Arts and Decoration in the Arab World

One no longer today can talk about contemporary Christian, Buddhist or Muslim arts and aesthetics. Although Islam is followed by huge world populations, the artistic forms that have been developed within Islamic culture roughly till the eighteenth century, live mostly as schematized forms today without comparable excellence with handcrafts of old times. Because, even when political encouragements support to safeguard traditions, cultural forms and practices are still dependent on contemporary economic and industrial forces. Non-western cultures that have, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, tried to preserve their local identities have only, under the effects of industrialization, been able to construct a hybrid culture. Therefore, this text will mostly refer to the arts and decorative practices of Arab and Islamic culture in their history. Islamic and Arab culture had reached its apex in science, philosophy and the arts in the Middle Ages. Between the eight and fourteenth centuries, it had created such an impressive wealth of cultural expressions that these can still today be sources of inspiration and guidance for those in search of local identities. The basic philosophical concepts that had given rise to these expressions can still today be guidance for an ethical life for Muslim intellectuals, even beyond limits of religion and culture. We can affirm that the qualities that we can ascribe to Islamic aesthetics have been formed by an understanding of time and space developed in the Arab world, in Asia and Medieval Europe. This conception involved a specific understanding of man's relation to god, to the world and how this understanding influences social relations. With different educational and lifestyle approaches imported from the West and against the overall developments acquired by the West through industrialization, the specific aesthetic and artistic approaches of the Muslim world started to lose their vigor and conviction. Many Muslim states faced cultural dichotomies while trying to industrialize and at the same time holding on to their local practices.