Despite the fact that these accounts, as well as records of thousands and hundreds of thousand of manuscripts in the libraries of Cordoba, Cairo, and Baghdad, point to an early production date, the beginnings of the Arabic illustrated book are marked by uncertainty and cannot be easily identified. Many have been lost : not a single dated illustrated Arabic book survives from before the year 1000 and the earliest surviving visual evidence consists of isolated leaves among the large motley body of undated fragmentary works on paper discovered at Fustat. The scarcity of early surviving works and the discrepancy between documentary and material evidence have led scholars to question the reliability of the documentary evidence and even to cast doubt on whether there was any significant production of illustrated manuscripts before the eleventh century.

Generally speaking, paintings of the human figure in early Islam can tentatively be divided into two main phases. The first cover the Umayyad and early Abbasid era between the late seventh and tenth century; the second begins in the late tenth or early eleventh century, covers Fatimed art in Egypt, and culminates in the late-twelfth to mid-thirteenth-century paintings in Mesopotamia. The two periods differ stylistically and ichnographically, but they also share some common sources that are reflected not only in the style of the figures, but also in the themes in which they appeared.

Numerous objects are mentioned in the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, a semi-historical account of the Malacca sultants, thei ancestors, and their descendents, first written in 1482 by a Johore prince, Raja Bongsu, also known as Tun Sri Lanang. The objects include textiles, weapons, metalwork, furniture, musical instruments, tombstones, vessels, buildings, gardens and fortifications.

A number of painters and calligraphers trained in Iran made important contributions to book production and book illustration in Mughal India. Here the careers of three of them, Mir Ali al-Harvari (ca. 1476-1545), Abd al-Samad Shirazi (ca. 1518 – ca. 1600), and Aqa Riza al-Haravi (fl. 1580-1608) will be examined. Documentation of their contributions will be supplemented by a more general survey of the artistic connections that existed between Iran and Mughal India.

The recent surge in publications dealing with European art on Islamic themes, especially the work of Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century, is a part of a general reappraisal of nineteenth century academic art occurring in our time, dually reflected in scholarly research and in the art market, and often showing the effect of the latter on the former. This dual interest has resulted in turn in a significant number of sumptuous new publications, often with many color illustrations. These books and catalogues have sought to appeal variously to the marketplace, to serious scholarship and to range a range of other interests from the hotly political to the mildly prurient.