Fundamental principles of traditional Arab-Muslim aesthetics and the system of predominant arts

ENArab-muslim aesthetics came into existence between the Western and Eastern worlds, reflecting its historical mission of connecting cultural, aesthetic and artistic traditions of different civilizational areas. It absorbed in itself aesthetic ideas typical of Hellenic world, the Hebrews, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and various steppe peoples, and tied them with traditional aesthetic views of the seminomadic Arabs. Firstly, Arab-muslim aesthetics differed from the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Antique and Western aesthetic traditions in its narrower reflection scope of the system of arts as well as in powerful penetration of fundamental Quranic ideological premises into the area of aesthetic consciousness. It conditioned specific hierarchy of arts in the Islāmic civilization, in which three great arts — poetry, calligraphy and architecture, — competed for primacy across different evolutionary periods and regions while the rest of the arts, despite some being important for separate regions and peoples, were largely sidelined.