Bridging The Divide Between The United States And The Muslim World Through Arts And Ideas: Possibilities And Limitations

Appendix IV: Background Paper
Cultural Awareness In A Time Of Crisis

The Early Modern Muslim World

By the late eighteenth century, the peripheral regions of the Muslim world were increasingly falling under the sway of European imperial regimes even as the old caliphal core, incorporated into the weakening Ottoman Empire or the weak royal regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, continued to stand against European encroachment. Artistic creators in these territories, still working within guild traditions, slowly evolved new styles, although a pervasive economic weakness dating (in most places) from the late seventeenth century, had lowered the levels of patronage that fostered outstanding works of art, architecture, poetry, and scientific inquiry only a century and a half earlier. It is widely acknowledged that the royal portraits and flower arrangements painted under the Qajar dynasty in Iran fell aesthetically short of the elegant miniatures of the Safavid court painters of the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century mosques of Istanbul do not rival the great edifices of the Ottoman heyday. Comparison of late eighteenth century and early seventeenth century productions in a variety of fields betrays a growing, though sometimes quite lively, provincialism.

The story in the peripheral lands penetrated by European imperialism was different. Personnel working for European trading companies or imperial administrations in a variety of countries — Dutch in Java, English and French in India, Portuguese in various Indian Ocean ports — acquired a taste for exotic manufactures and artworks. European patronage opened new perspectives for craft producers in areas where the guild system was less comprehensive than in Ottoman and Persian territories. Works from these outlying areas that found their way into international trade increasingly “represented” Islamic art despite local variances from the styles that in earlier eras had imparted a special cachet to the art forms of the central Islamic lands. This helped fuel still–existing tensions between Muslim cultural articulations emanating from the Middle East and those from other Muslim regions. To this day, surveys of Islamic art contain little or no mention of wooden mosque architecture from Malaysia and Uzbekistan or Arabic calligraphy from China and Sulawesi. Yet these cultural forms were flowering at a time when the arts of the Ottoman, Arab, and Persian lands were losing some of their dynamism.

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