The images presented here are taken from patterninislamicart.com, a website that largely consists of images from my own photo archive, which are themselves the fruits of a whole series of trips to different parts of the Islamic world.
I feel that this marvellous artistic tradition deserves to be better known and that it has a great deal to offer, not only to art-historians and other specialists, but to designers and lovers of art and beauty everywhere. At its best this art-form expresses a refined and even sublime aesthetic sensibility, but manages to remain perfectly accessible.
Because of this, Islamic pattern seems to me to offer a particularly appropriate antidote to the fears and suspicions that may have been induced by recent notions of a 'clash of civilisations'. The need to express and appreciate Beauty, through Art, is surely a universal human response.