The ubiquity of the written word on buildings and objects is one of the distinctive features of Islamic culture. Inscriptions, of course, are attested in numerous other civilisations, from ancient Greece to India, but they rarely have the prominence or visual impact of Islamic ones, even if they may be greater in number and richer in historical information. In a sense, then, Islamic inscriptions, which almost invariably will contain religious content or allusions, proclaim the distinctively Islamic character of a space even to an illiterate audience who would at least have recognised the script as that of the Qur’an, God's word. However, inscriptions could also perform secular functions of proclaiming the title and ambitions of earthly kings, as well as more frivolous ones, in the form of verses that decorated objects and textiles from the Abbasid period onwards. Moreover, after the fifth/eleventh century inscriptions in tongues other than Arabic appear, such as Persian, Turkish and the Berber languages. These too fall traditionally within the scope of Islamic inscriptions. Furthermore, ‘Islamic’ inscriptions – either actually in Arabic or pseudepigraphic – appear in Christian contexts, such as monuments patronised by the post-reconquest rulers of Spain. Despite the intimate association of religion and epigraphy in the Islamic world, there is no simple definition of what constitutes an Islamic inscription, and the present volume aims in part to show the breadth of material.

The study of inscriptions has traditionally been divided into two elements: an historical, philological approach that sought to record the text of inscriptions for historical data (and often neglected the religious content), and an art historical one. The earliest studies of Islamic epigraphy, exemplified by the magisterial volumes of Max van Berchem, focused on the historical information for patrons, chronology and artists that inscriptions provided. Later work, such as that by Nikita Elisséeff, drew attention to the importance of inscriptions as sources for dynastic ideology and chancery protocol. This tradition was continued by the most comprehensive collection of Islamic inscriptions, the Repertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe, which records some 6,400 inscriptions on all media produced between 22/642 and 800/1398 but is far from complete. More seriously, though, the Repertoire neglects to give any information on, or illustrations of, the context in which an inscription appears.