Water in Islamic Culture: An Aesthetic Phenomenon and Its Cultural Impact

The article is an attempt to give an overview and reconsider the historical role, peculiarities, significance,and meaning of water in Islamic culture. The emergence of long-lasting systems of water supply in the territories that eventually gave rise to Islamic culture resulted in elaborate aesthetics of water most commonly associated with the phenomenon of the Islamic garden. In a piece of what might be described as a generalist’s interest rather than departmentalized specialized research, the author of the article examines this phenomenon from the point of view of the history of ideas and attempts to grasp its universal features, which contributed to the dissemination of the cultural phenomenon beyond the Islamic realm and hadan impetus on the development of water culture in post-medieval Western Europe, especially during the Renaissance and Baroque eras when encounters with some of the Oriental cultural phenomena became more common and lasting. It is suggested that it was specifically the water culture of Islam that had a certain impact upon Western imagination and cultural practices from the dawn of the modern era. While analyzing the issue, the author uses the methods employed by the history of ideas and comparative historical studies.