For people of a certain age, the title of this essay may call to mind Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), a narrative of age-defying and undying love that endures even in moments of catastrophe. Without claiming Márquez’s storytelling magic, I am borrowing his evocative title to reflect on a different kind of endurance: the persistence—and precarity—of writing art history in times of war.For those of us engaged with the Islamic world, war is not a passing crisis but a persistent condition, predating Márquez’s novel and continuing, uninterrupted, to the present. The modern history of the Islamic world, like much of the formerly colonized Global South, has been punctured by armed conflict. Colonial conquests of the 19th and early 20th centuries reconfigured societies, economies, and cultural life. And the end of colonial rule brought no peace: postcolonial states unraveled into civil wars, territorial disputes, and neocolonial interventions.My own life has unfolded in the shadow of war—from the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab defeat, to the wars in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, today, Syria, Libya, Sudan, alongside the festering open wound of Palestine and the ongoing Israeli genocide against Gaza. These wars have left indelible psychological and identitarian scars while ensuring the prolonged entanglement of former colonizers in the governance and resource control of postcolonial states.But my aim is not to invoke a revisionist history as catharsis, nor to offer the consoling illusion that history writing can resist genocide or erasure—though in moments of despair, such a belief is seductive. Rather, I want to explore how war has shaped the formation, orientation, and theoretical entrapments of the field of Islamic art and architectural history since its inception. This is a causal context rarely examined but fundamental to understanding how “Islamic art” evolved as a Western scholarly endeavor, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and extending into our present moment under the banner of the protracted, so-called “War on Terror.”OF COURSE, THE LINK between war and history writing predates modern colonialism. In fact, the whole enterprise of history writing (or perhaps more accurately, history reciting) in the ancient world came about around heroic, nation-defining wars. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Islamic genre of Maghazi literature all establish conquest and armed struggle as narrative origins. War is not just a historical event but the engine of historical consciousness, framing the very act of historiography. Likewise, art has long been implicated in war: as booty, as spoil, and as symbol.The Baptistère de Saint Louis, 1320–1340.Take the “Griffin of Pisa,” a monumental Islamic bronze likely made in al-Andalus or Islamic Sicily. Most probably captured during Pisan raids in the 12th century, it was proudly mounted on the cathedral roof in Pisa before being transferred to a museum in 1828 once its artistic value was recognized. Or consider the Baptistère de Saint Louis, a Mamluk basin of extraordinary craftsmanship. Though its origin is undisputed—Mamluk Egypt or Syria—its date of acquisition is unclear. It could have been any time between 1249, the date of Seventh Crusade in Egypt; and 1292, when al-Ashraf Khalil finally expelled the last Crusaders from Acre in Palestine. The basin was used in French royal baptisms beginning around 1606, and was later attributed, at the end of the 18th century, to Louis the 9th, or Saint Louis: a king defeated and captured by the Mamluks. Both maneuvers suggest an attempt to rewrite a history of humiliation into one of triumphant appropriation. All these cases illustrate how Islamic art was not simply acquired, but conscripted into Western narratives of power and prestige.The European desire to possess Islamic objects grew tremendously during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, with the continent’s rising maritime power and its expansion into Asia and Africa. Early collectors acquired these objects by ostensibly ethical means: through trade, gift giving, bequests, or purchase.But soon as colonial power penetrated the Islamic world in the late 18th century, extraction became the norm. European consuls, officers, scholars, and explorers—often operating under multiple guises—dug, bribed, purchased, or plundered their way through Islamic cities and antiquities markets. By the 19th century, museum collections in Europe—especially in London and Paris—swelled with artifacts acquired through unjust partition of archeological findings, plunder, and outright theft. Restrictive antiquities laws, introduced in the second half of the 19th century, slowed this flow but never reversed it.World War I laid the entanglements of scholarship and imperialism bare. Figures like T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and Gertrude Bell began as archaeologists and emerged as colonial agents during the dismantling of Ottoman provinces at the end of the War. Lawrence played a dubious role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Bell influenced the shaping of modern Iraq, drawing its borders and choosing its king, before becoming the Director of Iraqi Antiquities and establishing the Iraq Museum in 1926. As director she drafted a new legislation that allowed the continued hemorrhaging of archeological finds outside Iraq, which she pushed against the opposition of the Arab nationalist minister of education, Sati’ al-Husri. Another early Islamicist, Louis Massignon, was arrested on suspicion of espionage in Iraq, only to reappear as a key advisor to the Sykes-Picot negotiators and to enter Jerusalem in 1917, alongside his friend Lawrence, with the British General Allenby, who started the process to fulfill the Balfour Declaration to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. K.A.C. Creswell, historian of early Islamic architecture, compiled a canon for the field while serving as Inspector of Monuments under General Allenby’s Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in Palestine and Syria in 1917-18.THESE OVERLAPPING ROLES—archaeologist, soldier, administrator—tell us this: the very foundations of Islamic art history as a field are colonial. These foundations have had enduring consequences. Perhaps the most insidious is the field’s continued one-directionality, with one civilization observing, classifying, and interpreting the cultural production of another, as the latter remains largely excluded from the process.This asymmetry persists today. With the exception of Iran and Turkey, and to a lesser extent Egypt, top academic positions, publications, and museum collections are centered in the West. Even as more scholars of Islamic background enter the field, the theoretical frameworks remain largely Eurocentric: the degradation of the classical heritage in the early Islamic period and the supposed prohibition of figural representation that led to abstraction are still syllabus staples. Local traditions of interpretation are rarely included and scholarship in Islamic languages is often dismissed as derivative or uncritical.This imbalance is epistemological as much as institutional. The very notion of discovery, foundational to Western art history, is a prime example of this process. Islamic sites and artifacts were—and still are—declared “discovered” by Western scholars, as if they had previously been invisible or unknown. The implicit claim is not merely to first contact, but to first understanding. Even when local communities have revered, maintained, or interpreted these objects for centuries, their knowledge is framed as anecdotal, unsystematic, or lacking historical consciousness. Discovery, in this colonial schema, is not an encounter—it is a claim to epistemic authority.The consequence of these claims to discovery is the erasure and belittling of indigenous interpretive frameworks—which are often labeled as intuitive, mystical, or uncritical. By contrast, Western modes of seeing are cast as analytical, dispassionate, rational, and implicitly, superior. This obfuscation robs local traditions of their historical agency and assigns meaning to their cultural output based on exogenous criteria. The act of “discovery,” then, functions not only as appropriation, but also as epistemic dispossession.While this dynamic is not unique to Islamic art—it also affects African, Indian, Chinese, and pre-Columbian studies—it is particularly acute due to the political, historical, and civilizational entanglements between Europe and the Islamic world. Moreover, because Islamic art shares a lineage with the classical Mediterranean, its output is often framed as a detour from the presumed teleology of Renaissance and Modernity. Even within debates on Late Antiquity, Islamic art is often seen as derivative rather than generative, marginal rather than central. When historian Garth Fowden reminds us that “there are roads out of antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance,” he reclaims a narrative space for Islamic continuity from Antiquity—a space often denied.Denying indigenous interpretations means that religion—so central to understanding Islamic cultures—is often marginalized, with Islam frequently invoked only in introductory chapters, then quickly bracketed out. The deeper structures of Islamic belief—its influence on aesthetics, ethics, space, and meaning—are rarely engaged. One exception is the Perennialist school of philosophy, exemplified by the work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, but their metaphysical readings are typically dismissed as ahistorical.This reluctance to engage with Islam as a living worldview mirrors the secularism of post-Enlightenment Western epistemology, which still afflicts art history. The Islamic world, however, never underwent a comparable Enlightenment rupture with religion. Instead, certain secular ideas were absorbed and then filtered through religious sensibilities, resulting is a modernity deeply entangled with religion—which Western observers often find incomprehensible, particularly when Islamic symbols spark political protest. These moments of incomprehension reveal the limits of treating secularism as a universal model, and by extension, the secular art history’s inability to fully grasping Islamic visual culture.This conceptual impasse is most visible in the historical amnesia surrounding 19th- and 20th-century Islamic art. Until recently, standard surveys simply ended before the onset of modernity. Scholars felt “uncomfortable in the 19th century,” to borrow a phrase from Islamic art historian Margaret Graves, because its eclectic artistic output challenged the dominant framework of rupture between the traditional and modern Islamic art. Accepting the creative continuity of Islamic art into the modern period would undermine the colonial narrative that depicted Islamic culture as static, in decline, and in need of European rescue. It would expose the “civilizing mission” for what it often was: a veneer for violence, looting, and epistemic conquest.THE ETHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL tensions haunting the modern study of Islamic art did not go wholly unnoticed, but acknowledgements by the likes of Oleg Grabar—perhaps the most influential figure in the field—stopped short of addressing their deep colonial roots. In an undated lecture draft he shared with me in the mid 1990s, Grabar reflected on the shifting landscape of Islamic art history and noted, with uncharacteristic unease, that “the most difficult to grasp change that was brought into the life of Islamic art in the last half-century is the importance taken by the contemporary world, its politics, the alleged sins identified with Orientalism, or the demands it made on all professionals.” Grabar saw that the field was no longer insulated from the political, ideological, and emotional ruptures of the present. Yet his phrasing—particularly “alleged sins”—betrays a certain ambivalence, if not reluctance, to fully reckon with the colonial entanglements that structured the very foundation of the discipline he helped shape.Oleg Grabar and Nasser Rabbat at MIT in 2006.Grabar’s observations were, nonetheless, astute. He recognized that “no one who has traveled or lived in Muslim lands can remain immune to the often very real emotional or cultural struggles which affect them. Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine, Kurdistan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, or the Sudan are all places where sad or tragic events have affected, or run the risk of affecting, the artistic heritage of these areas and, even more importantly, the education of men and women capable of learning about that heritage and of appreciating its products.” This is a powerful admission. Grabar acknowledges that political catastrophe does not merely damage monuments—it undermines the very possibility of local knowledge, of cultivating a generation of scholars from within the societies whose heritage is under study.Yet what is striking—and telling—is that Grabar does not extend this diagnosis to the field itself. He expresses sympathy for those “affected” by war but not for how war—and the broader histories of colonialism and epistemic violence—may have shaped the structures, methods, and assumptions of the field he led. The impact of war, in his account, is circumstantial and external. What remains unacknowledged is that the condition of war—colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial—has not simply damaged the raw material of study, but has structured the very ways Islamic art has been discovered, defined, interpreted, and institutionalized in the West.Later in the same reflection, Grabar turns his attention to the emergence of a new audience, a demographic shift he sees as transformative but somewhat unsettling. “We have now for the study of Islamic art and for all studies of the Muslim world, as for many other ethnic groups in North America, a new public seeking an awareness of the past different from the awareness expected in the countries from which their parents came and different from the allegedly universal scientific and academic scholarship of old. This has contributed tasks for which we are not, as a profession, well prepared and which we have not always handled very well.”This is a candid admission, but it also reinforces the epistemological asymmetry under critique. Grabar recognizes the growing presence of diasporic and Muslim-identifying scholars, but he frames their expectations as burdensome “tasks” for a profession built around a different—implicitly Western—conception of the past. His phrase, “allegedly universal scientific and academic scholarship,” is telling. The term “allegedly” introduces doubt, but this doubt is not pursued. Grabar does not ask why the field had presumed such universality in the first place, nor does he suggest that the methodologies and categories inherited from Enlightenment Europe might require fundamental rethinking in light of this new public.In effect, Grabar diagnoses the symptoms but avoids naming the underlying condition. His reflections acknowledge dissonance but hesitate to name its source: the field’s colonial origins, its exclusionary canon, and its secular epistemology. As someone who supervised more Muslim doctoral students than any of his contemporaries, he surely recognized the tensions faced by scholars straddling two traditions—one rooted in lived cultural experience, the other in Western academic detachment. But his proposed solutions were incremental and procedural, not structural or reparative.What Grabar could not—or would not—see is that war has not merely interrupted the study of Islamic art; it has been a constitutive force in its development. The colonial and postcolonial wars that ravaged the Islamic world were not just the background conditions for scholarly inquiry—they were the very crucibles in which the field of Near-Eastern and Islamic art history was forged. From the Crusades to the Napoleonic expeditions, from the World Wars to the ongoing “War on Terror,” the discipline emerged alongside and often through the very violence that it now seeks to study.The generational shift Grabar observed—of Muslim scholars seeking to reclaim and reinterpret their heritage—is not a burden on the field but an opportunity to reimagine its epistemic foundations. If, as Grabar wrote, “we are not… well prepared,” then the task is not simply to accommodate these voices but to rethink the assumptions, categories, and canons that have excluded them in the first place. Only then can we begin to disentangle Islamic art history from its colonial inheritance and make space for a pluralist, dialogical, and more impartial understanding of the past.