projects where the idea of “Islamic art” as a broad category is more important and more consciously engaged.20 Thus it will be these latter scholars that I will take as representative of what I call the cultural relativist school. I call this group of scholars the cultural relativists because the question mentioned earlier, ‘what makes Islamic art Islamic’ is indicative of a set of assumptions that leads these scholars to the self-gratifying conclusion that Islamic art is “different” than other forms of religious art. These assumptions include the assumption that Islam is a “way of life” and thus informs and can predict how Muslim individuals will think about and react to things. The quality difference in Islamic art is one that the cultural relativists ascribe to the particular cultural structure of Islam. The conclusion is self-gratifying in that Islamic art as a category separate and different from other categories of art must have some semblance of cohesion; that is, the art in the category “Islamic art,” must somehow 19
I make this distinction because any discussion of Orientalism is immediately reminiscent of Said’s Orientalism. Here I am not addressing an issue of power, which was particularly highlighted in Said’s argument, but the issue of “othering” that is one aspect of Orientalism. 20 Blair, Bloom, Grabar, and Ettinghausen published together in the two volume Pelican History of Art on Islamic art.They have also written innumerable catalogue essays for museum exhibitions, such as Blair and Bloom’s in Images of Paradise in Islamic Art. On the other hand, G¨ ulru Necipo˘glu’s The Age of Sinan and Annemarie Schimmel’s Calligraphy and Islamic Culture are seminal works in the narrower fields of the architecture and calligraphy, respectively; Necipo˘glu was a student of Grabar and Blair was a student of both Grabar and Schimmel. These are just a few examples of how interconnected this community of scholars is. In addition to publishing trends, we can see the overlap in scholarship in the footnote above where I talk about the basic geographic and chronologic bounds of Islamic art scholarship.