Introduction

This chapter contends that understandings of Islamic art tend towards the impoverished in the modern age. Such studies generally contrast the virtues of classical forms of culture, produced in a time before colonialism, with Muslim artists’ need to respond to the west's revolutionary aesthetic power in the age of imperialism. These readings form one part of the complex of positions which cohere to generate a “normative” account of Islam. As Shahab Ahmed observed, this “Islam” often tended towards ahistoricism in its erasure of varieties of “being Islamic”; pincered into this position by complementary logics of Orientalism and defensive strategies designed to protect Islamic “orthodoxy.” Mohammed ʿAbduh's famous 1904 CE fatwā on “Images and Statues, Their Benefits and Legality” lies absolutely central to this reductive culture. Indeed, it was foundational in the sense that its authoritative legal and textual basis mapped out the contours of debates about art and its permissibility in the modern Islamic world. As a judgement, it could be said to have been colonial in the sense that its premises were based upon western understandings of art and were remarkably incurious and unconversant with the variety of historic and contemporary modes of Islamic visual expression.

Had Mohammed ʿAbduh looked as carefully at the images which he would have encountered in Cairo, Beirut and Tunis as he did at pictures in Paris and Palermo, he might have perceived that artistic cultures were just as alive in the Islamic world as they were in the west in the late-nineteenth century.