Several impulses led to the writing of this book and, since these impulses dictated its scope and its format, there is a point in defining them briefly. A first one is that in the field of Near Eastern art there are almost no intermediates between the very specialized scholarly study and the very general book. The former rarely elicits much enthusiasm except in rarefied circles, while the latter is often general to the point of meaninglessness or erroneous in too many details because of the inability of even the most industrious scholar to keep up with the field’s literature or to consider thousands of monuments in anything but a very superficial manner. A second impulse is the tremendous range in time and space of Islamic art. It is found in Spain in the eighth century and in India in the eighteenth, and almost all countries and centuries between these two extremes have contributed to its growth. While there may be perfectly valid reasons for considering such a vast area as a single entity over a thousand years, it is equally certain that considerable modifications, regional or temporal, were inevitably brought to it. Thus, it seemed appropriate to devote a study to one period only, thereby opening the way for further investigation based on distinctions of time and area. …
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