Calligraphic inscription substitutes for sacred imagery in Muslim worship

Evidence

Muslim public prayer is a disciplined, communal act of submission to the Creator, to the One, remote and immaterial God. It admits of no drama and no mystery, and has no place for liturgical music or poetry, nor for representational painting or sculpture, which Muslim tradition rejects as blasphemy verging on idolatry. In their place, Muslim artists used abstract and geometrical design, and based their decorative schemes on the extensive and systematic use of inscriptions. … The text is divine, and to write or read it is in itself an act of worship. Many different styles of writing are used, and in the hands of the great masters the art of calligraphy achieved an intricate and recondite beauty, the mainsprings of which are not easy of access for one brought up in the western tradition. These decorative texts are the hymns and fugues and icons of Muslim devotion; they are a key to the understanding both of Muslim piety and of Muslim aesthetics. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 130

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the Islam-West legibility cluster: explains the translatable-but-not-obvious visual grammar of mosque spaces that Western observers historically read as ‘decorative’ or ‘empty.’