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LACMA Artifacts
One of the strengths of the collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is collection of works from the ancient Near East. This paper examines two of those artifacts, discussing both their aesthetics properties as well as the historical, political and cultural context in which the two works were created. These works - although they provide only the barest glimpse into the complexities of cultural and religious dynamics of the region - nevertheless help us to understand the intimate and powerful way in which religion and culture are linked even today in the Middle East. (Images of the two works are appended to the end of this paper.)
The first work is two leaves taken from the Koran, the holy book of Islam made during the Abbasid caliphate during the ninth or tenth centuries. Even for a viewer who cannot read Arabic and who knows little about the tenets of this faith, the book is beautiful. It is certainly no coincidence that there is an emphasis in Islamic art on the importance of calligraphy as a form of artistic expression given that the realm of creative are is limited by the Islamic proscription against concrete images. While lesser Muslim artists have no doubt been stymied by their religion's prohibition against depicting human-made or natural forms in art, greater artists have used this limitation as a challenge that...
As Wiet (1971) describes, during this dynasty both the Arab world to some extent became more splintered. This fracturing of the political power might also have fractured religious power and authority, but in fact the opposite was generally the case during this second major dynasty of the caliphate. As the capital was moved to the then-new city of Baghdad, the connections among citizens of the caliphate became increasingly based upon being members of the community of faith rather than upon any shared Arab nationality. This tended to result in an increase in the orthodoxy of belief as expressed in art.
Peterson argues (1995), quite convincingly, that the two single most important aspects of Islamic art are calligraphy (including calligraphic ornamentation) and the form of the mosque as it existed in different time periods. Museums are relatively limited in their ability to include mosques in exhibit - although they may include photographs of mosques, of course, as well as architectural elements of mosques that have been for one reason or another dismantled. However, they are free to exhibit…
Works Cited
Peterson, Andrew. Dictionary of Islamic Architecture. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Wiet, Gaston. Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate. Norman: U. Of Oklahoma, 1971.
Zakiriya, Mohamed. The Calligraphy of Islam: Reflections on the State of the Art. Washington DC: Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, 1990.
Allan, James. Islamic Ceramics. Oxford: Asmolean, 1995.
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