Museums have finally begun to open up to the public, so Sleuth’s Kafi Zafar took a trip to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to experience some art up close and personal. One room that made a big impression: the V&A’s Islamic Middle East room. If you aren’t lucky enough to see it in person, Kafi has the run-down on what makes this room so special.
It showcases a timeline of artwork from the early Islamic period in the 7th century, all the way up to the 20th century. It features calligraphy, textiles, ceramics, and scriptures. Here’s a brief walkthrough of how this art style emerged and developed over time, as well as how Islamic art has also influenced Western culture.
What is ISlamic Art?
Muslims don’t require objects like statues or shrines in order to worship God, so it may be difficult to understand how art itself can be ‘Islamic’. The term is usually used to describe an entire sophisticated, secular culture which existed beyond solely the religion of Islam. Unlike Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist art, Islamic art describes work produced in Muslim-ruled or dominant lands, rather than only religious art.
Islamic art was often expressed through architecture, books, and furnishings which may incidentally be used during worship and other religious activities. For example, the structures both inside and outside of a mosque, calligraphy and adornments within pages of the Quran, and prayer mats featuring geometric or floral designs.
The medium has spanned across 1,400 years and entire geographical empire, so it’s difficult to pinpoint its origins down to a specific style, material, or definition. While many Islamic scholars disapprove of the depiction of the human form (especially in places of worship or in holy texts), you may find Islamic art which incudes portraits as not all art from this time and region was created by Muslim artists.
Therefore, it’s important to recognise the difference between religious and secular Islamic art. It’s not always clear cut as to which kind a specific piece may be, as sometimes secular artists would depict religious scenes and themes featuring the human figure in their artworks, but these would be reserved for display in non-religious settings such as on the walls of a palace, or inside poetry books.
Islamic art as a whole takes influence from a vast array of other styles and cultures. These inspirations, in part, include Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Christian art. Central Asian and Chinese art had a particular influence on textiles, pottery, and painting.
Calligraphy
The range of styles in Islamic art is as wide and vast as the lands in which Islam spread. But one of the unifying features is calligraphy, usually in Arabic text.
The art of calligraphy wasn’t confined to just books, but was a focal point across various works of architecture and other decorative arts. Even in the modern world, intricately designed calligraphy can be found both inside and outside of mosques across the globe.
The most important example of calligraphy within the realm of Islamic art can be found in the Holy Quran, which is the central religious text for Muslims. There are a number of different types of scripts and fonts used when handwriting the Quran, the first of which was known as Kufic. Key characteristics of this font include an angular form, which stretched horizontally.
In Arabic, text is read from right to left, and only the consonants are written, with dots and lines above and below the letters signifying the vowels. Over time, and through different editions of scriptures, the way vowels are represented has varied. The pictured example of an early Kufic page uses red dots for the vowels.
After the Mongol conquest of Iran in the 1250s, larger and fancier copies of the Quran were produced, often split so that each of the 30 chapters of the book were bound separately. The V&A has one of these copies on display, showing a page from part 21 in a script called Muhaqqaq. It’s more cursive in appearance, and has a different presentation of the vowels than the Kufic font.
Not only are the verses of the Quran themselves treated as an artform, in some instances the entire page would be adorned with colourful geometric patterns to enhance the scriptures themselves, making sure to not detract from the words. Below are a couple of examples from within the V&A archives, showing some excerpts from late 15th century Egypt.
Ceramics
Another key medium within Islamic art is ceramics. This covers both pottery and the decorative tiles created for buildings, streets, and palaces. As mentioned before, Islamic religious art doesn’t feature people or animals, so ceramics often relied on the colour, patterns, and inscriptions within them instead.
The museum houses a range of ceramics from across the Islamic Middle East. One of my favourites is this collection of tiles which form a tessellating pattern (one which can repeat infinitely), and is made up of alternating crosses and eight-pointed stars. They come from 13th Century Iran, from the tomb of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
When inspected closely, each tile is unique in design, but tied together by the warm hues and botanically inspired designs on each of them. The outer border of each of the tiles has excerpts from the Quran finely painted on, too. It demonstrates the thought and care given to each individual tile, making up a larger piece.
Other examples of ceramics feature calligraphy as the main focal point, such as this tile fragment taken from a doorway leading to the tomb of one of the descendants of Genghis Khan, the infamous Mongol conqueror. Buyanquli Khan has a mausoleum built for him in Uzbekistan, which was adorned in similarly vibrant blue tiles both inside and out.
Western Recognition
It took a long while since its birth for Islamic art to make it into mainstream Western culture. In fact, the study of it didn’t really begin to take off until the 19th century, despite hundreds of years of depth and history.
One of the pioneers of the study of Islamic art, purely as an artform, above its cultural foundations, was architect and designer Owen Jones (1807 – 1874). Jones was enthralled by the idea of a range of colours being used in architecture, known as architectural polychromy, and at the age of 23 embarked on his Grand Tour (a journey usually taken by young, high status men) which ended in Granada, Spain.
Here, he carried out a six-month study of the Alhambra Palace, in which he and his research partner, Jules Goury, created hundreds of drawings and plaster casts to document the incredible artistic behemoth. While Goury sadly passed of cholera on this trip, Jones was determined to bring his findings back to the British public.
Jones went on to take inspiration from the vibrant colours and geometric tiles to create a temporary ‘Crystal Palace’ in Hyde Park, which was inaugurated by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He also published The Grammar of Ornament, which summarised his theories of design from various cultures and periods. It’s still in print today, over 150 years later, and much of the original artwork can be found at the V&A.
Unfortunately, not all depictions of the East were seen with the same adoration as Jones had. British colonialism, which had spread over the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia for a number of centuries, viewed these cultures through an Orientalist lens.
Orientalism, coined by the founder of postcolonial studies Edward Said, is the concept of Western media and literature presenting other cultures as somehow inferior, yet exotic. Sometimes, depictions of the East suggested they were barbaric and backward, while other times they were seen as overly romanticised civilisations.
When it comes to Islamic art, the idea of Orientalism helps to navigate the line between Western creatives appreciating the artform, and appropriating it. While this is arguably still something designers struggle to balance in the 21st century, our globalised and inter-connected world provides endless opportunities to continue to incorporate Islamic art styles into European ones.
If you want to learn more about the other art mediums which the Islamic empire helped to pioneer and develop, I would highly recommend making a trip down to the V&A yourself. Some examples of techniques which hold a rich history include carpetmaking and metalwork. Exploring the nearby rooms for South Asia, China and South-East Asia will also supplement the experience.