Islamic culture


Islamic cultures or Muslim cultures refers to the historic cultural practices that developed among the various peoples living in the Muslim world. These practices, while not always religious in nature, are generally influenced by aspects of Islam, particularly due to the religion serving as an effective conduit for the inter-mingling of people from different ethnic/national backgrounds in a way that enabled their cultures to come together on the basis of a common Muslim identity. The earliest forms of Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate to the Umayyad Caliphate and early Abbasid Caliphate, was predominantly based on the existing cultural practices of the Arabs, the Byzantines, and the Persians. However, as the Islamic empires expanded rapidly, Muslim culture was further influenced and assimilated much from the Iranic, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Caucasian, Turkic, Malay, Somali, Berber, and Indonesian cultures.
File:201 Dome Mosque 02.jpg|thumb|201 Dome Mosque, Tangail, Bangladesh
File:Blue Mosque Courtyard Dusk Wikimedia Commons.jpg|thumb|Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey
File:A typical charminar evening.jpg|thumb|Hyderabad, India during Ramadan|250x250px
File:Badshahi Mosque front picture.jpg|thumb|Badshahi Masjid in Lahore, Pakistan
Owing to a variety of factors, there are variations in the application of Islamic beliefs in different cultures and traditions.

Language and literature

Arabic

is the writing, both prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is "Adab", which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and which implies politeness, culture and enrichment.
Arabic literature emerged in the 5th century with only fragments of the written language appearing before then. The Qur'an, widely regarded by people as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language, would have the greatest lasting effect on Arabic culture and its literature. Arabic literature flourished during the Islamic Golden Age, but has remained vibrant to the present day, with poets and prose-writers across the Arab world, as well as rest of the world, achieving increasing success.

Persian/Iranic

comprises oral compositions and written texts in Western Iranian languages, particularly Middle and New Persian, and it is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Turkey, regions of Central Asia such as Tajikistan, and South Asia, where Persian has historically been either the native or official language. For instance, Rumi, one of the best-loved Persian poets, was born in Balkh or Vakhsh, wrote in Persian, and lived in Konya, then the capital of the Seljuks in Anatolia. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature from Iran, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan, the wider Transcaucasus, Anatolia, western parts of Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia.
Not all Persian literature is written in Persian; works written by ethnic Persians in other languages, such as Greek and Arabic, are sometimes included. At the same time, not all literature written in Persian is written by ethnic Persians or Iranians; Turkic, Caucasian, and Indian poets and writers have also used the Persian language in the environment of Persianate societies.
Described as one of the great literatures of humanity, including Goethe's assessment of it as one of the four main bodies of world literature, Persian literature has its roots in surviving works of Middle and Old Persian, the latter of which date back as far as 522 BCE, the date of the earliest surviving Achaemenid inscription, the Behistun Inscription. The bulk of surviving Persian literature, however, comes from the times following the Muslim conquest of Persia. After the Abbasid Caliphate came to power in 750, Persians became its scribes and bureaucrats and, increasingly, also its writers and poets. The New Persian language literature arose and flourished in Khorasan and Transoxiana because of political reasons, early Iranian dynasties such as the Tahirids and Samanids being based in Khorasan.
Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Saadi Shirazi, Hafiz Shirazi, Attar of Nishapur, Nizami Ganjavi, Rumi and Omar Khayyam are also known in the West and have influenced the literature of many countries.

Indic

For a thousand years, since the invasion of India by the Ghaznavids, the Persian–Islamic culture of the eastern half of the Islamic world started to influence the Indian culture. Persian was the official language of most Indian empires such as the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal Empire. Persian artistic forms in literature and poetry such as ghazals have come to significantly affect Urdu and other Indian literature.
More Persian literature was produced in India than in the Iranian world. As late as the 20th century, Allama Iqbal chose Persian for some of his major poetic works. The first Persian language newspaper was also published in India, given that printing machines were first implemented in India.
In Bengal, Muslim writers were exploring different themes through Islamic narratives and epics such as culture, cosmology, love and history. Starting from Shah Muhammad Saghir in the 14th century, Muslim writers began to enrich the Bengali language for over 600 years, often being actively supported and promoted by the rulers themselves. The early 20th century brought a new era for Bengali Islamic literature, with its most notable poet Kazi Nazrul Islam espousing intense rebellion against colonialism and oppression, in addition to writing a highly acclaimed collection of Bengali ghazals. Sultana's Dream by Begum Rokeya, an Islamic feminist, is one earliest works of feminist science fiction. UNESCO decided to observe 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The UNESCO General Conference took the decision that took effect on 17 November 1999,

Turkic

From the 11th century, there was a growing body of Islamic literature in the Turkic languages. However, for centuries to come the official language in Turkish-speaking areas would remain Persian. In Anatolia, with the advent of the Seljuks, the practise and usage of Persian in the region would be strongly revived. A branch of the Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum, took Persian language, art and letters to Anatolia. They adopted Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans, which can "roughly" be seen as their eventual successors, took this tradition over. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire, though the lingua franca amongst common people from the 15th/16th century would become Turkish as well as having laid an active "foundation" for the Turkic language as early as the 4th century. After a period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish had developed towards a fully accepted language of literature, which was even able to satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. However, Turkish was proclaimed the official language of the Karamanids in the 17th century, though it did not manage to become the official language in a wider area or larger empire until the advent of the Ottomans. With the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish grew in importance in both poetry and prose becoming, by the beginning of the 18th century, the official language of the Empire. Unlike India, where Persian remained the official and principal literary language of both Muslim and Hindu states until the 19th century.

Art

Public Islamic art is traditionally non-representational, except for the widespread use of plant forms, usually in varieties of the spiralling arabesque. These are often combined with Islamic calligraphy, geometric patterns in styles that are typically found in a wide variety of media, from small objects in ceramic or metalwork to large decorative schemes in tiling on the outside and inside of large buildings, including mosques. However, there is a long tradition in Islamic art of the depiction of human and animal figures, especially in painting and small anonymous relief figures as part of a decorative scheme. Almost all Persian miniatures include figures, often in large numbers, as do their equivalents in Arab, Mughal and Ottoman miniatures. But miniatures in books or muraqqa albums were private works owned by the elite. Larger figures in monumental sculpture are exceptionally rare until recent times, and portraiture showing realistic representations of individuals did not develop until the late 16th century in miniature painting, especially Mughal miniatures. Manuscripts of the Qur'an and other sacred texts have always been strictly kept free of such figures, but there is a long tradition of the depiction of Muhammad and other religious figures in books of history and poetry; since the 20th century Muhammad has mostly been shown as though wearing a veil hiding his face, and many earlier miniatures were overpainted to use this convention.

Depiction of animate beings

Some interpretations of Islam include a ban of depiction of animate beings, also known as aniconism. Islamic aniconism stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that creation of living forms is God's prerogative. Although the Quran does not explicitly prohibit visual representation of any living being, it uses the word musawwir as an epithet of God. The corpus of hadith contains more explicit prohibitions of images of living beings, challenging painters to "breathe life" into their images and threatening them with punishment on the Day of Judgment. Muslims have interpreted these prohibitions in different ways in different times and places. Religious Islamic art has been typically characterized by the absence of figures and extensive use of calligraphic, geometric and abstract floral patterns. However, representations of Muhammad and other religious figures are found in some manuscripts from lands to the east of Anatolia, such as Persia and India. These pictures were meant to illustrate the story and not to infringe on the Islamic prohibition of idolatry, but many Muslims regard such images as forbidden. In secular art of the Muslim world, representations of human and animal forms historically flourished in nearly all Islamic cultures, although, partly because of opposing religious sentiments, figures in paintings were often stylized, giving rise to a variety of decorative figural designs.