Introduction: Historiography of Islamic art and architecture, 2012

This introduction to Islamic art historiography outlines the collection of articles contained in the present volume, and offers a brief account of the field of Islamic art history at a time when it has become increasingly reflexive, a trend that is indicated by important publications of the last decade. Barely a century old, academic Islamic art history owes its formation to several disparate ventures: principally, to private and public Western collection facilitated by colonial engagement in the Middle East, and to the emergence of academic art history from primarily German scholarship. As a result, Islamic art today is distributed around the globe, as well as in the collections and originary sites of the Islamic world itself. In addition, current geo-politics determines that Islamic art collections and teachers are now expected to explain and even represent Islam to the Western world, a point that has emerged in several papers in the volume.