Let the beauty we love be what we do, there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Posted by ADP on Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Let the beauty we love be what we do, there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Thus Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Persian
poet, who has been the object of popular veneration and, overriding
sectarian, ideological and national divisions, a long lasting source of
inspiration for Muslims around the world. With his knowledge of the
inner spiritual recesses of Islam and skillful use of language, he is
unsurpassed even among the most select company of Muslim mystics. In
the West, the cult of Rumi has paralleled a rising torrent of
Islamophobia, indication that the celebration of the great Sufi master
may have little if anything to do with the intricacies of his message.
Dyed-in-the-wool secularists are wont to drop the
second part of the verse quoted above due to its obvious invocation of
religious worship. Rumi had foreseen the dangers of his poetry
beguiling listeners and, in the process, obscuring both its source of
inspiration and substantive thrust. As he put it in his inimitable way,
he composed poetry—a form he claimed not to care much for—only to
amuse his friends. Rumi was also insistent that his work be read in the
context of Islamic revelation and religious practice: “I am the
servant of the Quran as long as I have life/I am the dust on the path
of Muhammad, the Chosen One/If anyone quotes any-thing except this from
my sayings/I am repelled by him and outraged by these words.”
With these words of warning from the poet
himself, it is worth probing the meaning of the verse quoted at the
outset. On the face of it, what Rumi is saying is that one must seek
beauty in everything one does. But on closer reflection, it becomes
clear that he is conveying this simple truth in light of the Islamic
idea of beauty, a conception that pertains to the entire gamut of what
constitutes the good and ethical life expected of a Muslim.
The beauty that the true believer seeks in the
everyday is seen to flow directly from Allah, whose main attributes
include beauty and majesty. Everything else is palpably false, a mere
illusion. Muslim poets through the ages have celebrated the wonders of
the Creator, the most perfect, the incomparable, and the ultimate
beloved. Rumi is among the most exquisite practitioners of this art.
Rumi asserts that the true believer sees the face of Allah everywhere
and that his every act is akin to prostrating on the prayer mat.
These are not the thoughts of a surly theologian wedded to the strictures of ritualistic prayer. In the Masnavi,
Rumi makes it plain that formal prayers are of no consequence compared
to the intention and spirit with which they are performed. He relates
the parable of Muawiyah, the first Umayyad caliph, who was woken up one
day by Satan so that he could say his prayers. Muawiyah refused to
accept that the devil had done this because of his continued devotion
to God. Upon being prodded, Satan eventually confessed that if Muawiyah
had overslept and missed the hour of prayer, the caliph would have
felt sorrow and heaved many sighs, each of which would be regarded by
God as equal to 200 prayers.
Rumi’s allusion to a believer’s nostalgic
yearning for the beauty in prayer, a performance that entails kneeling
and bowing the head in humble submission to God, has been echoed by
several other Muslim thinkers. Among them is the acclaimed theosophist
Ibn al-Arabi, who, incidentally upon meeting the 8-year-old Rumi, had
remarked: “What an extraordinary sight! A sea followed by an ocean.”
According to Arabi, the real measure of a Muslim’s faith lies in
feelings of guilt about transgressions committed knowingly. There can
be no sin unless one is aware of doing something that is either
prohibited or reprehensible. What alleviates the tension between a
religious ideal and its practice is knowledge of God’s mercy in
absolving a believer’s sins after an act of genuine repentance. By
expressing remorse about their lack of religiosity, Muslims seek to
reaffirm their faith in full knowledge of the exertions expected of a
believer in the quest for inner peace and external equilibrium.
The establishment of serenity and equilibrium is
an ideal underscored in the teachings of the Quran and the practice of
the Prophet. It is manifested variously in works of Muslim art and
architecture, and inextricably linked to the very meaning of Islam as
peace. As a learned connoisseur of Islamic art put it, “beauty is
inherent in Islam” because it flows from the unity and perfection of
God and finds outward expression in peaceful equilibrium or justice and
generosity or plenitude. A Muslim is literally one who
submits to the will of God by following the path of right conduct based
on the Quran and the example of the Prophet. Far from being a passive
and mindless activity, submission assumes dynamic effort and reasoned
self-control against those personal inclinations and social tendencies
that prevent a believer from heeding God’s commands, thereby destroying
any internal and external sense of balance and proportion.
In the Islamic worldview, an emphasis on
transcendental faith in a monotheistic God is balanced with an ethical
conception of temporal life. The premium placed on egalitarianism in the
Quran underlines the connection between monotheism and humanism (even
if not quite the humanism of the “secular” variety familiar to the
West). Moral equilibrium and balance are the building blocks of husn-i-ikhlaq, literally
ethical beauty, but closer to the notion of good conduct, which Abu
Hamid al-Ghazali said is the key to happiness. Striving for beauty in
Islam requires doing what is just and generous, namely to put things in
their proper place. It is not simply a matter of striking the right
balance between the individual and the collective or the rulers and the
ruled, but an individual effort to live an ethical life informed by
knowledge of what is right and appropriate in any given situation.
The Islamic meaning of religion is best explained by invoking the three-dimensional spatial metaphor of Islam as submission related to external acts, iman or faith pertaining to the believer’s inner thoughts, and ihsan
or virtuous intentions aimed at doing what is good and beneficial both
for the individual and the community. In the hierarchy of importance
spelled out by the Quran, faith in the one and only God together with
the principle of the unity of creation precedes submission. Virtuous
intentions expand and deepen faith so that it becomes a lived certitude,
thereby ensuring that submission, instead of being restricted to
specific rituals and attitudes, touches upon every aspect of a
believer’s life.
If this triad of submission, faith and virtuous
intentions is constitutive of Islam, its moving principle is the notion
of jihad as a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle. Jihad
presupposes conviction in the principle of unitary faith. To isolate
jihad from faith or virtuous intentions, as I have argued more fully in
Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, is to lose sight of
the high ethical standards that distinguish mere mortals from human
beings, reducing the sacred to the profane, the transcendental to the
plainly temporal.
What does this have to do with the idea of beauty
in Islam? Ethics are intrinsic to the Muslim conception of earthly
beauty as a direct manifestation of God who is both different and yet
identical to created beings. According to Sufi wisdom, God was a
treasure waiting to be known, which is why He created the world. God’s
transcendence and incomparability in Muslim thought is invoked by the
idea of His majesty and wrath while His immanence and likeness to
created beings is represented by His beauty and infinite kindness. This
is best explained in the Quran’s Surah Nur where God is described as
the light of the heavens and the earth that guides creation. This
profound verse establishes the link between God and His creation
without simplistically equating the two.
It is no small coincidence that ihsan, literally good deeds but also implying perfection and excellence, comes from husn, meaning beauty. Whereas a Muslim is one who submits to Allah and need not be someone with faith (momin), the person who performs virtuous actions is called a mohsin.
A believer’s inclination to do good and beautiful things stems from
the certitude that Allah, though invisible to the human eye, sees all
and bestows mercy upon those who practice ihsan toward their
fellow beings, respecting and honoring them because they are part of
divine creation. The act of doing something beautiful must necessarily
be rooted in virtue and inner beauty. All human activity therefore is
art insofar as it gives expression to inner beauty and is carried out
in remembrance of God. This is what enlivens the Islamic concept of
creating beauty through works of art and has been seized upon by a
succession of Muslim poets to awaken the faithful to the imperative of
compassion for God’s creation as well as the rewards for good and
ethically sound behavior.
While Muslim poets have constructed beautiful
verses in all ages, poetry like other forms of Islamic art has rarely
been an end in itself. From the Islamic perspective, human beings can
never equal the art of God. Muslim artists do not in theory seek to
imitate God’s creation, which would be presumptuous and arrogant in the
extreme. They do not add something alien to an object, but rather seek
to bring out its essential beauty, whether it is a piece of metal,
wood, glass, or a jumble of words. Since reality cannot be expressed in
purely human words. Persian poets and, following them, generations of
Urdu poets have developed elaborate poetic metaphors to say what cannot
be conveyed in everyday language.
In the winged words of Shamsuddin Muhammad Hafiz,
the 14th century Shiraz-based poet, even the most ordinary experiences
of life are precious gifts from God: “Art offers an opening for the
heart/True art makes the divine silence in the soul/Break into
applause.” Muslim poets, like the rest of creation, see their primary
task as one of unceasing praise for the Creator. And they do so in the
main by spurring the faithful into God’s presence by inculcating in
them the high ethical standards expected of true believers.
What differentiates the poet, concerned more
often than not with matters of the heart and conscience, from the imam
who gives Friday sermons? It is no exaggeration to say that most prayer
leaders in mosques around the world rely on the power of fear to
induce what they consider correct behavior. If the God of the orthodox
preachers is distant and aloof from believers, the mystics have
presented Him as being closer to them than their jugular. In the very
first verse of his Masnavi, Rumi likens a believer’s heart to a
reed-flute that strikes sweet musical notes with the breath of God. If
Rumi is the best-selling poet in the world today, Hafiz is a close
second: “Hafiz encourages all art/For at its height it brings Light near
to us/The wise man learns what draws God near/It is the beauty of
compassion in your heart.”
In South Asia, where Indo-Persian cultural fusion
became marked after the 13th century, poets emulated the likes of Rumi
even while establishing their own distinctiveness by composing ghazals
in Urdu instead of Farsi. Among them was Mir Taqi Mir, who lived in
north India during the 18th century. “All beauty on earth flows from
the light of His effulgence/His divine spark too is what sets the sun
alight,” he wrote. If it had not been written in Urdu, the thought in
the couplet could just as well have been that of Rumi or Hafiz. In fact
the rest of the work is Mir’s spin on the famous story by Rumi in
which a devotee knocks on the door of the beloved friend, only to be
turned away when he says “I” on being asked who he was. He is told to
leave as there is no place in the house for the “raw.” Since separation
alone can cook what is raw, the disappointed devotee goes away for a
year during which he burns with yearning for the beloved. Suitably
cooked and burnt, he returns to the friend’s door and when asked who he
is replies, “You, dear, you” upon which he is invited in as
there is room for only one in the house. Assuming the role of the
shunned devotee, Mir followed his acknowledgement of God’s omnipresence
with the verses: “Only by knowing myself could I find God/Now I know
just how far I was from the truth ... The beauty envied by the
celestial nymphs Mir, resides within/If we cannot comprehend this
truth, the fault lies with us alone.”
Contrasting God’s beauteous perfection with man’s
miserable imperfections is a closely related strand in the ethical
weave of Muslim poetry. Take the ineffable Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib.
Like his predecessor Mir, Ghalib lived in an age of political, social
and economic upheaval, a time of great new ideas and general
uncertainty. The empire of the Mughals was a shadow of its former self
and Britain’s East India Company was gaining ascendancy in ever larger
parts of India. Ghalib witnessed the 1857 rebellion and its brutal
suppression by the English, particularly in his beloved Delhi. This
bitter, painful experience left a lingering impact on his literary
corpus. An acute observer of everyday life but steeped in the Muslim
mystical tradition, his poetry is inspirational and imaginative. In a
verse reminiscent of Rumi, Ghalib notes that beauty is everywhere for
us to see, but we do not have the courage to behold the glory of its
sight. His moods shift from invocations of beauty to the playful and
then to the sheer hopelessness of life: “‘Do good and you shall be
blessed’/That is all the dervish has to say?/I sacrifice my life for
you [Oh, God]/What else is prayer, I don’t know/It’s a trivial thing, I
agree Ghalib/What’s the harm if it can be had for free.”
All too aware of the virtues of prayer and
devotion, Ghalib confesses to being temperamentally incapable of
ritualistic religion based on social closures. He claimed not to belong
to any specific religion or community because, as a believer in the
unity of God, he had abandoned cultural rituals. With no rituals to
separate them, true faith can be established with all communities
finding equipoise through their shared belief in the unity of God. He
writes openly of his love of wine despite it being proscribed for
Muslims. Apparently defiant before God, but in an actually expiatory
spirit, Ghalib exclaims: “There is a limit to the severity of
punishment/After all, I am a sinner and not an infidel.”
Following Ghalib’s footsteps, a succession of
Muslim poets in India have given expression to their religious identity
and sense of good ethics without losing sight of their humanity.
Ghalib’s student Altaf Hussain Hali severely chastised Indian Muslims
in his Musadas-i-Hali for their intellectual laziness, cultural
depravity, double standards, and loss of ethical equilibrium:
If the stranger worships idols, he’s an
infidel/If he believes in the son of God, he’s an infidel/If he calls
fire his god, he’s an infidel/If he attaches miracles to the sun, he’s
an infidel/But for believers the ways are expansive/They may happily
worship whom they like/Turn the Prophet into God if they wish/Give
imams a status higher than the Prophet/Visit shrines to offer gifts day
and night/Or pray to martyrs if they so want/Neither the unity of
creation is impaired/Nor is Islam distorted, nor does faith take leave.
The use of poetry to instill in Muslims the
desire to wage a struggle for ethical beauty was taken to new heights
by the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. He lamented that Muslims
had lost all passion for life and, rudderless, were utterly lost:
“Their prayers are aberrant, distracted and unfelt/For they lack the
inner fire of a burning faith.”
Iqbal’s philosophy of khudi—the self or
personality—was designed to stir his benighted coreligionists to
purposeful action in keeping with the dynamic message of Islam:
“Prevail over the world with the power of selfhood/And solve the riddle
of the universe.” Iqbal realized that mankind as a whole, and not just
Muslims, lacked the vision to fully comprehend the power they possess
as lords of the world: “He neither knows himself, nor God, or the
world/Is this, O Lord, your greatest creation?” The real cause of
Iqbal’s angst, however, was that Muslims, who ought to know better, had
lost the vigor to strive in the way of Allah. Muslims had diligently
preserved the rituals of prayers, fasting, sacrifice, and pilgrimage,
but there was no God in any of them anymore.
“One of the saddest signs of the dissolution of
Islamic norms” has been “the loss of a sense of beauty” from everyday
life. This comment by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, two
leading scholars of Islam in the contemporary world, would be heartily
endorsed by any one of the poets mentioned earlier. Like Rumi, Hafiz,
Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib, Hali and Iqbal, who were immersed in the Islamic
mystical tradition in addition to knowing their Quran, sunnah and hadith,
Murata and Chittick are acutely aware of the inextricable link between
beauty and Islamic ethics. They note with considerable unease that in
many Muslim cities, once renowned for their traditional crafts, “people
think nothing of tossing exquisitely hand-wrought copper and wooden
utensils into the garbage to replace them by gaudy plastic goods.”
In bemoaning the “plasticizing” of Muslim
societies, Murata and Chittick are pointing their finger at a bigger
and far more serious problem. They are raising the red flag on what
they correctly see as the brazen distortion of the inner beauty of
Islam in modern times that has resulted from the virtual eclipse of the
idea of God’s likeness in the world with its attendant concepts of
kindness and mercy. In their eagerness to promote specific political
agendas, the ideologues of modern day Islam lay emphasis on divine
transcendence and, in contravention of tradition, make much of God’s
wrath and anger to justify waging war on those they regard as infidels.
This is because “rationalism is easy to harmonize with love for
science and technology,” while “a stressing of imagination [and] beauty
... brings forward issues of human nature that few people feel
comfortable with in the modern world.” Modern media thrives on the
clatter and dissonance created by cries of so-called holy war; Islam as
peace, harmony, and equilibrium just does not make headline news.
The routinization of suicide bombings by Muslims
targeting fellow Muslims and non-Muslims alike is the most horrific
example in our times of the destruction of the human form and spirit
that is God’s greatest creation. The ugliness of the mayhem of these
murderous, almost daily attacks represents the ultimate undermining of
Islamic ethics. This is what lends special urgency to the task of
recovering the inherent link between ethics and beauty in Islam.
Striving for beauty is an endeavor to attain the
perfection that God bestows on all creation. Not to give outward
expression to the beauty within is to be in a state of oblivion, a
sheer waste of a life that can only be lived once. Iqbal conveyed this
forcefully in his Persian work Javidnama, the pilgrimage to
eternity. A metaphorical escapade patterned on the Prophet’s ascent to
heaven, it depicts the poet, guided by none other than Rumi, having
discussions with important historical personalities at seven levels of
space until he is finally in the presence of God from whom he hears the
secrets of life firsthand:
To be is to partake of the beauty of God’s
essence/Creating? It is to search for a beloved, to display one’s self
to another being/All these tumultuous riots of being/without our beauty
could not come to exist/Life is both transient and everlasting/all
this is creativity and vehement desire/Are you alive? Be vehement, be
creative/like Us, embrace all horizons/break whatsoever is
uncongenial/out of your heart’s heart produce a new world—/it is
irksome to the free servitor/to live in a world belonging to
others/Whoever possesses not the power to create/in Our sight is naught
but an infidel, a heathen/such a one has not taken his share of Our
Beauty/has not tasted the fruit of the Tree of Life/Man of God, be
trenchant as a sword/be yourself your own world’s destiny!
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Notes