This book highlights the history of Islamic popular devotional art and visual culture in 20th-century India, weaving the personal narrative of the author’s journey through his understanding of the faith. It begins with an introductory exploration of how the basic and universal image of Mecca and Medina may have been imported into Indian popular print culture and what variants it resulted in here. Besides providing a historical context of the pre-print culture of popular Muslim visuality, the book also explores the impact the 1947 Partition of India may have made on the calendar art in South Asia. A significant portion of the book focuses on the contemporary prints of different localised images found in India and what role these play in the users’ lives, especially in the augmentation of their popular faith and cultural practices. The volume also compares the images published in India with some of those available in Pakistan to reflect different socio-political trajectories. Finally, it discusses why such a vibrant visual culture continues to thrive among South Asian Muslims despite the questions raised by the orthodoxy on its legitimacy in Islam, and why images and popular visual cultures are inevitable for popular piety despite the orthodox Muslims’ increasing dissociation from them. This work is one of the first books on Indian Muslim poster art, with rare images and simple narratives, anecdotes about rituals, ceremonies and cultural traditions running parallel to research findings. This second edition contains a new Afterword that discusses challenges to religious plurality arising on account of changing political landscapes, economic liberalisation, technology and new media, and socio-religious developments. It will appeal to the lay reader as well as the specialist and will be especially useful to researchers and scholars in popular culture, media and cultural studies, visual art and performance studies, and sociology and social anthropology.

The collection of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan contains some of the world's finest examples of painting and calligraphy and is perhaps the most important private Muslim collection of Islamic art. This volume, richly illustrated with 24 color plates and 101 black-and-white photographs, provides a brief history of the collection and offers a generous selection of paintings, manuscripts, calligraphies, bindings, and drawings that spans the geographic range of Islamic art from North Africa to India. Detailed discussions of each illustration introduce readers to the major patrons and artists in the development of the arts of the precious book. Anthony Welch and Stuart Cary Welch have selected the most magnificent pages from the prince's collection for this volume. Included are portraits of the great Mughal rulers of India, paintings from the pages of a sixteenth-century Shahnamah (Book of Kings) of Iran, and stunning examples of calligraphy. Among the Muslim manuscripts represented are Qur̕ans from North Africa, Ottoman Turkey, Iran, and India; historical works such as the Ottoman illustrated manuscript of the Tuhfet ul-Leta̕if; philosophical treatises such as the Ethics of Nasir al-Din Tusi of India; and literary works such as the late-sixteenth-century Anvar-i Suhayli, commissioned and probably illustrated by the leading Safavid Iranian painter Sadiqi Bek. -- Inside jacket flap.

This richly illustrated volume highlights the history of Islamic cosmopolitanism as documented through works of art from the eighth century to the present, examining artistic exchange between Muslim and non-Muslim societies.

The historical development of Islamic art and the variations of different geographical regions are surveyed

This collection of essays provides a timely reassessment of nineteenth-century Islamic art and architecture. The essays demonstrate that the arts of that era were vibrant and diverse, making ingenious use of native traditions and materials or adopting imported conventions and new technologies. However, traditionalists, revivalists and modernists all referred in one way or another to an Islamic heritage, whether to reinvent, revive or reject it. Beginning with an historical introduction and an assessment of changing attitudes towards the visual arts the following essays provide case studies of architecture and art in Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, Iran, Central Asia, India and the Caribbean. They examine such issues as patronage, sources of artistic inspiration and responses to European art. The essays have a relevance and importance for our understanding of the societies and attitudes of that time, and have a direct bearing on the more general debate concerning cultural identity and the integration of modern ideas in the Muslim world. The book is richly illustrated with very many illustrations in black-and-white and in full colour.

An alternate approach to Islamic art emphasizing literary over historical contexts and reception over production in visual arts and music.