"do your math..." (part two)

There is within the spiritual universe of Islam a dimension which may be called "Abrahamic Pythagoreanism" or a way of seeing numbers and figures as keys to the structure of the cosmos and as symbols of the archetypal world and also a world which is viewed as the creation of God in the sense of the Abrahamic monotheisms. It is this possibility within the intellectual universe of Islam and not any external influences that enabled Islam to develop a philosophy of mathematics akin to the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition of antiquity [...]

-Seyyid Hossein Nasr, from the Forward of Islamic Patterns by Keith Critchlow

So I recently picked up the book Islamic Patterns. I've owned it for a while, what I'm saying is that I'm making another attempt to get through it. It contains some interesting discussions of the philosophical principles which lay behind much of the geometric artwork in the Islamic world. To be honest, it is taking some effort to get through. What I'm finding is that my own mathematical training makes it hard for me to really see where Critchlow is coming from. There is definitely a gap between the typical academic concept of what a number is or what geometry is about and the Pythagorean notion of the same.