Our Story

The Beginnings, the Goal 

I am originally from Syria, living in the Tokyo area. I came to Tokyo in 2009 to complete my graduate study. I have got at the end of this journey a Ph.D. degree in Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japanese people consider it as MIT in US). I started this project in 2015 with my wife (She is an architect). The project aims to make communication between us as representatives of Islamic civilization and people from other civilizations.  To achieve that we employ Islamic Geometric Art as a communication language. The goal of that communication is to get to know each other at a highly civilized human-centered level.

We have experienced how effective this way is in our first exhibition in Japan. The reactions of the Japanese and even the foreigners in Japan were surprisingly shocking (in a positive meaning). The number of people who expressed an interest to visit the exhibition on the event page on Facebook and the number of visitors exceeded by far our expectations. The management of the hall told us when we informed them of the visitors' numbers that the visitors' numbers during the first three hours of our exhibition surpassed the visitors' numbers for six days of other exhibitions held in this hall. The reaction of visitors to this exhibition and the other events we held is a big reward and great motivation to us to continue and do more to share more beauty of this art.

 

Islamic, Well developed, Ancient but looking modern

Islamic as an adjective here and even the meaning of these patterns has nothing directly related to Islam. However, there is a relationship as a result of Islamic teachings. In Islam, it is forbidden to embody any living being since idolatry and idols are forbidden. So Muslim artists and Engineers during the golden age of this civilization found that the only available fields of art are plant ornaments, calligraphy, and geometric art. All of them have an engineering essence in Islamic Art.

Geometric art is a type of art that is existed in many civilizations, but Islamic geometric art is the most developed one and the richest one in terms of variety. The reason is that the sciences, engineering, astronomy, and mathematics were so developed during the golden age of this civilization. That helped to come up with sophisticated methods to do these patterns.

The other interesting point, this art can be only found in historical settings constructed by Kings and princes I mean the budget had no limit. Therefore, this art has received ample resources to develop and be presented in high quality.  

Although this art dates back hundreds of years, it still gives a sense of modernity, luxury, and elegance wherever it is used.  It is used till now to decorate important and special buildings funded by governments or wealthy people. 

 

Authentic Method

We were able to access the authentic method to draw these patterns after long research since the sources of this method are so rare and the available methods are invented outside of the Islamic world and sometimes result in deformed patterns and cannot be used to develop additional patterns. In the authentic method, you have to use a combination of circles and structural lines to finally get the design. You cannot get the design directly.

 

Final words

I can summarize the above as using engineering and science to produce art that you can't understand (maybe because the meaning of these patterns is still unknown. There are only opinions, nothing trustworthy). However, they touch something inside of you and give you a feeling of mysterious beauty that makes you unable to describe this feeling in words.

 

   Dr. Eng. Salah KASMO

    (Founder)