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‘Ajb and Gharb

Artistic Perception in Medieval Arabic Sources

Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture, Department of Architecture, MIT. E-mail: nasser{at}MIT.EDU

In the prodigious medieval Arabic historical output the mention of specific art objects reveals unfamiliarity with elementary aesthetic vocabulary. The authors usually refrain from judging the quality of art, unlike their expert discussion of literary works. This article uses a famous, relatively long and oft-quoted text from al-Maqrz's Khia describing three examples of Fatimid painting to explore how the Arab historians saw the visual arts, and why. It explores the linguistic roots of the most frequently used terms, such as ‘ajb and gharb, in twelfth- to fifteenth-century texts and how they were transposed from their semantic fields to the description of art objects. It then examines the sources’ reticence vis-à-vis the description of art and seeks an explanation in the intellectual formation of the historians and class distinction between historians and artists.

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