From the Dome of the Rock completed in Jerusalem in 692 to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosques constructed by the Moghul emperors in India in the seventeenth century, from the Topkapi Seray in Istanbul to the glories of Isfahan, from Cordoba and Toledo in Spain to the Gur-i-Amir in Samarkand, architectural triumphs have signposted the development of Islamic civilisation, many of them designed to reflect the promises of our faith.
Here I must explain the importance of the faith to every aspect of a Muslim’s life including his physical environment: all beings are affected positively or negatively by their surroundings but for Muslims it is a particularly critical matter.
Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation. The aesthetics of the environment we build and the quality of the social interactions that take place within those environments reverberate on our spiritual life, and there has always been a very definite ethos guiding the best Islamic Architecture.
Excerpt from speech given by His Highness the Aga Khan on receiving the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, University of Virgina, Charlottesville, Virginia, 13 April 1984
Ismailimail 
A great excerpt above from the speech you quoted. I particularly like the quote below which, if you don’t mind, I will add to my burgeoning collection on the link, the inseperability, between science and religion in Islam:
“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”
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And there is no better example of embodiment of this notion than the last Prophet of Allah himself. Here is an extract of Aga Khan’s Presidential address at the International Seerat Conference, 1976:
“The Holy Prophet’s life gives us every fundamental guideline that we require to resolve the problem as successfully as our human minds and intellects can visualize. His example of integrity, loyalty, honesty, generosity both of means and of time, his solicitude for the poor, the weak and the sick, his steadfastness in friendship, his humility in success, his magnanimity in victory, his simplicity, his wisdom in conceiving new solutions for problems which could not be solved by traditional methods, without affecting the fundamental concepts of Islam, surely all these are foundations which, correctly understood and sincerely interpreted, must enable us to conceive what should be a truly modern and dynamic Islamic Society in the years ahead.”
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