veiled4allah: Islamic theory of art

In other words, since there is nothing beautiful but God, Islamic art attempts to represent God's beauty without making the world beautiful in itself; it tries to display the signs of God's beauty while reminding people that these are only signs. Tanzih's abstraction balances tashbih's imagery by detaching beauty from the objects within which it becomes manifest. When an artist represents a figure, the observer will tend to associate the artistic beauty with the figure itself - the face is beautiful, the flower is beautiful and so forth. When relatively abstract designs are represented in place of created things, this introduces an element of tanzih, of separation of the beauty from the representation. One sees that the harmony of forms produces the beauty and can never think that a person or object is beautiful, since none is represented. (p. 300)

The principle of unity is also directly related to the combining of beauty and function or utility so characteristic of all Islamic art and especially architecture. Islam emphasizes the importance of beauty as the aura of the truth, for as the [...] hadith states, God is both beautiful in Himself and loves beauty. Furthermore, to quote another hadith, "God has written the mark of beauty upon all things." The need for beauty is innate in human nature and as necessary for the ultimate survival as the air that one breathes. Far from being a luxury, beauty is a human necessity. To be beautiful is to be "useful" in the deepest sense of the word; that is, in fulfilling a basic need of man. Functionality and utility are therefore not juxtaposed against beauty but complement it. To have a total and complete image of man as being at once a body, soul, and spirit, at once a creature of this earth but created for immortality and the eternal life, is to realize that no authentic functionality and utility can be divorced from beauty, for what is ugly is ultimately "useless": it is false and finally against man's deepest interests. (pp. 243-244)

Islamic art in its many forms is of the greatest import for the understanding of the essence of Islam and a central means of transmitting its message to the contemporary world. When one thinks of Islam, one should go beyond the repetitive scenes on television of wars and battles, which unfortunately abound in today's world, to behold the peace and harmony of Islamic art: seen in the great mosques, traditional urban settings and gardens, and the rhythm and geometry of calligraphy and arabesque designs; read in the poems that sing of the love that permeates all of God's creation and binds creatures to God; and heard in the strains of melodies that echo what we had experienced in that primordial morn preceding creation and our descent into this lowly world. Today more than ever before, the understanding of Islamic art is an indispensible key for the comprehension of Islam itself. (pp. 234-235)