The Islamic Art Collection: Beauty Across a Thousand Years

The Met's Islamic Art galleries — reopened and renamed "Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia" in 2011 — house one of the most comprehensive collections of Islamic art outside the Islamic world. The objects span from the 7th century to the early 20th century and cover an extraordinary geographic range, from Spain to Indonesia. What unifies them is not a single style but a set of shared aesthetic values: the integration of text and image, the exploration of geometric and vegetal pattern, the elevation of the applied arts to the status of fine art, and an engagement with surface and material that rivals any tradition in world art history.