Ani Kalousdian
Professors of Islamic Art use a variety of online resources to engage and educate students in the absence of a classroom, as has been the case in the recent pandemic. Longform books and articles have long been the content assigned to students, but in a digital age, resources to make research more convenient and accessible abound. Image resources and databases are incredibly useful in finding specific examples of techniques and styles, creating a tool not only for the teaching of Islamic art, but of history, math, and science as well. But images are only the beginning; videos, podcasts, and virtual reality tours expand the offerings that technology can give us with which to teach and learn. This compilation of resources is meant to act as a blueprint for educators of Islamic art, and as inspiration for the site we hope to build that combines the best of all of these websites, with images, short, accessible essays, and multimedia content, all created by a wide array of experts in the field of Islamic art.
Museums represent a prominent source of images, essays, and curatorial information. Though in-person visits can never be replaced, the online content created by many museums can be just as useful in research. Museums with extensive online collections include The Aga Khan Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The David Collection, The Walters Art Museum, Freer|Sackler, The Brooklyn Museum, Museum With No Frontiers, The British Museum, The Chester Beatty Library, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Musée du Louvre, The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, The Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Beirut Art Center, Arab Museum of Modern Art, The Shangri La Museum, The Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, and The Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo.
To partially compensate for the prohibition on in-person visits, virtual reality tours of Islamic monuments have also been made available. Among them can be counted the following: Virtual Large Mosques, Monuments in Damascus, The LACMA’s Damascus Room, The Alhambra, and The Süleymaniye Mosque.
Many libraries and online databases also present important Islamic artifacts, book arts, and materials related to calligraphy and epigraphy, above all digital scans of manuscripts. See for example: Islamic Painted Page, Islamic Inscriptions, The Database of Ottoman Inscriptions, BnF Image Database, The University of Edinburgh Library, The British Library Qur’ans, Islamic Manuscript Conservation, Fihrist, Witkam’s Islamic Manuscripts, Evyn Kropf’s Guide to Islamic Manuscript Studies, Vatican Library, and The Shahnameh Project.
One of the challenges that professors and educators of Islamic art face is a dearth of readily available teaching resources appropriate for undergraduate students and public audiences. Articles in blogs can thus be extremely useful as they are written for a less specifically knowledgeable audience, and they are short enough to hold the interest of those who have not dedicated their professional lives to the study of Islamic arts and culture. Some recommended articles and blogs include: What this Wine Jug Can Tell us About Islam, There is no such thing as Western Civilization, Square Kufic, Amir, and Public Medievalist.
Other useful resources include Islamic art-focused social media accounts that produce “bite-size” content, inter alia Instagram’s Rutgers Islamic Art and Twitter’s Students of Islamic Art. Podcasts have recently blown up in popularity as a way to learn while accomplishing errands and other tasks; among them are The Visual Past (an Ottoman History podcast), The Barakat Trust’s Arts in Isolation, and The Hamad bin Khalifa Symposia on Islamic Art.
Citation:
Ani Kalousdian, “Teaching Resources for Islamic Art,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 26 June 2020.