• Note from Founder and Director of NYU Center for Dialogues
• Introduction
• Changing impressions: Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas
• The Arts of Islam in the Eyes of the West: A Historical View
• Cultural exchanges: viewing history through gifts and commerce
• Gift exchanges: Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne
• Gift exchanges: Venice and the Ottoman Empire
• Commerce: coins, jewelry, and other goods
• Commerce: twentieth-century changes
• Creative Lives Under Changing Circumstances
• Early Muslim Society
• The Post-Mongol Muslim World
• The Early Modern Muslim World
• The Muslim World in 1900
• The Muslim World Today
• The Arts of Islam: A Brief History
• A. Poetry and Song
• B. Quranic Chant
• C. Calligraphy
• D. Belles Lettres
• E. Music and Dance
• F. Theater
• G. Painting, Sculpture, and Design
• H. Architecture
• Islamic Art Today
• Conclusion
• Recommended Further Reading
  General
• Poetry and Prose: Arabic
• Poetry and Prose: Persian
• Poetry and Prose: Turkish
• Poetry and Prose: Urdu
• Quranic Chant
• Music and Song
• Calligraphy
• Painting and Design
• Architecture
• Theater and Cinema
• Dance
• Videologue

THE ARTS OF ISLAM: A BRIEF HISTORY

Cultural developments that span fourteen centuries, scores of countries, and currently touch upon the lives of well over a billion people cannot be encapsulated in a few pages. Time and space, language and ethnicity, class and gender, genre and style all contribute a range of achievements that defy easy summary. In order to place the components of an arts festival into a meaningful historical context for an American audience, this brief account will track the development of the following art forms in the Islamic world:

A. Poetry and Song
B. Quranic Chant
C. Calligraphy
D. Belles Lettres
E. Music and Dance
F. Theater
G. Painting, Sculpture, and Design
H. Architecture

Though the average American is more likely to have had some exposure to Muslim visual arts, we will begin with the literary arts because they are the ones most deeply associated with the origins of the faith. So widely accepted is the general belief that Islamic societies are theologically opposed to depictions of living beings, that even knowledgeable people sometimes declare that the greatest arts of Islam are all verbal, or at most calligraphic or abstract in visual expression. This bias toward the verbal is sometimes attributed to the oral origin of the Quran, which is understood by Muslims to be God’s holy word. Others attribute it to the nomadic nature of Arab society in pre–Islamic times, in which poetry was, according to surviving documents, the sole recognized expression of the creative imagination. In either case, the visual forms that eventually became part of “Islamic art” are usually assumed to derive from forms that pre–existed in the lands that came under caliphal rule in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Since the fledgling state of archaeology in Saudi Arabia makes it difficult to reconstruct with any certainty the visual and social environment of Mecca and Medina in the time of the Prophet, we can only guess at any connections that might once have linked these locations with the architectural or ornamental traditions of earlier Arabian societies, that of Himyar in Yemen to the south, or that of the Nabataeans in Jordan to the north, or for that matter any other regional culture. It seems beyond question, however, that dance and song animated both settled and nomadic Arab societies of that time, as they still do in some tribal areas. These precursors of the song and dance traditions that have been collected in the field in modern times must be considered as underlying, to some extent, the poetic production that is recorded in early sources. One indication of this is that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina became the locus for the composition of wine songs during the first century of the caliphate, though these were disapproved of by pious Muslims.