vocabulary, such as‘arabesque,’‘ornament,’and‘decoration,’which iden-
tify it through European premises. The outmoded and imprecise term
‘arabesque,’in use by the eighteenth century, implies an essentialized
ethnic visual culture, exoticizing the inheritance of forms present in pre-
Islamic late antique culture.^3 Applied to surface geometries in Owen Jones
1851 Grammar of Ornament, the term‘ornament’was defined by Oleg
Grabar in 1983 as“any decoration that has no referent outside of the object
on which it was found, except in technical manuals.”He distinguishes this
from‘decoration,’defined as“anything applied to a structure or an object
that is not necessary to the stability, use, or understanding of that structure
or object.”^4 Both terms presume a system of outward mimesis in which
meaning and agency are external to form. But, as Graves points out,
separating surface treatment from associated forms misconstrues the
structure of geometric practices:“The medieval artistic modes collectively
and commonly termed‘ornament’make up a fully three-dimensional
system in which surface and space are mutually constitutive, rather than
a two-dimensional skin that can be unproblematically separated from its
carriers.”^5 ‘Ornament’can signal Islamicity but cannot engage in mimesis;
geometry can.
InThe TopkapıScroll(1995, Necipoğlu adds the Persian termgirih,
meaning‘knot,’to the lexicon.^6 This closely corresponds to the Arabic
term‘aqd, meaning repeat unit or pattern.^7 The term girihappears as early
as 1557, when Qutb al-Din Qissakhvan identified it among several non-
figural styles of painting, including the Chinese (khata’i), the European
(firingi), relating to margins (fassali), and marbled (abri).^8 The historical
longevity and geographical specificity of the term underscores its impor-
tance, but, as with decoration and ornament, seems to limit its meaning to
a habitual visual practice undertaken by craftsmen rather than one con-
sciously conveying philosophical or doctrinal meaning.
This chapter examines the meanings accorded to geometry in both
modern academic and premodern Islamic discourses. Thefirst section
examines the discomfort with geometry expressed by some founding
practitioners of Islamic art history. While their prejudices may no longer
dominate, their judgment of isometric geometry as non-signifying persists.
The subsequent section disputes the presumed absence of Islamic dis-
courses about geometry revealing its meanings not simply as a cultural
sign, but as a mimetic practice.
(^3) Allen,1988a:2. (^4) Grabar, 1992 : xxii–xxiii. (^5) Graves, 2018 :59–60.
(^6) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 22. (^7) Necipoğlu,2017a: 37. (^8) Porter, 2000 : 113.
Mimetic Geometries 269