267 SURVEYING ISLAMIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE Nasser Rabbat Eine deutsche Zusammenfassung dieses Beitrags von Alberto Saviello finden Sie am Ende des Textes. Surveys are the tools of trade in art and architectural history. Or at least they were until very recently when the field finally and reluctantly submitted its assumptions about periodization, the canon, and universal versus cultural representation to the scrutiny of the postcolonial and other critical theories and opened its domain to the new storage and telecommunication technologies from CD-ROM to the web. The combination of these two developments has polarized art historians into three groups: those who still believe in the survey as the premier pedagogical and meth- odological instrument and those who reject it, while the majority adopted an in- between position seeking alterations or modifications to the usual structure, scope, and focus of the survey but still accepting it as a frame for the arrangement and diffusion of art historical material. This last position, it seems to me, is where most Islamic art historians stand today. 1 And although I personally lean more towards implementing radical changes to the survey that might alter its character beyond recognition, I am still convinced of its ultimate value as a potentially adaptable mechanism for the presentation of art and architectural history both in print and online in an age of rapid shifts both in the conception and transfer of knowledge and in the definition and subdivision of established scholarly disciplines. For Islamic art and architectural historians who share with their colleagues the same space of polarization, one issue has particularly come to sharpen their posi- tions: how to conceive and write surveys that are culturally defined and historically focused without becoming inaccessible to the non-specialist and at the same time universally pertinent to the architect and art historian without becoming redun- dant to the culture specialist. 2 No fully successful answer exists, but many recent attempts in Islamic surveys have begun to chart the possibilities. What I propose to do here is to look closely and critically at the epistemological constraints affecting all culturally oriented surveys, not just the Islamic ones, and then to briefly touch upon one of the promising conceptual possibilities: applying the world history per- spective to the Islamic architectural survey, as a way to powerfully respond to the theoretical, pedagogical, and technical challenges facing the practice of surveying in the study of Islamic art and architecture. In culture-specific surveys, such as those of Islamic architecture, a common objective is to engage the audience and advance its knowledge of the aesthetic, 1 See the critique of Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey “ Journal of Architectural Education 52, 4 (May 1999): 207–15; and Panayiota Pyla, “Historicizing Pedagogy: A Critique of Kostof’s ‘A His- tory of Architecture,’ ” ibid., 216–25. 2 This is one of the issue that have led Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom to dub the Islamic art field as “unwieldy,” see Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,“ The Art Bulletin 85, 1 (March 2003): 152–84.