A place is undoubtedly emerging for Islamic material culture within the medieval Mediterranean framework: there is even a sub-discipline that has been styled the ‘Islamic Mediterranean’. This essay will not attempt a detailed historiographical review of all the recent academic output on this region, which is – suddenly – vast, but will offer some reflections on the ‘nascent field’ of what is becoming known as ‘Mediterraneanism’; next, it will examine some of the problems that still remain for the study of Islamic material culture in the Mediterranean, and suggest some ways forward.

Read More: Mediterraneanism: How to Incorporate Islamic Art into an Emerging Field, by Mariam Rosser-Owen

Despite well-meaning and well-informed scholarly and museological intentions, Islamic art history has had limited success as a good ambassador for Islam. Rather than suggesting that it should not be expected to take on this public role and cannot responsibly make such an attempt, or that the problem should be avoided by jettisoning the term ‘Islam’ from the name ‘Islamic art history’, this paper proposes the following. First, in order to function as a critical humanistic discipline, Islamic art history must engage in a self-conscious critique of the historiographic problems of its nomenclature in relation to its own sociopolitical contexts. Second, the field should, wholeheartedly and with critical self-awareness, take on the public and political role that has been foisted upon it by sociopolitical imperatives that will be discussed below.

Read More: The Islam in Islamic Art History: Secularism and Public Discourse, by Wendy M. K. Shaw

Regions and fields that can bring together state sponsorship, industry partners, science computing experience and resources will be at the forefront of a digital shift that reflects the world’s hierarchy of advanced industrialized nation-states and economies and their priorities. Already graduate students and researchers working in select fields can conduct large amounts of their research remotely and digitally, reducing costs for travel and archival work. Colleagues in humanities disciplines and fields of art history that successfully embark on the digital shift will be able to effortlessly scan through thousands of primary texts and images across centuries, perform statistical analyses on large pools of data, visualize complex relationships and correlations with geography and generate new genres of scholarship. Without a critical mass of systematically developed databases of historical texts, translations, and images with rigorous data quality controls and overlaying analytical tools, the way Islamic art history will be written will increasingly diverge from those fields of art history that embrace the digital shift more fully. This paper makes the case that the historiographical challenge which Islamic art historians face is not simply to consider and apply new theoretical frameworks, but to scrutinize and participate in the design and development of scholarly digital infrastructures, databases and analytical instruments specifically geared to the interests of Islamic art historians, while confronting the field’s archival legacies.

Read More: Towards Digital Islamic Art History, by Hussein Keshani