What is 'Islamic' Art?

Investigating what is Islamic about Islamic art through analysis of the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufi texts, ancient philosophy, and a rich corpus of transcultural poetry, Shaw challenges the historicism, secularism, and regionalism of traditional art history with new means of perceiving Islamic painting, music, and geometric pattern.

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Revealing what is 'Islamic' in Islamic art, Shaw explores the perception of arts, including painting, music, and geometry through the discursive sphere of historical Islam including the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufism, ancient philosophy, and poetry. Emphasis on the experience of reception over the context of production enables a new approach, not only to Islam and its arts, but also as a decolonizing model for global approaches to art history. Shaw combines a concise introduction to Islamic intellectual history with a critique of the modern, secular, and European premises of disciplinary art history. Her meticulous interpretations of intertextual themes span antique philosophies, core religious and theological texts, and prominent prose and poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu that circulated across regions of Islamic hegemony from the eleventh century to the colonial and post-colonial contexts of the modern Middle East.