music and mathematics based on an absence of their discussion in theore-
tical texts of the sixteenth century.^66 On the contrary, the repetition of
similitudes in poetry, as well as Jafer’s choice to frame the architect’s life
through music and his description of workmanship through the analogy of
aSufidhikrunderscores a sophisticated allusion to something too familiar
to need explanation. Recent assertions that such knowledge had been
forgotten assume that intellectual meaning relies on demonstrative textual
or ritual rearticulation. The historical methodological expectation of exeg-
esis external to artistic practice thus reduces the philosophical–theological
discursive framework of Islamic discourses to a means of political
identification.
Conversely universalizing, several studies attempt to interpret transme-
dial isometric geometries as an expression of cosmologies essential to
Islamic faith. The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian
Architectureby Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtyar applied the concept
oftawhidto geometric repetition, interpreting“geometric patterns as
eternal archetypes that could lead the contemplative mind from outer
appearances to inner esoteric realities of Sufism through spiritual
hermeneutics.”^67 In connection with the 1976 Festival of Islam, Issam El-
Said and Ayşe Parman’sGeometric Concepts in Islamic Artindicates the
correspondences between poetic, musical, and geometrical structures.^68
For participants in the festival, using symbolic language to engage with
perceptual culture provided a more meaningful introduction to Islam than
the historicism of museums or direct readings of the Quran. Yet the
preference, expressed by one of the directors of the festival, Titus
Burkhardt, for the authenticity of native informants can be misleading,
in that practitioners of a faith often lack awareness of the vast changes that
can accrue in a belief system over even short time spans and in close
geographies.^69 More comprehensively embedding his arguments in histor-
ical documentation, Akkach elucidates the“sense of integrated spatiality
that brings cosmology, geography, the human body, and architecture
together, allowing them to be seen in terms of one another without need
for theoretical mediation.”^70
This absence of a need for theoretical mediation suggests a perceptual
culture transcending verbalization. If art is thus the agent of its own
meaning, the semiotics of iconography and of demonstrative criticism
(^66) Wright, 2004 : 67. (^67) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 77; Ardalan and Bakhtiyar, 1973.
(^68) El-Said and Parman, 1976 ; Necipoğlu, 1995 : 204–208. (^69) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 78.
(^70) Akkach,2005a: xix.
Isometric Geometry in Islamic Perceptual Culture 291