Voices of Islam (184 page)

It could also be said—and this is confirmed by Muslim masters—that art consists in fashioning objects in a manner conformable to their nature, for that nature has a virtual content of beauty, since it comes from God; all one has to do is to release that beauty in order to make it apparent. According to the most general Islamic conception, art is no more than a method of ennobling matter.

The principle which demands that art should conform to the laws inherent in the objects it deals with is no less respected in the minor arts, for example, that of rug making, so characteristic to the world of Islam. The restriction to geometrical forms alone, which are faithful to the flat surface of the composition, and the absence of so-called proper images, have proved to be no obstacle to artistic fertility, on the contrary, for each piece—apart from those mass produced for the European market—expresses a creative joy.

The technique of the knotted rug is probably of nomadic origin. The rug is the real furniture of the nomad, and it is in rugs of nomadic origin that one finds the most perfect and the most original work. Rugs of urban origin often show a certain artificial refinement, which deprives the shapes and colors of their immediate vigor and rhythm. The art of the nomadic rug-maker favors the repetition of strongly marked geometrical forms, as well as abrupt alternations of contrast and a diagonal symmetry. Similar preferences are

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apparent throughout almost the whole of Islamic art, and this is very signifi- cant with respect to the spirit which those preferences manifest; the Islamic mentality shows a relationship of the spiritual plane to what the nomadic mentality is on the psychological plane: an acute sense of the fragility of the world. A conciseness of thought and action and a genius for rhythm are nomadic qualities.

When one of the first Muslim armies conquered Persia, they found in the great royal hall of Ctesiphon an immense ‘‘carpet of spring’’ with decorations of gold and silver. It was taken with other booty to Medina where it was simply cut into as many pieces as there were ancient companions of the Prophet. This apparent act of vandalism was, however, not only in conformity with the rules of war as laid down by the Qur’an, but it also gave expression to the profound suspicion felt by Muslims for every work of man that seeks to be absolutely perfect or eternal—the carpet of Ctesiphon incidentally portrayed the earthly Paradise, and its division among the companions of the Prophet is not without spiritual significance.

This too must be said: although the world of Islam, which is more or less coextensive with the ancient empire of Alexander,
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includes many peoples with a long sedentary history, yet the ethnic waves, which have periodically renewed the life of these people, and imposed on them their domination and their preferences, have always been of nomadic origin: Arabs, Seljuks, Turks, Berbers, and Mongols. In a general way, Islam combines badly with an urban and bourgeois ‘‘solidification.’’
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Traces of the nomadic mentality can be found even in Islamic architecture, although architecture belongs primarily to sedentary culture. Thus, construc- tional elements such as columns, arches, and portals have a certain autonomy, despite the unity of the whole; there is no organic continuity between the various elements of a building; when it is a case of avoiding monotony— and monotony is not always considered an evil—it is achieved less by the gradual differentiation of a series of analogous elements than by incisive changes. The ‘‘stalactites’’ in stucco hung from the inner surfaces of the arches and the patterns of the arabesques ‘‘carpeting’’ the walls certainly keep alive some reminiscences of nomadic ‘‘furnishings,’’ consisting as they do of rugs and tents.

The primitive mosque, in a form of a vast hall of prayer with its roof stretched horizontally and supported by a palm-grove of pillars, comes near to the nomadic environment; even an architecture as refi as that of the mosque at Cordova, with its superposed arcades, is reminiscent of a palm-grove.

The mausoleum with a cupola and a square base accords with the nomadic spirit in the conciseness of its form.

The Islamic hall of prayer, unlike a church or a temple, has no center toward which worship is directed. The grouping of the faithful round a center, so characteristic of Christian communities, can only be witnessed in

The Foundations of Islamic Art
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Islam at the time of the pilgrimage to Mecca, in the collective prayer round the Ka‘ba. In every other place, believers turn in their prayers toward that distant center, external to the walls of the mosque. But the Ka‘ba itself does not represent a sacramental center comparable to the Christian altar, nor does it contain any symbol which could be an immediate support to worship,
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for it is empty. Its emptiness reveals an essential feature of the spiritual attitude of Islam: whereas Christian piety is eager to concentrate on a concrete center—since the ‘‘Incarnate Word’’ is a center, both in space and in time, and since the Eucharistic sacrament is no less a center—a

Muslim’s awareness of the Divine Presence is based on a feeling of limitless- ness; he rejects all objectivation of the Divine, except that which presents itself to him in the form of limitless space.

Nonetheless, a concentric plan is not alien to Islamic architecture, for such is the plan of a mausoleum roofed with a cupola. The prototype of this plan is found in Byzantine as well as in Asiatic art, where it symbolizes the union of Heaven and Earth, the rectangular body of the building corresponding to the Earth and the spherical cupola to Heaven. Islamic art has assimilated this type while reducing it to its purest and clearest formulation: between the cubical body and the more or less ogival cupola, an octagonal ‘‘drum’’ is usu- ally inserted. The eminently perfect and intelligible form of such a building can dominate the indeterminate spaciousness of an entire desert landscape. As the mausoleum of a saint it is effectively a spiritual center of the world.

The geometrical genius, which asserts itself so strongly in Islamic art, flows directly from the kind of speculation favored by Islam, which is ‘‘abstract’’ and not ‘‘mythological.’’ There is moreover no better symbol in the visual order of the internal complexity of Unity—of the passage from the Indivisible Unity to ‘‘Unity in multiplicity’’ or ‘‘multiplicity in Unity’’—than the series of the regular geometrical figures contained within a circle, or that of the regular polyhedra contained within a sphere.

The architectural theme of a cupola with ribs resting on a rectangular body, to which it is connected in many different ways, has been abundantly developed in the Islamic countries of Asia Minor. This style is found on the art of building in brick, and from it Gothic architecture, with all its speculative spirit, probably received its first impulses.

The sense of rhythm, innate in nomadic people, and the genius for geometry: these are the two poles which, transposed into the spiritual order, determine all Islamic arts. Nomadic rhythmicality found its most direct expression in Arab prosody, which extended its infl as far as the Christian troubadours, while speculative geometry belongs to the Pythagorean inheritance very directly taken over by the Muslim world.

Art to the Muslim is a ‘‘proof of the divine existence’’ only to the extent that it is beautiful without showing the marks of a subjective individualistic inspiration; its beauty must be impersonal, like that of the starry sky. Islamic art does indeed attain to a kind of perfection that seems to be independent

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of its author; his triumphs and his failures disappear before the universal character of the forms.

Whenever Islam has assimilated a preexisting type of architecture, in Byzantine countries as well as in Persia and in India, subsequent development has been in the direction of a geometrical precision having a qualitative character—neither quantitative nor mechanical—which is attested by the elegance of its solutions of architectural problems. It is in India that the contrast between the indigenous architecture and the artistic ideals of the Muslim conquerors is without doubt most marked. Hindu architecture is at once lapidary and complex, elementary and rich, like a sacred mountain with mysterious caverns; Islamic architecture leans toward clarity and sobriety.

Wherever Islamic art appropriates incidental elements from Hindu archi- tecture, it subordinates their native power to the unity and the lightness of the whole.
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There are some Islamic buildings in India that are numbered among the most perfect in existence; no architecture has ever surpassed them.

But Islamic architecture is most faithful to its peculiar genius in the
Maghrib,
the West of the Muslim world. Here, in Algeria, in Morocco and in Andalusia it realizes the state of crystalline perfection that turns the interior of a mosque—or of a palace—into an oasis of freshness, a world filled with a limpid and almost unworldly beatitude.
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The assimilation of Byzatine models by Islamic art is exemplifi with special clarity in the Turkish variations on the theme of the Hagia Sophia. As is well known, the Hagia Sophia consists of an immense central dome fl by two half-cupolas, which in their turn are amplifi by several vaulted apses. The whole covers a space more extensive in the direction of one axis than of the other; the proportions of the resulting environment are highly elusive and seem to be indefinite owing to the absence of conspicuous articulations. Muslim architects like Sinan, who took up the theme of a central cupola amplifi by adjacent cupolas, found new solutions more strictly geometrical in conception. The Selimiye mosque at Edima is a notably characteristic example; its huge dome rests on an octagon with walls alternately flat and curved into apses, resulting in a system of plane and curved facets with clearly defined angles between them. This transformation of the plan of the Hagia Sophia is comparable to the cutting of a precious stone, made more regular and more brilliant by polishing.

Seen from inside, the cupola of a mosque of this type does not hover in indefi nor does it weigh upon its pillars. Nothing expresses effort in Islamic architecture; there is no tension, nor any antithesis between Heaven and Earth. ‘‘There is none of that sensation of a heaven descending from above, as in the Hagia Sophia, nor the ascending tendency of a Gothic cathedral. The culminating point in the Islamic prayer is the moment when the forehead of the believer prostrated on the rug touches the fl or, that mirror-like surface which abolishes the contrast of height and depth and

The Foundations of Islamic Art
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makes space a homogeneous unity with no particular tendency. It is by its immobility that the atmosphere of a mosque is distinguished from all things ephemeral. Here infinity is not attained by a transformation from one side of a dialectical antithesis to the other; in this architecture the beyond is not merely a goal, it is lived here and now, in a freedom exempt from all tendencies; there is a repose free from all aspiration; its omnipresence is incorporated in the edifi so like a diamond’’ (after Ulya Vogt-Goknil).
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The exterior of Turkish mosques is characterized by the contrast between the hemisphere of the dome, more in evidence than in the Hagia Sophia, and the needles of the minarets: a synthesis of repose and vigilance, and of submission and active witness.

In the arabesque, the typical creation of Islam, the geometrical genius meets the nomadic genius. The arabesque is a sort of dialectic of ornament, in which logic is allied to a living continuity of rhythm. It has two basic elements, the interlacement and the plant motif. The former is essentially a derivative of geometrical speculation, while the latter represents a sort of graphic formulation of rhythm, expressed in spiraloid designs, which may possibly be derived not so much from plant forms as from a purely linear symbolism. Ornaments with spiraloid designs—heraldic animals and vines— are also found in the art of Asiatic nomads, the art of the Scythians is a striking example.

The elements of Islamic decorative art are drawn from the rich archaic heritage that was common to all the peoples of Asia as well as to those of the Near East and of northern Europe. It came to the surface again as soon as Hellenism, with its essentially anthropomorphic art, had gone into retreat. Christian medieval art picked up this same heritage, brought to it by the folk- lore of immigrant peoples from Asia, and by insular art, both Celtic and Saxon, itself one of the most astonishing syntheses of prehistoric motifs. But this heritage was soon obscured and diluted in the Christian world by the infl nce of Graeco-Roman models, assimilated by Christianity. The Islamic spirit has a much more direct affinity with this vast current of archaic forms for they are in implicit correspondence with its conscious return toward a primordial order, toward the ‘‘primordial religion’’ (
din al-fitra
). Islam assimilates these archaic elements and reduces them to their most abstract and most generalized formulations; it levels them out in a certain sense, and thereby eliminates any magical qualities they may have possessed; in return, it endows them with a fresh intellectual lucidity, one might almost say—with a spiritual elegance.

The arabesque, which is the outcome of this synthesis, has also analogies in Arab rhetoric and poetry; a rhythmical outpouring of thought is given precision by parallels and inversions strictly interlinked. The Qur’an itself uses the same means of expression; in its periods they become elements in a spiritual algebra and rhythms of incantation. Thus, the Divine witness of

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the Burning Bush, which the Hebrew Bible conveys in the words ‘‘I am that I am’’ is rendered in the Qur’an by the paraphrase: ‘‘I am God, beside whom there is no divinity but I.’’

At the risk of pressing the point too hard, let it be said that for a Muslim the arabesque is not merely a possibility of producing art without making images; it is a direct means for dissolving images or what corresponds to them in the mental order, in the same way as the rhythmical repetition of certain Qur’anic formulae dissolves the fixation of the mind on an object of desire. In the arabesque, all suggestions of an individual form are eliminated by the indefinity of a continuous weave. The repetition of identical motifs, the fl ant movement of lines and the decorative equivalence of forms in relief or incised, and so inversely analogous, all contribute to this effect. Thus, at the sight of glittering waves or of leafage trembling in the breeze, the soul detaches itself from its internal objects, from the ‘‘idols’’ of passion, and plunges, vibrant within itself, into a pure state of being.