by Jon Lackman | 14 March 2006 | Books, Islamic
Of Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction, Yasser Tabbaa writes: “For a book that claims to be introductory and foundational, [its] oppositional, even antagonistic, stance against nearly all the scholars it discusses is a serious problem. I have encountered nearly two dozen places where Leaman disparages other approaches and conclusions as ‘wrong,’ ‘just wrong,’ ‘entirely wrong,’ ‘entirely implausible,’ ‘patently false,’ and so on … Since this book is just the most recent of several unsatisfactory books that purport to offer a theory of Islamic aesthetics, one is left to wonder whether such a project is useful or even possible … nearly all these books have succumbed to facile ahistorical essentialism and a self-serving selection of evidence.”
