Valerie Gonzalez - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Valerie Gonzalez

Religions

It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest o... more It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has becom...

Religions, 2022

During the last decade, the curation of Islamic art and artifacts has been crossed by tensions at... more During the last decade, the curation of Islamic art and artifacts has been crossed by tensions at both the theoretical and practical level. Not only has it been continuously grappling with the Orientalist legacy, but it has also been operating in a global contemporaneity affected by multiple conflicts engendering a misperception of Muslims and Islam by non-Muslims. With this heavy background, this curation has been pursuing three main objectives: educating the public, decolonizing the museum, and reaching out to the Muslim communities and refugees living in non-Muslim societies. However, in the West, which remains worldly influential in the domain of heritage management, the first two objectives drove curators to engage in problematic practices, most notably the suppression of what we may call the “religious plot” in the exhibits’ narrative. Moreover, while the educational impulse led to a secular didactic scholasticism erected as the supreme exhibitory norm, the decolonizing enterp...

Together with a few recent publications a number of the online Journal of Art Historiography (Jun... more Together with a few recent publications a number of the online Journal of Art Historiography (June 6, 2012) dedicated to “Islamic Art Historiography” offers a glimpse at the debates that since roughly a decade stir up Islamic art studies as they are practiced in the West. These debates concern the conceptual framework used to both investigate and show in public institutions the material dealt with in this field of research, traditionally designated by the attributive adjective “Islamic”. Many consider the latter a misnomer. The underlying objection is that any cultural instance generically labeled with this adjective constitutes a fallacious category that does not reflect much more complex realities. Yet, the contested word remains widely used in spite of the invention of an alternative, the term “Islamicate”. This paper examines this phenomenon of epistemological agitation symptomatic of the rather newly constructed field of Islamic art history. The analysis of the 10th century epi...

Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, 2021

This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production ... more This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.

darulfunun ilahiyat, 2019

Just the excerpt of my interview for the same Turkish magazine I previously uploaded.

Turkish culture magazine featuring an interview of myself by a Ph.D student. The number includes... more Turkish culture magazine featuring an interview of myself by a Ph.D student.
The number includes a variety of articles on interesting topics on painting, philosophie, etc., notably a piece on the famous film maker Alain Resnais who made, among other masterpieces, the movie on the Holocaust with real footage, "Nuit et Brouillard".

Religions 2023, 14(7), 827, 2023

This is my contribution to the latest special issue 'Religions in 2022', guest edited by Prof. Dy... more This is my contribution to the latest special issue 'Religions in 2022', guest edited by Prof. Dyron B. Daughrity, Prof. Susanne Olsson and Prof. Paul Morris, that includes the theme of critical perspectives in Islamic studies. Abstract:
It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies.

Regards, 15Regards, 28 | 2022 DOSSIER THÉMATIQUE :Whither the Spiritual? Rethinking Secularism’s Legacy in post-Ottoman Ar , 2022

The present article examines critically the spiritual-secular binary in modern and contemporary a... more The present article examines critically the spiritual-secular binary in modern and contemporary art from the SWANA region and by artists with heritage from that region who live(ed) elsewhere. Given this binary's origin in the European Enlightenment's view of religion and its epistemic canonization through post-Enlightenment ideas on art and culture in the colonial era, this examination is made from within the framework of current decolonizing art historical discourses and their postcolonial background. The reflection begins with a key moment of global modernism as it is underpinned by the colonial diffusion of secularism. It then proceeds to expound the cultural shifts in postmodernism and contemporaneity as marked by a renewed interest in spirituality across the region. This inspection allows for the identification and disentanglement of a knot of epistemic problems, theoretical misconceptions, and untenable contradictions in the decolonizing art historical literature. In particular, it uncovers the slip toward an anti-colonial ideology that attempts to rewrite history at the risk of minimizing foundational historical facts. Central to the entire problematic is the misconstrued concept of modernity linked, in an exclusive and reductive manner, to hegemonic Euro-American modernist thought and its brand of secularism. Offering a fresh look at the momentous cultural-artistic events of the modern and contemporary period and a much needed re-definition of the chief concepts at stake in them, this essay opens up new directions of research. Keywords | Global modernism; modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia; spirituality in art; modernity; coloniality and decoloniality.
See introduction: https://journals.usj.edu.lb/regards/article/view/780/635

Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art, 2022

This is my book chapter in "Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art". It offers an approach to Is... more This is my book chapter in "Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art". It offers an approach to Islamic ornament based on Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus. Concerned with the constitutive concepts of flux ontology such as movement, becoming, and multiplicity, process philosophy provides the most apt equipment to expound the alternative approach to Islamic ornament proposed in these pages and to demonstrate the reductivism of orthodox Islamic art history. My method is driven by the same idea stated by Brian Massumi about Deleuze’s books dealing with cinema and art in the foreword: these books “are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their project is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them.”

Iranian/Persianate Subalterns in the Safavid Period: Their Role and Depiction, 2022

A slightly longer version of my chapter (6) in this book edited by Andrew Newman (just published,... more A slightly longer version of my chapter (6) in this book edited by Andrew Newman (just published, 2022). ISBN: 978-3-95994-152-5 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-3-95994-157-0 (eBook) ISBN: 978-3-940924-82-7 (ePUB)

In its own aesthetic way, painting attests to the role and description of subalternity in Persianate societies from the thirteenth-century to the Modern period. At no time in the history of Persianate painting did the subalterns ever lose their voice. They were always conspicuously visible in the images’ iconography and constituted the primary site of pictorial experiment with human representation. However, to understand this phenomenon and discern through it the philosophy of subalternity within the Persianate social-political order, it is necessary to examine the pictorial approach to the duality subalterns versus royalty. Royal physiognomic portraiture emerges in the early Modern era of the Safavids, Mughals and Ottomans. Yet, unlike its neighbours, it is only at the end of Shah ‘Abbas I that the Safavids began to depict the physical appearances of the king. Until then, they applied the concept of natural imitation only to subaltern imagery, although they used other modalities of royal portraiture. These divergences in royal portraiture signal an age-old Persian economy of human representation premised upon a semantically charged divide between subalternity and royalty. The present article aims to unravel this economy and the conception of subalternity it conveys.

Número 5 H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arteJulio-Diciembre, PP. 241-245, 2019

https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/epub/10.25025/hart05.2019.12 Número 5 H-ART. Revista de hist... more https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/epub/10.25025/hart05.2019.12
Número 5
H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arteJulio-Diciembre, PP. 241-245
Universidad de Los Andes, Facultad de Artes y Humanidades, Bogota, Colombia

Religions, 2022

Just released, my latest article on Islamic art display in the journal 'Religion' , which will be... more Just released, my latest article on Islamic art display in the journal 'Religion' , which will be part of a special edition in April 22. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/4/281. It complements my previous essay on this topic also in open access (https://www.jcms-journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.170/). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, 2021

This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production ... more This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.

Al-Masaq Journal, 2021

My review of Simon O'Meara book on the Kaaba.

What Inspired Islamic Art? Husayn and Ahmed Ayed's KnowShow podcast, 2021

I was interviewed by Husayn Ayed for his Podcast the KnowShow. A personal account of my academic ... more I was interviewed by Husayn Ayed for his Podcast the KnowShow. A personal account of my academic engagement in Islamic studies.

Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics in Islamic and Art and Architecture, 2001

My 2001 book comprising a collection of essays on Islamic aesthetics in texts and arts. Published... more My 2001 book comprising a collection of essays on Islamic aesthetics in texts and arts. Published by the Ismaili Institute, London.

“Universality and Modernity” in The Ismaili United Kingdom, December 2002, pp. 50-53., 2002

Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), also known as Alhazen, was an Arab philosopher, physicist and mathemat... more Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), also known as Alhazen, was an Arab philosopher, physicist and mathematician whose legacy in the West is mainly due to his work in the optics. However, Ibn al-Haytham's contributions go far beyond his famous optical oeuvre, Kitab al-Manazir. In his lifetime of study, Ibn al-Haytham was able to articulate a relationship between the physical, observable world and the world of intuition, psychology and mental processes. His theories of knowledge and perception, which link the present-day domains of science and religion-resulted in a philosophy of existence based on the direct observation of the 'real' as it presents itself to the seeing subject. Much of his thought in this field is still present in the discourse of twentieth-century philosophy and phenomenology.

Darulfunun Ilahiyat, 2019

Qur'an 67, Surat al-Mulk ('Surat of the Kingdom'), describes the seven heavens in a sharply conto... more Qur'an 67, Surat al-Mulk ('Surat of the Kingdom'), describes the seven heavens in a sharply contoured image. This cosmographic image is one of the few textual icons forming the 'Quranic literary iconography'. The divine light contained in a lamp within a niche in Surat al-Nur ('Surat of the Light', 24), or the glass sarh of Solomon's palace, in Surat al-Naml ('Surat of the Ants', 27), constitute other examples among these icons. This essay argues that, by means of the heavenly description, Surat al-Mulk conveys an aesthetic meaning that is pivotal to its religious rhetoric. As a complement, this study includes an examination of the surat's phraseology by the linguist Muhammad Husain Kazi.

Religions

It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest o... more It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has becom...

Religions, 2022

During the last decade, the curation of Islamic art and artifacts has been crossed by tensions at... more During the last decade, the curation of Islamic art and artifacts has been crossed by tensions at both the theoretical and practical level. Not only has it been continuously grappling with the Orientalist legacy, but it has also been operating in a global contemporaneity affected by multiple conflicts engendering a misperception of Muslims and Islam by non-Muslims. With this heavy background, this curation has been pursuing three main objectives: educating the public, decolonizing the museum, and reaching out to the Muslim communities and refugees living in non-Muslim societies. However, in the West, which remains worldly influential in the domain of heritage management, the first two objectives drove curators to engage in problematic practices, most notably the suppression of what we may call the “religious plot” in the exhibits’ narrative. Moreover, while the educational impulse led to a secular didactic scholasticism erected as the supreme exhibitory norm, the decolonizing enterp...

Together with a few recent publications a number of the online Journal of Art Historiography (Jun... more Together with a few recent publications a number of the online Journal of Art Historiography (June 6, 2012) dedicated to “Islamic Art Historiography” offers a glimpse at the debates that since roughly a decade stir up Islamic art studies as they are practiced in the West. These debates concern the conceptual framework used to both investigate and show in public institutions the material dealt with in this field of research, traditionally designated by the attributive adjective “Islamic”. Many consider the latter a misnomer. The underlying objection is that any cultural instance generically labeled with this adjective constitutes a fallacious category that does not reflect much more complex realities. Yet, the contested word remains widely used in spite of the invention of an alternative, the term “Islamicate”. This paper examines this phenomenon of epistemological agitation symptomatic of the rather newly constructed field of Islamic art history. The analysis of the 10th century epi...

Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, 2021

This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production ... more This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.

darulfunun ilahiyat, 2019

Just the excerpt of my interview for the same Turkish magazine I previously uploaded.

Turkish culture magazine featuring an interview of myself by a Ph.D student. The number includes... more Turkish culture magazine featuring an interview of myself by a Ph.D student.
The number includes a variety of articles on interesting topics on painting, philosophie, etc., notably a piece on the famous film maker Alain Resnais who made, among other masterpieces, the movie on the Holocaust with real footage, "Nuit et Brouillard".

Religions 2023, 14(7), 827, 2023

This is my contribution to the latest special issue 'Religions in 2022', guest edited by Prof. Dy... more This is my contribution to the latest special issue 'Religions in 2022', guest edited by Prof. Dyron B. Daughrity, Prof. Susanne Olsson and Prof. Paul Morris, that includes the theme of critical perspectives in Islamic studies. Abstract:
It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies.

Regards, 15Regards, 28 | 2022 DOSSIER THÉMATIQUE :Whither the Spiritual? Rethinking Secularism’s Legacy in post-Ottoman Ar , 2022

The present article examines critically the spiritual-secular binary in modern and contemporary a... more The present article examines critically the spiritual-secular binary in modern and contemporary art from the SWANA region and by artists with heritage from that region who live(ed) elsewhere. Given this binary's origin in the European Enlightenment's view of religion and its epistemic canonization through post-Enlightenment ideas on art and culture in the colonial era, this examination is made from within the framework of current decolonizing art historical discourses and their postcolonial background. The reflection begins with a key moment of global modernism as it is underpinned by the colonial diffusion of secularism. It then proceeds to expound the cultural shifts in postmodernism and contemporaneity as marked by a renewed interest in spirituality across the region. This inspection allows for the identification and disentanglement of a knot of epistemic problems, theoretical misconceptions, and untenable contradictions in the decolonizing art historical literature. In particular, it uncovers the slip toward an anti-colonial ideology that attempts to rewrite history at the risk of minimizing foundational historical facts. Central to the entire problematic is the misconstrued concept of modernity linked, in an exclusive and reductive manner, to hegemonic Euro-American modernist thought and its brand of secularism. Offering a fresh look at the momentous cultural-artistic events of the modern and contemporary period and a much needed re-definition of the chief concepts at stake in them, this essay opens up new directions of research. Keywords | Global modernism; modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia; spirituality in art; modernity; coloniality and decoloniality.
See introduction: https://journals.usj.edu.lb/regards/article/view/780/635

Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art, 2022

This is my book chapter in "Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art". It offers an approach to Is... more This is my book chapter in "Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art". It offers an approach to Islamic ornament based on Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus. Concerned with the constitutive concepts of flux ontology such as movement, becoming, and multiplicity, process philosophy provides the most apt equipment to expound the alternative approach to Islamic ornament proposed in these pages and to demonstrate the reductivism of orthodox Islamic art history. My method is driven by the same idea stated by Brian Massumi about Deleuze’s books dealing with cinema and art in the foreword: these books “are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their project is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them.”

Iranian/Persianate Subalterns in the Safavid Period: Their Role and Depiction, 2022

A slightly longer version of my chapter (6) in this book edited by Andrew Newman (just published,... more A slightly longer version of my chapter (6) in this book edited by Andrew Newman (just published, 2022). ISBN: 978-3-95994-152-5 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-3-95994-157-0 (eBook) ISBN: 978-3-940924-82-7 (ePUB)

In its own aesthetic way, painting attests to the role and description of subalternity in Persianate societies from the thirteenth-century to the Modern period. At no time in the history of Persianate painting did the subalterns ever lose their voice. They were always conspicuously visible in the images’ iconography and constituted the primary site of pictorial experiment with human representation. However, to understand this phenomenon and discern through it the philosophy of subalternity within the Persianate social-political order, it is necessary to examine the pictorial approach to the duality subalterns versus royalty. Royal physiognomic portraiture emerges in the early Modern era of the Safavids, Mughals and Ottomans. Yet, unlike its neighbours, it is only at the end of Shah ‘Abbas I that the Safavids began to depict the physical appearances of the king. Until then, they applied the concept of natural imitation only to subaltern imagery, although they used other modalities of royal portraiture. These divergences in royal portraiture signal an age-old Persian economy of human representation premised upon a semantically charged divide between subalternity and royalty. The present article aims to unravel this economy and the conception of subalternity it conveys.

Número 5 H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arteJulio-Diciembre, PP. 241-245, 2019

https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/epub/10.25025/hart05.2019.12 Número 5 H-ART. Revista de hist... more https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/epub/10.25025/hart05.2019.12
Número 5
H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arteJulio-Diciembre, PP. 241-245
Universidad de Los Andes, Facultad de Artes y Humanidades, Bogota, Colombia

Religions, 2022

Just released, my latest article on Islamic art display in the journal 'Religion' , which will be... more Just released, my latest article on Islamic art display in the journal 'Religion' , which will be part of a special edition in April 22. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/4/281. It complements my previous essay on this topic also in open access (https://www.jcms-journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.170/). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, 2021

This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production ... more This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.

Al-Masaq Journal, 2021

My review of Simon O'Meara book on the Kaaba.

What Inspired Islamic Art? Husayn and Ahmed Ayed's KnowShow podcast, 2021

I was interviewed by Husayn Ayed for his Podcast the KnowShow. A personal account of my academic ... more I was interviewed by Husayn Ayed for his Podcast the KnowShow. A personal account of my academic engagement in Islamic studies.

Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics in Islamic and Art and Architecture, 2001

My 2001 book comprising a collection of essays on Islamic aesthetics in texts and arts. Published... more My 2001 book comprising a collection of essays on Islamic aesthetics in texts and arts. Published by the Ismaili Institute, London.

“Universality and Modernity” in The Ismaili United Kingdom, December 2002, pp. 50-53., 2002

Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), also known as Alhazen, was an Arab philosopher, physicist and mathemat... more Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), also known as Alhazen, was an Arab philosopher, physicist and mathematician whose legacy in the West is mainly due to his work in the optics. However, Ibn al-Haytham's contributions go far beyond his famous optical oeuvre, Kitab al-Manazir. In his lifetime of study, Ibn al-Haytham was able to articulate a relationship between the physical, observable world and the world of intuition, psychology and mental processes. His theories of knowledge and perception, which link the present-day domains of science and religion-resulted in a philosophy of existence based on the direct observation of the 'real' as it presents itself to the seeing subject. Much of his thought in this field is still present in the discourse of twentieth-century philosophy and phenomenology.

Darulfunun Ilahiyat, 2019

Qur'an 67, Surat al-Mulk ('Surat of the Kingdom'), describes the seven heavens in a sharply conto... more Qur'an 67, Surat al-Mulk ('Surat of the Kingdom'), describes the seven heavens in a sharply contoured image. This cosmographic image is one of the few textual icons forming the 'Quranic literary iconography'. The divine light contained in a lamp within a niche in Surat al-Nur ('Surat of the Light', 24), or the glass sarh of Solomon's palace, in Surat al-Naml ('Surat of the Ants', 27), constitute other examples among these icons. This essay argues that, by means of the heavenly description, Surat al-Mulk conveys an aesthetic meaning that is pivotal to its religious rhetoric. As a complement, this study includes an examination of the surat's phraseology by the linguist Muhammad Husain Kazi.

Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art, 2022

In my contribution to this collective book (Chapter 3), "Debunking the Regionalistic Myth in the ... more In my contribution to this collective book (Chapter 3), "Debunking the Regionalistic Myth in the Discourse on Islamic Ornament", I use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's famous book '1000 Plateaux' as a critical model.

Ashgate/now Routledge, 2015

Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture, 2001

My 2001 book on Islamic aesthetics published by IBTauris et the Institute of Ismaili Studies in L... more My 2001 book on Islamic aesthetics published by IBTauris et the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. It is a collection of essays on some aspects of medieval falsafa, geometry in the Alhambra, an aesthetic exegesis of Quran:27:44, and inscriptions on objects. The methodology includes comparison with Western art, art theory, Western philosophy and art criticism.

Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting, 1526-1658, 2015

Substantial excerpt of my latest book on Mughal painting.

Albin Michel, Paris, 2002

My book of Quranic exegesis: Verse 44/Sourat 27, in French

"Fatimid Cosmopolitanism: History, Material Culture, Politics and Religion": Day 3/4, 2021

https://youtu.be/W2SbcE4uDMg I am the sixth speaker in this line up. My presentation' s topic: ‘... more https://youtu.be/W2SbcE4uDMg
I am the sixth speaker in this line up. My presentation' s topic: ‘Reflecting on Ibn Al-Haytham’s Science and Aesthetics as Critical Tools for the Study of Islamic Art’
Abstract:
This paper will discuss the relevance of Ibn al-Haytham’s famous scientific treatises such as the Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) for the study of Islamic art. The product of the crossing of science and aesthetics in medieval Islam, these treatises, in particular those that expound the Fatimid polymath’s unprecedented method of probing the sensory experience akin to modern phenomenology of perception, have received much scholarly attention. However, like in the case of many other Islamic primary sources dealing with topics related to aesthetics and visual materiality such as the Brethren of Purity’s Epistles, the question remains open of the use of Ibn al-Haytham’s corpus as a critical tool for understanding the artworks, artistic processes and modalities of aesthetic reception themselves in both the particular context of Fatimid culture and the broader Muslim world. This discussion will indeed demonstrate that references to the Fatimid scientist’s findings in Islamic art historical investigations are problematic and revelatory of the actual difficulties posed by the use of these primary theoretical sources for the interpretation of the visual material. To what extent and in which sense do these findings enlighten specific artworks, and what exactly do they tell us about Islamic art making and reception? This interrogation will be addressed by examining some established arguments based on Ibn al-Haytham’s work in Islamic art studied.

Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée Lectures inédites

Le domaine des études islamiques se trouve enrichi avec cet excellent ouvrage d'Anne-Sylvie Boisl... more Le domaine des études islamiques se trouve enrichi avec cet excellent ouvrage d'Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau qui aborde le sujet du Coran sous l'angle d'un de ses principaux caractères littéraires : l'autoréférentialité, ou réflexivité. Cette étude, tirée de la thèse de doctorat de l'auteure, s'appuie sur l'ensemble des précédents scientifiques qui ont établi les paramètres de connaissances et les idées de fond nécessaires à une telle entreprise. Parmi ces précédents figurent les travaux d'Alfred-Louis de Premare, Stefan Wild, et plus particulièrement le livre de Daniel A. Madigan The Qur'ân's Self-image: Writing and Authority in Islam's Scripture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Mais il ne s'agit là que de la première partie, réalisée, d'un projet de recherche à deux volets, la deuxième partie étant en préparation. L'auteure a en effet pertinemment choisi de considérer en premier lieu le Coran tel qu'il est majoritairement accepté par les communautés et autorités musulmanes depuis le XXe siècle sous la version dite de Asim (p. 7), pour l'envisager ensuite comme une somme historique complexe de constructions textuelles successives. Le présent livre offre donc une approche « synchronique », par opposition à la seconde approche « diachronique »

AL-MASAQ, 2020

My review of 'What Is Islamic Art? Between Religion and Perception' Wendy M.K. Shaw, 2019, Cambri... more My review of 'What Is Islamic Art? Between Religion and Perception'
Wendy M.K. Shaw, 2019, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 366 pp., £29.99 (hardback), ISBN 9781108474658
Valerie Gonzalez
Published online AL-MASAQ: 13 Jan 2020

Al-Masaq, book review of The Fatimids and Egypt, by Michael Brett, 2020

My review of Michael Brett's latest book, in Al-Masaq.

caa.reviews, 2020

My book review of Jennifer A. Pruitt Building the Caliphate: Construction, Destruction, and Secta... more My book review of Jennifer A. Pruitt
Building the Caliphate: Construction, Destruction, and Sectarian Identity in Early Fatimid Architecture
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 216 pp.

Al-Masaq, 2021

My book review of 'Friends of the Emir, Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought'

Al-Masaq, November , 2021

My review of of Daniella Talmon-Heller's book, Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islam... more My review of of Daniella Talmon-Heller's book, Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East', in Al-Masaq, November 2021

Al-Masāq Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean, 2022

My review of Michael Sells's translation of some love poems by Ibn 'Arabi.

Journal of medieval studies 'Svmma', 2022

My review of 'Mostafa Badawi's book, Spiritual Significance in Islamic Architecture, 2021.

Book review, 2024

My book review of Adam Bursi's latest book, Traces of the Prophets Relics and Sacred Spaces in Ea... more My book review of Adam Bursi's latest book, Traces of the Prophets Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam