Aesthetics in Arabic Thought
Aesthetics in Arabic Thought

Author: José Miguel Puerta-Vilchez

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 954

ISBN-13: 9004345043

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In Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus José Miguel Puerta Vílchez analyzes the discourses about beauty, the arts, and sense perception that arose within classical Arab culture from pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran (sixth-seventh centuries CE) to the Alhambra palace in Granada (fourteenth century CE). He focuses on the contributions of such great thinkers as Ibn Ḥazm, Avempace, Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes, Ibn ʿArabī, and Ibn Khaldūn in al-Andalus, and the Brethren of Purity, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Alhazen, and al-Ghazālī in the East. The work also explores literary criticism, calligraphy, music, belles-lettres (adab), and erotic literature, and highlights the contribution of Arab humanism to shaping the field of Aesthetics in the West.

Aesthetics in Arabic Thought
Aesthetics in Arabic Thought

Author: José Miguel Puerta Vílchez

Publisher: Handbook of Oriental Studies

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 936

ISBN-13: 9789004344952

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Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus offers a history of aesthetic thought in the Arabic language from the pre-Islamic period to the Alhambra, with special attention to the great Arab philosophers of the Middle East and al-Andalus.

Arabic Poetics
Arabic Poetics

Author: Lara Harb

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1108490212

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What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analysing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the 11th century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was "traditionalist" or "static," exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-10th-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran.

Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty
Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty

Author: Sophia Vasalou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 1000472965

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Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty rethinks the relationship between the good and the beautiful by considering the work of eleventh-century Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). A giant of Islamic intellectual history, al-Ghazālī is celebrated for his achievements in a wide range of disciplines. One of his greatest intellectual contributions lies in the sphere of ethics, where he presided over an ambitious attempt to integrate philosophical and scriptural ideas into a seamless ethical vision. The connection between ethics and aesthetics turns out to be a signature feature of this account. Virtue is one of the forms of beauty, and human beings are naturally disposed to respond to it with love. The universal human response to beauty in turn provides the central paradigm for thinking about the love commanded by God. While al-Ghazālī’s account of divine love has received ample attention, his special way of drawing the good into relation with the beautiful has oddly escaped remark. In this book Sophia Vasalou addresses this gap by offering a philosophical and contextual study of this aspect of al-Ghazālī’s ethics and of the conception of moral beauty that emerges from it. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in Islamic ethics, Islamic intellectual history, and the history of ethics.

The Coloniality of Modern Taste
The Coloniality of Modern Taste

Author: Zilkia Janer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 100081808X

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This book analyzes the coloniality of the concept of taste that gastronomy constructed and normalized as modern. It shows how gastronomy’s engagement with rationalist and aesthetic thought, and with colonial and capitalist structures, led to the desensualization, bureaucratization and racialization of its conceptualization of taste. The Coloniality of Modern Taste provides an understanding of gastronomy that moves away from the usual celebratory approach. Through a discussion of nineteenth-century gastronomic publications, this book illustrates how the gastronomic notion of taste was shaped by a number of specifically modern constraints. It compares the gastronomic approach to taste to conceptualizations of taste that emerged in other geographical and philosophical contexts to illustrate that the gastronomic approach stands out as particularly bereft of affect. The book argues that the understanding of taste constructed by gastronomic texts continues to burden the affective experience of taste, while encouraging patterns of food consumption that rely on an exploitative and unsustainable global food system. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in cultural studies, decoloniality, affect theory, sensory studies, gastronomy and food studies.

The Theory of Islamic Art
The Theory of Islamic Art

Author: Idham Mohammed Hanash

Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 1565646967

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Divine oneness as the principle of beauty is perhaps quintessentially Islamic artistic expression and experience and what it celebrates. Why has Islamic art evolved as it has, what forms does it take, what is the logic underlying it? What message is the Muslim artist attempting to convey, what emotion is he seeking to evoke? This work views Islamic art as a subject of archeological study and treats its evolution as part of the historical study of art in the broader sense. At the same time, it paves the way for an epistemological shift from viewing Islamic art as a material concept having to do with beautiful rarities and relics that have grown out of Islamic cultural and artistic creativity, to a theoretical concept associated with a vision, a principle, a theory and a method. This theo-retical concept provides the intellectual and cultural foundation for a critical philosophical science of Islamic artistic beauty to which we might refer as ‘the science of Islamic art,’ or ‘the Islamic aesthetic’ that evaluates visual artistic creations in terms of both beauty and practical usefulness. In the process the study also explores orientalist misconceptions, challenging some of the premises with which it has approached Islamic art, with judgement rooted in a cultural framework alien to the spiritual perspective of Islam.

Beauty and Islam
Beauty and Islam

Author: Valerie Gonzalez

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2001-08-24

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0755699343

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'Beauty and Islam' explores aspects of aesthetics in classical Islamic thought in the light of contemporary theories, offering new perspectives on Islamic art and architecture with examples ranging from the Qur'an and the Alhambra to the works of present day artists and philosophers. Tracing the roots of Islamic aesthetics back to the works of the great philosophers of the Middle Ages such as Avicenna and Averroes, Valerie Gonzalez finds that aesthetic theory in Islam must be seen within the much wider context of parallel thinking on theology, ethics, physics and metaphysics.

Beauty in Arabic Culture
Beauty in Arabic Culture

Author: Doris Behrens-Abouseif

Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781558761995

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A specialist in Islamic architecture and social history, Behrens-Abouseif (U. of Munich) surveys the concepts of beauty in classical and post-classical Arabic culture through the 15th century CE, drawing on Arabic texts in philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, literary criticism, historiography, and the Thousand and One Nights. She shows how beauty was measured by the degree of pleasure it elicited in the recipient. The original German Schonheit in der Arabischen Kultur was published by C. D. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich, in 1998. Paper edition (199-3), $22.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age
Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age

Author: Jens Hanssen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-12-22

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 1316654249

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What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? This volume offers a fundamental overhaul and revival of modern Arab intellectual history. Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, it reassesses Arabic cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship and extends the analysis beyond Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the outbreak of World War II. The chapters offer a mixture of broad-stroke history on the construction of 'the Muslim world', and the emergence of the rule of law and constitutionalism in the Ottoman empire, as well as case studies on individual Arab intellectuals that illuminate the transformation of modern Arabic thought.

Sufi Aesthetics
Sufi Aesthetics

Author: Cyrus Ali Zargar

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2013-05-22

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1611171830

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Sufi Aesthetics argues that the interpretive keys to erotic Sufi poems and their medieval commentaries lie in understanding a unique perceptual experience. Using careful analysis of primary texts, Cyrus Ali Zargar explores the theoretical and poetic pronouncements of two major Muslim mystics, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) and Fakhr al-Din 'Iraqi (d. 1289), under the premise that behind any literary tradition exist organic aesthetic values. The complex assertions of these Sufis appear not as abstract theory, but as a way of seeing all things, including the sensory world. The Sufi masters, Zargar asserts, shared an aesthetic vision quite different from those who have often studied them. Sufism's foremost theoretician, Ibn 'Arabi, is presented from a neglected perspective as a poet, aesthete, and lover of the human form. Ibn 'Arabi in fact proclaimed a view of human beauty markedly similar to that of many mystics from a Persian contemplative school of thought, the "School of Passionate Love," which would later find its epitome in 'Iraqi, one of Persian literature's most celebrated poet-saints. Through this aesthetic approach, this comparative study overturns assumptions made not only about Sufism and classical Arabic and Persian poetry, but also other uses of erotic imagery in Muslim approaches to sexuality, the human body, and the paradise of the afterlife described in the Qur'an.