A love of patterning (1)

In the love of God, it is permitted to celebrate this presence, but not in idolatrous sculpture-making or craven images. Therefore, the wonderment, you can find in beauty — patterning — in the making of places and experiences that shows a love of God, and of beautiful things, represented in references like these — la geometria divina:

tsg | the later evening, the medina quarter, marrakech, morocco

“There is a saying or hadith, “God is beautiful and He loves beauty.” Beauty in the Islamic sense is, however, not beauty in the modern sense. Titus Burckhardt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Burckhardt, a scholar of Islam and the sacred arts who was once adviser to the Unesco on the preservation of the Islamic city of Fez, says: “Art to the Muslim is a ‘proof of the Divine existence’ only to the extent that it is beautiful, without showing the marks of subjective, individualistic inspiration. Its beauty must be impersonal like that of the starry sky.” Such a statement may not sit comfortably in the modern mindset’s “art is for art’s sake” where the genius of an artist relies on individual imagination and “originality.”

Instead, Islamic art is directed toward the experience of Divine Unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in Divine Unity. One gets a sense of this art in Burckhardt’s words “the entirety of plastic arts in Islam [as] essentially the projection into the visual order, of certain aspects or dimensions of Divine Unity.” (Patricia Ma. Araneta | Newsbreak)

REFERENCES:
http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/march02
http://www.exoticindiaart.com/article/islam/
http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/march02
http://kyotoreview.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/issue/issue4