What is Islamic Art

many years of ascetic ritual observance, it is said that he returned to his hometown, a suburb of Baghdad, and began to deliver ...

He builds a pyre from logs and massy trees ... Each plaintive note trills out, from each pierced hole Comes evidence of his unta ...

manuscript of the ninth-century physician ibn Bakhtishu’sThe Usefulness of Animals(Manafial-Hayawan), produced around 1297. [Fig ...

the Simurgh in the plurality of its guises. The representation of the Simurgh does not aim for historical authenticity, but for ...

Thus discourses between philosophy, music, and poetry add nuance to discussions of the image beyond the blinkered question of pe ...

4 Seeing with the Heart If‘art’designates a category of objects, then the Quran says nothing about art. Yet to delineate‘art’thr ...

4.1 Perception and the Quran When my grandfatherfirst held me as a newborn, he whispered in my ear, “There is no God but God, an ...

than his speech.”^5 Faith, then, lies in accepting a logical contradiction equivalent to that of the Nicene Creed, a fourth-cent ...

Distinct from the hermeneutics of scripture, a decipherable text holding doctrinal truth, the Quran functions as sound producing ...

For a Muslim, the sound of Quranic recitation in Arabic cannot be replicated in any other language; its truth emerges perceptual ...

through the ahistorical vehicle of the Quran, homogeneous across time in all its manifestations as tablet/book or text/speech, a ...

to it,”ibn Arabi describes the Quran as always already containing an infinity of interpretations (Q18:109).^22 By barring human ...

This practice of apprehension contrasts with both Baumgarten’s hier- archy between logical and sensory knowledge and the Kantian ...

Understood as a representation in the medium of human language, the Quran exists in its full and eternal plenitude only at the l ...

of the Quranic text limits hermeneutic interpretation: humanity can never resolve the boundary between the definite and the inde ...

Prophet’s vision of the miraculous night journey from Mecca to the “farthest place of worship”(isra), and the subsequentmi’raj, ...

What can‘art’mean in a culture where the primary organ of perception is not the eye or the ears, but the heart? It requires a sh ...

The Quran also suggests that this light can withdraw. For those who pretend to believe but lack faith: God is mocking them, and ...

of perception in their visual faculty so that they may see him directly. Reason, proof and instruction are of no consideration i ...

If it burns out of control, who can be blamed for loving?^44 Ibn Arabi thus describes Quranic lightning as simultaneously enligh ...