Shams Nadir is the pseudonym of Tunisian poet and novelist Mohammed Aziza, born in 1940. Mohammed Aziza worked as a director of Tunisian Radio-TV, and subsequently became an international civil servant with UNESCO in Paris, and served as Rector of the Euro-Arab Itinerant University. Through the guise of a pseudonym, Aziza wishes to create a dividing line between his work as poet and novelist and his aesthetic essays on the status of art in Arab-Islamic civilization. The latter include at least six essays in which he re-examines the problem of ‘Muslim iconoclasm’ and highlights the richness and variety of Islamic plastic arts.