To Build Is to Orient: Lessons from Arabic and Islamic Design
Design as Grounded Thought, Not Ornament
“To design is to materialise thought and in my tradition, thought is not only seen, but felt, recited, and lived. It is drawn not from a single canon, but from many constellations of meaning … always emerging from many worlds.”
Design today is often framed as a convergence of form, function, and aesthetic appeal. Yet beneath these layers lies a deeper stratum: philosophical orientation. This article emerges from my engagement with Arabic and Islamic thought, not merely as historical artefacts, but as living cosmologies that continue to shape how I perceive space, purpose, and possibility.
As someone whose cultural and intellectual roots are tied to Arabic and Islamic traditions, I approach design not as an imported discipline but as an unfolding continuation of indigenous epistemologies. Importantly, I write from one vantage point within a vast and plural tradition. There are many Islamic cosmologies, shaped by regional, sectarian, and philosophical variations: Sunni and Shi‘a, Bedouin and Mediterranean, Sufi and kalām. These are not simply cultural heritages to be preserved or cited; they are methodologies of perception, shaped by metaphysical assumptions, ethical priorities, and ontological commitments. They inform not only how we build, but why we build and for whom.
In this inquiry, I present several design philosophies drawn from the core of Arabic and Islamic thinking. These are not abstract ideals. They are embodied in patterns, practices, and built forms from the reverent abstraction that emerged where figural representation was withheld, to the architecture of longing encoded in garden courtyards, to the open-ended vastness of the desert as a model for spatial rhythm and sacred breath.
Yet too often, these principles have been filtered through Orientalist and colonial lenses. As historian George Saliba argues, the dominant “classical narrative” frames Islamic intellectual and scientific traditions as reactive emerging only through contact with older Greek, Persian or Indian civilisations. This framing marginalises the internal epistemic energy that animated Islamic contributions to global knowledge (Saliba, 2007, pp. 2–3).
Contrary to this view, the Islamic tradition reconstituted and extended the sciences it encountered. It frequently identified contradictions within Greek metaphysics and surpassed them through a distinct ontological framework rooted in Tawḥīd (divine unity), epistemological contingency, and a refusal of Aristotelian fixity. As Saliba puts it, Islamic scientists produced a “new kind of science” (Saliba, 2007, pp. 3–4) one that was conceptually different from its Greek antecedents, not merely derivative of them.
In the same way, Arabic and Islamic design philosophies are not residues of a past golden age. They are living ontologies still generative, still under-theorised, and still deeply relevant. They offer not nostalgia but reorientation … a way to move beyond secular materialism and into a vision of space as ethically and cosmologically charged.
This essay does not claim to provide a comprehensive map of Islamic design. It is an initial sketch … a philosophical excavation rather than a case study analysis. Its aim is not to catalogue artefacts, but to revive the orientations from which practice might evolve.
What follows, then, is not a nostalgic return to the past. It is a philosophical excavation … a reclaiming of the deeper logic beneath Arabic and Islamic material expression. These principles are not about “heritage aesthetics.” They are ways of knowing and shaping rooted in language, prayer, pattern, absence, and longing.
Limitation as Intensifier
“In reverence for the unseen, we shaped the visible through structure, rhythm, and word.”
A central philosophical principle in Arabic and Islamic design traditions is this: intention thrives within constraint. The well-known restraint on figural representation particularly in sacred contexts and Sunni traditions did not diminish artistic capacity. It rerouted it toward abstraction as a method of knowing. In the absence of figural imagery, Islamic designers and thinkers developed abstraction as a philosophical method and aesthetic system: geometry, calligraphy, arabesque, modular patterning, repetition, and symmetry. These were not aesthetic compromises. They were embodiments of meaning. They were—and still are—material expressions of metaphysical truth.
Islamic abstraction has often been misread through external lenses as decoration, as workaround, as absence. But these interpretations overlook its internal logic: abstraction is where form meets reverence, and geometry becomes a vessel for meaning (Saliba, 2007, pp. 1–5). Rather than representing the world through likeness, Islamic design orients the viewer toward divine presence without depiction.
From this perspective, abstraction was not a retreat from image it was a movement toward essence. Where figural art sought to replicate form, Islamic abstraction sought to unveil principle. Repetition became a gesture toward divine order. Calligraphy elevated the word into structure. Geometry became theology in motion; calligraphy, revelation in form. The refusal to depict was not silence. It was a different kind of articulation: one that privileged essence over likeness, form over image, and presence over portrayal.
Macro: Monumental Abstractions of the Sacred
In architecture, abstraction became spatial and immersive. Structures like the Alhambra Palace in Granada are canvases of visual philosophy: its walls dissolve into endlessly recursive zellij tilework, its ceilings into geometric muqarnas vaults turning stone into a meditation on proportion and recurrence. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem replaces figural art with a monumental embrace of Qur’anic calligraphy, transforming the sacred word into architectural form.
The Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo monumentalises inscription. Its vast bands of Kufic and Thuluth script are not adornments but spatial logic as language becomes structure. At Samarra’s Great Mosque, the spiralling Malwiya minaret abstracts ascension itself, offering no figural form, only rhythm and elevation. Similarly, the Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi in Syria reveals how desert palaces could translate geometry, proportion, and modular rhythm into directional and symbolic meaning architecture not as representation but as orientation.
The Dar al-Hajar in Yemen, carved directly into stone, becomes a vertical abstraction of the natural order. Its facade is layered in pattern, restraint, and rhythm not figural display. It exemplifies how sacred restraint led to poetic material expression.
Micro: Everyday Gestures of Sacred Abstraction
These philosophical principles extended into everyday space. Mashrabiyya screens, found across Egypt and Iraq, modulate light, shadow, and privacy through pure geometric logic. They do not depict. They filter, veil, and reveal. They cultivate atmosphere without iconography.
Mihrabs, from Andalusia to Central Asia, are focal points of prayer that never depict the divine. Instead, they are framed in tilework, carved arabesques, or Qur’anic calligraphy, rendering absence as presence. Likewise, the courtyard symmetry across early Abbasid, North African, and Andalusian homes creates an abstraction of paradise order, axis, flow; not through images, but through spatial balance and metaphysical symbolism.
✦ Design Insight
Constraints don’t stifle innovation. They focus and deepen it. In Islamic design philosophy, limitation is not absence. It is an ethical and metaphysical lens. It sharpens attention, tunes perception, and redirects intention.
✦ Comparative Associations
While traditions like Japanese wabi-sabi or Bauhaus modernism also embrace restraint, Islamic abstraction differs fundamentally. It is not stylistic but ontological. It emerges from a worldview that holds unity, balance, and the unknowability of the divine as core principles. Thus, abstraction in Islamic design is not emptiness. It is fullness without form.
The Architecture of the Desert
“Others see the desert as absence. We see it as clarity—decluttered space that opens the heart toward the cosmos.”
To the outside gaze, the desert often appears barren, silent, formless, devoid of content. But in Arabic and Islamic traditions, the desert is not a void. It is a spatial theology … an environment where presence is not made by excess, but by clarity, rhythm, and attunement.
For nomadic cultures, the desert was not something to be escaped. It was a teacher. It instructed through openness inviting perception, patience, and spiritual alignment. The value of a space was not in how much it contained, but in how well it breathed. Where others might seek to build for dominance, the architecture of the desert builds for humility.
Islamic architecture—particularly in its early and Bedouin-inflected forms—absorbs this ethos. It does not seek to enclose the sacred, but to orient toward it. It marks, aligns, repeats, refrains. This is not minimalism. It is metaphysical literacy. The mihrab points, but never depicts. The mosque opens toward prayer, but doesn’t seal it in. The tent shelters without fixing. The skyline of Samarra, the courtyards of Abbasid homes, the mashrabiyyas of Cairo all enact this desert ethic: openness, rhythm, light.
As George Saliba (1999) notes, Islamic astronomy and cosmology did not simply inherit Greek science they reconstituted it, rooted in lived observation and theological orientation. Bedouin star-naming systems were not symbolic projections, but navigational tools naming stars by their relevance to movement, water, time, and story. The night sky was not decorative. It was architectural: a structure of timing, bearing, and memory. This cosmological integration is mirrored in the built environment. As David A. King documents, Islamic societies designed spaces with astronomical intention orienting mosques to stars, winds, and the Kaʿba (King, 1997). Early mosques in Medina and Kufa were not monumental structures; they were thresholds, breathing with desert logic. Their qibla walls didn’t dominate—they aligned.
This spiritual geometry stands in contrast to Hegel’s symbolic architecture, as explored by K. Michael Hays. I cite Hegel not as source, but as contrast. In Hegelian terms, symbolic architecture precedes the full realisation of Spirit. It gestures toward divinity without yet embodying it. The Tower of Babel or Egyptian pyramids represent, for Hegel, Spirit struggling to free itself from nature through abstraction, repetition, monumentality. Spirit reaches upward, but remains external to its form.
But here is the departure: in Islamic and Bedouin architecture, the gesture is not a struggle. It is the revelation. Spirit does not need to enclose itself in form because its truth lies in the very refusal to be contained. In this view, architecture does not “fail” to express divinity, it succeeds by not claiming to. While Hegel interprets repetition as confusion, Islamic abstraction embraces repetition as dhikr—remembrance. It is not a failure to represent Spirit, but a rhythm of reverence, returning again and again not to define the divine, but to dwell within its infinite suggestion.
This is why the architecture of the desert feels so close to the sky: it is built for direction, not display; for alignment, not assertion.
Still, these are not the only expressions of sacred space within the Islamic world. If the desert teaches through openness, the Mediterranean teaches through enclosure. This plurality is not contradiction. It is coherence refracted. Yet it would be reductive to isolate this desert cosmology as wholly distinct from other Arabic spatial traditions especially those rooted in the Mediterranean. To do so would risk reproducing the same binary logic that colonial and Orientalist framings imposed dividing the lush from the barren, the monumental from the nomadic, the structured from the ephemeral.
What exists instead is not contradiction, but continuity refracted a spectrum of sacred design expressions shaped by geography, theology, and rhythm. These variations—desert and garden, tent and dome, rhythm and enclosure—are not oppositions but polyphonic modalities. Islamic cosmology is not singular; it is a constellation.
This is not a difference. It is an iridescence. A shifting hue of the same metaphysical current.
Among Bedouin Arabs, the longing is to remain close to the sky. What is misread as emptiness becomes intimacy architecture that breathes with the cosmos. Among Mediterranean Arabs, nearness to the divine is found in enclosure the garden, the courtyard, the fountain each one folding paradise inward. These are not divergent worldviews. They are modal variations on a shared cosmology: to build with reverence, to design not for domination but for alignment.
From Gesture to Geometry: Sacred Indirection
The mihrab is not a depiction. It is a bearing. It marks direction, not deity. Early mosques were not structures of power, but thresholds of gathering. They left the sky visible. Even the tent impermanent, rhythmic shelters without ownership. It reflects spiritual mobility.
✦ Design Insight
Space is not always to be filled. In Arabic and Islamic architecture, restraint is a theological act. It makes room for the unseen. It frames silence. It aligns intention with cosmos.
✦ Associations
ma in Japanese aesthetics: the sacred pause
fitra in Islamic cosmology: innate openness to divine order
dhikr in Sufi practice: rhythm as memory
Hegelian “Spirit” trying to know itself through architecture—reframed here as Spirit already known, simply not enclosed
Designing Beyond Function: Toward Emergence and Orientation
“To build is not only to solve—but to seed. I do not design just to shelter the body. I design to orient the soul.”
Design is often framed as utility: solve a problem, fulfill a need, minimize friction. This logic, shaped by modern industrial frameworks, tends to privilege productivity over possibility where time is measured in outputs, and imagination, unless immediately profitable, is often sidelined. But this is not a neutral design ethic. It narrows the role of creativity to what can be delivered, rather than what can be discovered.
This flattening is not incidental. It is structural. As Tristan Schultz reminds us, colonial modernity did not merely extract material resources, but suppressed alternative temporalities, cosmologies, and ways of designing the world (Schultz et al., 2018). Imagination, under these regimes, is treated not as fertile ground but as inefficiency as deviation from measurable use.
In Arabic and Islamic traditions, imagination is not optional. It is foundational. It is not ornamental, but ontological. We do not build domes to cover. We build them to echo the cosmos. We do not carve gardens for shade. We shape them as symmetrical invitations to paradise. We do not lay carpets to decorate. We unroll them as orienting fields of memory, rhythm, and prayer.
The carpet has held many symbolic roles—here, I use it as a metaphor of suspended imagination and ontological direction. The prayer carpet, once a cosmological instrument, evolved into the flying carpet not a fantasy of escape, but of movement without conquest. A way to travel without domination. A method of spiritual orientation. And then … it stopped.
The carpet—once a ground for prayer, then a dream of flight—was flattened, rebranded, aestheticised. It no longer points. It only adorns.
But the story need not end there. To design today with depth is to re-activate orientation. To build not just for function, but for clarity, resonance, and future possibility. This reactivation is not a denial of socio-material realities. It is a reclamation of metaphysical roots that enrich how we navigate complexity. This is not about reclaiming the past. It is about re-invoking ontological dignity in design.
We don’t need more efficient products.
We need more fertile systems.
Designs that orient, breathe, and allow emergence.
✦ Design Insight
In Arabic and Islamic traditions, a structure is never just physical. It is cosmological. Good design does not end in the now. It plants seeds for later. It holds clarity, rhythm, alignment. To design well is to leave room for emergence … to make architecture not of control, but of trust. As Schultz et al. (2018) put it, decolonial design is not a new style. It is a new soil.
✦ Comparative Associations
Speculative Design (Dunne & Raby): asks what futures we imagine, but Arabic and Islamic design already seeded this centuries ago, through prayer, orientation, and metaphysical geometry.
Decolonial Futures (Escobar, Tlostanova): de-linking from Western universalism to reclaim cosmologically grounded ways of world-making.
Ahmed Ansari’s critique: “Design’s epistemological roots in Eurocentrism erase non-Western modes of imagining form and function” (Ansari et al., 2019).
Benedict Anderson (1983): If nations are imagined communities, then the prayer carpet is a different kind of nation, a sacred field of alignment, not a bordered construct.
✦ Reframing the Question
The question is not: how fast can we make it?
The question is: what kind of world does it quietly grow?
What kind of orientation does it offer … what does it help us become?
Reorienting Design as Cosmological Practice
To design is to materialise thought. But in my tradition, thought is not only constructed. It is lived, prayed, felt, and recited. It emerges not from a single canon, but from a constellation of epistemologies, shaped by rhythm, revelation, and repetition. These are not poetic metaphors. They are methodologies of perception, embedded in Arabic and Islamic design for centuries. We have never designed only to solve. We have always designed to orient.
This orientation is not toward the past, but toward possibility. What I have traced here is not a return, it is a reactivation. Arabic and Islamic design are not lost frameworks awaiting revival. They are active cosmologies, ontologies still unfolding. Their silence in the dominant narrative is not because they are extinct, but because they were suppressed, bracketed, museumised. But even within that suppression, the pulse remained.
This is why we must shift the lens. These traditions are not “behind” modernity they offer other modernities. They never positioned time as linear, nor the future as a blank to be filled. Instead, they offered design as remembrance, alignment, and unfolding. A different temporality. A different ethic.
In this view, refusal is not reaction, it is creation. The refusal to depict is not absence, it is reverence. The refusal to dominate space is not retreat, it is ethical precision. A geometry not of control, but of care. A symmetry not for the eye, but for the soul.
Contemporary design often demands acceleration. Innovation, disruption, efficiency. But design is not inherently violent. It becomes violent when it forgets its metaphysical commitments. When it is cut off from the cosmologies that once guided it.
Yet we are not without maps. Across the design world today, movements are emerging: speculative design, pluriversal futures, decolonial imaginaries. But what is often proposed as new is already seeded in traditions like mine. As Escobar (2015) reminds us, these are not innovations, they are recoveries. Ahmed Ansari (2019) names this clearly: design has epistemological roots in exclusion. But it also has potential for reorientation.
This is where the carpet returns not as nostalgia, but as proposition. Once a prayer mat, then a flying metaphor, now flattened into aesthetic. The carpet did not die. It was silenced. And yet it still teaches. It shows us how to place ourselves, how to kneel, how to fly without conquest, how to carry memory across thresholds.
The carpet is not merely a surface, it is a philosophy. It embodies emergence. It invites sacred alignment. It teaches that to dwell well is not to enclose but to relate.
Cosmological grounding does not negate material complexity—it enriches how we navigate it.
So the question is not: what have we lost?
The question is: what are we willing to reawaken?
We do not need faster tools or shinier outputs. We need softer grounds, slower rhythms, deeper bearings. We need designs that remember where we are, and help us become what we are not yet. Not as invention. But as return through reorientation. Not to go back. But to build forward, from where our cosmologies never left.
References
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Ansari, A., Khandwala, R., & Schultz, T. (2019) ‘Decolonizing design discourses: Understanding the epistemic violence of “design thinking” and the need for critical design pedagogies’, in Clarke, D., Malik, A., & Zwicky, S. (eds.) Decolonising Design. London: Routledge, pp. 120–137.
Escobar, A. (2015) ‘Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation’, Sustainability Science, 10(3), pp. 451–462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0297-5
Hays, K. M. (2016) The Architectural Imagination. HarvardX / edX course. Video lecture available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl24jUcidN8 (Accessed: 2 July 2025).
King, D. A. (1997) ‘Astronomy and society in the Islamic world’, in Rashed, R. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 1. London: Routledge, pp. 128–184.
Saliba, G. (1999) ‘Science and medicine’, in Esposito, J. L. (ed.) The Oxford History of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 124–180.
Saliba, G. (2007) Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schultz, T., Ansari, A., & Tunstall, E. D. (2018) ‘Decolonising design: Mapping a pluriversal future’, Design Philosophy Papers, 16(1), pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14487136.2018.1501682
Tlostanova, M. V. (2015) ‘Between the Russian/Soviet dependencies and the neoliberal delusions: dewesternizing options and decolonial moves’, Cultural Studies, 29(2), pp. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000601
