Trip to Traditional Islam Crafts School VI: Wooden Arabesque

This wooden arabesque was carved by craftsman at the school. The level of detail was stunning.

Titus Burckhardt, an historian of Islamic art wrote this about the arabesque:

"The arabesque, with its rhythmic repetition serves quite a different artistic purpose than does pictorial art. It does not seek to capture the eye to lead it into an imagined world, but, on the contrary, liberates it from all preoccupations of the mind, rather like the view of flowing water, fields waving in the wind, falling snow or rising flames. It does not transmit any specific ideas, but a state of being, which is at once repose and inner rhythm...the purest simile for the manifestation of divine reality (al-hakika), which is the center throughout, in each creature, and in each cosmos, without any being or any thing being able to claim to be in its sole reflection, creating an unending reflection of centers in each other. The “unity of being” (wahdat al-wudjud), however, is expressed in two different ways in these “spiders webs of God” – by being woven from one single band, and in the way they radiate from many identical centers.”[Titus Burckhardt, Moorish Culture in Spain, p.206]