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Preliminary Notes for the Understanding ofthe Historical Significance of Geometry inArab/Islamic Thought, and its SuppressedRole in the Genealogy of World HistoryRasheed AraeenPublished online: 23 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Rasheed Araeen (2010) Preliminary Notes for the Understanding of the HistoricalSignificance of Geometry in Arab/Islamic Thought, and its Suppressed Role in the Genealogy of World History,Third Text, 24:5, 509-519

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Third Text, Vol. 24, Issue 5, September, 2010, 509–519

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DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2010.502770

Preliminary Notes for theUnderstanding of the Historical

Significance of Geometry inArab/Islamic Thought, and its

Suppressed Role in theGenealogy of World History

Rasheed Araeen

The idea that began its journey with the pyramids of Egypt, about 2600BC, entered Greece about 2300 years later and ‘transformed geometryinto an exact abstract reasoning device’.1 In both Egypt and Mesopota-mia geometry had provided not only an instrument of measurement but‘produced monumental modes of artistic expression (eg temples, palaces,sculpture, etc), which were without precedent’.2 But in Greece, stillpreoccupied with gods and their visual manifestation in sculpture, geom-etry seemed to have played little role in the development of art thatexpressed abstract thinking. And despite Euclid’s great achievement indeveloping geometry as a theoretical discourse, which laid the founda-tion of (modern) mathematics, it remained confined within the elabora-tion of this discourse. It was only the spirit of Islam which about 1200years later transformed the rationality of abstract thinking enshrinedwithin geometry into a sensory form of artistic expression.3

The aim of these preliminary – though somewhat fragmentary – notesis to initiate a serious investigation into the historical significance of theemergence and development of geometry as an artistic form in Islamicart, which, in my view, not only expresses a historical continuity ofknowledge produced by the Greeks but takes this knowledge further inthe rational trajectory of history, now reaching our own modern times.The context of this initiative is therefore the present state of the world,particularly the Muslim world. Why has the Muslim world now falleninto a state where its tradition of rational thinking – enshrined particu-larly in geometry – is no longer functional? Why has it abandoned thedignity of its own self-consciousness and the spirit that in the past

1. Issam El-Said and Ay[scedil] e Parman, Geometric Concepts in Islamic Art, World of Islam Festival Publishing Company, London, 1976, p 1

2. Ibid, p 1

3. The use of geometry is also found in the earliest forms of art before its emergence in Islamic art – forms used even today in many cultures – but my concern here is with what is enshrined in the complex configurations of geometry as a rational system of abstract thought fundamental to Islamic philosophy.

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produced great knowledge in science, philosophy and art? Just toemulate others? Why has it trapped itself within a world-view that infact opposes and denies the Muslim world not only its own spirit but itsplace in the genealogy of world history? Is it possible now to recover thepast achievements of the Arab/Islamic history and its own world-view?And how is it to be done? Can we retrieve and revive Islamic history byfirst allowing individual minds to think freely and rationally, so thatthey can understand not only the significance of the past but how thispast might now guide us, collectively, to move forward?

RATIONALITY OF HISTORY

History is supposed to have begun some 6000 or 7000 years ago withthe emergence of urban settlements, first in Mesopotamia and then inAncient Egypt, that grew into kingdoms and great civilisations.4 Havingresolved the problem of basic subsistence by developing the ability toaccumulate surplus and a system for its distribution, humans turned tothinking about the meaning of what surrounded them and their ownexistence within it. The questions that arose from this thinkingaddressed not only one’s own existence in the world but the world itself:who created all that was on earth and the universe? What was the mean-ing of life? How could human beings connect themselves to that whichcreated them? Answers to all this seemed to lie within the human bodyitself and its self-consciousness, its own physicality revealing what wasmost intelligent in nature but also the invisible force or entity thatproduced this intelligence. This led to an organised system of thinking inwhich the invisible force took the form of gods who had human bodies.In fact, humans became gods and gods humans.

‘Man’, looking at his own body and admiring it, began to worship it,as if it were or represented the body of the divine. But this narcissismbecame an obstacle to human imagination, which needed freedom to gobeyond the body and also bring people together in a rationally organisedcollective, without which humanity could not progress to a meaningfuland better future. So the human spirit eventually rid itself of these physi-cally burdensome gods. Abrahamic monotheism first realised the fallacyof idol worship and confronted it with a transcendental perception of thedivine, and the Greeks also strove to free themselves from the burden ofsupernatural or divine explanations of the world. Their self-consciousnessrecognised the creative potential of the independent mind and developeda rational and humanised discourse, resulting in a new and progressivebody of knowledge in science, philosophy and the arts.

But the forward march of Greek rationality was retarded by the risefirst of the Roman Empire and then Christianity, which adopted some ofthe Roman myths to bring the Divine back to earth in the form of aMan, thus placing Man at the centre of the universe and allowing Man-the-Divine to rule the earth. This was the beginning of the Dark Ages inEurope’s history which, by turning its back on the mind’s potential for anotional understanding of the universe, denied humanity the Divine’smost precious gift to it: the creativity of the mind.

The Arabs at the time were also trapped in the darkness of ignorance– Jahiliyya – worshipping idols, until Islam arrived in the seventh century

4. I am aware of the achievements of other civilisations – such as Persian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Aztec; also of many others in Africa, such as those of Mali, Ghana and Zimbabwe. But my concern here is only with what emerged in the area surrounding the Mediterranean.

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AD. The human spirit, trapped in a darkness detached from the historythat embodied humanity’s rational knowledge, could not generate aconsciousness beyond itself and advance knowledge further in pursuit ofself-fulfilment. Not only consciousness of being in the world but also ofits history was required to allow the spirit to overcome ignorance andtravel from one period to another of human history, and thereby carrythe ideas of the past into the present and forward to the future. But sincethe journey of the art form, representing the human body in painting andsculpture, had already occurred in its passage from Egypt to Greece, theearly Christian period and the Arabs of Jahiliyya, the spirit could notreturn to this past and recover itself in a form that had historicallyreceded. It needed a new sensory form that would supersede the sensu-ousness of the body and move on to a higher level of self-consciousnessfree from the body’s narcissism.

A system would emerge to receive the divine message and also followits multilayered complexity in encouraging the human mind to indepen-dence of thinking and creation. With the arrival of the Qur’an, the divinemessage was not only confirmed with all its attributes but offered a wayfor humanity to organise itself, not necessarily merely to submit to Hismessage, but for the betterment and welfare of humanity. What wasmost extraordinary about this message was a repudiation of any physicalrelationship of the Divine with humanity, creating both an infinity ofdistance and a nearness between the Divine and humans, which couldonly be penetrated and grasped through the contemplative power ofimagination. Imagination could now wander freely in the universe andexplore its vastness, producing a knowledge whose rationality for someseemed at first to contradict the revealed message but in fact comple-mented it. It was this relationship of a revelatory knowledge that engen-dered a ‘secular’ rational discourse that underlies the spirit of Islam.

There is a general misconception that Islam explicitly forbids therepresentation of living beings in art. Islam emerged in opposition to idolworship and to the notion that perceived the Divine in the form of thehuman body. The question was not one of prohibiting images of livingbeings, particularly human beings, but that such images had no place inwhat Islam came to stand for; they were anathema to and could notrepresent the spirit of Islam. The art that emerged in the Muslim worldcould not therefore be based on the human body or on images of livingbeings,5 but had to go beyond, whence the spirit was free from the sensu-ous physicality of the body and could reveal itself as the abstract abilityof the mind.

It was indeed the Arabs’ openness to other cultures, after theyadopted Islam, and particularly their encounter with the Greeks, thatallowed them to seize on existing knowledge and transform it into theelement that defined the Islamic spirit and its place in history. Thearrival of Greek knowledge in ninth-century Baghdad and its translationinto Arabic laid the foundation of what is known as Arab or Islamicphilosophy.6 Part of this knowledge was Euclid’s basic geometry of thesquare, circle and triangle, which fascinated the Arab mind. Althoughthe discourse of geometry played a fundamental role in Arab science andphilosophy, particularly in astronomy and cosmology, my concern hereis with what led to its emergence as a unique sensory form of art. This isnot simply about highly complex geometric forms, with symmetry as

5. The recent interest of the global artworld in the so-called new miniature painting, particularly in work produced by some young artists in/from Pakistan, is the reassertion by the West of its hegemonic ideology and its imposition on a Muslim country in a state of social turmoil and cultural confusion. Miniature painting has little to do with Islam, its spirit or world-view. It emerged in Iran in the fourteenth century, at the time of a decline in this spirit and an adoption by the ruling class of Iran of Chinese figurative painting to depict its own worldly life; it was then brought to India by the second Moghul emperor Humayun and developed further by the emperor Akbar. However, the most important work in the miniature painting was not executed under the patronage of the Mughals or Muslims, but in the Hindu states of Rajasthan and Sikh states of Punjab.

I am not here implying that picturing the world through living images is forbidden in Islam, but rather looking at the historical and ideological roots of picture-making. If picture-making in the Muslim world is a departure from the central spirit of Islam, a departure that no longer represents a return to idol worship but has become part of the everyday dynamic of life of the Muslim world, then it has to be understood through a rational discourse that reveals its historical complexity. Merely invoking one’s identity, as a Pakistani for example, and presenting and justifying the recent development of miniature painting as representing the authentic identity of a Muslim country is not only to reduce this complexity to a simple-minded absurdity, but also denies the reality of the Muslim world of the last few

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Cover of Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach by Keith Critchlow, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976

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their constant basis; it is about their philosophical and historicalsignificance. Were these geometric forms devised merely to decoratearchitecture, as they are often seen to be, or did they express somethingmore profound? I suggest that they were not just exercises in pattern-making, to fill the empty spaces of buildings, but involved an imagina-tion able to penetrate the cosmos and reveal what was invisible to theeye; making visible not only the abstract Divine but also the nature ofthe infinite cosmos which it created.1 Cover of Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach by Keith Critchlow, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976This entry of Greek knowledge into Arab/Islamic consciousnessspeaks of the historical journey of the spirit from its suppression inmedieval Europe to its freedom in the Arab/Muslim world, representingalso the movement of art from its early formations based on humansobserved in nature to contemplation involving abstract thinking. In thisprocess, human self-consciousness moves on from what it observes andexperiences towards its extraneous and superficial elements; and then itsspirit penetrates the observed thing to reveal its essence through asensory form of historical significance. From this we can conclude thatthe spirit of Islamic art represents the historical movement fromMesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and to the Arabs, from whose geniusgeometry emerges as a sensory art form, not only revealing the complex-ity of its own formation but enshrining within itself a rational discourseat the basis of Arab and Islamic civilisation, and whose world-viewopposes and supersedes the idea that places ‘man’ at the centre of theuniverse.

Meditation on revealed knowledge first produced the art form ofcalligraphy, a sensory form that already existed within the specificity ofthe Arabic language. While firmly grounding itself in this particularity,the imagination of the Islamic spirit also needed to go beyond andproduce a form of art which would transcend this grounding and becomeuniversal in a world of enormously diverse cultures and languages. Itwas, however, the very contemplation of revealed knowledge thatenhanced the ability of the mind to comprehend the world through asensory form (of calligraphy), which then moved to its next stage to revealthe universality of the spirit enshrined in geometry.

This multiple function of the mind represents Islam’s true message.While the mind must accept revealed knowledge and incorporate withinit whatever already exists in the world as knowledge, it must alsorespond to all this through self-consciousness and thus create what wasnot there before in the world. It was this ability of the creative mind toaccept what it received, admiringly and critically, and then to go beyondit that led to the shift from calligraphy to geometry in Islamic art; that is,from meditation on the given to the creation of a system of thought withits own rationality giving rise to an entirely unprecedented new languageof art. The sensuousness of geometric forms in Islamic art is self-determined, representing a self-consciousness that involves perceptionand conception simultaneously.

Geometry in Islamic art thus represents a paradigm shift in theevolution of human thought from the observation of things and their re-presentation as they appear to the eye to the creation of an art formwhose sensuousness is the product of pure abstract thinking, thusgiving the imagination enhanced power to think but also unprecedentedfreedom to create.

centuries when it had to struggle against the Western world in order to assert its own modern identity and self-determination.

6. This knowledge reached Baghdad as the philosophy of Neoplatonism. Although rooted in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, its centre was not in Athens but in Alexandria, Egypt.

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AN ENLIGHTENMENT OF EUROPE

In 1623, Galileo Galilei argued that ‘the grand book’ of the universe was‘written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles,circles, and other geometric figures… without these one is wanderingabout in a dark labyrinth’. How did he know this? Had it not alreadybeen established six centuries earlier in Baghdad? Of course, Europe wasthen trapped in the ‘dark labyrinth’ of its own perceived conflict betweenthe revealed divine message and secular knowledge; it only emergedfrom this darkness when it saw the light coming from Islamic Spain. Itwas in Cordoba that the great Islamic philosopher Abu Ibn Rushd (Aver-roes, 1126–1198) proved theoretically – following the work of Greekphilosopher Aristotle – that there was no conflict between the revealedmessage and secular knowledge but that they complemented each other.About a hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a Catholictheologian and thinker, picked up this dialectic and opened the door toEuropean enlightenment.

Although the light of knowledge from the Muslim world had alreadybegun to reach Europe in the twelfth century, it was the work of IbnRushd, after its influence spread in Europe through Thomas Aquinas,that helped to lift the Church’s ban on the teaching of Aristotle. In fact,Averroism (following Ibn Rushd) was the dominant influence on West-ern thought from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The importantpoint here is that although modern Western philosophy began its jour-ney with knowledge that originated with the Greeks, it was the Arabswho had developed this classical knowledge further and elaborated itbefore it reached Europe and produced the European Renaissance. Arab/Islamic history is therefore central to the history that links Europe withthe ancient Greeks and to the knowledge Europe produced followingthis link laying the foundation for the modern world.

HEGEL’S DIVERSION

But for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel the reality of this history wasunacceptable, because it clashed with a view and philosophy of historythat placed Europe at the centre of world history, from the Egyptian tothe Greek and Christian eras and then to the modern. In fact, while theo-rising the genealogy of history, he completely removed Islamic historyfrom this genealogy and established direct links between modern Europeand the ancient Greeks. Why did he do this? Hegel was one of the mostprofound thinkers of Western philosophy, and his discourse constantlyemphasised the truthfulness of reason, the rational mind and what itproduced as knowledge. Yet he did not construct his own history ofhumanity on a rational and truthful basis.

What concerns me here is the role of Greek art in Hegel’s view andhis subsequent definition and formulation of the whole of humanhistory. After being rediscovered during the Renaissance, Greek sculp-ture became the focus of the eighteenth-century German art historian J JWinckelmann, whose fascination with it inspired Hegel. And Hegelbecame so obsessed with the beauty of Greek sculpture that he saw in itthe highest peak of art’s achievement. Based on this fascination, Hegel

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then developed his philosophy of history on the primacy and representa-tion of the human figure in art, arguing that only the sensory form of thehuman body was capable of revealing the human spirit and realising self-consciousness that could move history.7 It seems that this argument ledHegel to conclude that the spirit of Islam had remained submerged; itnever made itself visible or revealed itself as a sensory form so that wecould see it, experience it with the eyes, and then know its significance.

Geometry, for Hegel, had no sensory form because it did not repre-sent the physicality of the human body. Which of course was a flawedargument. It had no rational or scientific basis but only an assumptionthat placed ‘man’ at the centre of the universe, which then became anideological predetermination that placed Europe’s, or the West’s, ownself-consciousness exclusively at the centre of the world – a centredefined by a historical genealogy that connected Europe directly withthe Greeks. Only within this genealogy, according to Hegel, could theAbsolute human spirit emerge that would define the destiny of theworld.

Hegel’s insistence on the centrality of the body in human self-consciousness led him to the conclusion that the sensory form of thespirit revealed in classical Greek sculpture had reached its peak then andhad since deteriorated. As the sensory form had become subordinated tothe ideology of medieval Christian art, in which art became the pictorialrepresentation of the stories of Christianity, particularly the crucifixionof Christ, it lost its freedom to reveal and realise itself by and in itself.From this Hegel concluded that the sensory form of art was no longercapable of revealing the spirit in the forward movement of history.

What is significant in Hegel’s scenario is an emphasis not only onestablishing a historical genealogy from Egypt to Greece to medievalChristian Europe, leading on to the modern, but also that this genealogyrepresents the continuity of human self-consciousness in its historicalpursuit of ultimate fulfilment. If art had reached its climax in ancientGreek sculpture and then declined with Christian art, how might thehuman spirit then continue its journey? Answering this question, Hegeldeclared the end of art. The spirit must now find a new and differentform to proceed further, not just any form but one that would placeEurope or the West at the centre of the universe. ‘For Hegel’, saysEnrique Dussel, ‘the Spirit of Europe (the German spirit) is the absoluteTruth that determines or realizes itself through itself without owinganything to anyone’.8 Criticising Hegel’s Eurocentrism, Dussel elabo-rates this further:

The German Spirit is the Spirit of the new World. Its aim is the realiza-tion of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination (selbstbestim-mung) of Freedom – that Freedom which has its own absolute form itselfas its purport.9

This new modern world had thus been created not by the free spirit ofhistory – which passed through the Muslim world before it enlightenedEurope – but by the Spirit solely embodied in Europe – in the body ofEuropean man himself that now replaces the sensory form of art thatoriginated in the ancient world but continues its journey in Hegel’sphilosophy of world history. This history is the history of the white manand his civilisation that now dominates the world.

7. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed with intro and commentary Michael Inwood, trans Bernard Bosanquet, Penguin Books, London, 1993. It has been pointed out by Inwood that Hegel ignored Plato’s views on Greek sculpture.

8. Enrique Dussel, ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity’, in The Cultures of Globalization, eds Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1998, p 3

9. Ibid, p 3

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What is extraordinary about this new Spirit is that it is not embodiedin an art form which has progressively evolved through the rationality ofthe spirit’s journey through many cultures and civilisations, but isdetermined only by Western philosophy which confuses narcissism withself-consciousness.10 When Hegel looks at the body in Greek sculpture,with its idealised ‘white’ facial features, his gaze reflects back towardshis own body, the body of Europe that has now triumphed in conquer-ing the world; and the narcissism of the infantile ego thus becomes fixed,eternally, by this conquest. It cannot therefore function or operate inrelation to others, recognising in others a human spirit, but by dominat-ing others in order to deny them their own self-consciousness and thepower of the spirit. The infantile ego cannot therefore engage in ‘recon-ciliation and resolution’ – as Hegel’s own dialectics proposes – a way ofcoming to terms with differences and conflicts. The mirror in which theWest looks at its own body, admiringly, is the mirror which has nowbeen turned toward the world; and with the West’s own image thusfixed onto this world mirror, others are denied their own reflection.

RETURN OF THE OPPRESSED

The idea began its journey with the dawn of human self-consciousness,travelling through many historical periods, many cultures and civilisa-tions, sometimes revealing itself through a sensory form of art, at othertimes suppressed for centuries, lying dormant but not dead. The ideanever dies, as the human spirit never dies. After remaining suppressed orlying dormant for centuries, it can always emerge again and make itselfvisible with renewed force, revealing itself as a new form in the world.My account here only deals with the idea’s movement through thecultural spaces surrounding the Mediterranean that have been constantlyinteracting and influencing each other. This movement, with theemergence of modern ideas based on the rationality of science and theirworldwide circulation, has now become global. And within this move-ment of modernity or modernism the re-emergence of geometry hasoccurred, not only as a sensory form within modern sculpture but also asa fundamental element of modern science. Geometry with its multifac-eted complex symmetry, which first emerged and revealed itself as asensory form representing the spirit of Islamic culture, is now fundamen-tal to the modern self-consciousness and imagination that havepenetrated the cosmos in a bid to comprehend its nature.

What is most important here is that art in the twentieth century hasdemolished the very primacy and superiority of the Western tradition ofart that had obsessed Hegel, so much so that he was blind to forms of artemanating from non-European civilisations. The emergence of abstractform in modern art, symmetry underpinning its formations, particularlyin Minimalism, has in fact vindicated the centrality of geometry in thespirit’s historical journey from its early periods to the modern.

The formulation and development of Minimalism, one of the mostimportant postwar avant-garde movements, depends on symmetry andseriality, elements fundamental to the geometry of Islamic art, confirm-ing the importance for the modern world of those ideas that emergedalmost a thousand years ago from the Islamic spirit; this also shows that

10. It can be argued that the Western obsession with the human body, particularly its physical shape, is tantamount to a narcissism that has led to voyeurism and exhibitionism but also produced the violence of pornography that is now part of modern life, not only in the West but globally as part of Western culture.

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the Islamic spirit can assert its position again, both historically anduniversally, and in doing so reaffirm its ability to move forward in themodern world in its own way.

THE MUSLIM WORLD TODAY

The art of geometry still prevails in the Arab/Muslim world, but withoutsubstance. It has now been emptied of its spirit and turned into the deco-rative patterns one finds in hotel lobbies, airport lounges, shoppingmalls, and so on, representing the intellectual vacuousness of the Muslimworld in general today. Geometric patterns now gloss over this empti-ness rather than revealing the spirit that produced a great civilisation.The humanism of the Islamic spirit is trapped deep inside the darkness ofits own dogmas, its eyes shut and its mind closed to what it could imag-ine to create something new and significant. Even though what was once

Rasheed Araeen, Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way II, 2008; a proposal for a 150 × 150 × 150 foot pyramid of latticestructures and glass, built in the sea about 500 feet from the coast and connected to the land through a tunnel. It symbol-ises the journey of the idea enshrined in geometry from Egypt to Greece and to the medieval Arab/Muslim world, andfinally to the modern. The building inside comprises eight floors of space, a centre to be dedicated to the study and devel-opment of rational/scientific knowledge in the Arab/Muslim world.

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fundamental to the Islamic spirit has now re-emerged in modernity, afterfive hundred years of submersion under the sea of Western dominance,and has confronted Eurocentric ideology and transformed modernity asa humanised global force, the Muslim world is totally unaware of this.11

The eyes of the Muslim world open only when there is something glitter-ing, but cannot penetrate beyond that glittering surface. The crisis of theMuslim world today is in the blockage of its own mind, caused by itsinability to penetrate the glittering spectacle to perceive what lies behindand beyond the appearance of things. A dysfunctional imaginationcannot see beyond what enchants the eye.2 Rasheed Araeen, Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way II , 2008; a proposal for a 150 × 150 × 150 foot pyramid of lattice structures and glass, built in the sea about 500 feet from the coast and connected to the land through a tunnel. It symbolises the journey of the idea enshrined in geometry from Egypt to Greece and to the medieval Arab/Muslim world, and finally to the modern. Thebuilding inside comprises eight floors of space, a centre to be dedicated to the study and development of rational/scientific knowledge in the Arab/Muslim world.The rationality of the Islamic spirit has returned, but it has no placewithin the Muslim world. It now wanders – sometimes aimlessly – in theworld that once excluded it from history. Which takes me back to thequestion I raised in the beginning: how can the Muslim world nowretrieve and revive its creative spirit?

There is no lack of individuals from the Muslim world with excep-tional talents and creative imagination, but many are exiled from theplace where they should be. They are exiled not because they offer athreat to the political power of the ruling classes, but because theycannot operate within a milieu that now dominates the Muslim worldand traps its intelligentsia in a culture of mediocrity. This has producedcomplacency, conformism and delusion, antithetical to creative imagina-tion, and created conditions for a kind of modern Jahiliyya, whichdestroys the ultimate fulfilment of the spirit: its pursuit of the freedom ofthe imagination.

What does the Muslim world now want? Does it want to moveforward intelligently and creatively, in the interest of the collectiveUmma, or remain deluded by what oil money has produced for some?12

The true spirit of Islam is not merely in its prescribed rituals but in whatthese should lead to: an obligation to others (Haqooq-ul-Ibad), not onlyto our fellow Muslims but to humanity at large. The golden age of Islamaddressed itself to all humanity by pursuing and creating knowledge inthe interest of all humanity. What is there now for the Muslim world tooffer to all humanity? Oil?

My argument here concerns the centrality of geometry in Islamicthought, by which I do not mean only its artistic form, nor am I suggest-ing its revival as art, but the understanding of what is embedded withinit as an idea. The whole process of contemplation and articulation ofgeometry, from its basic forms of square, circle and triangle to itscomplex multilayered configurations based on symmetry and seriality,produced not only a unique art form of its own making unprecedentedin history; but, more significantly, it enshrined and revealed a rationalitythat produced Islamic civilisation, with all its achievements in art,science and philosophy. The artistic form of geometry not only repre-sents the ability of the mind to deal with complex problems of anabstract nature but it demands that we look at things and understandthem through the rationality of science. The symmetry of geometry inIslamic art also offers, in my understanding, an allegory for humanequality (Musawaat), something that humanity now desperately needs.With this the Muslim world can now assert its own presence in themodern world at large, and thus offer the world a way to deal with itsconflicts, violence and disharmony.

11. Although the idea of World History is a Western philosophical construct, in which the West claims its centrality, it cannot be the responsibility of the West to recognise the rightful place of other cultures and civilisations in its genealogy. Although geometry is, in my view, central to Islamic philosophy, Muslim scholarship seems to have paid little attention to its role in the construction of history. Only when there is a scholarship that confronts the West’s view of history, from which Islamic history is excluded, and puts forward an alternative view of history, can the Muslim world retrieve and recover what has been lost in the West’s view of history.

12. Umma is an Arabic word meaning ‘community’ or ‘nation’, often used to refer to the whole Muslim world.

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Although the geometry of Islamic art offers a world-view differentfrom, and in opposition to, the West’s dominant view of the world basedon the genealogy of history which excludes Islamic civilisation from it,we must not reject everything that the West has produced. The West hasin fact produced an enormous body of original ideas useful to humanityat large. And although these ideas primarily serve the interests of thesystem that has imposed itself on the world, this should not diminishtheir epistemological value. What is needed is not the wholesale accep-tance or rejection of these ideas but to develop one’s own ability to scru-tinise these ideas critically through a rationality that allows dialoguewith the West on equal terms. Only then one can turn these ideas intouseful knowledge that recognises the empiricism of historical factsagainst a myth of history that privileges the West only.

The creation of knowledge is fundamental for any progress inhistory. When a thirst for knowledge emerged among the Arabs about1400 years ago, it was because the human spirit was eager to moveforward. If there is now a desire in the Muslim world to move forward,this can only occur through the rationality of knowledge, produced byits own spirit and imagination. What we now need again is anotherHouse of Wisdom, similar to the one the Arabs established in ninth-century Baghdad.

This ‘House of Wisdom’ could provide the means for the Muslimworld to overcome its endemic deprivation of knowledge, its ignoranceand apathy, and put it on a path that would rejuvenate its energy andimagination in the modern world.13

13. This new ‘House’ must not only comprise what is needed materially for research work and its presentation but also invite and facilitate serious scholarship in pursuit of not only lost but new knowledge that can help humanity move forward in its march for a better future.

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