versification suggests that geometry may have a representational function
informed by practices of conditioned reception not explicit to a casual
viewer.
Using music less as a formal than as a processual analogy, Jafer Agha’s
seventeenth-century biography of court architect Mehmet Agha, designer
of the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, uses transmediality to delineate the simili-
tudes of sacred space. Framing the biography of the creative individual in
the context of the divine, who creates without a compass, his prophets and
thefirst four caliphs, Jafer both avoids the threat ofshirkinherent in
praising human creativity and situates human creation within divine
cosmology. He depicts Mehmet as initially attracted by music, then pro-
ceeds to explain contemporary music theory beginning with its
Pythagorean origins. However, guided by the scholarly interpretation of
a dream in which gypsies lead him away, Mehmet learns that gypsies are
associated withjinn(malevolent spirits mentioned in the Quran), and
discovers the art of marquetry, also based on Pythagorean geometry.
Coupled with his modest and pious character, his unparalleled artistic
mastery allows him to gain the attention of the sultan, who likens the
beauty of his forms to intoxication with wine. Although dismissed by
Owen Wright as a quaint detail, this association with music comes full
circle as the construction of Mehmet’s crowning achievement, the Mosque
of Sultan Ahmet (1616) is endowed with cosmological significance through
the sounds of its construction.^61 Mehmet’s training in the“science of
music,”disparaged earlier in the work, is redeemed through association
with sacred space. Three sets of modes correspond to twelve types of stone,
creating four pitches by seven workmen. The process of creating the
mosque thus contains a numerical cosmology through sonic analogy.
The sound of chisels resounding on stone corresponds to a vocalized
“hu,” central to Mevlevi ceremonies of remembrance. Workers thus
bring the mosque into being by articulating the presence of God–“him”
(hu)–by working the stone. A long poem then praises the mosque,
likening it to a cosmographic space transformed through prayer into a
rose garden of paradise:
Each of the bright roses wore a turban on its head.
White turbans encircled the garden of the world.
Everywhere the nightingale sounded the call to prayer.
The congregation of trees turned toward the kibla in rows.
Bowing and prostrationfilled the garden of the world.^62
(^61) Wright, 2004 : 367. (^62) Crane, 1987 : 68, 73.
Isometric Geometry in Islamic Perceptual Culture 289