Islamic arabesque

The Islamic arabesque is a development of the Late Antique and Byzantine types of scrolling vegetal decoration that were inherited by Islam, and used with relatively little change in early Islamic art, for example in the famous 8th century mosaics of the Great Mosque of Damascus. The plants most often used are stylized versions of the acanthus, with its emphasis on leafy forms, and the vine, with an equal emphasis on twining stems.

The evolution of these forms into a distinctive Islamic type was complete by the 11th century, having begun in the 8th or 9th century in works like the Mshatta Facade. Thereafter it was used very widely across the Islamic world, by no means just in Arabic-speaking areas, in many media for several centuries, and developed further. In the process of development the plant forms became increasing simplified and stylized.[2] Though the broad outline of the process is generally agreed, there is a considerable diversity of views held by specialist scholars on detailed issues concerning the development, categorization and meaning of the arabesque.[3] The detailed study of Islamic arabesque forms was begun by Alois Riegl in his formalist study Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the Kunstwollen.[4] Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the Islamic arabesque; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today.[5] Jessica Rawson has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art, which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive.[6]
Complex Arabesque inlays at the Agra Fort in the Mughal Empire.

Claims are often made regarding the theological significance of the arabesque, and its origin in a specifically Islamic view of the world; however these are without support from written historical sources as, like most medieval cultures, the Islamic world has not left us documentation of their intentions in using the decorative motifs they did. At the popular level such theories often appear uninformed as to the wider context of the arabesque.[7] In similar fashion, proposed connections between the arabesque and Arabic knowledge of geometry remains a subject of debate; not all art historians are persuaded that such knowledge had reached, or was needed by, those creating arabesque designs, although in certain cases there is evidence that such a connection did exist.[8] The case for a connection with Islamic mathematics is much stronger for the development of the geometric patterns with which arabesques are often combined in art. Geometric decoration often uses patterns that are made up of straight lines and regular angles but are clearly derived as a whole from curvilinear arabesque patterns; the extent to which these too are described as arabesque varies between different writers.[9]

Many arabesque patterns disappear at (or "under" as it often appears to a viewer) a framing edge without ending, and thus can be regarded as infinitely extendable outside the space they actually occupy; this was certainly a distinctive feature of the Islamic form, though not without precedent. Most but not all foliage decoration in the preceding cultures terminated at the edge of the occupied space, although infinitely repeatable patterns in foliage are very common in the modern world in wallpaper and textiles.

Typically, in earlier forms there is no attempt at realism; no particular species of plant is being imitated, and the forms are often botanically impossible or implausible. "Leaf" forms typically spring sideways from the stem, in what is often called a "half-palmette" form, named after its distant and very different looking ancestor in Ancient Egyptian and Greek ornament. New stems spring from leaf-tips, a type often called honeysuckle, and the stems often have no tips, winding endlessly out of the space. The early Mshatta Facade is recognisably some sort of vine, with conventional leaves on the end of short stalks and bunches of grapes or berries, but later forms usually lack these. Flowers are rare until about 1500, after which they appear more often, especially in Ottoman art, and are often identifiable by species. In Ottoman art the large and feathery leaves called saz became very popular, and were elaborated in drawings showing just one or more large leaves. Eventually floral decoration mostly derived from Chinese styles, especially those of Chinese porcelain, replaces the arabesque in many types of work, such as pottery, textiles and miniatures.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabesque_%28Islamic_art%29

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Making religion relevant to science and technology

If we hope to secure a spiritual and ethical foundation for science and technology in today’s world, then we have to start arguing for the case of religion as an ‘ally’ of science and technology. But the challenge is formidable. Many scientists and technologists today, including Muslims, are of the opinion that science and technology have no need of religion. They would see any attempt to bring back religion into the secular domain of scientific and technological activities as an arrest on the progress of science and technology. But such a negative attitude toward religion in general, and not just Christianity, has been greatly influenced by the western experience of the relationship between religion and science, which throughout much of its modern history has been characterized by enmity and conflicts. The western public today needs to know that there are other living cultures and civilizations with a different kind of experience of relationships between religion and science. Their experience of it tells a story of mutual influence and harmony. This characteristic feature of harmony between religion and science is especially true of Islamic civilization.

The words we have quoted from Einstein might be his own, but the wisdom which those words seek to convey certainly did not originate with him. Those who are fairly acquainted with the history of human thought would readily tell us that the wisdom in question is of perennial concern to the great majority of humankind. Many intelligent men before Einstein in various cultures and civilizations have talked about it. Thinkers and philosophers of science especially, from Plato and Aristotle in the West and Lao-tze in the Far East to Ibn Sina in Islam and Galileo Galilee in medieval Europe and right to the twentieth-century philosopher-poet, Muhammad Iqbal, are in love with this wisdom. And decades after Einstein, we continue to have thinking people talking about it although in different tones and with different intellectual styles.

We are quite sure that this voice of wisdom on the unity of religion and science will continue to be heard in the near and distant future. Whether the future voice is going to be louder or softer than what we are hearing now, no one can tell. However, judging from present trends, which clearly show a growing interest in issues of religion and science in various parts of the world, especially in the United States, there is place for hope and optimism for a louder future voice speaking for the cause of unity of religion and science.

In Islam, the idea of harmony and unity of religion and science is very much cherished. As we have earlier emphasized, harmony between religion and science is a major characteristic of Islamic civilization. In Islamic civilization, science was born in the cradle of religion. More precisely, it was born in the cradle of monotheism – belief in the one true God – or what Muslims traditionally love to call al-tawhid, which literally means unity.

Islamic science grew and developed to become the most creative and the most advanced in the world for centuries until the seventeenth century, thanks to its nourishment by the teachings of monotheism or al-tawhid, which is at the heart of religion. In the finest moments of its history, Islamic science also owed its success to its nourishment and guide by the essential teachings of the Islamic Divine Law or the Shari’ah. Monotheism and Divine Law or Tawhid and Shari’ah were the twin forces of scientific and technological progress, which the religion of Islam gave to the world. Insofar as al-tawhid (unity) is a universal idea, we can easily find its believers outside the Islamic civilization. Sir Isaac Newton and Einstein in the West are good examples of scientists whose philosophical and scientific thinking and inquiries have been inspired by the idea of unity of reality. As for the Shari’ah, given its negative image in the minds of many contemporary men and women, we could easily be laughed at for claiming that it has been a source of scientific and technological progress in Islam. But modern scholarship supports the claim. Studies by such noted historians of Islamic science as David King and George Saliba provide ample evidence to demonstrate the creative role of the Shari’ah in spearheading practically-oriented scientific research, particularly in the field of astronomy. These studies also demonstrate the unity of religion and science at the level of law and ethics.

More generally, it could be maintained that the revealed teachings of the Shari’ah contributed to the origin, development and progress of science in Islam in at least three main respects. First, the religious sciences of the Shari’ah helped to give birth to the scientific spirit in its most comprehensive sense as we know it today. It is important to be noted that the origin and development of the scientific spirit in Islam differs from that in the West. In Islam this spirit was first demonstrated in the religious sciences. In the modern West it was conceived in rebellion against religion. Many modern scholars attributed the origin of Islam’s scientific spirit to the foreign sciences it inherited especially from the Greeks. A study of the early Islamic religious sciences, however, would reveal that by the time Muslims became deeply interested in the Greek philosophical and scientific heritage in the ninth century CE/third century AH, they were already in possession of a scientific attitude and a scientific frame of mind, which they had inherited from the religious sciences. As we have asserted in another work, “the passion for truth and objectivity, the general respect for fully-corroborated empirical evidence, and a mind skilled in the classification of things were some of the most outstanding features of early Muslim religious scholarship as can be clearly seen in their studies of jurisprudence (‘ilm al-fiqh) and the prophetic traditions (‘ulum al-hadith). A love for definitions and conceptual or semantic analyses with great emphasis on logical clarity and precision was also very much evident in Muslim legal thought as well as in the sciences concerned with various aspects of the Qur’an (‘ulum al-Qur’an).” In short, the early religious sciences of the Shari’ah sought to emphasize both the critical exercise of reason (ijtihad) and empirical investigations.

Second, the Quranic idea of God as the Law- or Shari’ah-Giver helps to create a scientific culture in which there is no cleavage between the “laws of nature” and the “laws of God” as to be found in the modern West. On the contrary, there is unity of laws of nature and the revealed Law of religion. This is because the “laws of nature” too are divine laws. God manifests His Will both in the cosmos and in human societies through laws. In the human domain God has prescribed a shari’ah for every people. The Islamic Shari’ah is only the last to be revealed. Some Muslim scholars in the past have referred to the different Divine Laws revealed to different branches of mankind at different points of time in human history as nawamis al-anbiya’ (‘Laws of the Prophets’). As for the Divine Law governing the whole of creation they refer to it as namus al-khilqah (“Law of Creation”).

Third, there is the creative role of the specific injunctions of the Shari’ah such as the canonical daily prayers, fasting in the month of Ramadan, payment of religious tax (zakat), and the pilgrimage to Mecca in motivating scientific studies and research. The practical need of the new and fast expanding Muslim community to follow these injunctions of the Shari’ah necessitated the determination of the times of daily prayers and fasting, and the qiblah, the direction of prayer toward Mecca, which vary from place to place. It is an established historical fact that the early Muslim concern with the revealed law of inheritance and the zakat institution helped to give birth to a new branch of mathematics, namely algebra. In Islam, the closely related disciplines of astronomy, mathematics and geography have been well nourished by the various injunctions of the Shari’ah.

Islamic science pioneered and invented many new scientific and technological discoveries in homage to God and His last Shari’ah to humanity. It was only with the replacement of Islamic science by modern western science beginning in the nineteenth century that Muslims began to be influenced by a new kind of relationship between religion and science. This new relationship was shaped by western man’s post-Enlightenment experience of religion and his insistence on a science that was free of religious influence that was characterized by tension, antagonism, and conflict. Consequently, Islamic civilization lost one of its most noted traditional characteristics, namely the unity of religion and science.

Throughout the centuries in the past, many Muslim philosophers, theologians and scientists wrote books on various aspects of the unity of religion and science. Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and al-Ghazzali – to name just a few of the famous ones – are all known to have explained why religion and science are truly in need of each other. In the common view of these men of learning and scholarship, what science needs most from religion is guidance on its real purpose and on how best it can serve humanity. By virtue of being a religion of knowledge, Islam was able to provide that guidance, thus helping science to play its legitimate role in society for the benefits of mankind. At the level of practical applications of science and technology, this guidance was provided by the Shari’ah. At the level of epistemology, this guidance was provided by the metaphysical, cosmological, and psychological teachings of the Qur’an.

With guidance from a higher kind of knowledge made available by divine revelation and from a higher spiritual and moral authority – which religion in fact is – science would know that its real purpose in civilized society is to complement religion in the task of helping man to fulfill his intellectual, rational and material needs in his life on earth. It is also to help man overcome social problems – which arise as a consequence of both natural disasters and human moral choice – that are within its capability and power to solve. It is not for science to compete with religion, let alone to revolt against it and replace it as it was to happen in the modern West.

On the other hand, what religion needs most from science is its well tested knowledge of the natural world, which could help the spiritual teachings of religion to be more enlightened and to become better understood. According to the Muslim scholars we have mentioned, science can even contribute to our better knowledge of God. The positive views of these scholars on the harmony and unity of religion and science have no doubt been inspired by the Qur’an.

The key to a genuine understanding of the unity of religion and science in the Islamic perspective is the idea of tawhid. Islamic history was witness to the pervasive role of this idea in the promotion of progress in many branches of knowledge. It is most unfortunate that such an important idea is little understood by the majority of Muslim scientists today. Equally distressing to observe is the fact that many graduates in Islamic studies have little grasp of the intimate connection between tawhid and progress in knowledge, particularly science, in the history of Islamic civilization.

This distressing situation among Muslims today needs to be corrected. A correct understanding of tawhid and its role in the progress of scientific ideas and other kinds of knowledge need to be presented in contemporary language to our students and younger generation of scientists. In particular, we Muslims today need to know how Muslim scholars and scientists in the past applied the principle of tawhid to their scientific thinking and research to the point of being able to create a healthy and balanced scientific culture. We need to learn lessons from our past history.

Source:http://i-epistemology.net/science-a-technology/845-the-spiritual-and-ethical-foundation-of-science-and-technology-in-islamic-civilization.html

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