Dr. Mamoona Khan

Professor, Chairperson
Department of Art and Design
Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi

Short Bio: Dr. Mamoona holds an impressive record of presenting papers in International Conferences in Pakistan and abroad, almost thirty conferences with paper presentations are on her credit. A number of her research papers are published in the journals of high repute. A research-based book, entitled Wazir Khan Mosque Rediscovered is on her credit along with chapters written in local and foreign books.

Keynote Topic:   Prevarications on Islamic Art of the Book Consistencies and Contradictions

The unique stylistic traditions connected with the Muslim Art, especially with Miniature Paintings have exclusively distinct features, misapprehended as decorative, lacking in dexterity, or labelled as a craft. Many scholars, including those tagged as orientalists misdeemed it by viewing through the lens of western aesthetics, labelled it as deficient to capture reality. Muslim artists are considered incapacitated or lacking in draftsmanship and the like. Interest in intricate details is classified as executed under the “fear of void”, or as fragmented reality. Whereas, reality in its totality is the ideal attained by the Muslim artists, who acted not as realists but as super-realists. Through esoteric optics, they focused on the entirety of events, captured on the small spaces of not more than the size of a page, but developed an unparallelly idiosyncratic style. The paper intends to dig deep the aesthetic norms that shaped the very roots of Muslim Art, to explore its true nature, whether linked with real or surreal. It will be an analytically exploratory research based on formal and textual analysis of the Muslim Paintings to make its aesthetics comprehensible and to mark its quality of super-realism conspicuous. Not mimetic in its representation, ignored verisimilitude, but reality is explored to its very cores by the Muslim artists.

Key words: Muslim Aesthetics, Miniature Painting, Esotericism, Mimesis