Until recently it was thought that the mathematical solution to the formation of nonreplicating patterns that go on to infinity had not been solved before current advances in Western mathematics. But the discovery of such patterns at several Islamic religious sites prompts us to ask why it mattered to the Muslim artisans of that day to solve the mathematics and create such patterns. Just as Western cathedral art represented a cosmological view so, too, we may conjecture that to these Muslim craftsmen the representation of a world that is full of individual elements that relate to one another in unique ways replicates in the visual world what Allah has created for mankind in the world of social relations. By linking the art form and the mathematics to this broader social vision, we may be able to understand why the masters of that age chose to represent on the walls of their religious structures this particular cosmological pattern.

In 2011 the Metropolitan Museum opened its renovated Islamic Art wing. In 2012 the Louvre opened its own new galleries on Islamic Art. Yet, neither New York nor Paris give any space to Asia beyond Moghul India. The Met’s Southeast Asia collection focuses on the Hindu-Buddhist “classical” period, while the Louvre simply does not have any objects from Asia, as these are exhibited at the Musée Guimet. This chapter suggests that the approach to the study of Islam in Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shaped an understanding of Islam as “foreign” to the region and vice versa, contributing to the idea of peculiar forms of Islamic devotion and beliefs in the lands beyond the Oxus/Amu Darya river. Illustrating the missed encounter between “Islam” and “Asia”, the chapter focuses on – and ultimately suggests ways to reconcile – the isolation of Islamic Studies and Asian Studies as two disciplinary fields of study.

The discursive sphere of Islam explored in this book emerges through the interaction of texts of many genres, elaborating faith and engaging with multiple previous, neighboring, and intertwined cultures, and disseminated through ritual, poetry, music, geometry, and painting. The ideas about perception woven through them suggest that the questions that we ask through modern, Euronormative frameworks of religion, art, and history often veil Islamic culture in the name of revealing it. This not only alters dominant understandings of Islam and its arts, but also destabilizes the presumed universalism of disciplinary art history. Positing the broader category of ‘perceptual culture’ against the analytic limitations implicit in the categories ‘art’ and ‘history,’ this introduction critiques the modern segregation of culture from religion as disingenuous. Rather than inviting a ‘Western’ reader trying to understand an Islamic ‘other,’ it situates the reader, regardless of faith or heritage, as a modern subject using historical theological, philosophical, and poetic discourses to enter an earlier episteme and engage with Islamic cultures of the past. The resulting study emphasizes interfaith communication and Sufism as central aspects of Islamic perceptual cultures. It reflects on the performative character of perception as experienced through the eye, the ear, or the heart.