Beauty in classical Islamic thought : the aesthetics of proportionality and harmony according to Ikhwān al-Safā’ (The Brethren of Purity) and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) -

Abstract

The key question that offset my interest in the topic of this thesis was defining Islamic aesthetics. From this elementary inquiry, I was hoping to trace the Islamic conception of beauty [al-jamāl or al-husn] that can instruct or ground an aesthetic study of Islamic art. I was also interested in tracking the secular and religious rudiments that could have mediated the Islamic conception of beauty and that would frame discourses on the experience of beauty in Islamic thought. The key question that offset my interest in the topic of this thesis was defining Islamic aesthetics. From this elementary inquiry, I was hoping to trace the Islamic conception of beauty [al-jamāl or al-husn] that can instruct or ground an aesthetic study of Islamic art. I was also interested in tracking the secular and religious rudiments that could have mediated the Islamic conception of beauty and that would frame discourses on the experience of beauty in Islamic thought. The thesis will be based on the exegesis of primary sources in view of extracting various references to beauty [al-jamāl or al-husn] in an attempt to determine the fundamental elements of an aesthetic approach that might have been constituted in classical Islamic thought. The two texts I will be focusing on are Epistle 5: “On Music” from the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Safā’ (generally translated as the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), and the other text I will be investigating groups Books II and III from Alhazen’s Kitāb al-Manāzir (known in English as The Optics). The choice of these two works was motivated by the Ikhwān’s take on music and Alhazen’s take on the experience of beauty in visual perception. Through an elucidative and analytic reading I will show that proportionality and harmony were key notions that construed the concepts of beauty in the target works. Although these notions were not explicated as aesthetic parameters, I hope to highlight them as potential forerunner