Preliminaries: Complementarity and Contradiction

It is a truism within the history of art and architecture that a given visual form may symbolize more than one idea simultaneously – even ideas that contradict each other, although there is usually a logic to the apparent contradiction. Thus in abstract Islamic art, for example, the relationship between God and humanity might be symbolized by a monumental structure – such as a domed building or the mihrab form on a prayer rug – overrun with minutely detailed decoration. In that case, the decoration, in being minute, symbolizes humanity, while its monumental framework symbolizes God. But simultaneously, the framework, in being, as a frame, finitizing, symbolizes humanity, while the infinitizing pattern truncated by the frame symbolizes the God who is infinite.

Thus “monumental” versus “minute” and “infinite” versus “finite” are visually presented in an interwoven array of apparent contradictions that nonetheless offer a logic to their interweave. For God is by definition utterly other than humanity, yet, according to the Muslim – and Jewish and Christian – tradition, God breathes the soul into us that makes us more than a clod of earth (Bible) or a blood clot (Qur’an), which means that, in some sense, we are like God. And therefore in some sense God must be like us. So the simultaneous similitude and absolute alterity of that relationship is effectively conveyed by the relationship among these abstract visual elements.

We may see this principle well articulated by the dome form. From the beginning of our existence, humans have looked up at the heavens and observed the changing patterns of night and day, winter and summer. Men have watched points of light moving slowly across the skies and those that race across them, suddenly disappearing into the darkness – and the infinite pattern of lights that shifts gradually from one horizon to the next without apparent change of its order. We have wondered, as we have recorded the shifting shapes: what underlies them? What forces move the heavens and how might those forces affect what happens to us, here on the earth. Myriad religious traditions assume that the dome of heaven contains secrets that, because it is the inhabitation of gods, can improve or upset our lives – if we can unravel them.