ABSTRACT
The introduction provides a rationale for the approach taken in the remainder of the book. Principally this is the decision to use fictional narratives as a means to examine the ways in which objects, representations and buildings might have been perceived when they were made or at some point in their later histories. It is argued that the sheer diversity of media typically encompassed by the label “Islamic art,” and the fact that pre-Modern Arabic and Persian sources do not tend to speak about a defined category of things as “art,” and still less as “masterpieces,” present significant difficulties for the creation of an agreed canon that can be dealt with in all survey texts. The introduction also notes that many books seek to delimit the geographical scope of the survey and arbitrarily halt the story of the development of Islamic art in c. 1800. In order to address these shortcomings, the introduction outlines the expanded geographical and spatial range of the present book, encompassing most regions of the Islamic world and a time period running from the seventh century to 2020 CE. The introduction describes the main materials and themes dealt with in the fifty chapters and the appendix. Finally, there is a discussion of the employment of narrative devices and characters from the famous Maqamat of al-Hariri, and the ways in which the present book diverges from this source text.
