Week 6: Islamic Art
I was intrigued by the lecture we heard about Islam in Bosnia. It was striking to the vastly different the interpretations of Islamic art. Mosques took all forms: some were entirely stone and sand, other were soaring glass towers. Some were wildly ornate, while others starkly simple. Yet all held an appeal and represented the importance of viewing Islam the religion through its many different art forms.
For this blog installment I used a compass, ruler, glue and construction paper to build an archway as one might see at a mosque. The strangeness of my depiction is immediately obvious when one realizes it is hardly symmetrical. I am trying to allude to this vast world of interpretation in Islamic art. On the left side of this arch, I tried to show the ornate, complicated designs found around the world, on the right, I tried to show the more simple, but no less appealing designs.
By keeping the general shape of the arch the same, and having it meet at the same place at the top, I tried to capture that although the methods may vary wildly, the end result is often the same. This idea ties into the side of the debate taken by Nasr, who argues that all Islamic art can be related back to the Qur’an, that the source is one, but the manifestations are diverse. I wanted these two diverse manifestations to be put in close proximity to represent the single source.