The sublime and the divine: Ashmolean exhibition explores Islamic divinatory art

An exhibition exploring the overlooked field of divinatory arts opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, last week (until 15 January 2017). For Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, Francesca Leoni, the museums curator of Islamic art, has gathered more than 130 objects from private and public collections throughout the British Isles, around a third of which are on view for the first time. Dating from the 12th to the 21st centuries, the exhibits represent a wide swathe of Islam,