In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several writers from Muslim lands produced Orientalist, supra-nationalist and nationalist visions of early Islamic art.1 This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive review of this period of ‘Muslim’ engagement with the early Islamic past. Intellectual activity at this time, in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab-speaking world, was so complex and varied that no survey could do justice to its sheer diversity. Rather, I will map three intersections between ideology and the historiography of early Islamic art: first, the nineteenth-century Protestant/Revivalist reconfiguration of Islam as a non-material religion; second, the Ottoman hegemonic discourse that promoted early Islamic heritage in order to preserve the spiritual and temporal power of the Caliphate; third, the subsequent Arab nationalist engagement with early Islamic art and archaeology, focused on Greater Syria and Iraq.