Is “Modern” Islamic Art Even Possible?
How art became a mode of conspicuous consumption destined for Sotheby's auctions.
On 30 April 2025, Sotheby’s London closed bidding on several pieces of Islamic art. Among them: a 17th-century Quran leaf in Hijazi script, a Malik-era Quran, and a line of calligraphy from a Quran so immense in size that it required a barrow to transport. Each was sold to the highest bidder.
Every year, Sotheby’s auctions exquisite Islamic art, objects that are breathtaking in their historical vibrancy. Yet, the auction exiles them, consigning Islam’s beauty to appraisal, acquisition, and anachronistic display. The result is a sense of spiritual vacancy.
Is the purpose of art to end up at a Sotheby’s auction, to be picked out and consigned to the basement of some mere collector? And how do we produce new art, anyway, that is not subject to the vulgar commoditisation of our era?
This question is not about the art market, which is both inevitable and necessary. Rather, this question is about whether Islamic art can orient itself towards the divine in a world that has lost the metaphysical ground that once made such orientation possible.
To answer this question — to know whether Islamic art is still possible — we must first understand what made it possible in the first place, and what we lost, when, and how. Without a genealogy, we risk remaining trapped in imitation, reproducing forms from another world, while remaining blind to our own.
The Copernican Turn
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along…
– John Ashbery
Nearly 500 years ago, the Copernican revolution altered our understanding of the cosmos, unsettling a millennium-old belief: the earth was not the centre of the universe. Yet, although the sun neither rises nor sets – we merely spin toward and away from it – we have nonetheless retained the language of our pre-heliocentric tradition. We have not ceased to speak of the “sunrise” and the “sunset.”
The characteristics of the pre-Copernican world are found not in its view on the earth’s orientation to the sun, but rather in its view on man’s orientation in, and to, the cosmos.
First, the pre-heliocentric man lived in a world that was not merely physical but also intelligible—where visible things were signs of invisible realities. The sensible world was a mirror of the absolute; beauty in nature was not self-contained but pointed beyond itself, toward divine Beauty. To perceive the world, then, was to participate in a higher order of truth that animated all being.
Plato’s description of beauty reflects this pre-heliocentric view:
…but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever–growing and perishing beauties of all other things. (Symposium)
The second feature of this worldview was teleology: everything had a purpose and tended toward its proper end. The soul sought God, beauty sought Beauty, and art sought to make the eternal present. Art, in this sense, was not self-expression but participation in a sacred order.
These two features — participation and teleology — were inseparable. One could only move toward what one could also apprehend. When participation in the absolute became philosophically impossible, teleology lost its ground.
This collapse unfolded gradually. René Descartes turned inward, locating certainty within the thinking subject rather than in the cosmos. Immanuel Kant completed the rupture: he denied that man could know things as they truly are. What we perceive, he argued, are appearances structured by the mind itself, not the reality of things in themselves. The world was no longer a window to the divine but a closed surface reflecting back our own reason.
Kant’s revolution altered not only our epistemology but also our aesthetics. Before Kant, beauty was considered an objective quality inherent in things themselves; it was seen as a reflection of divine perfection. As Plato wrote, art imitates nature without sinning against it. Indeed, for centuries, art – whether in the Christian West or the Islamic East – had been understood as imitation (mimesis) of divine realities. The artist was not the master of what he produced, as Henri Matisse would later claim, but a craftsman working within a tradition that provided both form and meaning. Art reminded rather than invented; it served contemplation rather than self-expression.
As for the observer, works of art were reminders. In other words, in the medieval world, works of art served as a means of supporting contemplation.
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in On the Genealogy of Morals, observed that Kant honoured art by granting it the predicates of knowledge – universality and impersonality. Yet in doing so, Kant subtly shifted the focus from the artist’s imitation of divine order to the spectator’s disinterested contemplation. The Romantics then reversed the relationship altogether, placing authenticity and individual expression at the centre of artistic value.
Islamic Art & Civilisation
Traditionally, Islamic art operated within this medieval understanding. Art was primarily produced to communicate a gnosis and serve a purpose. At that time, both the artist and the craftsman, still united, their divorce relatively recent and paralleling the divorce between “art” and “science,” possessed knowledge and intentionally contributed to their vernacular. Formerly, every artist who produced an object was a ‘craftsman’ and every discipline which demanded not only theoretical knowledge but also practical ability was an ‘art.’
As art is by definition an exteriorisation, Islamic art’s content reflects, in its own fashion, what is most inward in its civilisation: beauty itself as a divine quality. Titus Burckhardt articulates this:
The substance of art is beauty; and this in Islamic terms, is a divine quality and as such has double aspect: in the world, it is appearance, it is the garb which as it were, clothes beautiful beings and beautiful things; in God however, or in itself, it is pure inward beatitude; it is the divine quality which among all the divine qualities manifested in the world, most directly recalls pure beings.
This substance was articulated in two separate but complementary forms. First, the scholarly class’ articulation, whose deep understanding of the tradition would assist them in developing specific disciplines, such as ilm al-jamāl. The term ilm al-jamāl betrays its distinct modern coinage: for the ancients, aesthetics could never be conceived of as a standalone subject— its content was embedded throughout any form of actualisation, as a derivative of metaphysics or scattered across the marginalia. Beauty, in its realisation, is inextricable from knowledge. Aesthetics, together with true knowledge and being, is fundamentally anchored in the divine in the Islamic tradition. Thus, beauty as theorised was indistinguishable from beauty as concretised through the creation of physical cultural artefacts.
As for the Platonic view, God is identified as the Beautiful, the Good, and Being.
Verily, God is Beautiful and He loves Beauty
God’s beauty is manifested both in the seen and the unseen. To witness these manifestations, the Ishmaelite must turn towards God. For by this turn, one may discover that all of creation is in a state of worship. Perfection (ihsān) is described as:
worshipping Allah as if you see him (even if you do not see Him)
An aesthetic reading of the aforementioned narration demonstrates that higher stages of beauty are only accessible by becoming more beautiful, expressed through worship. Formulated as a contradistinction,
The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but falsehood. (Alija Izetbegovic)
For most, however, the silent theology imbued in Islamic civilisation proves to be more alluring and persuasive than its most rigorous treatises on theological minutiae. As Oludamini Ogunnaike wrote in Renovatio, between Cairo’s Al-Tulun Mosque and Al-Azhar, the former exhibits an attraction for the masses that the latter lacks. Nevertheless, Ogunnaike shows, the two are embodiments of Islamic art as a spectrum.
The twofold miracle of Islamic art is that it makes the divine truth and the truths of revelation present and tangible to us, while imbuing our surroundings with the beauty of divine truth. In a certain sense, jalāl (divine majesty and rigour) corresponds to the pole of truth, while jamāl (divine beauty) corresponds to that of presence.
Islamic art could promise a uniquely ritualistic form that centred both on the truth and the presence of divine reality. But in a world where the importance of ritual was declining, its power inevitably faded.
Renaissance, Hegel & the Romantics
With the Renaissance, an epoch in which Albert Hirschman writes that passions were replaced by interest, the subservience of art to the Church became challenged by the nobility, eager to rival the Church’s monopoly on the production of knowledge and aesthetics. As Walter Benjamin argues, art remained ritualistic, but rather than a religious cult and the worship of the Go(o)d, it served beauty. With the advent of the mechanical age, art became an end an sich: l’art pour l’art, pas pour Dieu.
Art as a discipline matured and differentiated itself from other fields. Gone was the time when the artist was bound, in immediate identity, to faith and to the conceptions of his world; no longer was the work of art founded in the unity of the artist’s subjectivity with the work’s content in such a way that the spectator may immediately find in it the highest truth of his consciousness, that is, the divine. In the Romantic understanding of art, the artist’s work would be informed by himself: the ability to produce a truly individual and unique work of art was its highest form. Celebrated by some, it was equally decried by others:
Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,
Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.
Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,
Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.
Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben
(Translation of the above)
But we have come too late, my friend. It is true that the gods are still alive,
but up there above our heads in another world.
There they are endlessly active and seem to care little whether we are alive,
so much do the heavenly spare us.
For a weak vessel cannot always contain them,
man can only support divine plenty from time to time.
Life henceforward is a dream of them.
(Holderlin, Bread and Wine. Translation by Leonard Forster).
Hegel observed in the early 1800s that works of art no longer satisfied the soul’s spiritual needs as it had done in earlier times, because our tendency toward reflection and critique was so strong that when we were before a work of art we no longer attempted to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempted to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment. By the turn of the twentieth century, this critical framework would completely replace the aesthetic narrative templates of organised religion.
Modernism
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
(Yeats, The Second Coming.)
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
(Crane, The Bridge.)
Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,
Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß man klage:
Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt
(Translation of the above)
This is a thing that no one ever fully grasps,
And much too dreadful to lament about:
That everything is gliding and flowing by us
(Hofmannsthal, On Transitoriness, in Terza Rima. Translation by Leonard Forster)
As creative genius replaced the narrative template provided by organised religion, mass emancipation came to discard the privileged role of the artist. In a mass democratic society, much like political parties, groups of people could form their own narrative templates and promote them with manifestos. In the early 20th century, narratives were conjured and promulgated through manifestos: philosophy entered art, and each art theory was buttressed by a linear philosophy of history whereby its current state is the end state.
In the age of the masses, the distinction between author and audience collapsed. Everyone could now produce and consume art simultaneously. The work of art was no longer an object of contemplation but an endless mirror reflecting collective desire. The public became both creator and critic – attentive yet absent-minded. With countless competing narratives, the grand narrative that once unified art and truth dissolved. What was once an imitation of divine order became ideology through manifestos, and eventually, mere self-reference – the post-historical condition of art that asks only: what counts as art at all?
Alongside the emancipation of the masses, technology caused a seismic shift. Where emancipation has made art accessible for all, technology has made it producible by all, surpassing the capacity of the painter’s craftsmanship. For Arthur Danto, this is the end of painting as an exclusive vehicle. As every individual can create their own narrative with sufficient political support or through democratisation, grand narratives tout court do not exist. The sense in which everything is possible is that in which there are no a priori constraints on what a work of visual art can look like, so that anything visible can be a visual work. That is a part of what it really means to live at the end of art history.
Artistically, AI does not provide anything unique whatsoever to an artist: fundamentally, it erodes the division between artist and observer even more by offering even the unwilling an outlet for production. The heralded march of AI is nothing more than Paul Valéry’s conquest of ubiquity, further eroding the importance of authenticity.
The conquest of ubiquity dismantles the traditional forms of art in the Islamic world. The discontinuity of tradition severs the cord between the old and the new, except for generating a colossal archive of the past consisting of nothing more than relics of a bygone world. Many of these forms remain in place, but are now largely irrelevant. While Plato considered banning poets from entering the city because of their ability to undermine self-mastery, and the Quran warns the Prophet ﷺ of their role in leading people astray, any Islamic art has been reduced to a testament of the past. Thus, the undercurrent of impotence that permeates contemporary Islamic art scenes.
As Maurice Blanchot notes, art tout court is no longer able to satisfy the need for the absolute, relegated within us. It has lost its reality and necessity. Although our nostalgia for the absolute is ever-present, any attempt to resurrect its circumstances will be futile. Even an art form that presents a fusion of the traditional and the contemporary, whether through Sadequian Naqqash’s attempts within the Huruffiya movement or the use of generative AI as a source of inspiration, will have to contend with this reality.
To make Islamic art that does not end up in a Sotheby’s auction is as such not to withdraw from the modern world but to reclaim orientation within it. The auction is not merely a market—it is the symbol of art’s dislocation from worship, the loss of its context and purpose. Islamic art must therefore learn to inhabit new forms, even digital ones, without surrendering its metaphysical axis. Whether carved in stone or generated by code, its worth lies not in its rarity but in its remembrance. The task is not to replicate the past but to restore presence—to make again for God, not for display. What is made in remembrance cannot be sold, only witnessed.
Wherever you turn, you face God.
God is Beautiful, He Loves the Beautiful.
Author: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy and is currently pursuing classical Islamic studies.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.
Further Reading
- On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
- After The End of Art, Arthur Danto
- The Silent Theology of Islamic Art, Oludamini Ogunnaike
- Art of Islam: Language and Meaning, Titus Burckhardt
- The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
- Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Ananda Coomaraswamy
- The Conquest of Ubiquity, Paul Valéry
- The Passions and The Interests, Albert O. Hirschman
- The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot