‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’, in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Reproduced by permission of the author and publishers.

Abstract

This article addresses the peculiar fact that in most art historical surveys the narrative of Islamic art history ends around 1800 CE. It considers the roots of this idiosyncrasy and its implications for attempts to coopt or instrumentalize the objects of Islamic art in the decade after 2001 in discourses of liberalism and tolerance in which an originary Islam was contrasted with modern more 'fundamentalist' understandings of religious belief and practice. It explores contradictions inherent in related attempts to locate models for Muslim religious subjectivity in medieval artefacts secularized as art objects