The first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art has twenty selections. The fascinating introduction, which is too brief, explains how, starting as a medievalist, Grabar entered the field of Islamic studies. Arriving just at the end of the era when European imperialism dominated scholarship, he had the privilege, denied, alas, to scholars nowadays, to travel widely and do archeological excavations. In those days, “with slow mail, few airplanes, no television, expensive and unreliable telephones, radios that still needed electric plugs in walls . . .” (xxv), scholarly life was very different. The book’s twenty essays are divided into four sections. Five essays deal with the origins and context of Islamic art; seven with the architecture of Umayyad period; five with Fatimid Egypt and its relationship with the Muslim West; and, finally, three discuss the Muslim East. In part 1, Grabar describes the starting point of Islamic art. “From its Arabian past the new Muslim art could draw almost nothing” (20). And so the inheritance provided by Byzantine culture was very important. Muslims, he argues, were not so much iconoclasts as aniconclasts. For them, images were essentially...