What is Islamic Art

gained renown elevating Andalusian court culture. He also improved the oud by making its body lighter, adding afifth pair of str ...

For al-Farabi, the image does not represent an absent reality. Rather, the aesthetic work–visual or musical–deposits its image i ...

“Would you like to eat?” Al Farabi said,“No.” So he said to him,“Would you like to drink?” Al-Farabi said,“No.” So he said to hi ...

with verdant, perfumed nature suggests romance as more heavenly than dangerous, perhaps because it exists in the imaginary realm ...

conjured through the agency of words. Such conjuring functions within the tradition ofwasf, which both reflected and transformed ...

the words of one of the sages. Figures seated on the upper register read books, presumably as future students of a living past. ...

as entertainment fostered moralization against it.^29 Similarly, an eleventh- century theoretician, al-Hasan al-Katib, underscor ...

As a Plotonian allusion, the arm-as-wing suggests that the proportions intrinsic to the body of man are also those that enablefl ...

happen upon it. Just as one who is not yet pure can go into a mosque to seek purity, so can one who“desires the purity of his so ...

place on the tambourine is a reference to the descent of the divine visitations from the innermost arcana upon generalexistence ...

Like the Brethren of Purity, who emphasize the intimate relationship between the proportions of music and calligraphic script, R ...

theAlchemy of Happiness, his elder brother Abu Hamid Muhammad al- Ghazali went even further, indicating audition as the only pat ...

The strings of your‘ud: O! sage-doctor of the lute– Are in dearness to the lovers as the jugular vein!^52 Indicating an intertex ...

month’s space the people who were gathered round him in the desert ate no food, and the children neither wept nor asked for milk ...

prohibition immediately after its revelation. Yet the enforcement of pro- hibitions was inconsistent. During the Abbasid period, ...

Rains burst like tears of a lover torn asunder from the one he loves. The transportation of the subject emergesfirst through sor ...

of Shiraz (1315–1319) frequently draw on transgressive tropes as meta- phors for divine love. For example, Rumi writes: ...Aren’ ...

A painting by Sultan Muhammad (c.1500–1550) from aDivan of Hafez illustrates the ambiguities of music. It depicts asama in the f ...

2.3 The Mutability of Form In both theoretical writings and in poetry, music functions within a shifting lexicon of similitudes– ...

of genre, material, region, religion or timeframe. This conflict undermines the possibility of art history as a conduit for cult ...