Mystical Approaches in Design of Knotted Kufic Inscriptions

Knotted Kufic، one of the first decorative manifestations of Kufic، has various knots as its principal components. In previous studies، decorative Kufic، specifically knotted one، has always been regarded as a combination of plain Kufic with decorative motifs; but it seems that knotted Kufic is a unified whole resulted from the changes in geometric relations of alphabet letters and their compositions. Therefore، the purpose of this paper is to find out the context of changes of knotted Kufic alongside the study of geometric relations of its alphabet letters and their compositions to recognize the thoughtsin their formation based on the formal development of knotted Kufic. To this purpose، historical، descriptive and analytic methods and hermeneutic approach are used to describe and analyze the geometric development of knotted Kufic based on the mystical connotations of knot. As a result the relationship between development process of knotted Kufic and mystical viewpoints is revealed indicating that mystical geometry of space and time has affected the design of knotted Kufic inscriptions and is manifested in forms of loop knots، heart-shaped knot and endless knot. This mystical geometry is utilized in the design of knotted Kufic’s compositions as well to induce the concept of entanglement and disentanglement respectively.