Islamic Art: Glorification of God Essay

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The emphasis on handicrafts also means that Islamic art does not have a focus on the output of individual artists like Western art. Prophetic sayings like "God likes that when you do anything, you do it excellently," have "provided the impetus for Muslims' embellishment and beautification of their places of worship, homes, and even of articles in common use in everyday life. The emphasis in Islamic art is on ornamentation rather than on art for art's sake; while the names of the producers of the finest works of Islamic art may not have survived, their works have become prototypes and models on which other artists and craftsmen patterned their works, or from which they derived the impetus for related work" (Siddiqui 2009).

Islamic art is often characterized by the use of geometric patterns that "create the impression of unending repetition, which is believed by some to be an inducement to contemplate the infinite nature of God. This type of nonrepresentational decoration may have been developed to such a high degree in Islamic art because of the absence of figural imagery, at least within a religious context" (Komaroff, 2007, Introduction).
However, it should be added that Islam does not prohibit the use of all representational figures: "Such images occur primarily in secular and especially courtly arts and appear in a wide variety of media and in most periods and places in which Islam flourished" (Komaroff, 2007, Introduction). But because religious art must not contain representational figures, Islamic artists were, because of this constraint, uniquely motivated to use geometry in intensely creative ways. Religion produced a profoundly different and often unrecognizable tradition and view of art in the Islamic world, and it cannot be appreciated in purely Western terms.

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