Much more important than plastic art were paintings, particularly frescoes and later Persian and Perso-Indian miniatures. Frescoes are found in the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid palaces and in Spain, Iran, and in the harem quarters of the Mughal palaces in India. Miniature paintings, introduced in Persia, assumed much greater importance in the later period in Mughal India and Turkey. Miniature painting was closely associated with the art of book illumination, and this technique of decorating the pages of the books was patronized by princes and other patrons from the upper classes. (Miniature painting is also discussed below; see Illustration of myth and legend.) Music
Instrumental music was forbidden by the orthodox in the formative stages of Islam. As for vocal music, its place was largely taken by a sophisticated and artistic form of the recitation of the Qurʾān known as tajwīd. Nevertheless, the Muslim princely courts generously patronized and cultivated music. Arab music was influenced by Persian and Greek music. Al-Fārābī, a 10th-century philosopher, is credited with having constructed a musical instrument called the arghanūn (organ). In India, Amīr Khosrow, a 14th-century poet and mystic, produced a synthesis of Indian and Persian music and influenced the development of later Indian music.
Among the religious circles, the Sufis introduced both vocal and instrumental music as part of their spiritual practices. The samāʿ, as this music was called, was opposed by the orthodox at the beginning, but the Sufis persisted in this practice, which slowly won general recognition. The great Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (died 1273)—revered equally by the orthodox and the Sufis—heard the divine voice in his stringed musical instrument when he said, “Its head, its veins (strings) and its skin are all dry and dead; whence comes to me the voice of the Friend?” Literature
In literature, drama and pure fiction were not allowed—drama because it was a representational art and fiction because it was considered akin to lying. Similar constraints operated against the elaboration of mythology. Story literature was tolerated, and the great story works of Indian origin—Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One Nights) and Kalīlah wa Dimnah—were translated from the Persian, introducing secular prose into Arabic. Didactic and pious stories were used and even invented by popular preachers. Much of this folklore found its way back into enlarged editions of The Thousand and One Nights and, through it, has even influenced later history writing. Because of the ban on fictional literature, there grew a strong tendency in later literary compositions—in both poetry and prose—toward hyperbole (mubālaghah), a literary device to satisfy the need of getting away from what is starkly real without committing literal falsehood, thus often resulting in the caricature and the grotesque. Poetry lent itself particularly well to this device, which was freely used in panegyrics, satires, and lyrics. As a form of effective expression, poetry is eminently characteristic of the East. Arabic literature in general displays a strong and vivid imagination not easily amenable to the rigorous order that reason imposes upon the mind. This borderline attitude between the real and the unreal was particularly favourable to the development, in all medieval Islamic literatures of the Middle East, of the lyric and panegyric forms of poetry wherein every line is a self-contained unit. Much more importantly, it afforded a specially suitable vehicle for a type of mystical poetry in which it is sometimes impossible to determine whether the poet is talking of earthly love or spiritual love. For the same reason, poetry proved an effective haven for thinly veiled deviations from and even attacks on the literalist religion of the orthodox. Architecture
Architecture is by far the most important expression of Islamic art, particularly the architecture of mosques. It illustrates both the diversity of cultures that participated in the Islamic civilization and the unifying force of Islamic monotheism represented by the spacious expanse of the mosque—a veritable externalization of the all-enveloping divine unity, heightened by the sense of infinity of the arabesque design. The arabesque, though ornately decorative, spiritually represents the infinite vastness of God.
Among the earliest monuments are the mosque of ʿAmr built in Egypt in 641–642 and the famous Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem (finished in 691), which, however, is not a mosque but a monument, a concentric-circular structure consisting of a wooden dome set on a high drum and resting on four tiers and 12 columns. The Umayyad ruler al-Walīd (died 715) built the Great Mosque at Damascus and Al-Aqṣā Mosque at Jerusalem with two tiers of arcades in order to heighten the ceiling. The early Syro-Egyptian mosque is a heavily columned structure with a prayer niche (miḥrāb) oriented toward the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca.
In Spanish and North African architecture these features are combined with Roman-Byzantine characteristics, the masterpieces of Spanish architecture being the famous Alhambra Palace at Granada and the Great Mosque of Córdoba. In the famous Persian mosques, the characteristic Persian elements are the tapered brick pillars, the arches (each supported by several pillars), the huge arcades, and the four sides called eyvāns. With the advent of the Seljuqs in the 11th century, faience decoration (glazed earthenware) of an exquisite beauty was introduced, and it gained further prominence under the Timurids (14th–16th centuries).
In the number and greatness of mosques, Turkey has the pride of first place in the Muslim world. Turkey’s earliest mosques show a Persian influence and then later Syrian in the 13th and 14th centuries, but Turkey developed its own native style of cupola domes and monumental entrances. The Turkish architects accomplished symmetry by means of one large dome, four semidomes, and four small domes among them. In the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, Muslim architecture first employed Hindu architectural features (e.g., horizontal rather than arcuate, or bowlike, arches and Hindu ornamentation), but later the Persian style predominated. Fazlur Rahman The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Islamic myth and legend
The strict monotheism of Islam does not allow for much mythological embellishment, and only reluctantly were the scriptural revelations of the Qurʾān elaborated and enlarged by commentators and popular preachers. Thus, in the first three centuries, a number of ideas from the ancient Middle East, from Hellenistic and especially from Jewish and Christian traditions, were absorbed into Islam and given at least partial sanction by the theologians. At the same time, legends were woven around the Prophet Muhammad and the members of his family. Though inconsistent with historical reality, these legends formed for the masses the main sources of inspiration about the famous figures of the past.