[Islam-Online- Art]

By the year 800 C.E., and within less than two centuries from the inception of Islam, a new religious and secular architecture materialized in a vast area: western Asia, all of North Africa, and southern Spain. The archeological and textual references for these projects have provided us with a wealth of physical and descriptive evidence of the emerging building types and forms of Islamic architecture. The mosque, for example, developed into a well-defined building type with characteristic physical features and spatial organization, among them the mihrab, the minbar, calligraphic inscriptions, and surface ornamentation, all of which are architectural elements whose designs and dispositions in the mosque space have taken on various reoccurring patterns.
The theological rationalization behind the historical evolution of mosque architecture is more formidable to consolidate, however, for information is scarce and it is difficult to interpret subjective information. The Qur'an decreed emphatically the salah (prayer) but did not describe what features a house of worship should incorporate. The Prophet taught salah to early Muslims and continued to lead the faithful in prayer in the architecturally modest mosque of MadEµnah. When the spatial requirements for congregational mosques became apparent, such architectural features as the mihrab appeared.
Mosque architecture began to develop under the Rightly Guided Caliphs and escalated through the succeeding Umayyad ascendancy, which witnessed the rise of architectural masterpieces in the expanding Islamic world. Mosque project officers incorporated innovations in designing the edifice in relation to its immediate environment, interior space planning, and construction techniques. But none surpassed the innovations in calligraphic inscriptions and ornamentation, which we classify as the surface arts of the mosque. The levels of productivity and quality of these surface arts defies description. What, then, was the source of motivation and poetics behind these creations?
This article suggests that the highly acclaimed Islamic surface arts are rooted in the corresponding calligraphic and illumination arts of the Qur'an and that Qur'anic arts arose to show the harmony of the theological idea of the sacredness of the Qur'an itself. This suggestion requires the clarification of two separate, but intertwined, relationships. The first is the relationship between the concept of the Qur'an's sacredness and the artistic presentation of the Qur'an as a holy book through fine calligraphy and illumination. The second is the relationship between the sacred arts of the Qur'an (calligraphy and illumination) and the surface arts of the mosque as a holy place (calligraphic inscriptions and ornamentation). In this article, such relationships are addressed more specifically through three questions: What made the Qur'an the absolute source and manifestation of sacredness in Islamic theology? What sacred arts of the Qur'an were developed in response to the established idea of the Qur'an's sacredness? What mosque surface arts were developed (out of Qur'anic arts) to express sacredness within the confines of the mosque?
To maintain consistency throughout the article, "calligraphy" and "illumination" are used in association with the sacred arts of the Qur'an; "inscriptions," "calligraphic inscriptions," and "ornamentation" are used in association with the surface arts of the mosque.

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