• 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

Commerce: coins, jewelry, and other goods

Though the gifts of ambassadors and rulers often included exquisite examples of artistic production, they frequently ended up in palace treasuries, or in royal menageries, as was the case not only with Charlemagne’s elephant, but also with a polar bear brought to Baghdad by European ambassadors in the thirteenth century for presentation to the caliph al–Mustansir (1226–1242). The more common mode of making the arts and crafts of Muslim societies known to a wider world was through commerce. This involved not only the goods being traded, but also the moneys used in the exchange. Tens of thousands of Muslim coins stamped with elaborate Arabic inscriptions have been found in Scandinavia and Poland, where they were often perforated, strung, and used as jewelry. Many Christian authorities, starting with King Offa of England in the eighth century and proceeding through various twelfth and thirteenth century rulers in Castile, Aragon, Norman Sicily, and Georgia, not to mention the Bishop of Maguelone in southern France, issued coins with Arabic inscriptions, sometimes with the words changed to convey Christian meanings, and sometimes not. ⁵ Though numismatists usually presume that these issues were intended for trade with Muslims, this has never been proven. But whether or not this was the case, it is apparent that the Arabic script was at that time a clear signifier of wealth and luxury, showing up not only on Christian coinage, but also on imported textiles used in European churches and sumptuous furnishings depicted by European artists in prosperous Italian and Dutch households.

The goods that arrived in Europe through normal commercial exchange ran the aesthetic gamut from fine textiles, glassware, carved ivory, metalwork, and ceramic vessels at the high end; through exotic spices transshipped through the Middle East; to basic commodities like sugar, paper, cotton goods, and, from the fifteenth century on, coffee. The measure of their appreciation was a wave of borrowing of a material variety that swept southern Europe from the twelfth century onward.

Venetians adopted sophisticated ceramic and glassmaking techniques and began to grow sugar on the Mediterranean islands that made up part of their seaborne empire.⁶ Cotton farming and weaving spread from Syria to Northern Italy. Paper mills gave Europe its own source of cheap writing materials just in time for the Gutenberg revolution. In short, alongside the well–known translation movement that restored Europe to its Greek heritage by way of Arabic intermediaries, there was a massive flow of lifestyle innovations from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the northern shore. The arts and styles of Muslim lands became so commonplace in major metropolitan centers that their point of origin lost any importance.

Further rounds of commerce affected different parts of Europe, particularly after 1600 and the advent of joint stock companies. High quality goods from the Muslim world—Persian rugs, Indian calicoes, Damascene swords—found ready markets even as European military and political force was making certain Muslim lands subject to imperialist control. European builders similarly benefited from a growing, if often imprecise, familiarity with Islamic architecture.

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⁵ For a sensible discussion of the King Offa dinar in the context of other Arabic script issues, see: www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMH–AQ–offa.htm

⁶ For extensive discussions of a variety of borrowed styles and practices see Rosamond E. Mack, From Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; and Venice and the Islamic World: 828–1797, op. cit.