Word: islamicizing
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The great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, have never swung away from mysticism as the pinnacle of holiness, though they also value deeds of compassion. Traditional Islamic belief views the saint or wali (friend of God) as a person with a foot in both worlds-one whose special...
Algeria says that it does not want the land for itself, but does not want Morocco's right-wing monarchy to have it either. Instead, Algiers favors self-determination, assuming that the Sahara's 70,000 or 80,000 nomads would opt for Algerian-style Islamic socialism. Hassan...
Nevertheless, the look of Islamic art is overwhelmingly abstract and, to a Western eye, puzzlingly so. This is partly due to the circumstance that, illiterate in Arabic, a Westerner cannot decipher the inscriptions or savor the interplay between conceptual and visual meaning in Islamic calligraphy. One can visually enjoy the...
But there is a deeper level of unfamiliarity. Since the early 15th century, European art has been so much concerned with finite space, with place and solidity rendered through perspective and tone, that we find it hard to grasp the forms of Islamic art−its "arabesques," those complicated embellishments...
The decorative pattern breaks up the surface. It volatilizes what once was solid, rendering substance−bronze, stucco, tile or parchment−almost immaterial. This was no less true of relatively small objects like a 13th century Syrian canteen in silver inlaid brass (see color page), with its elaborate conflation...