ABSTRACT

One might expect that just as monographs on Islamic history open with an excursus on the pre-Islamic Arabian background, so studies on Islamic material culture would follow suit. This is not, however, the case, for such works tend to assume that pre-Islamic Arabia was an aesthetic tabula rasa, that it did not possess ‘anything worthy of the name of architecture’, but was ‘an architectural vacuum’. It is emphasised that ‘the Arabs of Arabia had very few indigenous traditions of any significance’ and that ‘any modification of this impression of poverty in the artistic development of pre-Islamic Arabia is hardly likely to be significant’. Indeed it is pointed out that Islamic art was held back while the Muslims ruled from Arabia, for it was ‘an environment in which the visual arts . . . had no very significant role’.1