What is Islamic Art

indirectly with a widespread understanding of idolatry not simply as idol worship, but as a broader ethical demand to maintain a ...

The story of the cave also suggests the need for a symbolic space for retreating from the material world to understand it. This ...

who foresees Khosrau’s wife Shirin (Sweet), her horse, Shabdiz (Midnight), and the court musician Barbad, afigure based on the s ...

verisimilitude of the image (like the birds of Zeuxis), but of the effect of the Real that he conveys through the image into the ...

exclaims,“I have fallen so in love with this picture that one would take me for an idolater!”Rooted inHadith, however, Shapur’s ...

propagation to unworthy mortals. In contrast, the mental images created by dream and hidden portraits preceding the transgressio ...

illustration reflects the poetic reference to the Taq-e Bustan. [Figure 10]As with Shapur’s drawings, the artistry presumed sinf ...

Although the poem purportedly is about the relationship between Khosrau and Shirin as foretold in the initiating dream, the trag ...

In his rendition, three princes set forth with their father’s blessing to discover the far corners of their future kingdom. The ...

The restlessness of the young men resembles that of the young Bahram Gur, the hero of Nizami’sSeven Icons(Haft Paykar), whofinds ...

between worldly love and divine intention. [Plate 14] Each of the future brides represents a color, a planet, and an element ass ...

with metaphysical qualities, enabling everlasting affluence–presumably in the hereafter. Rumi’s palace, then, conveys not simply ...

their lack of insight. So they seek out a shaykh“endowed with insight... Not by way of the ear, but by inspiration from Reason.” ...

Attar’s incorporation of the story of Joseph and Zuleikha, a romance similarly set in a palace of images (seeChapter 8), with th ...

“all this is reality: whence, then, comes the form?” A form that frees you from form, a sleeper that awakens everyone who is asl ...

The door would become now the window, now the sunbeams; the earth would become now the wheat, now the bushel. In eyes the heaven ...

... His soul that was like a peacock in the garden of delight became like an owl in the wilderness of unreality. Like Adam, he w ...

In the highly intertextual eighteenth-century romanceBeauty and Love, the Ottoman poet Shaykh Galip (1757–1799), leader of the d ...

The Fortress of Form, then, is the robber of consciousness. We are trapped within the material world and an image-based, symboli ...

disciplinarity denies the facility to hear images between dreams and reality, between experience and projection, between faith a ...