ISLAM
Muslims are those who believe in one God and in Muhammad as the final Prophet of God. They devote their lives to the service of God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe.
Centuries before the time of Christ, nomadic Arabs known as Bedouins lived in the desert peninsula of Arabia east of Egypt. At the mercy of this arid land, they traded along the caravan routes of Southwest Asia. Bedouin Arabs were tribal people who worshiped some 300 different nature deities.
Statues of these gods, along with the sacred Black Stone (probably an ancient meteorite), were housed in the Kaaba, a cubical sanctuary located in the city of Mecca (in modern Saudi Arabia). Until the sixth century c.e., the Arabs remained polytheistic and disunited, but the birth of the prophet Muhammad in 570 in Mecca changed these circumstances dramatically.
According to Muslim tradition, the Kaaba was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael; it is also said to mark the sacred spot where, at God's command, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Muslims are expected to make the hajj to the Kaaba at least once during their lifetime. Some two million pilgrims throng to Mecca annually to take part in the ritual procession that circles the shrine seven times.
The Kaaba, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
Orphaned at the age of six, Muhammad received little formal education. He traveled with his uncle on caravan journeys that brought him into contact with communities of Jews, Christians, and pagans. At the age of twenty-five he married Khadijah, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior, and assisted in running her flourishing caravan trade. Long periods of retreat and solitary meditation in the desert, however, led to a transformation in Muhammad's life: according to Muslim teachings, the Angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad and commanded him to receive the revelation of the one and only Allah (the Arabic word for “God�). Now forty-one years old, Muhammad declared himself the final messenger in a history of religious revelation that had begun with Abraham and continued through Moses and Jesus.
Muhammad's followers—called Muslims (“those who submit to Allah”)—honor him as the last of the prophets, human rather than divine in nature. They acknowledge Allah as the one true god, identical with the god of the Jews and the Christians. Fulfilling the Judeo-Christian tradition of deliverance, Islam claims to complete God's revelation to humankind. The declaration of faith in Allah and his Messenger is the first of the so-called Five Pillars of Muslim practice.
Muhammad himself wrote nothing, but his disciples memorized his teachings and recorded them some ten years after his death. Written in Arabic, the Qur'an (literally, “recitation”) is the holy book of Islam
The Qur'an consists of 114 chapters (suras), each of which opens with the bismillah (invocation), “In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy.”
∆ Muslim Scripture reveals the nature of God and the inevitability of judgment and resurrection. It teaches that human beings are born in the purity of God's design, free from Original Sin. To the righteous, those who practice submission, humility, and reverence for God, it promises a hereafter resembling a garden of paradise, filled with cool rivers and luscious fruit trees. To the wicked and to infidels (nonbelievers), it promises the terrifying punishments of Hell—as hot and dusty as the desert itself. Muslims consider the Qur'an the eternal and absolute word of God. Chanted or recited, rather than read silently, it is often committed to memory by the devout. The Qur'an is the primary text for the study of the Arabic language. It is considered untranslatable, not only because its contents are deemed holy, but because it is impossible to capture in other languages the musical nuances of the original Arabic.
Kufic calligraphy from the Qur'an, from Persia, ninth–tenth centuries. Ink and gold leaf on vellum
∆ Islam unified the tribal population of Arabia in a common religious and ethnic bond that propelled Muslims out of their desert confines into East Asia, Africa, and the West. The young religion assumed a sense of historical mission much like that which drove the ancient Romans. In fact, the militant expansion of Islam was the evangelical counterpart of jihad, fervent religious struggle. Often translated as “holy war,” the word signifies all aspects of the Muslim drive toward moral and religious perfection, including the defense and spread of Islam. In Muslim thought and practice, the term denotes both “the lesser jihad” (war) and “the greater jihad” (self-control: the struggle to contain lust, anger, and other forms of
Generally speaking, early Muslim expansion succeeded not so much by the militant coercion of foreign populations as it did by the economic opportunities Muslims offered conquered people. Unlike Christianity and Buddhism, Islam neither renounced nor condemned material wealth. Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands were taxed but not persecuted. Converts to Islam were exempt from paying a poll-tax levied on all non-Muslim subjects. Into the towns that would soon become cultural oases, Muslims brought expertise in navigation, trade, and commercial exchange. They fostered favorable associations between Arab merchants and members of the ruling elite (in Africa, for instance) and rewarded converts with access to positions of power and authority. While many subject people embraced Islam out of genuine spiritual conviction, others found clear commercial and social
advantages in conversion to the faith of Muhammad.
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Sufi Poetry One of the richest sources of literary inspiration in Islamic history was the movement known as Sufism. As early as the eighth century, some followers of Muhammad began to pursue a meditative, worldrenouncing religious life that resembled the spiritual ideals of Christian and Buddhist ascetics and Neoplatonic mystics. The Sufi, so-called for the coarse wool (suf ) garments they wore, were committed to purification of the soul and mystical union with God through meditation, fasting, and prayer. As the movement grew, Sufism placed increasing emphasis on visionary experience and the practice of intensifying physical sensation through music, poetry, and dance. Religious rituals involving whirling dances (associated with Persian sufis, known as “dervishes”) functioned to transport the pious to a state of ecstasy. The union of the senses and the spirit sought by the members of this ascetic brotherhood is also evident in Sufi poetry.
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Islamic art is perhaps the most accessible expression of a complex civilization that often seems enigmatic to outsiders. Through its brilliant use of color and its superb balance between design and form, Islamic art creates an immediate visual impact. Its strong aesthetic appeal transcends distances in time and space, as well as differences in language, culture, and creed.
∆ Islamic conquests, Bysantine and Sasanian lands the newly absorbed within the Muslim commonwealth had their own indigenous artistic traditions. It seems likely that the art of the preceding period persisted for a time, as artists who had lately worked under Byzantine or Sasanian patronage initially continued to follow preexisting conventions, but under Muslim patronage. It is therefore difficult at times to distinguish between early Islamic and pre-Islamic art. Characteristic of this transitional period is a stucco relief plaque, depicting a king hunting on horseback, from a small palace in northern Iran, datable to the end of the seventh or the first half of the eighth century
∆ Although several styles of writing were practiced in the seventh and eighth centuries, by the ninth century socalled Kufic had supplanted these in the production of Qur'ans. Named after the city al-Kufa, in southern Iraq, this is a remarkably diverse, rectilinear script, written, like all Arabic scripts, from right to left. Early Qur'ans, copied in the Kufic script (fig. 4), were generally written in black or dark brown ink. Short vowels were usually indicated by red, green, or gold dots, and diacritical marks distinguishing certain consonants were denoted by diagonal strokes. (This system was in common use until the eleventh century.) Gold illumination sometimes signaled the beginning of each chapter, and gold medallions were often used to denote groups of five or ten verses. Parchment, which is made from cured and scraped animal skin, was the preferred material for early Islamic and early medieval Qur'ans.
Page from a Manuscript of the Qur’an Tunisia, probably Qairawan, early tenth century Gold and red ink on parchment dyed blue.
Early Medieval Period: Art Combining innovative styles, techniques, and forms with previously conceived ones, early medieval art is often marked by strong regional characteristics. Compared with early Islamic art, works of art from this period make much greater use of figural decoration and forms. Under the Fatimids ceramics and glassworking were also highly developed art forms. Artisans of this period revived or continued earlier techniques but gave them their own distinctive stamp. The art of luster-painted ceramics was likely introduced in Egypt at least by the early eleventh century. Fatimid lusterware is typically decorated with figures, both human and animal, as can be seen in a bowl with four golden fish alternating with an inscription repeating the Arabic word for prosperity, on an opaque turquoise ground.
Bowl Egypt, twelfth century Earthenware, overglaze luster painted
Late Medieval Period:
Inscriptions in Islamic art served twin functions: to inform and to decorate. Such is the case with a sumptuous enameled and gilt glass oil lamp, produced in Mamluk Syria or Egypt (fig. 37). Today, though the lamp has been removed from its original setting, its boldly rhythmic Thulth inscriptions, as well as its distinctive decoration, help to reconstruct its context. The Arabic inscription on the neck of the lamp quotes from a very famous verse in the Qur'an (xxiv.35), in which the light of God is likened to the light from an oil lamp. This indicates that the lamp was in fact produced for a religious setting. Only the first few words of this section of the verse have been transcribed ("God is the Light of the heavens and of the earth"), but they are a sufficient a reminder of the entire verse, of which the lamp itself is a tangible visual re-creation.
Lamp Egypt or Syria, mid-fourteenth century Glass, free-blown and tooled, enameled and gilded
Late Islamic Period:
Luxury wooden objects – furniture and furnishings as well as architectural fittings inlaid with precious materials such as ivory, ebony, silver, gold, motherof-pearl, and tortoiseshell – were produced in limited quantities for the Ottoman court beginning in the early sixteenth century. A rare and spectacular games board from the first half of the sixteenth century in LACMA’s collection provides a wonderful example of this medium (fig. 50). When open, it offers a backgammon board rendered in ivory and ebony inlays with details of silver and tiny mosaics; when closed, it provides two more gaming opportunities, including an ivory- and ebony-inlaid chess board.
High court art under the early Safavids is perhaps best exemplified by manuscript illustration. This is a manuscript whose size, scale, and quality make it one of the most luxurious Islamic books ever created.
No discussion of Islamic art, however brief, would be complete without some mention of carpets, which are perhaps the best-known Islamic art form throughout the world. Most famous of all Islamic carpets are those from Iran. Because of their fragile nature, it is only from the sixteenth century onward that Persian carpets have survived in any quantity, although woven carpets have a long history in the Middle East.
The Ardabil Carpet Iran, dated 1539–40
Islamic Culture • The Muslims created the first global culture—a culture united by a single system of belief, but embracing a wide variety of regions, languages, and customs. • Muslim scholars produced original work in the fields of mathematics, optics, philosophy, geography, and medicine. They translated into Arabic the valuable corpus of Greek writings, which they transmitted to the West along with the technological and scientific inventions of Asian civilizations. • Themes of unrequited love were popular in Arab lyric verse. The poetry of the Islamic mystics known as the Sufi drew on the intuitive and mystical dimensions of religious experience. Lyrical repetition and infinite extension are notable features of the classic collection of prose tales: The Thousand and One Nights. • The Great Mosque in Córdoba and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are two examples of Islamic architectural ingenuity: the first for its inventive disposition of horseshoe-shaped arches, the second for its domed, octagonal plan and its dazzling mosaics. Resistant to image-making, Islamic religious art is dominated by geometric, floral, and calligraphic motifs, often interlaced in patterns of infinite extension. Secular manuscripts, such as herbals and chronicles, feature lively scenes of everyday activities.
Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, Israel, ca. 687–691. Lying below the Dome is the sacred rock that some identify as the foundation stone of Solomon's Temple. Islamic maps identified this spot in the city of Jerusalem as the “center of the world.”