Passion for Perfection
Islamic art
The Islamic period began in 622 with the migration (hijra) of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina. Just over a hundred years after the death of the Prophet in 632, Islamic rulers controlled an area stretching from Spain to Afghanistan, Northern India, and the Chinese border. A few centuries later, this territory had expanded to include areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and further north. Peoples with a wide variety of religious, cultural, historical, and artistic backgrounds suddenly had something in common – namely, Islam.
From the very start, Islamic art and architecture were influenced by local artistic traditions. Conversely, local styles were adapted and reformed in accordance with Islamic principles. This interaction was reinforced by trade. It enriched not only the cultures of the Muslim world, but also those of the older civilizations surrounding it. At first, Islamic art was closely connected to the established artistic styles of Byzantium and the Sasanians. But in the mid-eighth century, when the Abbasids took power, it came to fruition, developing an utterly original formal language.
The most striking architectural features are wall and floor decorations, including glass, woodwork, mosaics, wall tiles, and stone and stucco ornaments. Such decorations illustrate the importance of religious architecture in Islamic cultures, though they are also found in palaces, in honour of God’s dominion. Calligraphy is central to all Islamic arts. Qur’an verses in Arabic – the language in which the Qur’an was written and has been transmitted – endow objects with spiritual unity and special dignity. Another important and universally recognized feature of Islamic art is the frequent use of vines, arabesques, interlaced patterns, and geometric motifs.
But figural scenes have played a larger role than is often supposed. The Hadith – the traditional body of knowledge about the words and actions of the Prophet, first transmitted orally and later in writing – forbids the pictorial representation of people and animals in a religious context, but they are generally tolerated in a secular one. While figural decorations are almost never found in mosques and Qur’ans, non-religious art and architecture show an enormous variety of scenes, with frequent use of birds and other animals.
Decoration: sacred and profane
The Islamic tradition seldom draws a clear distinction between religious and secular art. Prayers can be found on water jugs, and Qur’ans are often illuminated with themes from secular jewellery. Some patterns recur throughout the vast geographical expanse of the Islamic world. These universal themes include vines and arabesques, with half or whole palmettes, embedded in both two and three-dimensional compositions. In the nineteenth century, interlaced patterns were often thought to be a universal Islamic motif, but they are primarily Spanish and North African.
The old Western Asian tradition of heroic tales provided another major theme, that of combat with animals or mythical beings: lions attacking their prey, a phoenix fighting dragons, and eagles swooping down on hares. This theme is closely connected to the many fantastic creatures in Islamic art, such as sphinxes, harpies, and griffins. Many of these fabulous beasts came from Greek mythology. Later, they were joined by Chinese monsters and mythical animals. But Muslim artists tended to copy the appearance of these creatures without much concern for their original meaning.
One striking characteristic of religious ornament – an important genre, because of the large number of illuminated Qur’ans – is what is usually called abstraction: the replacement of realistic scenes with carefully composed plant and flower patterns, geometric lacework, and inscriptions. The term ‘abstraction’ is somewhat misleading, however, because the elements of the decoration can still be figural. While their figural nature is de-emphasized, the forms do have an animate quality.
Abstractions of figural subjects are also found in combination with writing. This is true not only in a religious context, but also on many pieces of secular inlaid metalware from Khorasan and the north of what is now Iraq (dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries). Letters with long vertical strokes tend to be embellished with human heads, and sometimes with the heads of birds or dragons.
Qur’anic inscriptions
Objects are often decorated with Qur’anic inscriptions that have relevant themes. Take verse 35 of al-Nur (The Light)], Sura 24 of the Qur’an:
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things. [All quotes from the Qur’an are taken from the English translation by Yusuf Ali.]
In mosques, this is often used to decorate lamps. The inscription ‘We made from water every living thing’ (Sura 21, al-Anbiya’ (The Prophets), verse 30), found on a silver Ottoman water scoop, is a reference to God’s creation and the vital importance of water in sustaining life. Some Qur’an verses were engraved on amulets for their talismanic properties, especially in and after the thirteenth century.
Courtly and elite art
The court was the leading patron of Islamic art, and court workshops drew craftspeople from throughout the known world. Other artisans were brought from captured cities to work at Islamic courts. As a result, many of them were not Muslims but Jews, Christians, or members of other tolerated minorities. Most of their work was commissioned by the court, but they would also work for anyone else who could afford them. Like their counterparts in medieval and Renaissance Europe, these artisans travelled a great deal, and their experiences often gave their work a more cosmopolitan flavour. From the twelfth century onward, thanks to travellers, crusaders, traders, and exchanges of gifts, some of their creations found their way into European church and palace treasuries. The Mughal emperor Jahangir (reigned 1605–1627) and the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II (reigned 1576–1612) collected the same types of precious objects.
Centuries of war, mass migration, and natural disaster devastated the Islamic empires, leaving their former glory in tatters. Yet there are medieval accounts that give some impression of the incredible wealth of treasures received and collected by Muslim rulers. In the Europe of Charlemagne and his successors, the splendour of the court of Baghdad – a splendour echoed in other Islamic palaces – seemed wildly implausible, like a fairy tale. One of the greatest treasures in the Abbasid palace was a silver tree, described in 917 by an emissary of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. The tree was in a large pool of gleaming quicksilver, flanked by sculptures of lancers mounted on warhorses with caparisons of brocade. The silver branches swayed gently in the breeze, and the air was filled with the sounds of mechanical songbirds large and small, all made of brilliant precious metals.
Although later Muslim historians unanimously claim that the traditions and ceremonies of their Muslim leaders stem from the Qur’an, in fact most of them were deliberately adopted from Mesopotamia, Eastern Greece, and the Sassanid Empire. Some aspects were drawn from Persian culture, which experienced a renaissance in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Luxury was considered a natural accompaniment to power. Perfection in surface texture was considered the highest proof of artistic mastery. Such mastery is on display in some of the rare objects made from precious metals.
The glitter and glamour of Islamic art may sometimes seem excessive, but they reflect the belief that besides honouring the ruler, art is, in equal measure, for the glory of God.
Production and innovation
From the early years of Islam, courtly art and mass-produced items such as glass and pottery developed in tandem. Mass-producers based their products on courtly art, but adapted them to meet the demands of a broad public. At the same time, objects for the mass market were refined to suit royal tastes. For instance, pottery with blue and white decoration, made in Iznik, was a popular substitute for Chinese porcelain in the Ottoman period.
The introduction of glazed ceramics caused genuine social upheaval. Apart from its aesthetic value, glaze made ceramics impermeable to water. At the same time, higher firing temperatures made glazed objects sturdier, so that they could be used for more purposes. The result was a growth in local variation and specialization, along with increasing trade along caravan routes and at the major annual markets in Mecca and Medina, which took place during the pilgrimage season. Ninth- and tenth-century lustreware from Mesopotamia, for example, was exported to places as far away as China and later imitated from Spain to eastern Iran. During the Italian Renaissance, it would serve as an inspiration for maiolica.
In many Islamic cultures, art was sold both on the open market and to elite patrons. For instance, the makers of manuscripts in the Iranian city of Shiraz included many family businesses whose capacity was limited. But there were also larger workshops that produced greater numbers of manuscripts, some of which were grand enough for court use.
Court workshops proved most successful in making luxury items from precious metals and in crafts that required great skill, such as the working of semi-precious stones. The production of less exclusive items was often spread over a wider geographic area. We can see this clearly in the case of carpet weaving. This art form underwent gradual centralization and an increase in scale under the courts of the Ottoman Empire and Iran’s Safavid dynasty, but many small family workshops still survived in remote corners of the Islamic world.
Figural representation
The depiction of humans and animals in Islamic art has formed the subject of innumerable studies and lengthy debates. This is because the tenets of Islam permit legal and theological experts to form their own moral and religious opinions about a wide range of issues, including figural art. Most studies of this topic have concentrated on the geographical origins of Islam. Far fewer have examined Islamic cultures in other regions and in later periods. Furthermore, it is often overlooked that certain rulers and some Muslim societies were more tolerant of figural representations than others.
Although pictorial representation (unlike idolatry) is not expressly prohibited in the Qur’an, a number of texts in the Hadith, which played an important role from the earliest days of Islam, are very hostile to figural decoration. In the late seventh and eighth centuries the influence of these passages increased, and the prohibition on religious pictures became a prohibition on all pictorial representation.
There was an especially strong aversion to illusionistic painting, or trompe-l'oeil, which strives to create the semblance of reality. But this aversion was not felt throughout the Islamic world; in Iran, on the contrary, artists who could skilfully imitate reality were greatly admired.
Paintings were expensive: in most Muslim cultures, they were affordable only to the rulers and their courts. Furthermore, painting came under increasing fire. It was said to encourage insincerity, frivolity, drunkenness, and other worldly ways, and painters were accused of having loose morals. Nevertheless, painting – often in the form of manuscript illustration – also bolstered the authority of the sovereign. Many paintings showed great figures of the pre-Islamic period: Solomon, a model for Islamic kingship; Alexander the Great, referred to in the Qur’an as Dhu’l-Qarnayn (the Two-Horned One); the legendary Iranian hero Rostam, and the Sasanian dynasty. In Iran, the early eleventh-century poet Firdawsi created a national epic, the stories and legends compiled in the Shahnamah (Book of Kings). This book was often recited in public and became a source of inspiration for figural painting and sculpture throughout the Iranian world.
Some paintings had moral messages. One favourite theme was the story of Joseph, who resisted the advances of Potiphar’s wife Zuleika (Genesis 39). In the Islamic version of this tale, the seductress repents (Sura 12, verses 23–29). Another popular source of inspiration was the Siyer-i Nebi, a biography of the Prophet Muhammad based on Qur’an passages and Islamic traditions. The stories include that of Muhammad’s Night Journey (Mi‘raj) to the seventh heaven and his visit to hell (referred to briefly in Sura 17, verse 1, ‘Glory to Him Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque . . .’, and Sura 67, verse 3, ‘He Who created the seven heavens one above another’). Although the Siyer-i Nebi was probably not illustrated until the late fourteenth century, it was known to Dante and provided source material for the Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy.
Other frequently painted themes included biographical tales of the woes of the assassinated Caliph ‘Ali and his family, based on stories from the Shi‘i tradition. The death of ‘Ali’s son Hussein on the battlefield at Karbala was depicted on murals in Shi‘i holy places and decorated the walls of tea rooms and cafés in Iraq and Iran even as recently as the twentieth century. And the lives of saints – mystics, martyrs, masters, legal scholars, and Sufi ascetics – were copied and illustrated not only for use in palaces, but also by the people.
Very little remains of the figural paintings and sculptures in the Muslim palaces described in the chronicles. We find traces of them in the ceramic and metal objects with naturalistic representations of people and animals that were produced for the Persian and Northern Indian courts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One fine example is the late thirteenth-century ceramic chess piece from Kashan representing the Seljuq sultan Togrul Beg.
As diplomatic and commercial ties between Europe and the Muslim world grew stronger, the role of Islamic art was consolidated and expanded. Countless contemporary artists bear witness to this by working in the traditions of the Islamic past and present.
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