Twelve-pointed stars in cedar: what is Islamic geometric pattern actually for?
My father taught me to lay out a star pattern for a ceiling with nothing but a compass, a straightedge and a cord. You start with a circle, divide it, draw lines that pass through the divisions, and the twelve-pointed star appears as if it was waiting. Then the pattern must repeat and close perfectly at the edges of the panel, or everyone who looks up for the next two hundred years will see your mistake.
Visitors often tell me this kind of ornament exists because Islam forbids images, so craftsmen had to decorate with shapes instead. I don't like this explanation. It makes our tradition sound like a workaround.
I recently read a better account: that pattern is a positive achievement in its own right, a way of pointing to an order that goes beyond any picture. An infinitely repeating pattern says something about the infinite that a portrait of a king cannot. Unity appears in the way every star is generated from the same circle.
But here is my honest doubt. My father never spoke about theology in the workshop. He spoke about whether the lines were true and whether the joint would hold. The theological meaning is beautiful, but it comes from scholars and books. Is the meaning of a pattern in what the makers did, or in what the commentators later said about it? Can a craft carry a philosophy that the craftsmen themselves did not put into words?