Ubiquitous Voice

(oil pastel) Islam is a religion and a culture characterized by vast and abundant diversity in ritual, practice, and interpretation, which has resulted in a rich and inspiring collection of cultural manifestations which all hold the Qur’an and the core of Islam in common. As Daftary writes in Diversity in Islam: Communities of Interpretation, “almost every Muslim […]

     (photography) In Topkapi Scroll, Gulru Necipoglu describes 19th-century Orientalist conceptions of architecture in the Muslim world, based on the “view that architecture and the decorative arts were determined by climate and racial character,” (Necipoglu 62). Intellectuals at the time observed what they characterized as a unique racial style of Arabs: “The innate spirituality and mysticism […]