What is Islamic Art

3 The Insufficient Image If music was understood as producing images in the soul, then how were visual images understood to comm ...

all arts,”withholds praise and leaves to contemplate hidden wisdom. The story continues: And as the star-watcher took his place ...

reach the unseen stations.”^5 Like drinking, music is forbidden. Yet even as it poisons, it remedies the distance between human ...

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being andfind assuran ...

introduced to the Islamic world much earlier, in the anthology of wisdom entitledal-Mujtanaby ibn Durayd (d. 933).^13 Plutarch r ...

however, are the animals. They are badly drawn and look positively dead. Akbar’s painters were masters at illustrating animals, ...

Majnun, as a poet in the wilderness whose main claim to fame is love, already has Orphic overtones in Nizami’s rendition–long be ...

The other two paintings on the organ represent this competition. On the bottom, a Mughal artist kneels before a European, who ho ...

Plato and the animals. Yet the knowledge enabled by music and embodied by the meaning of the picture is crooked-hatted. This mea ...

Thus the“nocturnal lament”of the string, inducing sleep like Plato’s music, also suggests death, with the“dart transfixing the h ...

overfigures in paintings or alone on tiles or everyday objects. These visitations suggest intertextual associations with the bir ...

featuring humans, told by the Hoopoe. It combines elements of earlier theological prose, including the anonymousEpistle of the B ...

leads them to ignore a voice from beyond the clouds warning,“Throw not yourself with your own hands into ruin”(Q2:191). They set ...

Suhrawardi’s philosophy. His combination of Hellenic philosophical tradi- tion with Islamic hermeneutics enabled a powerful narr ...

another long poem while serving the needs of 600 patients daily.^50 The inordinately large volume of patients hints toward a met ...

announcing him as a perfumer, or as a pharmacist, his sobriquet may indicate him as a Platonist. Appropriating the inverted fabl ...

worth the greatest hardships. Far from reflecting a prohibition of images, the poem emphasizes their inherent insufficiency. Non ...

represents that which cannot be represented, but which people compul- sively try to represent. The Simurgh emerges as an icon of ...

Their souls rose free of all they’d been before; The past and all its actions were no more. Their life came from that close, ins ...

survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty.^63 Like the sun, Att ...