Criticism on the Opinions of Contemporary Traditionalists in Islamic Art and Architecture; Based upon the concept of the tradition in Definition of Islamic architecture

Islamic art and architecture are precious treasures resulted from corporate efforts and experiences of Muslim artists throughout history. This chain has been detached due to cultural development in the contemporary era. Exploring in theoretical and philosophical foundations of Islamic art and architecture is one way to revive cultural identity and eliminate its attributed untruth. It is an imperative that has not been considered the priority yet in spite of an over three decades of Islamic revolution which have frequently led to superficial, commonplace and arbitrary impressions of Islamic art and architecture. The intellectual flows of contemporary traditionalists (Guenon, Schuon, Burkhart, Nasr) in the past four decades has been the mainstream of our colleges and art and architecture centers -without any profound review and discussion- which have directly affected other theories of this field as a result of excessive efforts in interpretation of Islam and Iranian art and architecture. The contemporary traditionalists in seeking religious and traditional principles of art and architecture by authenticating the architectural history of before Renaissance in different lands, interpret architectural shapes and forms physically regardless of social and historic conditions of architectural formation and and introduce principles of religion and sacred art and architecture with a romantic approach and spontaneous elimination of rational logic. They have benefited from shapes and symbols, verbal similarities and arbitrary interpretation of architecture and external appearance of various religions and rites in this process of making art and architecture sacred and have entered Christian art and Hindu art interpretations in the theoretical basis of Islamic architecture. Scrutinizing the opinions of the founders of this intellectual flow known and introduced as contemporary traditionalists reveals the mismatch between historic production and development of Islamic-Iranian architecture and their presented principles of Islamic architecture. This paper tried to summarize and outline the main points of this group of scholars about Islamic art and architecture in order to offer a logical criticism and scrutinization of these theories.