Lifting the veil from the face of depiction Middle Eastern miniature painting in light of sufism and phenomenology

Middle Eastern miniature painting flourished mainly from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Drawing on Sufi philosophical concepts, miniature painting was perceived by contemporaries as mirroring qualities of divine creation while remaining unconcerned with Western artistic preoccupations such as verisimilitude. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western political and cultural influence led to the disappearance of the art form and its original milieus while miniature paintings entered Western consciousness through expositions, influencing artists such as Henri Matisse. Finally, modern Western art inspired its own philosophical tradition, mainly in phenomenology, with many philosophers’ ideas bearing resemblances to the Sufi philosophy used to approach miniature painting in the Middle East.
To date, no scholarly work has traced the line of influence between Sufi philosophy, miniature painting, Western abstract art, and phenomenology. Further, there has been no ontological assessment of miniature art in light of Sufi philosophy and no comparative analysis of the two philosophical traditions, Sufi and phenomenological. This study fills these gaps by assessing (1) the historical continuity and (2) the philosophical common ground of the “Eastern” and “Western” traditions in question. Rather than demonstrating an indebtedness of modern Western philosophy to Sufi thinkers, the study aims to expose the compatibility of Sufi and phenomenological approaches to art, and to employ both approaches in tandem to produce innovative readings of Middle Eastern miniature paintings.