A Comparative Study on Islamic Art Patterns In the View of Perennial Philosophy and Historians and Based on the Views of Keith Critchlow and Gulru Necipoglu

Ornaments are one of the primary characteristics of Islamic art. Therefore, it's imperative to explore the influential elements of the development of the ornament patterns. In order to have a fair judgment and a clearer picture of the issue, we need to have a proper methodology in studying Islamic art. Scholars have applied various methods and approaches that led to various results and consequently caused disagreement and conflicts among them.  Perennial philosophy and historian are the two known approaches for studying Islamic art. The historians aim is studying Islamic art within its chronological scheme and analyzing the artworks in limited historical documents in the light of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Perennial Philosophy, on the other hand, believes the eternal truth of religions and seeks to investigate the origin of Islamic art within a religious tradition beyond chronological and historical borders. In fact, these two approaches highlight different aspects of the nature of Islamic art. However, dealing with these approaches sometimes result in different findings and a lot of conflicts among researchers. So, exploring various methods of studying Islamic art is a matter of importance. Thus, the present inquiry aims to answer what are the factors and features of shaping Islamic patterns based on Perennial Philosophy and historians? And in what ways are they different? Applying a descriptive-analytic study, we aim to provide a more complete understanding of Islamic patterns as well as different approaches for studying them. Also, this paper attempts to articulate how these approaches studied art. To address the issue, we selected two books of leading researchers of the field Keith Critchlow, a follower of traditional values and Perennial philosophy, and Gulru Necipoglu, a historian of Islamic art, then their ideas were explained and compared.