BOOK REVIEW : The Pride of Islam’s Art and Architecture : THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD <i> by Katharina Otto-Dorn</i> ; University of California Press, $65, 490 pages, illustrated)

Twenty-five years ago, Katharina Otto-Dorn, the distinguished scholar of Islamic art at UCLA, published, in German, an introduction to Islamic art. It stood out from the mass of introductory volumes to any art for two reasons: It was thoughtful and scholarly, and it expressed original points of view instead of providing superficial surveys.

“The Art and Architecture of the Islamic World” is the long-postponed English version. The original text has been brought up to date or modified in the light of recent investigations, and a more reasonable equilibrium than in the German version has been established for the different periods and techniques of Islamic art, although architecture still receives, correctly in my view, pride of place.

The new presentation has preserved the arrangement of well- chosen photographs interspersed at appropriate places within the text. And rather old-fashioned, but on the whole successful, small drawings of objects or of buildings occasionally appear in the margins. They provide the reader with more humane interpretations of monuments than the handsomely composed photographic prints.

Thirteen of the book’s 17 chapters are defined in straightforward historical and geographical terms: the first two Islam-wide empires (Umayyads and Abbasids); four regional periods identified by dynasties (two in eastern Iran and two primarily in Egypt); Spain and North Africa throughout the Middle Ages; a very large and very important chapter on the so-called Seljuq period, which includes Iran and Anatolia in the 12th and 13th centuries separated from Syria, which receives its own chapter; and four chapters on later empires (the Mongols in Iran, the Ottomans primarily in Anatolia, the Mamluks in Egypt, the Safavids in Iran).

India, Southeast Asia and most of Africa are excluded, as are the arts of the last 300 years.

Of the other four chapters, two are obvious in purpose, if not equally successful.

One, the valuable one, deals with the mosque, explains its origins and identifies its component parts as they developed in early Islamic times. The author’s presentation represents what may be called the standard assessment of how a new type of building was created. It does not reflect most recent scholarship--on the minaret, for instance. And the use of the term basilical for certain groups of mosques is confusing, especially when it often seems to stand for hypostyle, the more commonly accepted term for large mosques with multiple supports.

The other obvious chapter attempts a historical outline of Muslim lands over a thousand years.

It is an impossible task to accomplish in a few pages. The author manages quite well to identify two key moments in the creation of Islamic art--one at the very beginning with the Umayyad empire, the other from the late 11th Century to the middle of the 13th Century with the Seljuqs. But she fails in even suggesting the internal motors of Islamic civilization, its religious struggles, its scientific and intellectual achievements, its social structures and its economic crises.

Dynastic and ethnic patronage seems to dominate the arts and the importance of the new people, primarily Turkic, who came from Central Asia and may often have had less to do with the forms they brought than with the social and political roles they played.

The last two chapters are the weakest and seem to have been afterthoughts already in the German edition.

The much-expanded chapter on painting is still not up to the kind of historical and aesthetic reflection that painting deserves, especially in Iran.

The last chapter on sources dealing with figural art is too short and too limited to begin to address one of the fundamental issues raised by Muslims and non-Muslims alike about the alleged interdiction of representation by the faith of Islam. It is a pity indeed, for the author has throughout her historical chapters given particular importance to representations of all sorts and at all times.

The most important chapters are the historical ones. The information in them is almost always accurate, and the interpretations often are original and challenging, such as the representation of Jerusalem on the mosaics of the Great Mosque of Damascus or the specific royal symbols on Anatolian decorative tiles.

My disagreement with these and several other points of the same scholarly weight is not very important, because the book must be judged--and used--not so much as an introduction to Islamic art but as a personal interpretation by a scholar.

She has helped shape what the history of that art is now and is deeply committed--even if she does not acknowledge it in the English edition as she had done in the earlier one--to a vision of the history of art and of the role of the “Orient” in it developed more than 50 years ago in Central Europe.

I shall only bring up two points:

One is that the study of the arts is, for the most part, the study of the development in almost Darwinian terms of forms that have an identity and a pedigree. Social and other upheavals are secondary, and the contemporaneity of any work of art rarely lies in the aesthetic appreciation anyone may have had of it at that time.

In order to appreciate the wealth of Otto-Dorn’s book, one must know how to enter into the wonderful world of the evolution of forms.

The second point is the absence of the modern world, in fact of 90% of what is the visual experience of the contemporary Muslim world. What is shown in this book is the Islamic art of the past, of a past long gone now.

The sin shared by western Orientalists and Muslim fundamentalists is that both wish for the past to be the present rather than for the present to dialogue with the past.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Dorothy Healey Remembers” by Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman (Oxford University Press).