Museographs The Art of Islam: A Survey

By Caron Caswell Lazar

Experience desert-dwelling at its most vibrant! From the essential features of a mosque to a wide assemblage of colorful edifices designed to offset monochromatic and infertile landscapes, Islamic art encompasses an impressive scope of mediums and styles. Some traditions mirror regional tastes that span from Spain and Morocco in the West to Central Asia and India in the East, still others connote the trademark aptness of color, shape, and pattern for which Islamic art is universally known.

Let "Islamic Art: A Survey" start you on the road to appreciating the complexity of Islamic imagery. Investigate the Qu'ran's (Koran's) ideological and decorative influence--from moral codes to the absence of sculpture and the silhouetting of characters on murals or illustrated stories with Biblical and prophetic themes. This astonishingly eclectic monograph has it all! The pottery, calligraphy, and metalwork represent benchmark achievements that will blow your mind! Perfect as a rainy day read to enliven your senses and whet your appetite for intriguing and stimulating knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Feb 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781456608552

Book preview

Celts

The Art of Islam: A Survey

Note: Certain Arabic words used in this monograph lack their complete and proper diacritics. The omissions are because these symbols may not display properly on all eReader devices. We hope that these omissions will not be seen as disrespectful but rather as an accommodation to technologies as they exist today.

Bowl,

Persian, Rayy

13th century

Collection of Cincinnati Art Museum

Given in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Williams by their children

The Prophet Comes

In the 6th century the Arabian peninsula lay between the margins of the civilized world, bordered by both the Byzantine and Persian empires but subject to neither. Most of the population was nomadic, tribal peoples who lived by tending their herds and by raiding rival tribes and the people who lived in the oases and borderlands. Some earned their living by tilling the soil in the few areas where the earth granted her consent; some made their livelihoods by commerce during periods when world events led to a revived interest in the trans-Arabian trade routes. After nearly a century of peace the renewed conflict between Byzantium and Persia ushered in one such period with both empires becoming active in and near Arabia in the 6th century. A few small towns made a living on a share of the traffic that passed through Arabia—between the Mediterranean world and the East. One of these towns was Mecca, a small oasis settlement in western Arabia. Muhammad was born here, around the year 571C.E.

The people of the peninsula, the Arabs, had a common literary language and a rich poetic literature that helped to give these widely dispersed tribes a sense of shared identity. However, they had no common political order and religiously they remained pagans, worshipping many gods whom they believed to be under the authority of the supreme god, Allah. The Arabs were familiar with other religions, there were colonies of both Christians and Jews in Arabia, and in fact some Arabs had converted to both of these groups. Others, who were also dissatisfied with idol-worship, found themselves unable to find comfort in either Christianity or Judaism.

According to tradition, Muhammad received