Jewad Selim, Children’s Games . 1953, oil on canvas, 90.5 x 71 cm. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. © the descendants of Jewad Selim. Khaled al-Rahal’s Carpet (1965), at a mere 9 x 12 inches, encourages you to lean in a bit more than you might like. Suspended against a beige background whose mottled impasto recalls patinated bronze, the work  offers a new and more intimate way to look at a well-trodden art object that has become, at least in the Western imagination, one of the most potent symbols of Islamic art. al-Rahal’s carpet wants nothing to do with the scrolling arabesques and palmette blossoms that characterize the great Safavid court carpets at the Met, whose aesthetic power—if admired from far back enough—is inseparable from a recognition of the gargantuan human possibility at work in creating objects of such scale.  al-Rahal’s carpet, on the other hand, only permits its viewer to make out its gnarled globules of crimson, navy, and turquoise knots and outstretched black…