Qur'an page

Western historians have often argued that Islamic civilization made its greatest mistake in the fifteenth century when it refused to accept the printing press, for this failure supposedly condemned Islamic civilization to isolation from the mainstream of knowledge. Although Muslims did not use the printing press until the eighteenth century, and then only tentatively, they had other means of...

It is customary to separate secular and religious impulses in the formation and development of an art. It is also often said that the separation is not entirely meaningful in Islam, which did not make a distinction between the realms of God and of Caesar. A word of explanation must therefore be provided to justify our use of the term “religious” in the title of this chapter. What we are trying to identify are those elements or sources of inspiration in early Islamic art that could not have …