Islamic Design from my perspective

As an engineer by profession, Art alludes me. I have problems trying to figure out what the artist is trying to say except to just look at the art as it is .

It was through art that fate led me to Islamic Design, and as my journey began to unravel, it got me to slowly appreciate Islamic Design from an engineering students perspective.

Per my understanding , Islamic art does not include figural works, because we cannot copy God's creation.

Islamic art is usually a combination of two items, which is the calligraphy and the illumination (or the design around or under the calligraphy).

We read the Quran and take for granted the calligrapher, or the person who copies the Quran. It is a painstaking process as the person or persons has to write it as consistently as possible. It is more difficult/interesting if it is done by more than one person. The copying time is shorter but the job gets trickier because each one of them has to write in in the same kind of handwriting. This is of couse impossible as forensic science tells us that each individual has a certain style, no matter how close the handwriting it is. But it is more or less indistinguishable to the layman, which is more than enough for its purpose.

Usually, the Quran is written in Nasakh script or font. It is done so for easy reading by everyone. However, there is a specific technique in writing in Nassakh e.g. the letter alif must be a height of 4 dots or 5 dots aligned vertically. These dots are dependent on the size of the nib of the pen. So if the nib is bigger, the dots get bigger, which will automatically make a bigger alif. This applies for all the letters. The calligrapher is guided by the size of the nib of the pen when writing the surah. Therefore, the text is proportionate to each other.

Hence in copying the Quran, the calligrapher needs to know the size of paper and what to write, then choose the size of the nib.

Moving on to the illumination or design around the text and its intricacies, I realized that each design uses translation and/or rotational symmetry. The principles behind the illumination is a reflection of the concept of Tauhid. No beginning, No end. If you take a look at the design, the design repeats itself and you are able to imagine it go beyond the page infinitely. With this kind of design, one is unable to find where the shapes start to take form, and thus is unable to find where the shape ends.

I once found an article of a university lecturer who teaches Maths using one of the walls of the building in Cordoba, Spain which was full of tiled Islamic Design. I now realise that this is possible when you are studying geometric shapes and matrix.

In Malaysia, unless named Al-Quran Mushaf Malaysia, the qurans that one usually gets on the street are most probably from Saudi Arabia or Syria. We bring a lot of it into Malaysia and some are reprinted in our neighbouring country. The designs and writers are from these respective countries.

Whats sets the Al-Quran Mushaf Malaysia apart from the others is that it is made up of designs from the 14 states of Malaysia, hence the name. The quran incorporates designs inspired by items such as old palaces, plants, wood carvings etc. from each state. It is also coloured according to the various states that it represents.

Illumination or design in Islamic art is very mathematical. I also see this in the flowers and plants around us. The Fibonacci series was inspired by the birthing of rabbits. But later, it was corelated to other theories such as the golden section in nature, where the the spread of the leaves as it grows, is of the ratio 1.688. I also noticed that if you map out the spread of the petals of a flower , you can get a consistent angle of spread from petal to petal. That was how I got to started in taking a closer look at the flowers around us and later moved on to plants. There are many websites that go in depth in the mathematics in plants. As Albert Einstein said “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better".

I later chanced upon research done by Dr. Peter Lu at Havard University. Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as quasi crystal. Basically, it is an infinite tiling pattern that doesn't regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals. He found out that the mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th‑ to 17th‑century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West.

To me this is wonderful, if we can just have our Malaysian design on the fixed format of the tiles, which has 5 distinct shapes, we can actually have our own thoroughbred Malaysian Islamic design tiles for all our buildings.

Back to calligraphy writing, Kufi font facinates me as it is very geometric. Back in the day, Kufi font was most commonly used for decorating buildings. As a civil engineer, it becomes more facinating as I think it can be applied to the design of the buildings itself or rather the format of building can be in Kufi writing. It is also used for logos. Compared to the Nasakh script, it is more mathematical because it uses squares . Its application goes beyond logos on buildings to songket weaving, which uses squares as their main format.

I guess it is worth looking deeper into it and getting a better understanding of Islamic design after all.