Beauty and the Umma

It is said that one of the best ways to appreciate the heart of a civilization is via its art. This is no less true for Islam. Indeed, it is a basic tenet of Islamic cosmology that the physical plane is a reflection of the Divine. Thus the creation of art, through the crafting of the beautiful is a way of penetrating into the higher realms of reality.

In Islam there is no dichotomy between beauty and spiritual worth. With beauty the reflection of God, foulness is a reflection of His negation. This can be demonstrated in the Arabic language, where the word of beauty, husn, also means goodness. Conversely, qutb means both ugliness and evil. Throughout the world one only has to look at all the historical buildings, calligraphy and other works of Islamic civilization to see this ethic in work. The sheer elegance of the symmetry and sophistication of such art is remarkable in how easily it captures the soul and soothes the heart. The transcendence, unity and infinite nature of the Divine is thus given for mortal contemplation.

Now I use the word ‘historical’ purposefully. A major problem facing the Muslim world of today is the abandonment of traditional philosophy and practices, and the aesthetics of societies is one of the key indicators of this decline. A ‘cult of ugliness’ is prevalent in modernity, a fashion which has strong associations with the bifurcation of the sacred and profane. I recall how traditionally, the trades and crafts in Islamic societies were organized into guilds, frequently under the direction of a spiritual master. In this way a guild was practically a Sufi order or lodge by itself, where the working of their art was the form of worship. Unlike in today’s’ thought art wasn’t an ‘extra’. It was a good in itself. One couldn’t be ‘either an artist or not’, as everyone was an artist in their everyday activities. Art was life.

Compare this with the situation of today. These guilds have been largely swept away by the ravages of modern capitalism, the market flooding with cheap mass-produced goods. With the abandonment of traditional cosmology, we are no longer God’s vice-regents over nature, but Mammon’s exploiters of it. We no longer work with nature and instead at against it, hence the proliferation of monstrous industrial hives and wastelands we call ‘cities’ and other things, whilst we destroy the environment. Ugliness is now regarded as the norm and reality, whilst the beautiful is seen as secondary and indulgent. Is it any surprise that our splitting of heaven and earth have produced things like existentialism and atheism, which readily incubated and thrived in our bleak urban surrounds?

This ‘cult’ exists in the religious realm as well. How many times have we been to horrendous tube-lit mosques full of sharp angles with the call to prayer delivered via crackling loudspeakers? How many of us Muslims today place pride in our aversion to all forms of music and dance? This is an extremist approach. Within this ideology, its exponents would have us destroy our rich heritage of sublime spiritual music and the whirl of the dervish, responsible for bringing so many people into the deen as well as helping them achieve the highest states of spiritual advancement. It is true that wrong forms of artistic expression can tighten the leash of Iblis upon us – one only has to look at the modern music scene to observe this – but this fearful Puritanism is nothing but a manifestation of an intellectually and spiritually bankrupt innovation with absolutely nothing to contribute, an externalization of a petty inferiority complex towards Western encroachment.

We should remind ourselves that art, and by extension beauty, are spiritual necessities. Islamic art is Islamic precisely in that it reflects the rhythms and harmonies of nature and expresses the relationship between man and the cosmos, allowing us a form of access to higher realities. It can be said that all worship is but the art of the development beauty, with the soul being the ultimate canvas. Thus the pleasure of God, who is the Beauty, is attained. Our civilization has already taken heavy blows; let us not cripple it further.

Aphorisms by the Donkey #2

Al-Mustafa: not to be confused with Mr. Kemal

When ingratitude is a virtue: “Thanks for the mosque, but you can keep your books!”

The End of History? The History of the End, rather!

Homo Prometheus - and we Neanderthals cry for eagles

Would one tell a diabetic to be grateful for the sweetness of his urine?

The Enlightenment: history is written by the losers

The greatest discovery of modern science was that superstition need not be confined to the metaphysical

Leave no Rome unspurned

The right wing on Wahabism – “With enemies like these, who needs friends?”

The Reactive Nature of Muslim Thought

*This is an edited version of a previous essay of mine*

The topic of Islam (or indeed, any religion in general) and its relationship with science and other intellectual disciplines is obviously a touchy issue. Two stereotypes tend to dominate in the present psyche – regressive primitives, and modern reformists. The later is often praised, but more often than not this is undeserved. The religion today suffers not only from the sicknesses of the old, but those of the new – not many people appreciate the dangers of modernist thought in the sciences and humanities to the intellectual state of humanity at large. In today’s increasingly globalised world, it is essential that Muslims and other followers of genuine religions understand themselves in regards to this issue.

In Islam, there are essentially two main classes of people concerned with religious, intellectual and philosophical questions: the ulema and other authorities, and the religious modernists. Respectively these groups often occupy these general attitudes towards science as well as other things ‘Western’. The first is a trend that has become unfortunately very prevalent amongst the puritanical movement; that is, the rejection of science and ‘Western things’ altogether. The second, preserve of the modernists, is an obsession with Western science, and the belief that the West is strong because of science.

That is, that one can espouse the merits of Western science whilst performing one’s religious obligations, and everything will be hunky-dory. That the problems of Western science are not due to intellectual clashes, but ones of ethical application in that Western science is safe and sound if you just apply Islamic ethics. This viewpoint fails to recognize that science is not an objective entity in itself, but value-determined and based upon the imposition of culturally-specific categories and assumptions on nature – if one civilization is to make use of the science of another, it must adapt it to its own framework.

The values and assumptions that drive contemporary Western science have gained man prodigious knowledge in certain areas but is ultimately narrow and unconcerned with the deeper aspects of reality. The ultimate goal of Islamic science is integrative; promoting the contemplation of the universe, and using the insight gained from such contemplation to improve the self and remould it to become more in accordance with the divine decree, and thus also improve the surrounding world. Modern science in contrast is characterized by the dispersive externalization of action and the violent tearing apart of man and nature.

Likewise, in regards to philosophy, modernized Muslims and Easterners in general constantly compare this Eastern philosopher to that Western philosopher, in an effort to give respectability to the former. This fails to acknowledge the fact that contemporary Western philosophy is essentially different to that of the East. The majority Occidental trend is to place emphasis on and conflate philosophy with reason, with its concern with analysis and sense data, at the expense of a wholistic approach which treats reason as but one faculty amongst others. Eastern philosophy traditionally operates only as an aspect of a larger path. The anti-metaphysical character of modern Western philosophy means that if we do not consider this distinction, then all efforts at comparison will fail as we reduce all content to the lowest common denominator.

Such attempts at synthesis are the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The modernists, with their particular educational background, have a fetish for all things western and a sense of inferiority related to all things Islamic, mistaking their own disequilibrium for that of the religion itself. This is the greatest problem of the Muslim world and most deeply afflicts those who would be most expected to face the challenges of the west and modernity. I do not criticize the West, I do not criticize Western culture per se, but I do criticize the problems that have developed in the West.

What is lacking in the Muslim world today is a thorough examination and careful criticism of all that is happening in the modern world. The conflation of Western science with Islamic science has produced many Muslim scientists, but very few Islamic scientists. Unless one applies an Islamic world view, attempts to harmonize Islam and modern western phenomena are doomed because the appropriate evaluative criteria are bypassed. Islam is seen as a partial entity to be complemented by some modern ideology rather than as a complete system and world view in itself. The rapidly changing whims of the day are itself proof of the fallacy of such an approach, and ideologically-charged movements in general which universalize the contextually specific.

We live in a time where paradoxically, as people in the West become more aware of the peaking and gradual deterioration of their civilizational paradigm, modernized Muslims have begun to be a force to be reckoned with. Even with the weakening of confidence in the west, Muslims are still on the receiving end in both ideas and material objects, from philosophy down to fashion. Lacking confidence in their own intellectual tradition, many modernized Muslims are like a blank slate waiting for input from the West, the precise ideas they receive depending on which country or region they have the strongest association with. People rarely bother to adopt a truly Islamic intellectual attitude which operates from an immutable centre and in a positive manner of discernment.

Modernized Muslims praise Islam because they say it paved the way for the Renaissance and Enlightenment. This is true, but is has often been forgotten that the Islamic elements were only used after being deprived of their distinctive character and broader philosophical framework. This value criterion is made doubly ludicrous since it was the Renaissance and Enlightenment which became the breeding grounds for so many of the problems facing humanity today.

Too many Muslims are unaware of not only the roots of western movements, but the history and development of such movements and wait until they occupy centre stage in the western psyche, and only then they start to at like it existed. For example, in the case of environmental degradation, how many Muslims did not wait until Al Gore made his movie based on a Powerpoint presentation before even thinking about it?! And how few have thought about it in the light of the rich intellectual Islamic traditions concerning nature? Unfortunately, such study has mostly been made only as a result of an inferiority complex in an effort to prove that ‘the Muslims did it first’. Rarely is this heritage treated as a legitimate path in itself.

In their attempts to confront the problems of modernity, Muslims are constantly using apologetics and jumping through hoops to show somehow that this or that element of Islam corresponds to whatever is fashionable in the west at the present (I myself admit that I was frequently guilty of this in the past), while other elements for which there are no western equivalent are ignored. For example Muslims often make such a big fuss about the egalitarian nature of Islam not because they necessarily see it as true in the Islamic framework (which it is), but because egalitarianism is what is currently popular in the West. By affirming such obvious and easily defensible things, they have evaded the basic challenge which threatens the heart of Islam itself. It is through the lack of a critical and discerning spirit that many modernized Muslims possess a passive, servile and docile attitude towards whatever thought is in vogue. Superficialities like gangsta rap and what women wear at the beach are easily criticized, but few bother to tackle the fundamental fallacies of our times.

I have talked about the two main groups of the traditionalists and the modernists. But a third group is gradually arising, who are traditional like the ulema but also know the modern world. It is precisely members of this third group that we need more of.

To save Islam, a true intelligentsia needs to be developed which is both traditional and fully conversant with the modern world. Traditionalists as described here too often resort to answering the challenges of the modern West merely through religious jurisprudence (even in interactions with non-Muslims!). Muslims need to revive the study of Islamic sciences and humanities. They need to abandon their sense of inferiority and go on the intellectual offensive and not just the defensive without succumbing to so-called ‘traditional’ ideologies which are ironically actually products of modernist thought, such as Wahabism.

Contemporary Muslims must act from where and what they are – physically, culturally, and spiritually -  if they and humanity in general are to have a hope of coping with the problems of modernism. In turn, by learning from the Islamic intellectual disciplines, the West will greatly benefit by rediscovering the truths which were at the heart of its traditions but were forgotten or discarded with time. By basing their understandings on this rather than subjective and ever-changing modern trends, the East/West divide itself can be transcended, both geographically and within one’s own being.

Aphorisms by the Donkey

Shari’ah: democracy is the servant of human rights
No Shari’ah: human rights is the servant of democracy

Sarcasm is the lowest form of humour. But puns come pretty damn close

If religion is the opiate of the masses, then atheism is the crystal meth of the disaffected bourgeois romantics

Unbelief is worse than nonbelief. Disbelief is worse than unbelief.

An atheist is a third of the way towards becoming Muslim

Pity: repression by the well-intentioned

In love with a woman one has never met: any less stupid than one’s passion for Him?

Forgiveness bought by a ransom is not forgiveness at all

A wise monk once told me of the unreality of the world. I kicked him in the balls.

Very Western Terrorism

One of the most enduring images of intercivilizational conflict these days is that of the Islamist terrorist and his war on the West. This is almost universally portrayed as a conflict between the traditional, the oriental and the quintessentially Islamic and the modern, culturally and intellectually superior occident. However, this perspective is dependent on a historical amnesia that affects so much of modern society today. Islamist terrorism is not a story of Islam versus the West, but rather of modern secularism falling upon its own sword.

We often attribute the violence of entities like Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah to superstitious primitivism. Far from being medieval throwbacsk, such movements have their ideological foundation in Western modernity. The most distinctive features of violent Islamism - the globalization of organized violence and the belief in the possibility of establishing a utopia via acts of destruction - are unfounded within traditional Islamic scholarship. Rather, they are the by-products of Enlightenment philosophy. The Islamist is just as likely to be middle-class and university-educated, rather than a stereotypical ignorant Third-Worlder. He often has spent time in the west, and received a western education. We only need to read the history of Muslim political radicalism to understand these facts.
The association between Islam and anti-Western violence is notable only because of its rarity. Except in cases of response to direct military invasion, such as African resistance to the redcoats of the British Empire, and more recently the conflicts in Bosnia and Cold War Afghanistan, the Muslim response to the challenges of the West was overwhelmingly informed by pragmatism, self-reflection and conciliation. The true weapons of the dissemination of Islam have always been through culture, religion and philosophy, hence its ability to spread to places like Southeast Asia, China and West Africa. Even during periods of military conquest by Muslim kingdoms, one would be hard pressed to find examples where it was actually motivated by religion.

However, many radicals see the traditional response as a flawed approach, and in espousing of violent insurrection reject the scholarship of tradition. In drifting away from Tauhid, the metaphysical Unity at the heart of Islam, they adopt the cosmology of the universe as Light and Dark, with the former’s imperative to conquer the latter. This Occidental archetype, this pursuer of victory against an Other, who if incapable of achieving this goal settles for the glorious and spectacular end, is an impossible role model if one follows the religion of a God who is the master of history, who sends the rain on good and evil alike.

How terribly modern the terrorist is! They justify the targeting of civilians as religiously-sanctioned, but how ironic is it that the self-styled warriors of God base their philosophy on secular modernism. From the bombing of German cities by the RAF to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such violence is typical of the utilitarian Enlightenment ethic. For the religious, morality can never be subjected to the whims of convenience. On the contrary, the harder it is to follow, the more crucial it becomes. Within this attitude war is no longer an activity of defence, or a way to attain resources or power, but a veritable act of social engineering. This Utopianism, arising from the revolutionaries of France to be later passed down to innumerable inheritors, is obsessed with ideas of progress. That humanity can somehow be made better, and the fundamental evils and injustices wiped out through external action – armed conflict being an effective and legitimate way of achieving this. The ‘Greater Good’ conquers all.

Similarly, the fashion of the suicide attack is Islamically baseless in spite of its perceived normativity. Even the Hashashin preferred to be struck down by the bodyguards of their victims or be dragged off for torture than turn their blades upon themselves. If Christians would forgive me for the use of this polemic device; in the Quran there is no Samson. Jonah does not ask to be chucked overboard and Job does not pray for death. Though Islamic history and literature is replete with martyrs, one would be hard-pressed to find any who actively sought after martyrdom. There is neither Achilles nor Ajax, nor any of those who threw themselves at the Roman authorities begging for death, glorifying it for its own sake. Suicide bombing itself was pioneered by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group which carried out the most number of these attacks up to the Iraq invasion, and passed on this technique to groups in the Middle East which were also of Marxist persuasion.

The insurrectionist and revolutionary mentality of the philosophers of Islamism, is symptomatic of a Westphalian conception of statehood with no basis in religion. ‘Muslim’ no longer becomes a descriptor of one’s metaphysical world view, but the name of a member of a certain political party, and jihad is the token revolutionary struggle through which supremacy is established. The Islamist attempts to establish a state where, in contrast to the traditional proliferation of self-regulatory bodies and separation between the ulema and the political leadership, he mimics the ideological totalitarianism of the modern centralised entity. In such a state, political dissidence is identical to blasphemy and people fear the government rather than God. In these “Islamic” societies morality is relegated to the law courts and individual conscience is negated. Virtue thus becomes superfluous and Paradise is accessed through obedience rather than effort or devotion.

From the Jacobins to the Marxists to the neoconservatives, modern philosophy gave rise to the view, found nowhere within Islam, that a new world may be brought about through the use of systemic violence. It is one of the great ironies of our times how the Islamists have internalized the essence of the very things they profess to hate.