Where Nizami and Jami had compared architecture to the cosmos
through analogies of form, here the analogy expands to include sound
and movement (seeChapter 7.4bandChapter 8.2). Seemingly casual
anecdotes underscore the beauty of the mosque that came not from
external, disinterested qualities, but through qualities intrinsic to the
process of construction. These were enabled through the architect’s train-
ing in cosmological knowledge through music, his vocational election in a
dream, and the good character thereby bestowed on him, as on the
calligraphers described in and Qadi Ahmad and Mustafa‘Ali’s treatises.
These intrinsic qualities were further fortified through the process of
construction, which created cosmological space through a ceremony
enabling union with the divine. The mosque renders permanent the sacr-
ality created in the performance of thesama(see Chapter 2.1).
The persistence of a culture understanding geometry as representation
of such correlations and divine similitudes is perhaps nowhere more
succinctly expressed than in an eighteenth-century argument used to
dismiss it in favor of naturalism. Much as modernists argued against the
trap of visual verisimilitude at the turn of the twentieth century, the
Ottoman poet Sünbülzade Vehbi (1718?–1809) advised his son:
Do not esteem geometry
Avoid getting caught in that circle of distraction.^63
For him the dangerous realism that renders the image simultaneously
attractive and deceptivepharmakonoccurs not in painting, but in the
structural realism of pattern. In distracting, it takes us away from the
concrete world of naturalistic representation. His modernity redefines
interiority as a distraction.
Yet according to several scholars today, the mimetic properties of
geometry had long since been forgotten. Yasser Tabbaa proposes that
under the Abbasid caliphate the extensive use of polyhedral isometric
geometry may initially have served to propagate Ash’arite orthodoxy and
signal allegiance to Abbasid sovereignty with no awareness of its theologi-
cal implications.^64 Similarly, Necipoğlu implies that the heritage of
Platonism embedded in Islamic visual culture proliferated into a polysemy
of meanings no longer affiliated with antiquity.^65 Both argue that geometric
form signaled dynastic or regional identity while confirming Grabar’s
reluctance to recognize a consistent underlying conceptual meaning.
Similarly, Wright discounts active knowledge of the relationship between(^63) Necipoğlu, 1995: 219. (^64) Tabbaa,2001. (^65) Necipoğlu, 1995: 222–223.
290 Mimetic Geometries