S.’s Reviews > Art of Islam, Language and Meaning: Commemorative Edition > Status Update

" ... a sacred art is not necessarily made of images, even in the broadest sense of the term; it may be no more than the quite silent exteriorization, as it were, of a contemplative state, and in this case—or in this respect—it reflects no ideas, but transforms the surroundings qualitatively, by having them share in an equilibrium whose center of gravity is the unseen."

“Those who became interested in Islamic art for its so-called ‘abstract’ nature often did so for the wrong reasons. They thought that Islamic art is abstract in the same sense as modern Western art, whereas the two stand at opposite poles. The result of the one form of abstraction is the glass skyscrapers which scar most modern cities, and the fruit of the other is the Shāh Mosque and the Taj Mahal.”