Amin is one of the first to bring Islamic calligraphy into the three dimensions of sculpture. The art of Islamic-Arabic calligraphy quickly developed into a myriad of styles within a few decades of the advent of Islam in the 7th century AD. Traditionally the calligraphic inscription of ayat, passages from the Koran, was confined to the two dimensional page. Eventually calligraphy also came to adorn functional objects as well as architecture, specifically in the form of carved stone relief. Never, however, did it come to stand by itself as sculpture. By carrying this long calligraphic tradition into the three dimensional realm, Amin is breaking new ground entirely. For the first time in Islamic art history, calligraphy is not used to adorn functional form -- be it architecture or a bowl -- but to create form itself.

Amin is interested in form and repetition. In his calligraphic sculpture he often uses a certain line from the Koran in a particular script, for example the line "Which of the favors of God can one deny?" from the Surah-e-Rehman in Eastern Kufic. He repeats this line in different works over the years. It is the form that changes and evolves. Form, then, becomes as important as content in his work Other texts that Amin has used are the line "God taught humankind what it did not know before" from the Iqra ayat in Naksi script; "Alhamdillah" --  Praise be to God -- in square kufic script; and "Allah" in square kufic script.

For Amin repeating a certain line or a word from the sacred text over and over again defines the simplicity and direct quality of his relationship with the divine.

Deriving its source from mathematics, the Moslem aesthetic has a great love for geometry and pure form. Some art historians have speculated that geometric pattern, logical in its derivation but infinite in its continuity, might reflect the divine. Circles and squares and the interplay of the two are evident in some of Amin's work. This motif finds its source in the iconography of Islamic aesthetics, in which the circle has often been used to denote the divine, and the square human existence. Cylinders, not dissimilar, to the minaret of a mosque, are another repeated emblem.

In the mid- to late 90s the artist used rock crystals to render the form of his sculptural inscriptions. Crystals themselves have an art historical resonance, as the artistically prodigious Fatmids (Islamic caliphs who ruled much of the Middle East from the 10th to the 12th centuries) used to carve upon them in reverence of their luminous quality. But even this tradition Amin has reinvented: While the Fatmids used carved rock crystal to adorn objects like bowls and scepters, Amin uses the crystals in their natural state as elements of pure form. By freeing the crystals from the constraints of functionality, Amin strives to achieve two aims: First, to express the divine pattern of the universe; and second, to symbolize what is known in Sufism, the mystical path to Islam, as Nur, or divine light.