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The Ka‘ba Orientations: Readings in Islam’s Ancient House, by Simon O’Meara; Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria , by Richard J. A. McGregor; and Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage , by Qaisra M. Khan

2023; College Art Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00043079.2023.2179330

1559-6478

Finbarr Barry Flood,

Ancient Egypt and Archaeology

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsFinbarr Barry FloodFinbarr Barry Flood is director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Recent work includes Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: Pèlerins, reliques, copies (Musée du Louvre/Hazan, 2019) and Tales Things Tell—Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke, University of Bern, which will be published in 2024 by Princeton University Press [Institute of Fine Arts, the James B. Duke House, 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075, barry.flood@nyu.edu]Notes1. The emergence of material religion as a field of inquiry is especially relevant. See the founding of the journal Material Religion in 2005 and the recent Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, founded in 2020.2. For example, Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Sydney: Power Publications, University of Sydney, 2017).3. Chief among them are juridical rulings seeking to regulate social practice by ruling on questions of permissibility in relation to the production, sale, or consumption of certain kinds of manufactured goods. For some recent attempts to demonstrate the utility of such sources for the history of material culture, see Leor Halevi, “Christian Impurity versus Economic Necessity: A Fifteenth-Century Fatwa on European Paper,” Speculum 83, no. 4 (2008): 917–45; Ruba Kana’an, “The de jure Artist of the Bobrinski Bucket: Production and Patronage of Pre-Mongol Metalwork in Khurasan and Transoxiana,” Islamic Law and Society 16, no. 2 (2009): 175–201; Finbarr Barry Flood, “Bodies, Books and Buildings: Economies of Ornament in Juridical Islam,” in Clothing Sacred Scriptures: Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Cultures, ed. David Ganz and Barbara Schellewald (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 49–68; and Corinne Mühlemann, “Made in the City of Baghdad? Medieval Textile Production and Pattern Notation Systems of Early Lampas Woven Silks,” Muqarnas 39 (2022): 1–21.4. Among them, Patricia L. Baker, Islam and the Religious Arts (London: Continuum, 2004); and Yousuf Saeed, Muslim Devotional Art in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012).5. See, for example, Wendy M. K. Shaw, What Is “Islamic” Art? Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Samer Akkach, ed., Naẓar: Vision, Belief, and Perception in Islamic Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2022).6. Cited in Michael Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage (New York: Grove, 1997), 378.7. Cited in Khan, Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage, 265.8. Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse: Éléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste (1933; Paris: Éditions Vincent, Fréal, 1964), 154.9. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3–41.10. A pioneering study is that of Ahmad Taymur Pasha, Al-Āthār al-nabawīyya (The prophetic relics) (Cairo: ʻĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1971). For recent works, see Brannon Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Josef W. Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power in Medieval Islam,” Past and Present 206, supp. 5 (2010): 97–120; Iman R. Abdulfattah, “Relics of the Prophet and Practices of His Veneration in Medieval Cairo,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 1, no. 1 (2014): 75–104; Anthony Cutler, “The Relics of Scholarship: On the Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation of Hallowed Remains in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, Early Islam, and the Medieval West,” in Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2015), 309–45; and Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).11. Muhammad Umar Memon, ed., Ibn Taymiyya’s Struggle against Popular Religion (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 313.12. Richard Ettinghausen, “Arabic Epigraphy: Communication or Symbolic Affirmation,” in Near Eastern Numismatics: Iconography, Epigraphy, and History; Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. D. K. Kouymjian (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1974), 297–311; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 47–118.13. For example, Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (Geneva: Skira, 1962), 119; and Şule Aksoy and Rachel Milstein, “A Collection of Thirteenth-Century Illustrated Hajj Certificates,” in M. Uğur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift, ed. İrvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul: Sabanci University, 2000), 106, pl. 1. Also relevant is Elizabeth Fowden, “Shrines and Banners: Paleo-Muslims and Their Material Inheritance,” in Encompassing the Sacred in Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. L. Korn and Ç. İvren, Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und Archäologie 6 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2020), 5–23.14. Venetia Porter, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (London: British Museum Press), 2012; Venetia Porter and Liana Saif, eds., The Hajj: Collected Essays (London: British Museum Press, 2013); Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya and Cécile Bresc, Hajj: The Journey Through Art (Milan: Skira, 2013); Luitgard Mols and Marjo Buitelaar, Hajj: Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (Leiden: Sidestone, 2015).15. Khalili Collections, Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage, MSS 1288.16. Finbarr Barry Flood, Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’Islam: Pèlerins, reliques et copies (Paris: Hazan/Musée du Louvre, 2019 ), 141–207.17. Flood, 35–67.18. See also the dismissal, as false or misleading, of the interpretations of previous scholars regarding the interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi’s theophanic rapture and its relation to the spatial organization of the Meccan sanctuary (Ka‘ba Orientations, 97).19. Qur’an 22:46.20. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1990), 59–60.21. On at least one occasion, a Sasanian gold brazier in use in the Ka‘ba was reportedly smashed for fear that it would transform the shrine into a Zoroastrian fire temple. Aḥmad ibn al-Rashid Ibn al-Zubayr, Book of Gifts and Rarities / Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa al-Tuḥaf, ed. and trans. Ghada Hijjawi Qaddumi, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 29 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 186.22. Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For a critique, see Samer Akkach, “Neo-Eurocentrism and Science: Implications for the Historiography of Islamic Art and Architecture,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 10, no. 1 (2021): 206–7.23. Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr, Riḥla, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1907), 85; Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr: Being the Chronicle of a Mediaeval Spanish Moor Concerning His Journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the Holy Cities of Arabia, Baghdad the City of Caliphs, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 80.24. Ibn Jubayr, Riḥla, 90, 166; Ibn Jubayr, Travels, 85, 170.25. Flood, Technologies, 157–72.26. Typified by the rather condescending comments of the eleventh-century polymath Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni regarding the tendency of the uneducated masses to kiss and rub images of the Ka‘ba and the Prophet. See Kitāb fī tah.qīq mā li’l-Hind (Hyderabad: Osmania Publications Bureau, 1958), 84–85; and Edward C. Sachau, Al-Beruni’s India (1910; Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1989), 1:111.27. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22–23. For Freud, seeing was the civilized way of touching, a sublimation that was central not only to the possibility of artistic creation but also to the development of civilization, even as it was to the healthy human psyche.28. But see Thomas Bauer, A Culture of Ambiguity: A Cultural History of Islam, trans. Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).29. Shaw, What Is “Islamic” Art, 29.30. Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). On the tension between the lack of homogeneity and the aspiration to coherence in Islamic traditions, see Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): 1–30; and for reflections of this tension in the historiography of Islamic art history, see Avinoam Shalem, “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Islamic Art’? A Plea for the Critical Rewriting of the History of the Arts of Islam,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1–18.31. Carla Power, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” Time, November 14, 2014, https://time.com/3584585/saudi-arabia-bulldozes-over-its-heritage/; Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 165–207; Ahmed, What Is Islam, 532–37.32. Web Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 1 (2008): S124. See also John E. Cort, “Art, Religion, and Material Culture: Some Reflections on Method,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 3 (1996): 613–32.33. Al-hajj Mahmud Kati, Tarikh El-Fettach, trans. O. Houdas and M. Delafosse (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964), 222 (French), 122–23 (Arabic); O. Houdas, trans., Tarikh Es-Soudan (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1981), 91; Labelle Prussin, Hatumere: Islamic Design in West Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 149.