A Comprehensive Review on the Concepts of Beauty and the Paradigm of City Beautification from the Perspective of the Islamic Wisdom

Beauty is considered as an eternal quality which comes from a perpetual truth, and has been a part of man's pure nature. Beautification, however, is a process of trying to enhance and equate the surrounding environment into the lost, unreachable quality that the descended man has always been seeking for. From this perspective, the concept of beauty in Islam and its examples in the material world has always been a clue to that hidden aspect and eternal truth. The city beautification process in its contemporary state has considered the providing of some superficial elements with apparent and ephemeral aesthetical qualities as the tools to maintain the beauty in an urban environment. Departing from an architecture and urbanism, based on wisdom and spiritual meanings gradually deviated into a kind of formalism, imitation and reproduction of forms in the process of reshaping the built environment. As such the application of imitated beautification processes, has not only resulted in the missing of genuine beauty, but will make an inharmonious schema not probably lasting long. In this research, after describing the concept of genuine beauty, the procedure of creation of beauty in the core of Islamic wisdom was interpreted to demonstrate the bottom-up process of shaping the ‘wholeness’ or the generation of genuine beauty based upon the idealistic nature of human beings, reflected in the existence of the ‘integral’ city. Finally, the principles of ‘city beautification’ process and the crucial factors in the perception of [genuine] beauty from the Islamic point of view are presented.