Voices of Islam (182 page)

A common characteristic of the authors in this volume is that they are all products of hybridity and express the tradition of vernacular cosmopolitan- ism in a modern Islamic context. Martin Lings, as noted above, was an En- glish convert to Islam who lived in Egypt for many years. In this, he is

Introduction
xxvii

similar to Emma C. Clark, who spent time in Iran and now teaches at the Prince of Wales’ School of Traditional Arts. Frithjof Schuon was an Alsatian, from the border between France and Germany, who lived in Switzerland and the United States and embraced Islam in colonial Algeria. Titus Burckhardt, his longtime friend and collaborator, was German-Swiss and was related to the famous Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burckhardt. Jean-Louis Michon is French-Swiss and lived for many years in Morocco. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s family is from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; he was born in En- gland, grew up in France and Singapore, and teaches at Cornell University in upstate New York. Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore has homes in Louisville, Kentucky and Cairo, Egypt. Laleh Bakhtiar, who is of Iranian descent, is a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist who, despite her nontraditional training, writes about traditional Islamic medicine and healing.

In addition, some of the best-known authors in this volume, such as Schuon, Burckhardt, and Lings, are representatives of the so-called Tradi- tionalist school. Writers of the Traditionalist school have been criticized by some modernist and historicist scholars of Islam for maintaining an idealized notion of tradition, for supporting conservative and antimodernist political and cultural positions, and for adhering to a perennial philosophy that is based largely on Neo-Platonism. Certainly, when Schuon writes, in the lead chapter of this volume, ‘‘Islamic art is contemplative, whereas Gothic art is volitional,’’ and that Renaissance art is ‘‘worldly, hypocritical, sensual, and ostentatious,’’ he is expressing an opinion formed from a particular view of religious expression. However, it is also an opinion derived from a deep com- parative knowledge of religious art and from a spiritually profound under- standing of
tawhid,
the Islamic theological concept of divine unity. For Schuon, Islamic art is the crystalline unfolding of
tawhid
in countless facets of expression, each reflecting a different perspective of the same divine light. It is crucial to remember that Schuon and his collaborators do not read Islam through Europe; rather, they read Europe through Islam. In doing so, they are not less Islamically authentic than the philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna,

d. 1037
CE
), whose perennial philosophy interpreted Plato and Aristotle (the ‘‘cutting-edge’’ theorists of his day) through the lens of
tawhid.

The hybridity that is represented in this volume of
Voices of Islam
should remind the reader that the community of Muslims—the
Umma Muslima
— is today as it always has been: a ‘‘community envisaged as a project—at once a vision and a construction.’’
21
At one point in its history, the construction project of Islamic culture was centered on the Arab world. At another point, it was centered on Iran and Central Asia. In another period, it drew inspira- tion from Turkey and South Asia. Today Islamic culture is fully global and has as much to do with Europe, America, and Southeast Asia as it does with its former cultural centers. The perspective that one obtains from each of these centers of Islamic culture is as valid as another is.

xxviii
Introduction

This being the case, the task of the creative interpreter of Islamic culture is not to erase the past or to impose an artificial homogeneity of cultural expres- sion. Rather, it is to engage, within one’s own intellectual or artistic medium, in the time-honored and fully legitimate process of Islamic interpretation as
ta’wil
—to ‘‘go back to the beginning’’ (
ta’awwala
) in order to take Islamic cultural expression beyond where it is at present. Particularly important is to open new horizons of art and creativity by reconnecting Muslims to the transcendent consciousness that created the miracle of Islam in the first place. In the words of Bhabha, a perspective on art and culture that is born of hybridity ‘‘does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic prec- edent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent, ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.’’
22
Such a perspec- tive is indeed ‘‘otherwise than modern,’’ but it should not be misconstrued as antimodern. Rather, it is what Bhabha terms
contra-modern.
It is born of modernity and contingent to modernity, but it is resistant to the oppressive homogenization of modernity and its tendency toward totalitarianism.

NOTES

1. Jacques Berque,
   Cultural Expression in Arab Society Today
   (Langages arabes du pre´ sent), trans. Robert W. Stookey (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1978), 197. This poem originally appeared in Nizar Qabbani’s 1968
   Diwan
   (Collection).
   

2. Ibid., 198.

1. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions,’’ in
   The Invention of Tradition,
   ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 4.
   

2. Fatima Mernissi,
   Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry,
   trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (reprint of Basil Blackwell original, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1991), 15. This work was published in the United States as
   The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam
   (Reading, Massa- chusetts: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1991).
   

3. Abdolkarim Soroush, ‘‘Life and Virtue: The Relationship Between Socioeco- nomic Development and Ethics,’’ in
   Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essen- tial Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush,
   ed. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43.
   

4. Seyyid Qutb,
   Milestones
   (Damascus: Dar al-‘Ilm), 109–110. See also, the Ara- bic edition of this work, Sayyid Qutb,
   Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq
   (Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 2000), 139.
   

7. Ibid., 136–137.

8. Khaled M. Abou El Fadl,
Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam

(New York and Oxford: University Press of America Inc., 2001), 114. 9. Ibid., 266–267.

Introduction
xxix

1. Berque,
   Cultural Expression,
   171.
   

2. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘‘Traditional Art as Fountain of Knowledge and Grace,’’ in Nasr,
   Knowledge and the Sacred
   (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 257.
   

3. Nasr, ‘‘What Is Tradition?’’ in Nasr,
   Knowledge and the Sacred,
   65.
   

4. For the full text on inspiration and creativity as
   khawatir,
   see Abu al-Qasim ‘Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri,
   al-Risala al-Qushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-tasawwuf,
   ed. Ma‘ruf Zurayq and ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Hamid Beltarji (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 1990), 83–85.
   

14. Ibid., 84.

1. See Abu al-Fadl Jamal al-Din ibn Manzur,
   Lisan al-‘Arab,
   vol. 8 (1883; repr., Beirut: Dar al-Sadir, n.d.), 6–8.
   

2. Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din, ‘‘The Spiritual Function of Civilization,’’ in
   The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism,
   ed. Jacob Needleman (London, Boston, and Henley: Arkana Publications, 1984), 104.
   

3. See Homi K. Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture
   (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
   

4. Benedict Anderson,
   Imagined Communities: Refl on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
   (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 133.
   

5. Bhabha, ‘‘Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition,’’
   The Location of Cul- ture,
   xvi–xvii.
   

6. Ibid., xv.
   

7. Ibid., 4.
   

22. Ibid., 10.

1
‌

I
SLAMIC
A
RT

•

Frithjof Schuon

The nonfi tive or abstract arts of Judaism and Islam must not be overlooked. The former art was revealed in the Torah and is exclusively sacerdotal. Islamic art is akin to Judaic art by its exclusion of human and animal representations. As to its origin, Islamic art issued from the sensory form of the revealed Book; that is, from the interlaced letters of the verses of the Qur’an, and also, paradoxical though this may seem, from the forbidding of images. This restriction in Islamic art, by eliminating certain creative possibilities, intensified others, the more so since it was accompanied by the express permission to represent plants; hence, the capital importance of arabesques, and of geometrical and botanical decorative motifs. Islamic architecture, the themes of which were inherited from neighboring civilizations, was transmuted by its own particular genius, which tended at the same time both to simplifi and to ornamentation. The purest expression of this genius is perhaps the art of the Maghrib (the Islamic West), in which no preexisting formalism invited concessions. In Islam, the love of beauty compensates for the tendency to austere simplicity. It lends elegant form to simplicity and partially clothes it in a profusion of precious and abstract lacework. ‘‘God is Beautiful,’’ said the Prophet, ‘‘and He loves beauty.’’

Islamic art allies the joyous profusion of vegetation with the pure and abstract severity of crystals. A prayer niche adorned with arabesques owes something to a garden and to snowflakes. This mixture of qualities is already to be met with in the Qur’an, where the geometry of the ideas is as it were hidden under the flamboyance of forms. Islam, being possessed by the idea of Unity (
tawhid
), if one may so put it, also has an aspect of the simplicity of the desert, of whiteness and of austerity, which, in its art, alternates with the crystalline joy of ornamentation. The cradle of the Arabs is a landscape of deserts and oases. Let us also mention the verbal theophany, which is the psalmodized recitation of the revealed texts,
1
calligraphy being its visual mode,
2
or again, in Islam, the canonical prayer, the majestic movement of

2
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

which expresses the sacred in a manner that from the point of view in question is not without relation to the
mudras
of India.

Christianity corresponds to a volitional decision between the here below and the hereafter. Islam, on the other hand, is a sapiential choice of the Truth, and in the light of this Truth, all must be known and evaluated. In metaphysical truth, there is neither here below nor hereafter. Everything is contained in it, and this can be seen in Islamic art. Everything natural to the human being finds its place in this truth. The world is seen in God and thus is given its meaning and spiritual efficacy.