Islamic art: calligraphy, geometry and the arabesque

Short answer: Islamic art is the art made in Muslim lands and for Muslim use, from the seventh century onwards. Its best-known forms are calligraphy (beautiful writing, above all of the Quran), geometric patterns built from circles and stars, the arabesque (endless scrolling leaves and stems), tilework, and illuminated manuscripts. In mosques and copies of the Quran it avoids pictures of people and animals, because the Prophet ﷺ warned against making images of living beings. So artists put their skill into words, geometry and plants instead.

What counts as Islamic art

"Islamic art" is a name given by museums and historians. It covers what was made across a huge area, from Spain to India, over more than a thousand years: buildings, Quran manuscripts, ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, carpets and woodwork. Not all of it is religious. A brass bowl made for a sultan's table is Islamic art as much as a mosque lamp is. What ties it together is a shared visual language, and at its centre is the written word of the Quran.

The Prophet ﷺ taught that beauty is loved by Allah:

Muslim craftsmen took this to heart. They made ordinary things, a door, a water jug, a book binding, as fine as they could.

Calligraphy: the first Islamic art

Because the Quran is the word of Allah, writing it well became the highest art. The first revelation itself speaks of the pen:

The earliest Quran manuscripts use Kufic, an angular script with long horizontal strokes. Rounder scripts followed. In Baghdad, the vizier Ibn Muqlah (died 328 AH, 940 CE) set rules of proportion for the letters, measured in dots of the pen. Ibn al-Bawwab (died 413 AH, 1022 CE) and Yaqut al-Musta'simi (died 698 AH, 1298 CE) refined them. From their work come the six classic scripts, among them Naskh, still used to print most copies of the Quran, and the grand Thuluth you see on mosque walls. Later came Nasta'liq in Iran and Diwani at the Ottoman court.

Calligraphy is everywhere in Islamic art: around the base of domes, over doorways, on tiles, lamps, coins and swords. On a building it is often a verse chosen for the place, such as Ayat al-Kursi or the opening of Surah al-Fath.

Geometric patterns

The second great language of Islamic art is geometry. Craftsmen drew their patterns with only a compass and a straight edge, starting from a circle divided into equal parts. From those divisions come stars with six, eight, ten, twelve or sixteen points, joined by lines that seem to run on for ever. The pattern can be cut in stone, laid in tiles, carved in wood or painted on a ceiling.

Muslim mathematicians of the Abbasid age wrote on geometry, and some of their works explain the constructions craftsmen used. Many writers today see a meaning in these patterns: a design with no beginning and no end, centred on one point, reminds the viewer of the oneness of Allah. That reading is a modern one and the old craftsmen did not write it down, but the patterns certainly suited buildings made for worship.

The arabesque

The arabesque, called islimi in Persian and Turkish, is a pattern of stems, leaves and flowers that split and curl and grow into each other without end. It grew from the vine scrolls of late Roman and Persian art, but Muslim artists made it abstract: the plants are not real plants, and the scroll can fill any shape. It is often laid over a geometric grid or wrapped around calligraphy.

Tiles, glass and lamps

Glazed tiles cover whole buildings in Iran and Central Asia, where turquoise and deep blue domes stand out against the desert. Morocco and al-Andalus are known for zellij, mosaics of small cut tiles in star patterns. The Ottoman potters of Iznik made the blue, turquoise and red tiles of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the Blue Mosque of Istanbul. In Cairo the Mamluk sultans hung their mosques with enamelled glass lamps, many of them written with the Light Verse of the Quran (24:35).

Manuscripts and illumination

A fine copy of the Quran was the work of several masters: the calligrapher, the illuminator who painted gold and colour around the text, and the binder who made the leather cover. The opening pages often carry a decorated band or panel, the unwan, and verse markers mark the end of each ayah. One famous early copy, the Blue Quran, is written in gold Kufic on parchment dyed deep blue. It is usually dated to the ninth or tenth century and linked to North Africa.

Why people and animals are rare in religious art

There are no pictures of people or animals in mosques or in copies of the Quran. This comes from the hadith. The Prophet ﷺ said:

A man once told Ibn Abbas that he earned his living by making pictures. Ibn Abbas told him the hadith, and then gave him a way out that shaped Islamic art:

Scholars differ today on photography and screens; see our note on images and AI. In history, figures do appear in some Muslim art outside religious use: wall paintings in Umayyad palaces in the desert, and the painted miniatures of Persian and Mughal books of poetry and history. Historians record them; they were never part of mosque or Quran decoration.

FAQ

Sources

1. Sahih Muslim 91, from Abdullah ibn Mas'ud.
2. Sahih al-Bukhari 5950, from Abdullah ibn Mas'ud; Sahih al-Bukhari 2225, from Sa'id ibn Abi al-Hasan, reporting Ibn Abbas. Arabic checked against the hadith-api text.
3. On images in the Hanafi school: Ibn Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar, Kitab al-Salah, chapter on what is disliked in prayer; al-Marghinani, al-Hidayah. For the other schools, their standard manuals.
4. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250 to 1800 (Yale, 1994), and Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture 650 to 1250 (Yale, 2001).
5. Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), on Ibn Muqlah, Ibn al-Bawwab and Yaqut.
6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, essays on Islamic art and on figural representation.
7. Quran 96:3 to 5 and 24:35, Arabic from the Uthmani text, translation by Sahih International.

The rulings on this page are pending review by the scholars on our team.