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.