The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its flamboyant style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is intellectual and not dramatic, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of omnipresence (God is everywhere), which coincides with that of simultaneity (Truth has always been); it aims at avoiding any particularization or condensation, any unique fact in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of unique fact, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is everywhere center, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it decentralizes and universalizes to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any personalist mysticism. To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islamin art as in theologyas a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an association (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against centralizing images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a Christic uniqueness and is decentralized by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islamor the Koranwhich is similarly integrated in a universal fabric and a cosmic rhythm, having been preceded by other religionsor other Bookswhich it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points.If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere.