What is Islamic Art

secular sphere, and associate luxury goods with courtly culture devoid of religion.^47 The Quran underscores the importance of n ...

the invisible God of Islam.^51 As in the Platonic tradition, visuality may thus sometimes be suspect in its production/recogniti ...

Figure 4Anonymous,Angels Bowing before Adam, from theMajalis al-Ussaqby Amir Kamil al-Din Gazurgahi, 1580. Bibliothèque National ...

This understanding of the image retreats from its physical form, the object of art history, in favor of a mediating function tha ...

This attitude also defines the role of the artist not as excessively prideful in imitating God, but as honoring God by emulating ...

which we come to know internally through self-knowledge. Ibn Sina’s thought reverberates with the Brethren of Purity’s thirty-si ...

The association between the composite sense and the mirror comes directly from the thought of Plotinus, who likens conceptual im ...

The sentient will perceive all features of the object only by discerning all the features of all its parts. That being so, the c ...

object into tactile, visual, and other sensory components, and then encoun- ters a process of unification resulting in afixed co ...

at the heart, as preferred by Aristotle.^80 He elaborates on the nature of the heart more fully in theRevival of the Religious S ...

Dominant modern historiography envisions late antiquity as exclusively in the so-called Western tradition. Modern European thoug ...

discussions of the legitimacy of pre-Islamic and Judaic texts known as israeliyyatunderscore scholarly engagement with these sou ...

5 Seeing through the Mirror Far from a secularflaunting of sanction, the image in Islamic discourses can reveal faith, often in ...

scholar at the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad illustrates his role in reli- gious institutionalization. Despite his apparent renun ...

and we will prove ourselves.”The curtain was lifted. Then one saw their side shining and full of the same colors as that of the ...

archetype: he can empirically build the rules for beauty by making constant comparisons and observations, thus building a clear ...

potential deception of the image is for the viewer to retain a critical faculty at ease with the necessary gap between represent ...

Like Plato, al-Ghazali uses parable to discuss painting less as an aesthetic object than as a trope. The wall painting, executed ...

basis for multiple cosmologies, as well as for the stations of unveiling as a Sufiprogresses on the path toward the manifestatio ...

the human soul. Set against the trope of painting as a metaphor for the logical, rational method of knowledge identified as Gree ...