Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On a hill above the city of Granada, looking out over the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada on one side and the sprawl of the Andalusian plain on the other, stands a palace complex that many architects and travelers have called the most beautiful building in the world. The Alhambra — al-Qal'a al-Hamra , "the Red Fortress" in Arabic, named for the reddish hue of its outer walls at sunset — is the supreme surviving monument of Al-Andalus , the Muslim civilization that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. Built and continuously elaborated by the Nasrid dynasty between 1238 and 1492, the year of the Christian Reconquista's final triumph over Granada, the Alhambra is simultaneously a royal palace, a fortress, a city within a city, and a meditation in stone and water and light on the nature of paradise. The Nasrid emirate of Granada was the last Muslim political entity in the Iberian Peninsula, a small kingdom that survived...

Islamic geometric art is perhaps the most mathematically sophisticated visual tradition in human history — and its sophistication is inseparable from its theology. In Islam, the depiction of the human figure in sacred contexts is problematic: no human form should compete with the divine. What took its place was geometry — the abstract language of mathematical pattern, understood as the closest available approximation to the infinite, self-replicating order of God's creation. The tile patterns of the Alhambra in Granada, the carved plaster of the Moroccan madrasas, the mosaic domes of Isfahan's Friday Mosque contain, in visual form, the same mathematical structures that Western science discovered analytically centuries later: quasi-crystalline symmetry, non-periodic tiling, the seventeen plane symmetry groups. The artists who made these patterns did not have algebra in the modern sense. They had something that may have been more powerful: an intuitive, practiced, devotional rela...