Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam

摘要

How do you determine what believers make of their religious art? Do you fabricate a questionnaire and report the resultant statistics? Can it be retrieved from an historical record established only by the literate elite? Do you watch what ordinary people do with that art and decipher the meaning from the concepts and relationships they form as a result of their encounter? Or do you spin out a theory, born of your own sense of explanation and elegance, which you then fit over the presumed facts?