Islamic arts

Islamic arts, literary, performing, and visual arts of the vast populations of the Islamic world from the 7th century onward. Adherents of Islam and those living in Islamic settings have created such an immense variety of literatures, performing arts, visual arts, and music that it virtually defies any comprehensive definition. In the narrowest sense, the arts of the Islamic peoples might be said to include only those arising directly from the practice of Islam. More commonly, however, the term is extended to include all of the arts produced by Muslim peoples, whether connected with their religion or not. In this article, the subject includes the arts created in pre-Islamic times by Arabs and other peoples in Asia Minor and North Africa who eventually adopted the Islamic faith. On the other hand, arts produced in cultural areas that were only partially Muslim are discussed primarily in articles on arts of those regions (see Central Asian arts; South Asian arts; Southeast Asian arts).

General considerations

It is difficult to establish a common denominator for all of the artistic expressions of the Islamic peoples. Such a common denominator would have to be meaningful for miniature painting and historiography, for a musical mode and the form of a poem. The relationship between the art of the Islamic peoples and its religious basis is anything but direct.

Like most prophetic religions, Islam is not conducive to fine arts. Representation of living beings is prohibited—not in the Qurʾān but in the prophetic tradition. Thus, the centre of the Islamic artistic tradition lies in calligraphy, a distinguishing feature of this culture, in which the word as the medium of divine revelation plays such an important role. Representational art was found, however, in some early palaces and “at the doors of the bathhouses,” according to later Persian poetry. After the 13th century a highly refined art of miniature developed, primarily in the non-Arab countries; it dwells, however, only rarely upon religious subjects. The typical expression of Muslim art is the arabesque, both in its geometric and in its organic form—one leaf, one flower growing out of the other, without beginning and end and capable of almost innumerable variations, only gradually detected by the eye, which never lose their charm. An aversion to empty spaces distinguishes that art; neither the tile-covered walls of a mosque nor the rich imagery of a poem allows an unembellished area, and the decoration of a carpet can be extended almost without limit.

The centre of Islamic religion is the clean place for prayer, enlarged into the mosque, which comprises the community and all its needs. The essential structure is similar throughout the Muslim world. There are, of course, period and regional differences—large, wide court mosques of early times; the court mosques with big halls of Iran and adjacent countries; central buildings with the wonderfully shaped domes of the Ottoman Empire. The implements, however, are the same: a niche called a mihrab—pointing to Mecca—made of wood, marble, mosaic, stone, tiles; a small pulpit (minbar) for the Friday sermon; minarets, locally differently shaped but always rising like the call to prayer that is uttered from their tops; the wooden carved stands for the Qurʾān, which is to be written in the most perfect form; sometimes highly artistic lamps (made in Syria and proverbially mentioned throughout the Muslim world); perhaps bronze candlesticks, with inlaid ornaments; and rich variations of the prayer mats. If any decoration was needed, it was the words of God, beautifully written or carved in the walls or around the domes. At first connected with the mosques and later independent of them are schools, mausoleums, rooms for the students, and cells for the religious masters.

The poetry of the Arabs consisted in the beginning of praise and satirical poems thought to be full of magical qualities. The strict rules of the outward form of the poems (monorhyme, complicated metre) even in pre-Islamic times led to a certain formalism and encouraged imitation. Another early poetic form was the elegy, as noted in the work of the Arab female poet al-Khansāʾ (died after 630).

For the most part, however, Goethe’s statement that the stories of The Thousand and One Nights have no goal in themselves shows his understanding of the character of Arabic belles lettres, contrasting them with the Islamic religion, which aims at “collecting and uniting people in order to achieve one high goal.” Poets, on the other hand, rove around without any ethical purpose, according to the Qurʾān. For many pious Muslims, poetry was something suspect, opposed to the divine law, especially since it sang mostly of forbidden wine and of free love. The combination of music and poetry, as practiced in court circles and among the mystics, has always aroused the wrath of the lawyer divines who wield so much authority in Islamic communities. This opposition may partly explain why Islamic poetry and fine arts took refuge in a kind of unreal world, using fixed images that could be correctly interpreted only by those who were knowledgeable in the art.

The ambiguity of Persian poetry, which oscillates between the worldly, the divine, and often the political level, is typical of Islamic writings. Especially in Iran and the countries under its cultural influence, this kind of poetry formed the most important part of literature. Epic poetry of all kinds developed exclusively outside the Arabic-speaking countries; Western readers look in vain for an epical structure in such long poems (as in the case of the prose-romances of the Arabs) and find instead a rather aimless representation of facts and fictions. A similar characteristic even conditions innumerable historical works in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, which, especially in classical times, contain much valuable information, put together without being shaped into a real work of art; only rarely does the historian or philosopher reach a comprehensive view. The first attempt at a philosophy of history, Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah, in the 14th century, was rarely studied by his Arab compatriots.

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The accumulation of large amounts of material, which is carefully organized up to the present, seems typical of all branches of Islamic scholarship, from theology to natural sciences. There are many minute observations and descriptions but rarely a full view of the whole process. Later, especially in the Persian, Turkish, and Indo-Muslim areas, a tendency to overstress the decorative elements of prose is evident, and the contents even of official chronicles are hidden behind a network of rhymed prose, which is often difficult to disentangle.

This tendency is illustrated in all branches of Islamic art: the lack of “architectural” formation. Instead, there is a kind of carpetlike pattern; the Arabic and Persian poem is, in general, judged not as a closed unity but rather according to the perfection of its individual verses. Its main object is not to convey a deep personal feeling but to perfect to the utmost the traditional rules and inherited metaphors, to which a new image may sometimes be added. Thus, the personality of the poet becomes visible only through the minimal changes of expression and rhythm and the application of certain preferred metaphors, just as the personality of the miniature painter can be detected by a careful observation of details, of his way of colouring a rock or deepening the shade of a turban. The same holds true for the arabesques, which were developed according to a strict ritual to a mathematical pattern and were refined until they reached a perfection of geometrically complicated figures, as in the dome of the Karatay Medrese in Konya (1251); it corresponds both to the most intricate lacelike Kūfic inscriptions around this dome and to the poetical style of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, who wrote in that very place and during those years. His immortal mystical poems comprise thousands of variations on the central theme of love. Although such a perfect congruency of poetry and fine arts is not frequently found, the precept about Persian art that “its wings are too heavy with beauty” can also be applied to Persian poetry. Thus, the tile work of a Persian mosque, which combines different levels of arabesque work with different styles of writing, is reminiscent of the way Persian poetry combines at least two levels of reality. And a perfect harmony is reached in some of the miniature manuscripts of Iran, Muslim India, or Ottoman Turkey, which, in their lucid colours and fine details of execution, recall both the perfection of the calligraphy that surrounds them on delicate paper and the subtlety of the stories or poems that they accompany or illustrate.

Those accustomed to the Western ideals of plasticity or form in the fine arts and literature or to the polyphonic interweaving of melodic lines in music have some difficulties in appreciating this art. The palaces seem to be without a fixed architectural plan; rooms and gardens are simply laid out according to daily needs. The historian offers an astounding amount of detailed reports and facts but with no unifying concept. The Muslim writer prefers this carpetlike form and adds colour to colour, motif to motif, so that the reader only understands the meaning and end of the whole web from a certain distance. Music, differentiated as it may be in the countries between Morocco and India, follows the same model: variations of highest subtlety on a comparatively simple given subject or theme.

Drama and opera in the Western sense did not develop in the Islamic countries until the 19th century, and the art of the novel is also a comparatively recent development. There was no reason for drama: in the Muslim perception, God is the only actor who can do whatever he pleases, whose will is inscrutable. Humans are, at best, puppets on a string, behind whose movements those with insight detect the hand of the play master. Neither is the problem of personal guilt and absolution posed as it is in the West, nor is a catharsis, or purging of emotion, needed through drama. The atomist theory, widely accepted in Islam since the 10th century, leaves no room for a “dramatic” movement; it teaches that God creates everything anew in every moment, and what is called a “law of nature” is nothing but God’s custom, which he can interrupt whenever he pleases.

It is true that certain other forms are found in the more folkloristic arts of Islam. Every region has produced poetry, in regional languages, that is livelier and more realistic than the classical court poetry, but poetry limited to one region tends to become restricted to certain fixed forms that can be easily imitated. Attempts at drama in Islam come from these more popular spheres in Iran (and, rarely, in Lebanon and Iraq), where the tragic events of the murder of Ḥusayn (680) at Karbala were dramatized in strange forms, using the vocabulary of traditional Persian poetry and theology. Thus, strangely hybrid forms emerge in the Islamic arts, highly interesting for the historian of religion and the student of literature but not typical of the classic Islamic ideals. Popular illustrations of tales and legends and those of some of the heroes of the Shiʿah are similarly interesting but atypical. In modern times, of course, there have been imitations of all forms of Western literary and visual arts: paintings in the Impressionist or Cubist style; the use of free verse instead of the stern classical forms; and novels, dramas, motion pictures, and music combining Western and Eastern modes. Belief in the Qurʾānic dictum “Whatever is on earth will perish save His face” discouraged artistic endeavour on a large scale, but the Prophetic tradition (Hadith) “Verily God is beautiful and loves beauty” has inspired numberless artists and artisans, writers and poets, musicians, and mystics to develop their arts and crafts as a reflection of that divine beauty. A theory of aesthetics comprising the various artistic expressions of the Muslim peoples has yet to be written. Although there have been a number of studies in literary criticism, the formal indebtedness of some of the best modern poets and painters to the Islamic heritage has yet to be fully articulated.

It is notable that the arts of the Islamic peoples have had relatively little impact on other cultures, certainly far less than their artistic merit would appear to warrant. Europe has known art objects of Islamic origin since the early Middle Ages, when they were brought home by the Crusaders or manufactured by the Arabs in Sicily and Spain. Much admired and even imitated, they formed part of the material culture in those times, so much so that even the coronation robes of the German emperor were decorated with an Arabic inscription. At the same time, Islamic motives wandered into the belles lettres of Europe, and Islamic scientific books formed a basis for the development of Western science. Islamic culture as such, however, was rather an object of hatred than of admiration; a more objective appreciation of both the works of art and of literature did not start until the mid-17th century, when travelers told of the magnificent buildings in Iran and Mughal India and the first works from Persian literature were translated, influencing German classical literature. Indian miniatures inspired Rembrandt, just as European paintings were imitated by Islamic, especially Mughal, artists. Persian carpets were among the most-coveted gifts for princes and princesses.

A bias against the cultures of the East persisted, however, until after the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. The indefatigable work of the British scholars at Fort William at Calcutta (now Kolkata) brought new literary treasures to Europe, where they were studied carefully by specialists in the emerging field of Islamic studies. Poets such as Goethe in Germany in the early 19th century paved the way for a deeper understanding of Islamic poetry. Islamic literatures, however, continue to be known to the larger Western public almost exclusively by The Thousand and One Nights (translated first in the early 18th century), Omar Khayyam’s robāʿiyyāt (“quatrains”), and the lyrics of Ḥāfeẓ. Even experts who were aware of the immense wealth of the literatures in the different Islamic languages (such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu) until the 20th century rarely appreciated the literatures from an aesthetic viewpoint; rather, they used them as a source for lexicography and for philological and historical research. The situation in Islamic fine arts and architecture was similar. Although the beauty of the Alhambra, for example, had already inspired European scholars and artists in the early 19th century, a thorough study of Islamic art as an independent field began only in the 20th century. Interest in the music of Islamic peoples, the arabesque-like uniformity of which seems strange to Western ideals of harmony, was also slow to develop.