Voices of Islam (181 page)

Put another way, one can say that in the perspective of the Qur’an, God is the Supreme Artist. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the noted Islamic scholar and commentator on Islamic art, has observed: ‘‘God is not only the Grand Architect or Geometer; He is also the Poet, the Painter, the Musician
...
Being ‘created in the image of God’ and therefore a supreme work of art, man is also an artist who, in imitating the creative powers of his Maker, real- izes his own theomorphic nature. The spiritual man, aware of his vocation, is not only the musician who plucks the lyre to create music. He is himself the lyre upon which the Divine Artist plays, creating the music which reverber- ates throughout the cosmos, for as Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi says, ‘We are

Introduction
xxiii

like the lyre which Thou pluckest.’’’
11
The lesson to be learned from Nasr’s statement is this: When the reader of the present volume approaches chapters on the arts of calligraphy, music, garden design, poetry, literature, and medi- cine, he or she should always remember that ultimately, in the perspective of Qur’anic Islam, it is God who is the Writer, Designer, Musician, Poet, and Healer. As vicegerents of God, human beings exercise creativity in imitation of the Divine Creativity that brought them and the world into being.

This is an important point to remember because much of the ugliness that has been perpetrated in the name of modern Islam is the unintentional result of a superficial and literalistic understanding of the Word of God. This is not to say, however, that one should not be careful in interpreting the divine dis- course. Pious caution has always been a legitimate and important part of tra- dition in world religions. Although the human being has been given the license to produce works of beauty after the fashion of the Maker, one must be careful not to assume that, like God, one can originate something out of nothing or create something completely without precedent. As Confucius said, ‘‘I do not create. I only tell of the past.’’
12
The challenge for the Muslim artist is how to create beauty out of words, sounds, colors, and materials without arrogating to oneself the role of ultimate Creator. Again, this prob- lem is not confined to Islam alone. In fact, it is as old as the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea and as universal as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.

The question of creativity and its limits has a long history in Islam. In the medieval Islamic world, creativity was seen as related to inspiration and was discussed with reference to the Arabic term,
khatir
(pl.
khawatir
). In his influential
Treatise on Sufism,
the famous Sufi and scholar Abu al-Qasim al- Qushayri of Nishapur (d. 1074
CE
) defines
khawatir
as ‘‘addresses that arise in the conscious mind’’ (
khitabat taridu ‘ala al-dama’ir
). In other words, for Qushayri, inspirations are like voices inside the head, which may come from self-subsisting knowledge (
min ilqa’ malakin
), from Satan (
al- Shaytan
), from the mind or ego-self (
al-nafs
), or from an encounter with God as the Truth (
al-Haqq
).
13
If inspirations come from self-subsisting knowledge, they are ‘‘ideas’’ (
ilham
); if they come from the mind or ego- self, they are ‘‘notions’’ (
hawajis
); if they come from Satan, they are ‘‘sugges- tions’’ (
wasawis
); if they come from God, they are ‘‘true intimations’’ or ‘‘true inspirations’’ (
khatir haqqin
). The truth of a new idea is proved or dis- proved by its correspondence to something already known or by testing it in the outer world. By contrast, notions of the ego-self are characterized by their drive to gratify the senses or enhance pride in the self. Satanic sugges- tions can be recognized because they lead to disobedience of God. However, a true inspiration from God is known because it always leads to success and has no harmful effects on the soul. The problem with creativity is that when it is associated with the mental processes that produce ideas and notions, it can be affected by outside factors, such as the appetites. In such a case, it might be that one cannot distinguish an inspired idea from a Satanic

xxiv
Introduction

suggestion. Furthermore, says Qushayri, all of the Sufi masters agree that ‘‘the ego-self never tells the truth, but the heart never lies.’’
14
Thus, from the point of view of Sufi psychology, the modern concept of creativity, which stresses the originality of the individual, self-governed imagination, must always be suspected because the ego-self never tells the truth.

Today, when modern Arabic speakers talk about creativity, they use the term
ibda‘.
This term is not used by Qushayri in his discussion of creativity, which suggests that the current use of the term
ibda‘
for ‘‘creativity’’ may be a modern innovation. Etymologically,
ibda‘
is related to
al-Badi‘,
‘‘the Originator,’’ which is one of the Names of God in the Qur’an. It is also related to the word
bid‘a,
‘‘innovation,’’ which has often been understood negatively in Islam. The medieval Arabic dictionary
Lisan al-‘Arab
(The Lan- guage of the Arabs) by Abu al-Fadl Jamal al-Din ibn Manzur (d. 1321
CE
) mentions the term
ibda‘
twice. However, neither mention of the term corre- sponds to the modern understanding of creativity.
15
For Ibn Manzur, the signifi of
ibda‘
revolves around the idea of fashioning something: In the first example, it means the fashioning of an object, and in the second example, it refers to God’s ‘‘fashioning’’ creation. The modern concept of creativity, in the sense of the creative artist fashioning something completely new, does not seem to have occurred to Ibn Manzur any more than it occurred to Qushayri. The closest approximation to the modern concept of creativity is conveyed in
Lisan al-‘Arab
not by
ibda‘,
but by the verbs
ibta- da‘a
and
abda‘a.
These verbs, which are related in meaning to the disap- proved religious concept of
bid‘a,
signify the creation of an unwarranted innovation; in other words, the refashioning of tradition in illegitimate ways. This is expressed in the Qur’an, for example, by the use of the verb
ibtada‘a
to characterize the Christian ‘‘innovation’’ of monasticism (Qur’an 57:27). Apparently, Ibn Manzur and Qushayri both agreed with the Qur’an and with Confucius that as far as creativity is concerned, one does not create but one only tells of the past.

The Islamic concept of
bid‘a
is discussed at length in Volume 5 of
Voices of Islam
in the chapter ‘‘Creativity, Innovation, and Heresy in Islam’’ by Umar

F. Abd-Allah. Thus, it does not need to be discussed any further here. How- ever, it should be noted that the concepts of development (
tatawwur
), progress (
taqaddum
), renaissance (
nahda
), and renewal (
tajdid
), which have been associated with the notion of creativity in modern times, have histories in nineteenth and twentieth-century Islamic thought that make them prob- lematical because they involve changing tradition in the sense expressed by the Qur’anic verb
ibtada‘a.
Each of these terms has appeared historically in the context of either Arab secularism or Islamic modernism or both, and it has been suggested in certain quarters that the positivistic and progressivistic worldview they imply has contributed to the moral and aesthetic ugliness that pervades much of today’s Islamic discourse. As the English Muslim scholar Martin Lings (under his Muslim name of Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din) pointed

Introduction
xxv

out in a lecture at Al-Azhar University in 1964, from the perspective of the Qur’an, ‘‘progress’’ (
taqaddum
) is best defi in a religious sense not as the replacement of traditional beliefs with new and improved versions but as a series of steps (from the Arabic word
qadam
) toward spiritual and moral development. ‘‘Every individual should hope to progress, and that is the meaning of our prayer, ‘Lead us along the Straight Path’’’ (Qur’an 1:6).
16

The fact that an English convert to Islam made this observation, and not a Muslim from the Arab world, Iran, or South Asia, illustrates another aspect of creativity in Islamic civilization that is often overlooked by both nationalist and fundamentalist purists: its
hybridity.
The term, ‘‘hybridity,’’ is associated with the writings of Homi K. Bhabha, a postcolonial theorist from Mumbai who grew up as a Zoroastrian Parsi in a city that was primarily Hindu and sec- ondarily Muslim. As a culture critic, Bhabha purposefully locates his work on the margins of the dominant forms of cultural and intellectual discourse. For Bhabha, hybridity is the ‘‘location’’ of creativity in a globalized world.
17
It is a concept of displacement and dislocation, and was characteristic in colonial times both of the metropolitan colonialist who created a parody of European culture in a faraway land and of the colonial subject that mimicked metropoli- tan values in a morality play of contradictions. Today, hybridity is a major result of the global movement of populations from the former colonies of the Third World to European political and cultural centers, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and now Italy and Spain. It also charac- terizes the emerging intellectual culture of the United States as the imagined center of a globalized world, a place where the ‘‘imaginary’’ of globalization has been recreated in microcosm, especially since the opening of U.S. borders to a greater mix of peoples from Latin America, Asia, and Africa following the reform of immigration laws in 1965. Hybridity thus expresses a place of unre- solved tensions, recognitions, and mis-recognitions—a culture of borders and thresholds, of strikingly different references and frames of mind—a place where authoritarian attempts to ‘‘speak with one voice,’’ whether it be in the realm of culture, religion, or even language are subverted.

‘‘It is a mistake,’’ says Benedict Anderson, ‘‘to treat languages in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them—as
emblems
of nation-ness, like fl gs, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest. Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect
particular solidarities.
’’
18
The same can be said about religion. The mimicry of classical styles in the creation of pseudo-tradition, the fetishiza- tion of scripture, and the ideological reformulation of the Islamic
Umma
into an ‘‘Islamic nation’’ are all recent examples of the attempt to treat the con- cept of the ‘‘Islamic’’ as an emblem, in the way that languages are used as emblems in nationalistic discourses. The emblematic approach to Islam stifles creativity because it turns selected aspects of Islamic civilization (such as Islamic Law, the Islamic State, Islamic dress, the community of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions) into exhibits in what French critical

xxvi
Introduction

theorists call the ‘‘museum of the imaginary’’ (
muse´e imaginaire
). More importantly, however, it also stifl creativity because it takes the point of ‘‘religion’’—the bond between the individual human being and God—out of the religion of Islam. The Qur’an reminds Muslims: ‘‘Whoever submits himself fully to God and acts with goodness, has indeed grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold. And with God is the resolution of all affairs’’ (Qur’an 31:22).

The notion of hybridity subverts and undermines fundamentalist and other totalitarian models of religion and culture. Political Islamists resist the study of the full range of Islamic history because knowledge of Islamic history makes it impossible to turn the Arabic language, the Islamic state, or Islamic culture into emblems, and thus to ignore the importance of vernacular expressions of culture, such as Islamic art. The world of Islam has always been full of hybrid communities where many ‘‘vernacular languages’’ of art, poli- tics, and even science have been expressed and many ‘‘imagined commun- ities’’ have arisen within larger communities of discourse. The artistic and creative traditions of Islam have always exhibited what Bhabha calls ‘‘ver- nacular cosmopolitanism,’’ unique local expressions of art and culture that claim the right to ‘‘difference in equality’’ while maintaining ‘‘symbolic citi- zenship’’ in the Islamic Umma.
19
Vernacular cosmopolitanism can be seen in the traditional Javanese mosque without a minaret, where the muezzin’s call to prayer is assisted by the beating of a large drum. It can be seen in Islamic calligraphy from Borneo that merges elements of native Iban decora- tive motifs with classical Islamic calligraphic styles. It can be seen in the walk- in
mihrab
of the North African and Andalusian mosque, which not only des- ignates the direction of prayer but also recalls the Virgin Mary’s use of the
mihrab
as a refuge in the Qur’an (Qur’an 3:37; 19:11). It can even be seen, despite the ideological tendency toward uniform Islamist dress, in the fashion shows of
hijab
styles for women that take place every year in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf. The existence of the vernacular and its stubborn insistence on ‘‘difference in equality’’ is why there has always been a debate about an ideal- ized ‘‘Tradition of Islam’’ versus the historical reality of
traditions
of Islam. Traditionalism is not vernacular. As an idealized construct and an ideology, it speaks with a single, authoritatively imposed voice. This is why traditional- ism is oppressive whereas actual traditions allow some degree of creativity. ‘‘Oh humankind! We created you from male and female and made you into cultures (
shu‘ub
) and tribes so that you may know each other,’’ says the Qur’an (Qur’an 49:13). For contemporary Muslims, this verse should be taken as a reminder that where creativity is concerned, ‘‘Globalization must always begin at home.’’
20