Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘From Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End

of Islamic Art’, originally published in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: A

Changing Discipline and its Institutions, London: Routledge, 2007, 31-53.

Abstract

This article addresses the peculiar fact that in most art historical surveys the narrative of

Islamic art history ends around 1800 CE. It considers the roots of this idiosyncrasy and

its implications for attempts to coopt or instrumentalize the objects of Islamic art in the

decade after 2001 in discourses of liberalism and tolerance in which an originary Islam

was contrasted with modern more ‘fundamentalist’ understandings of religious belief

and practice. It explores contradictions inherent in related attempts to locate models for

Muslim religious subjectivity in medieval artifacts secularized as art objects.

Bio

Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities, at the Institute of

Fine Arts and Department of Art History, at New York University. He is the author of

Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the 2011 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize

of the Association for Asian Studies. His current book project Islam and Image: Polemics,

Theology and Modernity, will be published by Reaktion Books, London.

Keywords

Islamic art, museum, art canon, nineteenth century, postcolonialism, Qajar art

ERRATUM

On page 42 of this article, the quote before footnote 49 was issued by the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York. In the original published version of this article, the quote

was misattributed to the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in

Washington DC.