Discussions of Islamic art used to see it as developing from the passive adoption of Roman and Sasanian features.2 This was especially the case in scholarship on the so-called Umayyad desert-castles in the early twentieth century.3 As a result, this period of Islamic art was perceived as an eclectic mixture of Eastern and Western motifs with little symbolic content.4

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.

Shidyaq wrote in an era when capitalism had already made its way into the Ottoman Empire. Scribal work was already an inheritance to be refused, the discourse of the master was in recession and the crumbling symbolic order presented itself at every corner: in the home, where cultural practices of generosity impoverished his family; and most importantly in the traditional schools (kuttab), where learning grammar was harder than ‘scratching your own balls’. Rejecting the impotent work of scribes and grammarians, Shidyaq invoked metaphors of ejaculation to describe his version of linguisteriks. The writing of his pen is described as a ‘cut’ (shiq al-qalam): an incision into the symbolic sphere, from which a sense of pleasure is derived, yet one that does not satisfy. Instead of the rampant seraglio, the paradise of pure enjoyment, the liberalising sphere of empire is experienced as a zone of impotence, a place in which pleasure can no longer be derived from coitus, if it ever has been. Pleasure cannot be derived from the sweet taste of sin even; rather, paradise itself, the promised paradise of satisfaction, is like the ‘fruit of the zaqqum tree’, a tree that grows in hell whose fruits taste bitter and ‘its nectar like pus’. The foul taste of a world in which masters can no longer be identified is experienced at once as a penetrating force and an excessive pressure. Shiyaq wrote, ‘I once thought the world is like the vulva for both are stuffing in shape, I say it's more like the anus in its circularity’. He compares the release experienced through the written word to a precipitation from the bottom up, a painful emptying out that through the ‘narrow slit’ of the pen.

Writing is a literal emptying out of the nozzle of the pen. It is a result of offering oneself to the desire of an Other who is perceived as a seductress the pursuit of whom is the pursuit of divine providence itself: ‘my books had taken against me as a wife does her husband and I have decided to have nothing more to do with them’. He continues ‘ my intention in writing this book has been to approach closer to them and use it to appease, not anger, them’.

The modern impasse hails for the Arabic reading subject a crisis in symbolic identification: there is a retreat of the discourse of the master, a crisis in the symbolic and the relationship between language and law comes to fore. The nineteenth century in particular is marked by the emergence of a neurotic subject (Bustani) obsessed with questions of origins (original sin, origins of language, origins of society and habit, origins of culture) and a hysteric subject (Shidyaq) that asks: what do you want of me? The problem of origins does not cease to repeat itself in the corpus of texts from the time, it takes the shape of a compulsive reposing of the questions of beginnings and ends: where does taste come from (inclination, disposition, acquired)? What is the origin of sociality? How does habit originate? What is the origin of language? How to write a history of culture? When and how does culture originate? How does one become a woman? Bustani's encyclopaedic and lexicographic texts were largely an attempt to answer this problem of origins. He begins his treatise on culture, Khutba fiadab al-ʿarab (1869), by repudiating apologetics who claim a golden age of Arabic culture in the past: ‘don't tell stories of origins and inheritance, the only origin is that which is actual in the present’ (la taqul asli wa fasli abadan inama asl al fata ma qad hasal). The actuality of culture (ma qad hasal) is not discerned from the past (its essence) but from its existence in the present: the essence of culture is nothing but that which manifests itself in the present. Culture in this understanding is the measure of the failures or successes of a society in the present: i.e. culture has a validity but not a value-in-itself. Bustani maintains that culture is a result of a process of self-reflection that goes against the principle of inheritance. Culture in this sense is similar to science:

The term ‘literary modernity’, which has been widely used to describe modern Arabic thought, originates in Paul de Man's deconstructionist understanding of modernity as the paradoxical condition of a literary period – following Heidegger's notion of an epoch of beings – within ‘which it discovers the impossibility of being modern’. Modernity in de Man's formulation is a ‘concept that, like all concepts that are in essence temporal’ acquires a further complexity when ‘made to refer to events that are in essence linguistic’. For de Man, the way to restitute the presumed incongruous relationship between modernity and history is to affirm that the study of literature can only be historical or, more specifically, historicist (neither scientific nor structural). The reason for insisting on historicism to understand literary modernity (which is what necessitates that modernity be reduced to a literary mode of being) is that literature is an entity that constantly puts its own ontological status into question. For de Man, the literary is itself a mode of being: ‘there is a literary mode of being that as a form of language that knows itself to be mere repetition, mere fiction and allegory, forever unable to participate in the spontaneity of action or modernity’. Further, this ‘literary mode of being’ is experienced as a compulsion; as soon as a literary act is posited as a breakaway from the past into the future, the present is itself not ‘allowed to come into being’. It is as though the present is forever halted or stunted in between two successive moments in time: ‘literature is an entity that exists not as a single moment of self-denial, but as a plurality of moments that can, if one wishes, be represented, but this is a mere representation, as a succession of moments or a duration. In other words, literature can be represented as a movement and is, in essence, the fictional narration of this movement’.

The definition of literature as a ‘mode of being’ is evidently beholden to Heidegger's reworking of the categories of substance and existence in Being and Time. But for de Man, language is assumed as a substance; and history or historicality is its mode of existence, the result of a self-reflexive stance of the literary mode of being from which a ‘linguistic existence’ can be discerned.

In Why Are the Arabs Not Free? Mustapha Safouan claims that the existing schism between spoken and written Arabic instils a mode of domination that commands a ‘voluntary servitude’ to a master signifier: a signifier literally incarnated in the figure of the leader. Safouan argues that this state of servitude arises from within Arabic-speaking societies in modernity, and that domination gets generated ‘internally’ rather than through the external forces of colonisation alone. In Safouan's account, the separation of written from spoken Arabic disrupts the creation of ‘culture’ or the symbolic sphere of society, which is always fundamentally mediated by language. The co-optation of speech by the apparatuses of the State relies upon robbing people of the possibilities through which acts of freedom become possible. Safouan thus maintains, contra Edward Said, that speaking truth to power is not adequate as a strategy for liberation, but rather functions like a fantasy, precisely because ‘power entails deafness to such speech’. The condition of unfreedom in the Arabic-speaking world is premised on three factors: the isolation of people from the realm of thought through the confinement of writing to a classical language; the religious nature of the State's authority which, like God, commands the sole right of interpretation; and the subjection to an imaginary father or patriarch – in the figure of the monarch or the supreme leader – which places authority outside intersubjective relations, thereby rendering it unquestionable to its subjects.

Absolute authority is analogous to the name-of-the-father who is removed from circulation, from the profane world of exchange, frozen as an imaginary image with which subjects identify.

In 1992, Safouan translated Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1549/1576) into Arabic in an attempt to engage with the unquestioning faith in the figure of the unifying leader of masses in the Arab world (Gamel Abdel Nasser in particular). In a psychoanalytic vein, Safouan posits that there is a fundamental link between language and law. Despotism does not work simply through coercive force, but by instituting a transcendental master signifier, a One, who commands a ‘voluntary’ form of servitude. According to La Boétie, the love of liberty is unnatural to the human animal.

By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had begun to sow the seeds of its tanzimat reforms that were largely liberal in nature and had transformative implications for property rights, legislation and governance, as well as taxation and military conscription. The peasant uprisings of Mount Lebanon (1820s, 1830s, 1841, 1845 and 1860) occurred in the context of drastic land reforms and the encroachment of private property and industrial capital on the premodern tax-farming system, as well the institutionalisation of waged labour. This was concomitant with the rise of the Maronite Church as a landowning power, and the demise of the traditional power of Druze and Christian feudal overlords in light of the influx of European mercantile and industrial capital, the establishment of wage labour through trade and the silk industry, reformed Ottoman property and tax laws, Ottoman–Egyptian commercial rivalry and the rapid urbanisation of Beirut and Damascus. It is from within this historical context that the liberal nation form, or watan, surfaced in Bustani's writings as a regulative ideal for a society in crisis. The conversion of the political violence into the paradigm of ‘civil war’ within one nation rendered a natural history of the nation in a way that made it appear as history's point of departure rather than as the result of a historical process.

Commenting on the 1860 events, Bustani wrote a series of eleven nationalist pamphlets, entitled Nafır Surriya (The Clarion of Syria) and signed anonymously muhib lil watan (‘loving patriot’), and in that same year a translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Throughout these pamphlets, and using Crusoe's story as an allegory for civil society in a post-war temporality, Bustani formulated a form of liberal nationalism in defence of the ‘true religion’ (diyana haqiqiya), Protestant in spirit and corresponding with a political economic logic that ties it to the history of capitalism.

This wedding of religion and political economy is most strikingly evident in the way the concepts of guilt and debt were used to separate out a universalistic conception of religion from sectarian political identities, according to which Bustani's conception of nationality rendered the moral guilt accumulated in the wake of sectarian conflict into a quantifiable debt that underpins a project of national revival through cooperative labour.

Language perceived as a mirror, in which an image of likeness is constructed, is nothing but the language of the social contract: a tool for communication to be possible and justified by a legitimate authority. This ‘image’ of language is one that is constructed by grammar specifically. It is grammar that constructs a unity of totality. And in grammar language is seized in a glance, all at once, as an imaginary totality. The question of mastery in language – its correctness and incorrectness – lies at the heart of grammar. As such, it is also a substitute question for the legitimation of the sovereign and the social contract.

Arabic grammar in particular has been concerned throughout its history with the problem of presumed ‘corruptions’ in or of the language: Arabic is eternal, like the soul, and it is to be guarded against error. In fact, it is the very fear of error, of corruption, of ‘low’ language (ammiya) that renders the first treatise of Arabic grammar possible. It is always the fear of the neophytes (the new Muslims, conquered people, and so forth) that renders the codification of correct linguistic norms necessary. The fierce debates between Arabic grammarians and logicians – exemplified in the famous medieval contestation between As-Sirafiand Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunis – concerning the category of meaning shows how heavily guarded was the Arabic grammarian tradition against philosophy, against a ‘foreign logos’: while As-Siraficonsidered meaning a ‘semantic aspect of a phonetic expression’, Yunis claimed meanings referred to ‘logical operators of the mind’. Despite the consensus reached by the introduction of logic into Arabic linguistics, grammar largely remained Arabo-Islamic without foreign influence.

The beauty of Arabic grammar, conceived as an eternal synchronic, lies in its untarnished state, a pure language that does not submit to diachronicity, that seems to have subverted the historical break between grammar and linguistics inaugurated by the scientific revolution.