{[Islamic Art –] Visual Arts [continued –] Early and Middle Periods of Islamic Art [continued]}[20th April 1991]

[Redbook9:130][19910420:0953c]{[Islamic Art –] Visual Arts [continued –] Early and Middle Periods of Islamic Art [continued]}[20th April 1991]

19910420:0953

[continued]

*‘The second** complication derives from the fact that Muslim conquest hardly ever destroyed former civilisations with its own established creativity [sic].*** Material culture, therefore, continued as before, and archaeologically it is almost impossible to distinguish between pre-Islamic and early Islamic artifacts. Paradoxical though it may sound, there is an early Islamic Christian art of Syria and Egypt, and in many other regions the parallel existence of a Muslim and of a non-Muslim art continued for centuries. What did happen during early Islamic times, however, was the establishment of a dominant new taste, and it is the nature and character of this taste that has to be explained. It occurred first in Syria and Iraq, the two areas with the largest influx of Muslims and with the two successive capitals of the empire, Damascus under the Umayyads and Baghdad under the early Abbasids. From Syria and Iraq this new taste spread in all directions and adapted itself to local conditions and local materials, thus creating considerable regional and chronological variations in early Islamic art.’

****

This sounds like the pattern of a political impulse successfully grafting itself onto an existing major cycle.

*[Text continues from last previous ts journal entry]

**[See last previous ts journal entry]

***?=

**** – ibid [Encyclopaedia Britannica 22:] 76

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