BBC: The Hidden Art of Islam

A collection of artefacts from the Muslim world

is about to be put on show at the British Museum.

They tell the story of the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, strictly forbidden to non-Muslims.

Much of the beautiful artwork on show conforms to the religious rules

which inspire the rich visual language of Islamic culture, past and present.

I can only pray, Inshallah, that this exhibition will be a source

of education, of understanding and of delight.

In Islam, depictions of God and the prophets are prohibited,

but to many Muslims, so too are any human depictions or living creatures.

One group would say any depiction is not allowed.

Then there is the other school which say it's not a big deal.

But on show at the British Museum are images from Muslim history

which appear to break the present-day understanding of the rules of Muslim art.

In the modern period, people take this prohibition

in a much more literal sense than they might have taken it in a pre-modern period.

Included here are portraits, depictions of human figures

and whole tableaux, showing pilgrims performing the most important pillar of the Muslim faith.

There's nothing in the Qur'an that says figural art is not permitted.

But idol worship is not permitted.

So, if human depiction is the source of such controversy,

how come art displayed here shows a tradition of figurative art

at the heart of Islam, for century after century?

I'm fascinated to see how the artistic traditions of Islam

have navigated this through the centuries.

Sometimes they've been at odds with the clerics.

Sometimes, visual depiction has led to violence, crisis and destruction.

There's been no public controversy over the inclusion of these images in this exhibition,

supported by the country overseeing the sacred sites of Mecca. But why?

Have the rules changed? I'm setting out to get to the bottom

of what forms of art are acceptable for a Muslim

and why this artistic tradition has thrived in the hidden art of Islam.

To understand the origins of the Muslim approach to visual art,

you have to understand the significance of this place.

It was here, at a cave overlooking the city of Mecca,

that Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God.

These revelations continued throughout his lifetime

and formed the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book.

And it made Mecca the centre-point of Muslim worship.

It's the place people strive to reach in their lifetime...

..pray towards five times a day...

..and the direction in which they are buried when they die.

At the heart of Mecca is the Grand Mosque, and at its centre, this, the Kaaba.

In essence, the most beautiful thing about Mecca is the Kaaba itself and its beauty is in its simplicity.

It's a black box and it's a black box which people circumambulate.

And it's just so divinely simple, yet so divinely beautiful.

Muslims believe that the Kaaba was built by the Prophet Abraham,

under divine instruction, as a focal point of a simple message that there was one god,

not the many gods of the pagan past.

But by Muhammad's time, the Kaaba had been taken over by pagan Arabs

and somewhat ironically, had been festooned with icons of their tribal gods.

Until, in 630 AD, after years of persecution, exile and warfare,

Muhammad and his followers took over leadership of Mecca.

He destroyed the idols at the Kaaba and re-established it

as a simple house, dedicated to the one god.

This act defined this most sacred site in Islam

as a place where the one god should not be depicted.

The Kaaba is just something which is the house itself,

the way it was built, this is the meaning in Arabic.

But in fact, it's the symbol of God's house. He's not here

but this is the symbol of his presence on Earth,

where Muslims have to go, and there is no images, nothing there to represent him

because we should not represent God.

So it's a place without a physical presence but a spiritual presence.

The depiction of God himself, or the Prophet, or any of the figures that are religiously associated,

any prophets for that matter, or the angels, are prohibited.

This is to keep the sanctity of God who is beyond a depiction, God who is beyond an object.

The Prophet Muhammad, when he takes Mecca, destroys the idols in the Kaaba,

and the very strong iconoclastic nature of that.

The fear is that if something is made, it may become an object of worship.

People will produce, for example, sculptures, which could also double up as idols.

The simplicity of the Kaaba itself provides a constant reminder

to Muslims of why there should be no depiction of God or the prophets.

A message most profoundly underlined when any Muslim completes the pilgrimage of the Hajj - the fifth pillar of Islam.

I've been to Hajj myself and one of the greatest journeys of any human's life is Hajj.

What was the most awesome experience was looking at the house of God.

But as well as the visual meaning attached to the Kaaba,

there is a further reason why artists from the Islamic world

have been discouraged from creating depictions of any human likeness, if they are in religious settings.

In the Qur'an, there are 99 different names for God, each of them signifying a characteristic.

There is Al-Rahman, The Beneficent, Al-Rahim, The Merciful.

One of those characteristics is Al-Khaliq, The Creator,

and it's the reason why so many Muslims believe

that when an artist shows the human form or the form of any creature,

they're putting themselves in the role reserved for God.

And it's the reason why, over the centuries,

clerics and artists have debated what is acceptable and what isn't.

It's also left room for interpretation as to what could be deemed to be realistic or not.

Some would say this saying of the Prophet, or sayings of the Prophet,

around prohibition of human beings or living entities, a drawing of them, is clear and absolute.

That is not true, because if it was absolute, why would there be so many others who say it's not?

I don't think human beings have the capacity to draw anything real.

Whatever I draw can never be real, though it may be a replica of what is real, but it is not real.

Therefore I sit quite comfortably, not worried about anyone competing with God and winning.

You can't win with God!

At the British Museum, they're unpacking a unique parcel.

In it is a carefully wrapped Qur'an, dating back to the 8th century,

one of the first examples of a written Qur'an.

Muslim scholars accept that this Qur'an is from the Hijaz region of what is now Saudi Arabia -

a region which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The text is written on parchment, in an early style of Arabic script called Ma'il,

which means "sloping", in this case to the right.

It also lacks any marks or symbols that usually distinguish letters of a similar shape.

It was this, the Arabic script's shape and design that led to the first and most enduring element in Islamic art.

If it was generally agreed in the early Islamic community that there shouldn't be figural art in religious settings,

then the early artists and calligraphers were faced with what to do with the Qur'an.

After all, they were part of a tradition where the Bible had been illustrated sumptuously,

and so there were models for what religious books should look like.

But the Qur'an, if it wasn't going to have figural designs in,

what was it going to have? And so illumination was developed

and geometry, geometric designs, were something they'd inherited from late antiquity, and so,

the early artists and calligraphers adopted it, used it for illumination.

And so you get frontispieces of early Qur'ans which are geometric

because that's a non-threatening type of decoration which adds great lustre to the items concerned.

There are three fundamental aspects behind Islamic art.

You have geometry, which is the foundation.

Then you have islimi, which you might know as arabesque, which is the floral aspect of Islamic art.

At the top of the hierarchy is the calligraphy cos that's the word of God.

Islamic artists built on the Arabic saying, "Purity of writing is purity of soul."

They experimented with the shape and design of the Arabic letters,

using the flowing Arabic language to express the beauty they perceived in the words of the Qur'an.

I've been doing calligraphy for about ten years now.

It started off as an exploration of, essentially, the written word.

Ruh Al-Alam is a young British artist.

He studied the art of calligraphy in Cairo, under one of the most well-known calligraphers today.

Arabic calligraphy began with two fundamental sources.

One, the Qur'an, the holy scripture.

And the prohibition against depicting figurative work in Islam.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,

the first word that was revealed to him, by the Angel Gabriel, was "Iqra", meaning "read".

This was the foundation for seeking knowledge for Muslims.

But also, the verse continues, it continues to teach Muslims that knowledge was taught to man by the use of the pen.

And therefore, transmission of knowledge was key.

Calligraphy binds both knowledge and penmanship in one.

These are a few of the letters that are found in the Holy Qur'an,

which, in fact, nobody knows the meaning of.

These are the mysterious letters that are found at the beginning of certain chapters of the Qur'an.

Er, and that mystery, of not knowing what these letters represent, is, in itself, beautiful.

Calligraphers were given precise rules for how they should write letters from the medieval period.

And particularly with respect to how they copy Qur'ans.

The interesting thing was how you should write a certain ligature,

for example in one brushstroke, how the size of a ligature was related, say,

to the proportions of the eye, the eye which is seeing it.

How the dots, the noktas, related to the ligatures and so forth.

There's elements of proportion which were very mathematical and precise,

which are laid down. The idea was you could produce something which was beautiful using these rules.

The way the letters were used, even though they may not seem as decorative, right at the beginning,

in between the 8th to 10th centuries, even then there was a very specific geometry used.

There was a real harmony in the way the letters were fitted to the page and the way certain letters

were elongated so that each line, the margins would be even on both sides and they'd be justified.

As Islam spread, the art of calligraphy developed, reaching its peak, among other places, here, in Turkey, under the Ottoman Empire.

Calligraphy is also integral to the decoration of the world's great mosques.

The words come from the Qur'an or are names of the Prophet Muhammad.

At an Istanbul art gallery, there is the largest collection of contemporary Turkish calligraphy.

It is put together as a homage to the Prophet Muhammad.

In this work, art and belief go hand in hand.

MAN DESCRIBES ARTWORK IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Oh, there's er... Amazing, fantastic.

Do you have any particular feelings when you're writing verses from the Qur'an?

When you look at the art forms

in the world, you will see that the only divine form is the art of calligraphy,

because we are putting the words of God on paper and hence enable people to read it.

That's why I can't describe or compare the feeling I have doing calligraphy.

Actually, it is said that the heart can only be happy with the mention of God.

The same feelings apply to us when we deliver Qur'anic verses in calligraphy.

Alongside calligraphy, the exquisite precision

of traditional Islamic design, seen in arabesque and geometric patterns,

has maintained its appeal in contemporary design studios.

It's a language of symmetry which was first developed by the Greeks,

but then extrapolated and developed upon within the Islamic tradition.

So often what you will see is an underlying geometric pattern which you might find in Euclid.

And then, on top of that, you'll find the Muslim craftsmen would elaborate

more complex geometric designs which would appear on top of that grid.