Calligraphic inscriptions replace icons as Muslim devotional art

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 names of God, the Prophet, and the earlier Caliphs, the Muslim creed that ‘there is no God but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God’, and verses or even whole chapters of the Koran—these are used to decorate the walls and ceilings of the mosque. 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

• DEFINE: Explains why Islamic art is abstract and calligraphic rather than representational — the iconoclasm rationale.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of religious-legal-cultural norms shaping visual and material culture, and to general questions of how a culture’s taboos generate its distinctive aesthetic forms.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Hymns and fugues and icons of Muslim devotion’ — how prohibitions (no music, no figuration) generate entire alternative art forms; could compare with how the aniconism of early Islam parallels Protestant rejection of images and produce parallel aesthetics.
• CANDY: The idea that mosque inscriptions function as hymns and icons — a compact, tweetable reframing of Islamic aesthetics.