Some interesting bits:
<b>Reviewed Work(s):</b> The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, by Douglas L. Wheeler, <i>Journal of Interdisciplinary History</i>, Vol. 28, No. 4. (Spring, 1998), pp. 673-674.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Subrahmanyam, an Asian historian who teaches in France, lends an Asian perspective to da Gama and the economic relationships in the Indian Ocean during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. He argues convincingly that no "Islamic world economy" had infiltrated the region c. 1500, only polycentric networks of great religious and ethnic diversity-the challenging context into which the Portuguese inserted themselves. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Irrigation Agrosystems in Eastern Spain: Roman or Islamic Origins?</b>, Karl W. Butzer; Juan F. Mateu; Elisabeth K. Butzer; Pavel Kraus, <i>Annals of the Association of American Geographers</i>, Vol. 75, No. 4. (Dec., 1985), pp. 479-509.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Abstract.</b> The long-standing controversy concerning Islamic diffusion of cultivars and irrigation technology to Spain is approached by comparing Roman and Islamic agrosystems at the general, regional, and local levels. We describe the Roman intensification of the older Mediterranean agrosystem and then examine the subsequent agricultural and demographic decline between A.D. 250 and 800. The operation, organization, and evolution of large, intermediate, and small-scale irrigation are analyzed in seven case studies from the Valencia region of eastern Spain. The largest systems were refurbished in Islamic times, but during a period when Berber and Arab settlement was thin and acculturation of the indigenous population incomplete. As a result the Roman agrosystem and irrigation networks remained largely unchanged, despite the presence of new technologic features and cultivars. Later transfer of irrigation agriculture to the adjacent mountain valleys followed the Roman model, but with more Islamic elements apparent. Muslim agriculture in the area remained characteristically Mediterranean after the Christian Reconquest (A.D. 1238), and it survived largely intact into the present century, even after the Muslim expulsion in 1609. [...]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In conclusion, the Spanish irrigation agrosystem was not the product of Islamic civilization, and it is a bad cliche to regard Medieval horticulture in Spain as a re-creation of the desert oasis. Islam contributed significantly to both renewed expansion and further development of Spanish agrosystems. But the Hispano-Romans practiced sophisticated irrigation on a major scale, their basic agrosystem survived intact during the late Roman and Visigothic economic depression, and subsequent re-intensification represented a revival of the Roman system under conditions of demographic and economic growth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field</b>, Sheila S. Blair; Jonathan M. Bloom, <i>The Art Bulletin</i>, Vol. 85, No. 1. (Mar., 2003), pp. 152-184.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Definition and Historiography of Islamic Art</b>
Islamic art is generally held to be "the art made by artists or artisans whose religion was Islam, for patrons who lived in predominantly Muslirn lands, or for purposes that are restricted or peculiar to a Muslim population or a Muslim setting." It therefore encompasses much, if not most, of the art produced over fourteen centuries in the "islamic lands," usually defined as the arid belt covering much of West Asia but stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Spain on the west to the steppes of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean on the east.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Despite its name, the academic field of Islamic art has only a tenuous and problematic relationship with the religion of Islam. While some Islamic art may have been made by Muslims for purposes of the faith, much of it was not. A mosque or a copy of the Koran clearly fits everybody's definition of Islamic art, but what about a twelfth-century Syrian bronze canteen inlaid with Arabic inscriptions and Christian scenes? A carpet bearing a design of a niche containing a lamp and laid on the ground in the direction of Mecca is clearly Islamic art, but what about a technically identical but iconographically different carpet used simply to cover and soften the floor? Some historians have attempted to solve these problems by creating new adjectives such as "Islamicate" to refer to the secular culture of Islamic civilization, but these unwieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance. Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant - but not sole - religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not cornparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Compared with other fields of art history, <b>the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars.</b> Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth." There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "islamic," and <b>the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it.</b> Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. <b>Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world.</b> In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture. This all-embracing view of islam and islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Reviewed Work(s):</b> The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, by Douglas L. Wheeler, <i>Journal of Interdisciplinary History</i>, Vol. 28, No. 4. (Spring, 1998), pp. 673-674.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Subrahmanyam, an Asian historian who teaches in France, lends an Asian perspective to da Gama and the economic relationships in the Indian Ocean during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. He argues convincingly that no "Islamic world economy" had infiltrated the region c. 1500, only polycentric networks of great religious and ethnic diversity-the challenging context into which the Portuguese inserted themselves. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Irrigation Agrosystems in Eastern Spain: Roman or Islamic Origins?</b>, Karl W. Butzer; Juan F. Mateu; Elisabeth K. Butzer; Pavel Kraus, <i>Annals of the Association of American Geographers</i>, Vol. 75, No. 4. (Dec., 1985), pp. 479-509.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Abstract.</b> The long-standing controversy concerning Islamic diffusion of cultivars and irrigation technology to Spain is approached by comparing Roman and Islamic agrosystems at the general, regional, and local levels. We describe the Roman intensification of the older Mediterranean agrosystem and then examine the subsequent agricultural and demographic decline between A.D. 250 and 800. The operation, organization, and evolution of large, intermediate, and small-scale irrigation are analyzed in seven case studies from the Valencia region of eastern Spain. The largest systems were refurbished in Islamic times, but during a period when Berber and Arab settlement was thin and acculturation of the indigenous population incomplete. As a result the Roman agrosystem and irrigation networks remained largely unchanged, despite the presence of new technologic features and cultivars. Later transfer of irrigation agriculture to the adjacent mountain valleys followed the Roman model, but with more Islamic elements apparent. Muslim agriculture in the area remained characteristically Mediterranean after the Christian Reconquest (A.D. 1238), and it survived largely intact into the present century, even after the Muslim expulsion in 1609. [...]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In conclusion, the Spanish irrigation agrosystem was not the product of Islamic civilization, and it is a bad cliche to regard Medieval horticulture in Spain as a re-creation of the desert oasis. Islam contributed significantly to both renewed expansion and further development of Spanish agrosystems. But the Hispano-Romans practiced sophisticated irrigation on a major scale, their basic agrosystem survived intact during the late Roman and Visigothic economic depression, and subsequent re-intensification represented a revival of the Roman system under conditions of demographic and economic growth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field</b>, Sheila S. Blair; Jonathan M. Bloom, <i>The Art Bulletin</i>, Vol. 85, No. 1. (Mar., 2003), pp. 152-184.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Definition and Historiography of Islamic Art</b>
Islamic art is generally held to be "the art made by artists or artisans whose religion was Islam, for patrons who lived in predominantly Muslirn lands, or for purposes that are restricted or peculiar to a Muslim population or a Muslim setting." It therefore encompasses much, if not most, of the art produced over fourteen centuries in the "islamic lands," usually defined as the arid belt covering much of West Asia but stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Spain on the west to the steppes of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean on the east.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Despite its name, the academic field of Islamic art has only a tenuous and problematic relationship with the religion of Islam. While some Islamic art may have been made by Muslims for purposes of the faith, much of it was not. A mosque or a copy of the Koran clearly fits everybody's definition of Islamic art, but what about a twelfth-century Syrian bronze canteen inlaid with Arabic inscriptions and Christian scenes? A carpet bearing a design of a niche containing a lamp and laid on the ground in the direction of Mecca is clearly Islamic art, but what about a technically identical but iconographically different carpet used simply to cover and soften the floor? Some historians have attempted to solve these problems by creating new adjectives such as "Islamicate" to refer to the secular culture of Islamic civilization, but these unwieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance. Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant - but not sole - religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not cornparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Compared with other fields of art history, <b>the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars.</b> Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth." There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "islamic," and <b>the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it.</b> Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. <b>Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world.</b> In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture. This all-embracing view of islam and islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->