Arts
&
Crafts

You know,

people have always made pictures and sculptures of special people,

but that idea of them being special

can easily turn into an idea of them being

something more than ordinary humans,

some kind of gods.

In a way, you even have it today,

when movie stars are called screen idols,

and singers can become pop idols,

but in the past, famous and powerful people who died

were sometimes thought of as gods apart from God.

Some, like Pharaoh were even thought of as gods while they were still alive.

And when the Messenger was alive,

statues and pictures of what people thought were gods

were all around the Ka'aba in Makka,

and people came from far and wide to pray to them there.

But the Messenger made clear that there was only One God,

and when the muslims finally took over Makka and the Ka'aba,

they tore all those false gods down.

And because the muslims knew how easy it was for people to turn those images of special people into gods,

they made a point of not using pictures of people in the way they decorated things.

They looked for beauty in patterns,

and especially in nature and the shapes of growing things,

and they put the two together

to make curly patterns of leaves and flowers that is known as arabesque.

So those sorts of patterns are seen all around the muslim world,

carved in stone or wood,

and in patterns embroidered into fabrics,

like the curly leaf type patterns Scots found when they went to muslim Kashmir,

which they copied in fabrics when they came back home

in what are now called Paisley patterns.

Arabesque can also be seen in all the different kinds of carpets that were made across the muslim world,

with people following different designs, each coming from the place where they lived,

and each thread of a carpet being knotted into the background weave by hand.

Many carpets used patterns of flowers and leaves

to suggest that when you were standing on the carpet you were standing in a garden,

and muslims were specially fond of this in those carpets they used as a clean place to make their Sala.

But of course, the place that muslims are most likely to see such patterns is in the pages of their Qur'ans,

where the page around the Fatiha will often be decorated with arabesque patterns,

and other markings in the text are also often given the shape of stylised leaves and flowers,

a reminder that the Qur'an is there to lead us into the Garden of Paradise.