The terms “Islamic” and ‘Arab” are not ideal instruments for classifying modern or contemporary art, for they are meta-categories that can variously encompass Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. Nonetheless, as historians of modern art in Islamic regions, we seem to have inherited a longstanding commitment to Islamic art as an epistemologically unique practice that produced limitless abstract patterns and other “non-Western” visual expression. It is time to move beyond such overburdened lineages. In this paper, I aim to historicize the formulations of a specific Arabo-Islamic aesthetic that emerged in the 1970s. I do so by a study of a single event and its metacultural claims: the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976. The Festival projected optimistic countercultural options for art and civilization that remain instructive today, while the complexity of its organizing structures demonstrates the limitations of the West/rest paradigm in interpreting its artistic products.