Oleg Grabar and Islamic art interpretation

The Islamic world formed and gave the most suitable meanings, of its needs and understandings, to the inherited rich cultural heritage of the conquered lands and led to the creation of many of today?s magnificent artifacts. Oleg Grabar, who has a privileged place among the scholars in Islamic fields, is one of the few scholars who came up with different ideas and suggestions in order to understand, as fully as possible, how this great cultural and artistic accumulation was formed, and how effective it was in its creation. Besides his writings on different areas of Islamic art and architecture, Grabar has also written on aesthetics. Analyzing his works in details can help to understand Islamic art better by approaching this issue from different perspectives. In this thesis we concider Grabar?s researches based on topics such as general Islamic attitudes toward the arts, the importance of ornament in Islamic art as a mediation, the forms and meanings in Islamic art . In general it is assumed there is a direct relationship between Islamic culture and the spirit and culture of Revelation. Therefore to understand the cultural wisdom of Islamic Art, it is first important to understand Islam itself. Grabar?s aim is to show that besides faith there are numerous varied impulsesand needs in the creation of a culture or an art. The forms themselves in Islamic art are neutral, almost indifferent, but they can also be ?charged.? This is to say it is possible to transform them into specifically meaningful monuments by a series of very different devices. The most common of these devices are ?inscriptions?. The formal analyses, which are enough to understand Classical or Christian art, are not enough to understand Islamic art. Hence according to Grabar what is needed is an immersion into the culture, its visual associations, its aspiration, its dreams, the metaphors of its language, its systems of intellectual discourse and personal communication, and most importantly, the specific contingencies of any one of its moments. The huge monuments or humble ceramics of Muslim creativity, are the creation of a faith or, moreover, of a culture; the choices of concrete historical moments whose unique motivations - pietistic or secular- must be discovered. Key Words: Oleg Grabar, representation, iconoclasm, aniconism, mediation of ornament, meaning of forms.