1.2. The Cultural Relativists
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Clergy, community, and secularization are themes that Western-trained scholars have marked as “problems” thereby establishing Islam as “different,” precluding the possibility that Islam is more complex, and is indeed concerned with the individual and has its own means of dealing with the demands that are solved in Christianity by clerical institutions and secularization of the public sphere. The unfortunate result of cultural relativism has often been that scholars will accept the differences of a culture without critically engaging them. Islam, in this case, is othered and not taken seriously, but merely accepted as different. This type of perspective creates an intellectual divide in which scholars suggest that they cannot say much about the content of Islam or Islamic art because they are “outsiders.” In the field of religious studies, this is not a new issue. In fact, scholars have been debating it for years. Who is allowed to interpret religious materials? What is the relative importance of emic and etic perspectives? Is religion necessarily a distinct realm from, say, politics, culture or economics? If we accept that only individuals within a tradition can speak about their tradition, any work on religion will be in the category of something like theology. Religious scholars are generally hesitant to say that only outsiders can understand a religious tradition, as this would be to diminish the importance of an individual’s experience and suggest that religious people are delusional, ignorant, or lack perspective. A balance between these positions allows us to take seriously what individuals within a tradition say about their tradition and to take seriously the primary sources (in the form of literature, ritual and material culture that are accessible both to outsiders and those within the tradition), while at the same time engaging rather than othering the subject. Cultural relativist scholarship, however, errs on the side of refusing to engage a subject for fear that as outsiders we not only don’t “get it” but also cannot get it. This mindset leads to, in the case of scholarship on Islamic art, the over-emphasis of artist intention; we see this particularly in Grabar’s essay “What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?”53 Grabar, to his credit, recognizes the possibility that there is no Islamic art in the sense of a body of works connected by an Islamic essence.54 Ultimately, however, Grabar does affirm an Islamic structure, less because of an explicit theoretical conviction but through the implications of his other concerns and assertions.55 For example, Grabar’s apology for being a nonMuslim writing about Islamic art very clearly indicates both an assumption that there is 53
This essay was first published as “What Makes Islamic Art Islamic,” in AARP. The essay was then published, unchanged, in Islamic Art and Beyond. 54 Grabar, Dome of the Rock, 247. 55 In addition to the examples I will discuss in detail, Grabar talks about “inner characteristics of Islamic art” on page 247; the effect of the “deep egalitarianism of Islam” on page 249; and “Islamic culture” developing the tendency of aniconism on page 249.