The Silent Theology of Islamic Art

On December 17, 2017, Oludamini Ogunnaike gave a talk at Zaytuna College inspired by this article. A panel discussion with calligrapher Elinor Aishah Holland and designer Ian Whiteman followed his talk; the discussion can be found on the Videos page.

Left to its own devices, reason can deduce that God must be above and distinct from everything we perceive, but it is unable to perceive the presence of the divine in phenomena (except in an abstract causative sense) or state anything positive about the nature of God. It is only through poetic prophetic revelations and reports, and through using the imaginal faculty to contemplate God’s signs, that we can understand and perceive the positive attributes of the divine. If God were simply the Necessary Being (al-wājib al-wujūd) or the first cause of the proofs of theology or philosophy, people wouldn’t love Him any more than they love the Big Bang.

In other words, religious forms must always contain truth and presence: without presence, their truth becomes abstract and uninspiring, like a half-remembered fact from middle school geography, while without truth, their presence becomes vapid and meaningless.⁸ The twofold miracle of the Islamic arts is that they make the divine truth and the truths of its revelation present and tangible to us, while imbuing our tangible surroundings with the beauty of divine truth. In a certain sense, jalāl (divine majesty and rigor) corresponds to the pole of truth, while jamāl (divine beauty) corresponds to that of presence. Neither can exist without the other, but it is the pole of beauty and presence that inspires love, that force which moves everything in the cosmos, including our souls, both from and back toward their divine origin and end.⁹

Love, Beauty, and Islamic Art

In the Qur’an, the Islamic tradition in general, and our everyday experience, beauty (whether iĥsān or jamāl) is always connected to love, and love to beauty. “God is beautiful, and He loves beauty” the hadith says, and the Qur’an repeatedly says, “God loves the beautiful-doers (muĥsinīn)” (2:195, 3:134, 3:148, 5:13, 5:93). Islamic thinkers, as different as al-Ghazālī and Ibn Sīnā, even defined love as an inclination or attachment to what is pleasing, perfect, and/or beautiful.¹⁰

Religious art, meanwhile, includes items of religious significance or those used for religious purposes. Not all religious art is Islamic art, while much of Islamic art is religious art—even if not obviously so. Syrian wood inlay cabinets and tables may be used to hold alcohol, but their geometric patterns portray some of the loftiest realities of Islamic metaphysics and cosmology. Posters of Mecca and Medina or mass-produced prayer carpets emblazoned with the Kaaba are religious art but not Islamic art, despite the sacred architecture of the sites they depict. The recitation of the Qur’an in traditional maqāms and even the singing of inspired poetry in these modes and rhythms are both Islamic and religious art, whereas “Islamic” parodies of Justin Bieber songs and the popular auto-tuned, acapella qaśīdahs in four-part harmony may be religious, but Islamic or sacred they certainly are not. 

While difficult to define in concrete, formal terms, Islamic art is recognized easily, especially by those familiar with other dimensions of the Islamic tradition. Whether visual or sonoral, the Islamic arts project unity (tawĥīd), which manifests as symmetry, harmony, and rhythm—the imprint of unity on multiplicity. The Islamic arts do not mimic or imitate the outward forms of things but present their inner, archetypal realities, hence the emphasis on number (geometry) and letters (calligraphy), which are the basic building blocks of space/time and language. In traditional calligraphy, geometric ratios govern even the shapes and sizes of the letters, which gives the lettering art its remarkable harmony.

The Islamic arts also all bear the imprint of the Qur’an in terms of its meanings (ma¢ānī) and structures (mabānī). Like many sacred texts, many of the surahs and verses of the Qur’an have a chiastic, or ring, structure. That is, the final section mirrors the first, the penultimate section mirrors the second, and so on, until the center, which contains the main theme or message. This symmetric, polycentric structure of overlapping patterns is clearly reflected in the geometric patterns of illumination that adorn Qur’anic manuscripts; the tessellations that adorn the mosques, madrasas, and homes where its verses are chanted; and even the structure of the musical maqāms in which it is recited.

Islamic art is founded on the interconnected sacred sciences of mathematics, geometry, music, and cosmology, not so different from the medieval Christian notion of ars since scientia nihil est (art without science is nothing). All of these sciences connect the multiplicity of creation to the unity of the Creator and engage the qualitative, symbolic aspects of multiplicity as well as its quantitative dimensions. Aristotle divided philosophy into three parts: physics, mathematics, and theology (ilāhiyyāt). Physics addresses the natural or material world, and theology the divine, while mathematics (and the associated sciences of geometry and music, which are numbers in space and time, in the visual and sonoral domains, respectively) deals with the intermediate, archetypal, imaginal realm—the barzakh, between the divine and the terrestrial. These sciences of the intermediate realm allow the Islamic arts to serve as a ladder from the terrestrial to the celestial, from the sensory to the spiritual. They also have their foundation in Islamic metaphysics and spirituality, which give the artists direct access to the spiritual realities and truths represented in their art.

Plato describes beauty as the splendor of the true; the inability to discern between beauty and ugliness, therefore, corresponds to and accompanies the inability to discern between the true and the false (al-bāţil). Harmonious and geometric, true beauty is timeless and reflects the beauty of the unseen, leading to tranquility and the remembrance of God. False beauty, like ugliness, is fleeting, discordant, and unbalanced, reflecting the chaos and multiplicity of the lower world and the lower levels of the human psyche, which leads to imbalance, dispersion, and heedlessness (ghaflah). It brings out the opaque aspect of creation that hides or veils the divine, whereas true beauty brings out the transparent or reflective aspect of things that makes them legible as signs of God.

The Two Streams of Islamic Art

Beauty is found in two things: in a verse, and in a tent of skin.
– Emir ¢Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’irī

While the Islamic arts are many and diverse, they can be roughly categorized into two domains: adab and ambience—that is, the arts of language and those that create the environment in which people live (such as dress, architecture, urban design, and perfume). In precolonial times, both of these domains were nearly ubiquitous; they were part of the education of not only Islamic scholars but all Muslims. Virtually all scholars studied, quoted, and wrote poetry. Many were masters of geometry; some were architects; while others, such as al-Fārābī and Amīr Khusrow, were master musicians. Even those scholars who were not accomplished artists were nurtured by the arts of adab, which they studied, and the arts of ambience that marked the institutions of their education. Some of the finest masterpieces of Islamic architecture are madrasas, such as the Bou Inania of Fes and Ulugh Beg in Samarqand, because it was understood that architecture can support and nourish the soul, kindle the intellect, and nurture all the other Islamic sciences. Moreover, the arts of adab and ambience were not limited to mosques, madrasas, and palaces but determined the structure and form of the cities and homes in which Muslims lived, not to mention the utensils and tools they used; the clothes they wore; and the melodies, poetry, and idioms that filled their hearts and flowed from their tongues. As Ananda Coomaraswamy notes, in traditional societies, “the artist was not a special kind of man, but every man a special kind of artist.”

"Adab" is a word that is notoriously difficult to translate into English. Meaning at once “custom, culture, etiquette, morals, courtesy, decorum, and civilized comportment, as well as literature,” to have adab is to be well-read and educated, to have good manners, to be cultured or refined, and to have the wisdom to give everything and everyone their due rights. The literature of adab is so named because it is designed to cultivate adab in its readers. Studying Islamic literature in the traditional fashion shapes and refines one’s soul, intelligence, behavior, and speech according to the prophetic norm of elegance and eloquence.

The Prophet’s wife ¢Ā’ishah called the Prophet ﷺ “the Qur’an walking on earth,” and the arts of adab nurture the creation of such character. Virtually all works of Islamic literature are, in one way or another, commentaries on the Qur’an. Even the profane poetry of Abū Nuwās or al-Mutanabbī bears the imprint of the revelation in its language, images, idioms, and rhythms. The sophisticated belles-lettres of al-Jāĥiż, al-Ĥarīrī, Niżāmī, and Sa¢dī sharpen not only the linguistic but also the intellectual and moral faculties of their readers. The philosophical allegories of the Brethren of Purity, Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, and Ibn Ţufayl draw on Qur’anic narratives and concepts, while integrating and inspiring the imagination and the intellect.

The influence of the Qur’an is even more evident in the more sacred works of adab, such as Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Mathnawī; ¢Aţţār’s Manţiq al-ţayr; Ibn ¢Aţā’ Allāh’s Ĥikam; and the poetry of al-Būśīrī, Hafez, Ibn al-Fāriđ, Yūnus Emre, Amīr Khusrow, Ĥamzah Fansūrī, Shaykh Aĥmadu Bambā, Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse, and many others whose meanings, structures, styles, and even sounds closely mirror those of the Qur’an.¹³ These works of adab are like lagoons that open onto the ocean of the Qur’an, which in turn opens onto the divine reality. Works of adab bring us closer to the Qur’an and bring the Qur’an closer to us: they train us to read and interpret verses that have multiple levels of meaning, to read verses and stories from multiple perspectives, and to dive into their depths for pearls of meaning; they teach us how to read and live the Qur’an and Sunnah. In short, they cultivate adab.

Throughout Islamic history, most Muslims learned metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics through these poems and works of literature. To paraphrase a South Asian Muslim nawab’s lament: “We lost our culture and the living reality of our religion when we stopped studying the Gulestān of Sa¢dī.” Our grandmothers and grandfathers and the former generations of Muslims learned how to realize, live, and put into practice the Qur’an and Sunnah, in large part, through the poems and works of the literature they memorized and studied, even if they could not read or write. The words of the eighth-century (second-century hijrī) scholar and muĥaddith Ibn al-Mubārak seem even more true today: “We are more in need of acquiring adab (courtesy) than of learning hadith.” 

The traditional madrasa combines the learning of adab with the beautiful arts of ambience. Whether in the elaborate and ornate tessellation of the Ben Youssef madrasa of Marrakesh or under the simple shade of a baobab tree in the Sahel, surrounded by God’s artwork of nature, Islamic learning traditionally takes place in a beautiful ambience. This is significant and intentional, as one’s surroundings have a profound impact on one’s thoughts. Contemplating the twin rosettes/stars on a Moroccan door helped me grasp the relationship between the divine essence and names, and their manifestations in the cosmos and the human soul, and it was while gazing at the tiles in the Bou Inania madrasa in Fes that I realized the meaning of the metaphor describing God as “a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

The most ubiquitous and important art that creates an Islamic ambience is the recitation of the Qur’an. This is the first and highest form of Islamic art, from which all others are derived. The precise art of tajwīd and the science of the maqāms, the musical modes in which the Qur’an is recited, bring out the beauty and geometry of the Qur’anic revelation as it was revealed to the Prophet ﷺ. In reciting the Qur’an, we participate in the divine act of revelation and the prophetic act of reception, both of which have a profoundly transformative effect on our souls. The sound of Qur’anic recitation is an integral part of the soundscape of any Islamic city or town and is nearly always arrestingly beautiful. This is significant because in traditional Islamic civilization, truth (of which the Qur’an is the highest example) is always accompanied by beauty. In fact, beauty is a criterion of the authentically Islamic. There is nothing Islamic that is not beautiful. This axiom governs every other traditional art of ambience, such as calligraphy; architecture and geometric design; music; and even dress, food, and perfume. As music plays such a prominent role in contemporary Western culture, it is important to examine music as an Islamic art more closely.

Many who know little about music or Islam confidently proclaim that “there is no such thing as Islamic music” due to the lack of consensus about the status of music in Islamic law. First, it is important to distinguish the English term music from the Arabic mūsīqā. Although both are derived from the same Greek word meaning “the art of the muses,” they have slightly different meanings and connotations. Whereas a native English speaker would classify the religious chanting of poetry, prayers, the adhān, or the Qur’an as music or musical, these arts would not be considered mūsīqā, which has the connotation of involving instruments and being non-religious. Similarly, the instrumental and vocal music (in the English sense) that accompanies some Sufi ceremonies is seldom considered mūsīqā; rather, it is called samā¢ (audition) or dhikr (remembrance).

Nevertheless, instrumental music, whether mūsīqā or samā¢, remains controversial in the Islamic legal traditions precisely because of its tremendous power to elevate or debase the soul. Simply compare the behavior of an audience at a heavy metal concert with that at a concert of Andalusian music. When criminals or soldiers pump themselves up to commit acts of violence, they seldom listen to the Indian classical music of Ali Akbar Khan. Traditional Islamic music has a remarkable power to induce states of remembrance, peace, contentment, joy, courage, harmony, balance, and most especially love and longing for the divine. The Islamic philosophers developed elaborate musical theories based on the principles of Pythagorean harmony to explain and refine preexisting folk traditions of music. Court musicians produced a refined and refining art that served as the acoustic equivalent and accompaniment of adab, while the Sufi orders developed powerful traditions of spiritual music capable of transporting the soul into the divine presence. Although Islamic music differs widely from culture to culture, it has certain common features related to its Islamic cosmology and emphasis on tawĥīd. It typically has a regular rhythm (rhythm is the imprint of oneness across time), often increasing in pace toward the end of the song or concert, before dropping off into silence (which mirrors the acceleration of time as the final hour approaches); it often includes śalawāt or Qur’anic recitation; and it is characterized by a unity of melodic voices, eschewing the complex harmonies and multiple voices that characterize the best of Western music (e.g., Bach), due to its emphasis on tawĥīd. For the skilled musician in an Islamic tradition, playing music is like praying with one’s instrument, and for the prepared listener, it is like listening to the wordless praise of the angels and the cosmos. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes, “Islamic civilization has not preserved and developed several great musical traditions in spite of Islam, but because of it.”¹⁴

It is important to note that music and other traditional Islamic arts not only belong to the past but are contemporary living traditions. All of these art forms are dynamic: they continually change, adapt, and create new possibilities, all without departing from the fundamental principles of their particular form, the very principles that make them Islamic. These same principles can be applied to new art forms, such as web and graphic design, photography, and cinematography. The cinematic arts are primarily derived from the theater, which was never a major Islamic art, as it was in the ancient Greek, Christian, and Hindu civilizations. In fact, Greek works of drama and theater were just about the only works Muslims did not translate into Arabic, perhaps because the Islamic revelation is based more on a presentation of “the way things are” and not on the heroic sacrifice of a God-man (Christianity) or on the myths about personified aspects of the divine (ancient Greek and Hindu traditions) that are repeated in liturgy and passion plays. The relatively non-mythological character of the Islamic tradition, and its emphasis on the unity and omnipotence of the divine, precluded dramatic tension within the divine or between human heroes and the divine. However, Persian Shi¢ism developed the drama of ta¢ziyeh depicting the events of the battle of Karbala, and while not a central sacred art, it was nevertheless an important Islamic religious art form. This is probably not unrelated to the fact that Iran has the most developed cinematic tradition of any Muslim country. Although some of Majid Majidi’s films come close, I believe a truly Islamic cinematic art has yet to develop. Islamic cinema is not just movies about Islam or Muslims, or cinema made by Muslims, but the very philosophy and techniques of the art must be rooted in the Islamic perspective, much as Bresson’s work is rooted in Catholicism, Terrence Malik’s work is rooted in a Heideggerian philosophy, and Tarkovsky’s work is rooted in his own unique metaphysical vision influenced by Russian Orthodox Christianity.¹⁵

All of the Islamic arts exist to support the supreme art: the purification of the soul, the cultivation of character, and the remembrance of God. “I was sent only to perfect the beauty of character,” the Prophet ﷺ said. There is no question of “art for art’s sake” in the Islamic arts because all of them have practical, psychological, and spiritual functions. The Islamic arts are not a luxury; rather, they serve as essential supports for that art which is the raison d’être of Islamic law, theology, and indeed the entire Islamic tradition—the realization of the full potential of the human state (and thus the entire cosmos, through humanity’s role as khalīfah) through the remembrance of God. The neglect of the Islamic arts has severely crippled the ummah’s ability to pursue this highest art, both individually and collectively.

Can Art Heal Our Souls? 

Know, O brother ... that the study of sensible geometry leads to skill in all the practical arts, while the study of intelligible geometry leads to skill in the intellectual arts because this science is one of the gates through which we move to knowledge of essence of the soul, and that is the root of all knowledge.¹⁶
– Ikhwān al-Śafā

Beauty will save the world.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky