The Architecture of Mimesis in Plato and in the Quran

Abstract

The way we understand mimesis is fundamental to epistemology, physics, and representation in political life as well as in the arts. Can truth/reality be copied? The most enduring understanding of what truth and reality are has come to us from Plato, who launched an attack on poetry as false representation of the divine. Although a rarely defined Neoplatonism is routinely attributed to the ninth and tenth-century philosophers who wrote in Arabic, I and others have overlooked how much of Plato there is in the whole of Islamicate literature and culture, beginning with the linguistic environment of the Quran. But it is well known that Plato was revered in historical Islamicate societies; Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) and many others referred to him as “the divine Plato,” and considered him a prophet in the monotheistic tradition. There is now a small body of work on mimesis and Islam, but here I will look specifically at Platonic topics found in the Quran with regard to mimesis and poetry, and the kind of methodology needed to appreciate them.