The Politics of Aesthetics in the Muslim Middle East

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the study of music/sound art, and with particular reference to Islam from an anthropological angle. The very category of the “Islamic art object,” as many art historians have noted, emerged from a plundering of archeological sites and libraries in the Middle East. Illustrations were ripped out of books and objects were removed from archeological digs for the purposes of display or collection in the West, to be apprehended as beautiful but entirely decontextualized objects. Encounter with Sassanians and Byzantines in the early decades of the Muslim conquests created anxiety about visual representation as idolatry. In recent debates and discussions in Islamic art history a grounded and critical historical case for thinking about Islamic aesthetics has emerged. The problems that anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have had stem from an idea of aesthetics as a theory of the beautiful involving the disinterested contemplation of art objects.

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