culture - that also must be understood as having played a critical role in shaping approved Islamic art forms, content, use of materials, function of works, and iconography (Adams, 1997; Janson, 1986).
The exhibition will consist of ten items drawn from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be historical in that each work will be from the so-called "Golden Age" of Islam, a period identified by Hourani (1991) as one in which Islam as a religion and a culture flourished, resulting in the creation of many lasting and enduring works of art, literature, philosophy, science, and architecture. This was also a period of cross-pollination, in which the Islamic world exerted an influence on Christian Europe and, in turn, was influenced by the Western, Christian cultures with which it came in contact as it expanded into Europe (Hourani, 1991).
A central goal of the exhibition is to illustrate for the viewer the ways in which Islam, as both a religion and a culture, shaped the creation of "ordinary objects" used in daily life. As Janson (1986) has pointed out, it is essential that we understand the Islamic attitude toward representation; it has often been related to that of the Byzantine Iconoclasts, who were also opposed to the depiction of sacred images, but who reveled in the pleasures of ornamentation. Janson (1986, p. 251) states that "theoretically, human or animal figures of any kind were forbidden by Islamic law. Yet in actual practice the ban was fully effective only against large-scale representational art for public display." In private spaces, such as the home or the courts of caliphs and other leaders and rulers, images of living things (in sculpted functional objects, paintings, carvings in wood and stone, and other media) were viewed as harmless if they did not cast a shadow, if they were on a small scale, or applied to objects of daily use such as rugs, fabrics and pottery (Janson, 1996). It is the...