The black ink in the image above from a 9th century Quran marks the consonants for the reader. The red dots that are visible on the page note the vowels. However, calligraphic design is not limited to the book in Islamic art. Calligraphy is found in several different types of art, such as architecture.
The interior of the Dome of the Rock Jerusalem, circa , for example, features calligraphic inscriptions of verses from the Quran as well as from additional sources. As in Europe in the Middle Ages , religious exhortations such as Quranic verses may be included in secular objects, especially coins, tiles, and metalwork. Interior view of the Dome of the Rock : The interior of The Dome of the Rock features many calligraphic inscriptions, from both the Quran and other sources; it demonstrates the importance of calligraphy in Islamic art and its use in several different media.
Calligraphic inscriptions were not exclusive to the Quran, but also included verses of poetry or recorded ownership or donation. Calligraphers were highly regarded in Islam, which reinforces the importance of the word and its religious and artistic significance. Manuscript painting in the late medieval Islamic world reached its height in Persia, Syria, Iraq, and the Ottoman Empire.
The art form blossomed across the different regions and was inspired by a range of cultural reference points. The evolution of book painting first began in the 13th century, when the Mongols, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, swept through the Islamic world. Upon the death of Genghis Khan, his empire was divided among his sons and dynasties formed: the Yuan in China, the Ilkhanids in Iran, and the Golden Horde in northern Iran and southern Russia.
The Ilkhanids were a rich civilization that developed under the little khans in Iran. Architectural activity intensified as the Mongols became sedentary yet retained traces of their nomadic origins, such as the north—south orientation of buildings. Persian, Islamic, and East Asian traditions melded together during this period and a process of Iranization took place, in which construction according to previously established types, such as the Iranian-plan mosques , was resumed.
Islamic book painting witnessed its first golden age in the 13th century, mostly within Syria and Iraq. The tradition of the Persian miniature a small painting on paper developed during this period, and it strongly influenced the Ottoman miniature of Turkey and the Mughal miniature in India. Because illuminated manuscripts were an art of the court, and not seen in public, constraints on the depiction of the human figure were much more relaxed and the human form is represented with frequency within this medium.
Influence from the Byzantine visual vocabulary blue and gold coloring, angelic and victorious motifs, symbology of drapery was combined with Mongol facial types seen in 12th-century book frontispieces.
Chinese influences in Islamic book painting include the early adoption of the vertical format natural to a book. Motifs such as peonies, clouds, dragons, and phoenixes were adapted from China as well, and incorporated into manuscript illumination. The breadth of the work has caused it to be called the first world history and its lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists. The largest commissions of illustrated books were usually classics of Persian poetry, such as the Shahnameh.
Under the rule of the Safavids in Iran to , the art of manuscript illumination achieved new heights. The Court of Gayumars, from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp : Illuminated manuscripts of the Shahnameh were often commissioned by royal patrons. The medieval Islamic texts called Maqamat that were copied and illustrated by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, were some of the earliest coffee-table books.
They were among the first texts in Islamic art to hold a mirror to daily life, portraying humorous stories and showing little adherence to prior pictorial traditions. In the 17th century a new type of painting developed based around the album muraqqa.
The albums were the creations of connoisseurs who bound together single sheets of paintings, drawings, or calligraphy by various artists; they were sometimes excised from earlier books and other times created as independent works. The paintings of Reza Abbasi figure largely in this new form of book art. The form depicts one or two larger figures, typically idealized beauties in a garden setting, and often use the grisaille techniques previously used for background border paintings.
The Mughals and Ottomans both produced lavish manuscripts of more recent history with the autobiographies of the Mughal emperors and purely military chronicles of Turkish conquests. Portraits of rulers developed in the 16th century, and later in Persia, where they became very popular.
Mughal portraits, normally in profile, are very finely drawn in a realist style , while the best Ottoman ones are vigorously stylized. Album miniatures typically featured picnic scenes, portraits of individuals, or in India especially animals, or idealized youthful beauties of either sex.
Masterpieces of Ottoman manuscript illustration include the two books of festivals, one from the end of the 16th century and the other from the era of Sultan Murad III. These books contain numerous illustrations and exhibit a strong Safavid influence, perhaps inspired by books captured in the course of the Ottoman—Safavid wars of the 16th century. Islamic art has notable achievements in ceramics that reached heights unmatched by other cultures.
Discuss how developments such as tin-opacified glazing and stonepaste ceramics made Islamic ceramics some of the most advanced of its time. Islamic art has notable achievements in ceramics, both in pottery and tiles for buildings, which reached heights unmatched by other cultures. Early pottery had usually been unglazed, but a tin-opacified glazing technique was developed by Islamic potters.
The first Islamic opaque glazes can be found as blue-painted ware in Basra, dating to around the 8th century. Another significant contribution was the development of stonepaste ceramics, originating from 9th century Iraq. The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century.
Other centers for innovative pottery in the Islamic world included Fustat from to , Damascus from to around , and Tabriz from to Lusterware is a type of pottery or porcelain that has an iridescent metallic glaze.
Luster first began as a painting technique in glassmaking , which was then translated to pottery in Mesopotamia in the 9th century. The belief that the universe has a finite origin which spurred its expansion and development. This uncaused cause and origin of everything is Allah God , the lord and creator of all worlds. There can be nothing before this universe because God is its origin and the source of all things in it. God the uncaused cause and origin of everything is characterized by three major qualities:.
God is He who created the physical world of the five senses and the world which is beyond perception. Hence, He is the creator of the plants, animals, and inanimate objects, as well as imperceptible creatures like angels and jinn. However, the greatest of all creatures are human beings, whom God honored by giving them reason, free will, and numerous capabilities for accessing and utilizing the resources of the universe, which makes the perpetual journey towards perfection full of discovery and creativity.
God is all-knowing and is the source of knowledge for humankind. He supplies them with information which they then comprehend, study, and analyze, and thereby chart out their path of fulfillment through innovations, achievements, and the eventual accomplishment of their desired human perfection.
As such, God communicates His knowledge to certain chosen of His humankind through one of the following means:. When God created Adam and the human population began to grow, and its aspirations and needs advanced and became complex, God chose individuals who possessed distinctive qualities and appointed them as prophets and messengers to preach, guide, and proclaim His message. In a nutshell, they set the standards for missionary work.
What were these standards? Chiefly, they professed the peaceful path to Islam. They did not raise the sword to spread the religion. They resorted to more peaceful methods such as establishing Koranic schools and mosques, upgrading of mosques, holding sessions on Koranic exegesis, preservation of holy sites where yearly Islamic gatherings take place and being itinerant traders who took Islam to their clients and customers.
But just as they had methods, they also had tactics! For example, they believed in numbers and therefore were keen to multiply their talibes or disciples. The disciples having gone through years of tutelage, would be allowed to disperse and then mass up new disciples themselves. Through massification, the Jakhanke helped to strengthen their religion. Also, they had a tactic of withdrawing into enclaves far from the maddening crowds, so to speak. Generally, Jakhanke needed the quietude of the monastery and thus were very good at establishing theocratic entities sometimes deep in the Senegambian Savannah, where they developed self sustaining communities dedicated to Islamic scholarship and renditions.
So far absent in our discussion is the figure of Alhaji Salim Suwareh, the founder of the Jakhanke Islamic movement we have discussed above. He was a central in the success of the Jakhanke missionary work and therefore deserves our brief attention. His early life is shrouded in mystery, but a few strands deserve serious attention and are revealing.
He died around and reputedly made seven pilgrimages to Mecca where he had relatives and lived before relocating to Black Africa to spread Islam, settling in the Jaka region of Masina, in present day Mali. When he completed his seventh hajj, he returned to Africa and stayed. He led his people from Jaka Masina to Jaka Bambuku.
When the animist ruler of Bambuku became hostile, Suwareh did as the prophet of Islam did when Meccans started to throw stones at him: flee into exile. Suwareh led his band of talibes towards present day Senegambia. So dedicated were the Jakhanke to the spirit of peaceful spread of Islam that when a Serahuli religious hothead, Momodou Lamin Drammeh opted to wage war to convert Bundu eastern Senegal into Islam, the Jakhanke disowned him and fled further down to present eastern Gambia.
His swashbuckling style was quite in contrast to their orderly ways of Islamization! Without bearing the sword, the Jakhanke were able to fasten the spread and reform of Islam in contrast to the jihadist like Drammeh, Umar Taal, or Maba Jahou Bah. To conclude therefore, what is the significance of the Jakhanke movement?
Simply put, the Jakhanke epitomized peaceful and community led spread of Islam which made a deep impact on the recipient societies of Islam as the way of peace. The present day bomb throwers who claim to spread this religion by doing so may want to learn a lesson or two from the Jakhanke movement which started over years ago. Ampadu B. NUUT Co. Ltd Kumasi Ghana Fynn , J. Addo-Fening History for Senior Secondary schools.
Evans Brothers, Ltd. London Insoll, T. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Levtzion, N. Mones, H. Elfasi, ed. According to a nineteenth-century account, it took four months to travel from west to east and two months to travel from north to south. The caliphate was organised as a decentralised state seeking to establish Islamic law over its large territory. The jihad and caliphate officially ended with the British conquest, but has since been widely studied and its legacy endures today, especially in Nigeria.
Many observers have tried to understand the jihad, the caliphate and especially the figure of Usman dan Fodio. The jihad, itself at the origin of a rich Islamic scholarship, has now given place to a wide and varied literature. For dan Fodio, the main reason for the jihad was the purification of Islam in territories which were already Muslim at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The legitimacy of his struggle stemmed from his belief that, until this point, Muslim leaders had only practiced an impure form of Islam.
As a champion of the people, dan Fodio launched his fight against the king and the aristocracy of Gobir in Even if the social dimension of the jihad should not be totally neglected, dan Fodio himself declared mainly religious reasons to be at the origin of the jihad in Kitab al-Farq. Correspondence exchanged with the leader of Borno in the s is here revealing. After attempting to invade the kingdom that had existed since the ninth century, dan Fodio tried to convince Mohammed el-Kanemi of the religious and legal merits of his struggle.
For dan Fodio, the jihad was mainly but not only conceived as a way of reforming lax Muslims by pure Muslims. In the s, some historians stressed an ethnic dimension in the jihad of Sokoto. According to this interpretation, dan Fodio was the descendant of Fulanis installed in Hausa regions since the fifteenth century, and would have pitted Islam against Hausas.
However, even if most leaders of the Sokoto jihad were Fulani, it is difficult to argue that the numerically inferior Fulani would have believed that they could have overthrown the Hausa kings on exclusively ethnic grounds. Dan Fodio himself wrote against any ethnic discrimination in his treatise Bayan Wayan Wujub al-Hijra.
Scholars have also tried to show to what extent the jihad was not totally new in West Africa. Indeed discussions on the place of Islam in society had already taken place before the jihad of dan Fodio whether it was about food bans, marriage laws or clothes that women had to wear. It was this last point that had attracted the attention of Shaikh Jibril b.
In other words, some Muslim scholars had already become reformers-conquerors before the advent of Usman dan Fodio. The religious questioning of the jihad of dan Fodio was therefore not completely original.
It is his lasting political victory over a vast territory that ensured his long-term success. The first six years of jihad were fundamental in the creation of a political and religious foundation for a state that was never an empire, but a collection of territories under the authority of the caliph in Sokoto.
Indeed the Caliphate of Sokoto was a highly decentralised state ruled by the Caliph. The Caliphate itself was a novel phenomenon in the Hausa regions and conferred moral and political authority on dan Fodio and his successors. Companions of the caliph, Fulani scholars who had become jihadists, were thus placed as emirs at the head of each territorial subdivision who answered directly to the caliph.
Because of its size, the caliphate became divided between the western emirates under the authority of Sokoto and the eastern emirates which remained more or less autonomous. The different successors of dan Fodio had to carry out military campaigns to assert their authority, thus making jihad a virtually uninterrupted phenomenon until the mid-nineteenth century. It thus became necessary to ensure the security of the caliphate at its borders but also in the buffer zones between each emirate.
Thanks to soldiers recruited during the dry season, the troops of Sokoto could quash any rebellion or Tuareg incursion from the north. In replacing the taxes of the Hausa leaders by Islamic taxes like the zakat , revenues of the Caliphate were in theory subject to Islamic law.
However, these taxes depended largely on each emirate with, for example, the existence of a property tax in Kano or Zaria outside of the emirate of Sokoto.
The caliphate of Sokoto, faithful to the original intentions of the jihad, looked to establish Islamic law in the courts of the whole caliphate.
The need for educated men encouraged the emergence of schools in urban centres, even though the first years of the Caliphate were marked by a shortage of qualified personnel. Indeed, a defining feature of the Caliphate of Sokoto was the literate staff working in the administration of each emirate. Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.
Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions. In addition to hosting prayers, mosques often function as public gathering places and social centers. While some Muslims use their faith to justify terrorism, the vast majority do not. In fact, Muslims are frequently victims of violence themselves. Recent surveys have found that in countries with high Muslim populations, the majority of Muslims have overwhelmingly negative views of terrorist groups like ISIS.
While Muslims aim to clear up misconceptions about their faith, the religion continues to spread rapidly. Experts predict Islam will surpass Christianity as the largest religion by the end of the century. Islam, BBC. What is Sharia Law and How is it Applied?
Pew Research Center. The Islamic Calendar: TimeandDate. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4, years ago.
Zoroastrianism was the state religion of three Persian dynasties, until the Today, with about million followers, Hinduism is the third-largest religion behind Christianity and Islam. Followers of Judaism believe in one God who revealed himself through ancient prophets. The history of Judaism is essential to understanding the Jewish faith, which has a rich heritage of law, With about million followers, scholars consider Buddhism one of the major world religions.
Its practice has historically been most prominent in East and Southeast Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of The Inquisition was a powerful office set up within the Catholic Church to root out and punish heresy throughout Europe and the Americas.
Beginning in the 12th century and continuing for hundreds of years, the Inquisition is infamous for the severity of its tortures and its Mormons are a religious group that embrace concepts of Christianity as well as revelations made by their founder, Joseph Smith.
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