Over a century of scholarship in Islamic art has produced numerous monographs, catalogues, and surveys; yet until recently, only a few studies have been published on the aesthetics of Islamic art. The last three decades, however, have seen several books and exhibitions that claim to deal with the “common principles,” “aesthetics,” and “philosophy” of Islamic art. Oliver Leaman’s book is both a contribution to and a critique of this particular tradition.

Although according to Leaman his book is intended to “establish a solid foundation for the aesthetics of Islamic art” (vii), the book is in fact not solely focused on art but addresses questions in philosophy, literature, and music as well. With nine chapters that include such titles as “Eleven Common Mistakes about Islamic Art,” “God as Creator, Calligraphy and Symbolism,” and “Home and Garden,” the book seems to serve more than anything as a receptacle for Leaman’s enormous erudition, which ranges over centuries, regions, languages, and academic fields. While sometimes enriching, this kind of erudition can equally be disorienting, as the author breathlessly moves within the span of a few pages between the tenth-century philosopher al-Farabi and the contemporary Syrian poet Adonis.

More disconcerting is the overall aggressive tone of this book and the author’s relentless attacks on historians and theorists of Islamic art: the positivists for losing sense of meaning, the phenomenologists for finding too much meaning, the historicists for steering too close to history, and the essentialists for abandoning history. For a book that claims to be introductory and foundational, this oppositional, even antagonistic, stance against nearly all the scholars it discusses is a serious problem. I have encountered nearly two dozen places where Leaman disparages other approaches and conclusions as “wrong,” “just wrong,” “entirely wrong,” “entirely implausible,” “patently false,” and so on.

Whereas a few of Leaman’s critiques are justified, many more seem to result from misreading the literature or, even more seriously, from the outright omission of some recent scholarship. For example, Leaman’s conclusion that the illegibility of certain Islamic inscriptions on monuments and objects renders “the meaning of the text irrelevant” seriously trivializes a debate that has achieved a great deal of sophistication in recent years. Although most participants in this debate—including Oleg Grabar (The Mediation of Ornament, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), Irene Bierman (Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and the present author (The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001)—have tended to emphasize the semiotic function of Islamic inscriptions over their informational aspect, none would be so dismissive of their content. More generally, Leaman’s statement contradicts the consistent sense of decorum that dictated the use of most inscriptions on monuments and objects as well as the occasional specificity and intentionality of some inscriptions.

Curiously, the book itself is prone to some of the same pitfalls of which Leaman accuses others, pitfalls that could be attributed to its comprehensive sweep of all periods and regions of Islamic art and culture. This includes the use of non-contemporaneous, often much earlier philosophical or literary discourses to corroborate or reject various interpretations of Islamic art. For example, early philosophical treatises that are variously impacted by rationalist Mu‘tazili thought—including the works of al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and the Epistles of the Sincere Brethrens—cannot be uncritically applied to later periods of artistic production when this rationalist thought had been forcefully rejected and replaced by more dogmatic works of theology. This ahistorical position, which rests on assumptions of seamless continuities in Islamic art, has recently been criticized by Gülru Necipoglu (The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture, Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995) and myself (above), both of whom have highlighted the deep intellectual controversies and cultural disjunctions that characterize different epochs of Islamic art.

Having ridden roughshod through the literature of Islamic art, Leaman concludes his book in a series of soliloquies that conflate periods, mix up evidence, and reduce complex ideas to mere banalities. He even cautions against a contextual reading of Islamic art since that would hinder its aesthetic understanding, and artlessly advises in his last paragraph that “we should treat Islamic art as ordinary art.” Full of such non-sequiturs, which exist within a stockade of opposition, the book serves to enclose rather than open up the discourse on Islamic art.

Since this book is just the most recent of several unsatisfactory books that purport to offer a theory of Islamic aesthetics, one is left to wonder whether such a project is useful or even possible. With the exception of Grabar’s Mediation of Ornament, which is much more focused thematically and theoretically, nearly all these books have succumbed to facile ahistorical essentialism and a self-serving selection of evidence without really offering any new perspectives to historians of Islamic art. Far more effective have been recent works—for example, by D. Fairchild Ruggles (Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), F. Barry Flood (The Great Mosque of Damascus and the Making of an Umayyad Visual Culture, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), and Oya Pancaroglu (A World Unto Himself: The Rise of a New Human Image in the Late Seljuk Period, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2000)—that theorize from within a specific period or a body of related works without losing sight of the distinctiveness and specificity of the period or theme under consideration. One would therefore be well advised to look for these works and others mentioned in the review for aesthetic theories of Islamic art.