User:Mimibowman/be bold

"Islamic art is abstract, but also poetical and gracious; it is woven of soberness and splendour… uniting the joyous profusion of vegetation with the abstract and pure vigour of crystals: a prayer niche adorned with arabesques holds something of a garden and something of a snowflake. This admixture of qualities is already to be met with in the Qoran where the geometry of the ideas is as it were hidden under the blaze of the forms. Being, if one can so put it, haunted by Unity, Islam has also an aspect of the simplicity of the desert, of whiteness and of austerity which, in its art, alternates with the crystalline joy of ornamentation."