26
Chapter 1. Art Historical Scholarship
Islamic-ness to Islamic art (although what this structure might be is not specified) and a cultural relativist stance regarding “Islamic culture.” Another cautionary word is also an apology. The views and opinions which are here expressed were developed as a Western observer sought to understand an art. They do not derive from a Muslim experience, and it is indeed a problem faced by nearly all scholars in the field that neither the traditional nor the contemporary Muslim cultures have so far provided the kind of intellectual and verbal framework which facilitated the perception of Chinese or Japanese art for those who are outside the culture itself. . . . All of us will greatly profit from contemporary Muslim meditations on Islamic art as well as from more practical investigations into the psychological and emotional attitudes of the modern Near East toward its own visual expression. For the time being, we have no choice but to understand the Muslim tradition of art from the outside and for this reason whatever follows is still preliminary.56 Grabar sets up an outside versus inside, observer versus observed, dynamic in which he situates himself, and all non-Muslim scholars, by definition on the outside.57 NonMuslim scholars become voyeuristic, or passive observers, looking in on a culture that they cannot, or will not, engage. Grabar’s argument is particularly interesting because it admits the defeat of both art and art history by suggesting that neither could have anything meaningful to say on their own, that is, without the aid of insider information. Although historical and literary sources can add great depth to art historical analysis, many subfields of art history get by with the help of few or no written sources expressing artistic intention, with regards to Grabar’s lament of a lack of Islamic theorizing on art and aesthetics, we must also remember that not all fields need to be individually theorized by separate cultures.Which is to say that theories of politics, economy and psychology, to name a few, have been widely applied to societies in times and places that far overreach the geographic and temporal bounds of where they were originally theorized. This is not to say that I believe there is necessarily one, universal theory of art or aesthetics, but would argue that theories about Islam (or Islamic art, culture, etc.) need not be necessarily be 56
Grabar, Dome of the Rock, 248. Shelia Blair writes similarly, “I write this survey of Islamic calligraphy as an outsider. I was not raised writing Arabic script, nor have I trained as a calligrapher. I am not a Muslim.” Both an apology, like Grabar’s comment, and an implicit, uncritical assertion of the right to use Western art historical methods, Blair’s statement reinforces the norm of scholarship on Islamic art rather than challenging it to approach the material in new ways to make this “problem” of the outsider less of a problem. See: Blair, Sheila. Islamic Calligraphy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xxvii. 57