The Many Patterns of Allah

By ROBERT HUGHES

The word Islam means submission -to the will, it is implied, of Allah. No religion was more appropriately named. At the height of its conquests in the 8th century A.D., the empire of Islam stretched from the Atlantic beaches of Portugal to the western fringe of China. It encompassed half the known world. This Moslem superstate was the largest religious and political bloc mankind had seen since the Augustan empire, and it had all been consolidated in a little more than 100 years after the death of the prophet Mohammed, in 632.

Fear of the crescent and the scimitar was one of the fundamental experiences of Christian culture in Mediterranean Europe for nearly 1,000 years, until Don John of Austria broke the Turkish navy at the Battle of Lepanto. In Western eyes, it endowed Persians, Turks and Arabs with an extraordinary strangeness, an "otherness," of which echoes are heard to this day. One of the areas in which they persist, however faintly, is that of art. Given the collections of it in the U.S., not to mention the undying appetite for Oriental carpets, one could hardly say that Islamic art is unfamiliar to Americans. Yet the ceramics and glasswork, the architecture and mural decoration, the metalwork and (except for Mughal miniatures) the paintings that form the relics of this vast imperial culture are much less known to museumgoers than their equivalents from Japan or China.

Swift Irregularity. So the current exhibition, Art of the Arab World, at Washington's Freer Gallery is not to be missed. Organized by Art Historian Esin Atil, from the encyclopedic stores of the gallery's own collection, the show contains 80 objects, many of superb aesthetic interest, ranging across a period of 800 years. It does not include Turkish or Persian work. As the name implies, the focus is on Arab art as such -mainly from Syria, Egypt and Iraq.

The show is particularly rich in pottery: lusterware, invented in Baghdad during the Abbassid dynasty (750-1258) in order to mimic the richer gold or silver dishes used by the court; elaborate dishes and bowls; and several examples of that ethereal and, for some reason, uncopiable turquoise-glazed black-figure ware which was produced in Syria around the 12th century. One plate (see cut) bears the design of a heron, stalking with incomparable grace through this background color as if through azure water. The body of a vase is adorned with leaf-shaped flecks of black, each done with one movement of the brush, but the design -in all its swift irregularity -is full of vitality. The Arabic mastery of pattern was absolute.

One thing everyone "knows" about Islam is that it prohibited artists from painting the human figure. In fact, this was not wholly true. The Koran had nothing to say on the matter. Prophetic tradition banished figures from the walls of mosques, for fear of idolatry; but there was no rule against secular figure painting. Therefore, the decoration of all the great mosques of Islam was nonfigurative, but there was nothing heretical about the secular miniatures -of astrological images, courtly scenes or scientific inventions -represented in this show. Arab culture was pragmatic. Almost everything the Italian Renaissance knew of medicine and chemistry, for instance, was transmitted to it through Arabic versions of Greek texts, which often required drawings of the human body. The Freer show contains several scientific manuscripts. One is a splendidly decorated version of a herbal by the Greek naturalist Dioscorides. Another is a fascinating 14th century manuscript on water clocks, paddle wheels and the like, al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.

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 writing on an 8th century Koran page: the angular Kufic script done in a swordsman's strokes, decisive and muscular; the rich gold foliations round the white chapter heading; the placement of red dots, fit to make Mondriaan despair. Nevertheless, it is frustrating not to be able to read the page. (In a less exalted context, this becomes an advantage: neon signs never look more beautiful than in Arabic.)

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 that twine like morning-glories across every surface, an undulant line branching into unimaginably complicated mazes, knots, overlays, repeats and meander patterns. One is faced, not by another decorative style, but by a wholly different notion of space and substance.

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 of Islamic and Christian imagery arranged in dense concentric bands, than of vast architectural projects like the tile-work of the Alhambra in Granada. It is hard -perhaps impossible -to hold the entire pattern in one's mind, even when looking at it.

This leisurely elaboration is unique to Arab art. It proclaims that there is always "world enough and time." Pattern, repeating and transforming itself, be comes a metaphor of infinity. No wonder the style seems so appropriate to a culture of mathematicians. At a time when the visual talents of the Arab world appear to have sunk to brass ash trays, souvenir hookahs and oil-rich Castro Convertible kitsch, it is a joy to see what went before.

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