The concepts of tekhnē (ṣināʿa) and mimesis (muḥākāt) are two foundational notions inherited from Greek philosophy, which were received and reinterpreted within the Islamic philosophical tradition. In classical Arab-Islamic thought, tekhnē (ṣināʿa) denoted practical and productive arts, encompassing both manual and intellectual disciplines such as architecture, medicine, navigation, grammar, and logic. Far from being autonomous or aestheticized as in modern conceptions of “art,” these fields were classified within the broader framework of the sciences (ʿulūm), emphasizing their rational, ethical, and technical dimensions.

Mimesis, by contrast, entered Islamic thought primarily through the Arabic reception of Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, where it was also rendered as tashbīh and muḥākāt. While these terms often reduced the concept to imitation or resemblance, Islamic philosophers reframed it through the lens of takhyīl—make-believe—thus highlighting its role in cognition and aesthetic perception. Ibn Sīnā’s Poetics in Kitāb al-Shifāʾ approaches poetic discourse through logical and psychological frameworks, while Ibn Rushd’s application of Aristotelian poetics to Arabic literary criticism in Talkhīṣ Kitāb al-Shiʿr illustrates the deep and systematic engagement with artistic expression in Islamic philosophy. In the classification of Islamic sciences, disciplines like music, which is placed within mathematics, and poetry, categorized under the science of language, are unified under the concept of muḥākāt, effectively bridging these arts together.

Ayşe Taşkent’s research centers on aesthetics and theories of art within the tradition of Islamic philosophy. Her first book, “Güzelin Peşinde Fârâbî, İbn Sînâ ve İbn Rüşd’de Estetik (The Pursuit of Beauty: Aesthetics in al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes) (2011), examines the concept of beauty and artistic expression as developed by these three major thinkers, considering their ontological, cosmological, epistemological, and psychological dimensions. She is particularly interested in the reception and reinterpretation of Aristotelian poetics in the works of al-Fārābī, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Her current book project, “The Thought of Art in the Islamic Philosophical Tradition in the Context of the Concepts of Tekhne (Art) and Mimesis (Imitation)”, explores the transformation of ancient Greek aesthetic concepts in classical Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources. She earned her Ph.D. in Islamic Philosophy from the Institute of Social Sciences at Marmara University in 2009 with a dissertation on The Aesthetics of al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes. Her M.A., also from Marmara University (2001), focused on Avicenna’s poetics and its relation to Aristotelian tradition. Between 1997 and 1998, she conducted research at the University of Houston. She holds a B.A. in Theology from Marmara University, completed in 1997. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an Associate Professor at Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa.