Voices of Islam (180 page)

absent. A suicidal absence.’’
4

Characteristic of the nostalgia for the past as described by Hobsbawm and Mernissi is the rejection of values labeled as ‘‘modern’’ by Muslim ideological conservatives. In the context of postcolonial Islam, this means a rejection of virtually everything that bespeaks Western liberalism. The Iranian essayist Abdolkarim Soroush, despite being highly critical of the Islamic Republic of Iran, supports the antiliberal stance of the Iranian Revolution when he writes, ‘‘The modern world is the ethical inverse of the old world. The ancient apocalyptic prophecies came true: Reason is enslaved to desire, the external governs the internal, and vices have supplanted the virtues.’’
5
In his famous manifesto
Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq
(Signs along the Road), the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) warns Muslim youth to avoid Western views of ‘‘the interpretation of human endeavor
...
the explanation of the origin of the universe, [and] the origin of the life of man
...
. It is
...
not permissible for a Muslim to learn them from anyone other than a God- fearing and pious Muslim, who knows that guidance in these matters comes from God.’’
6
The reason why Muslims must reject the products of Western culture, says Qutb, is that ‘‘these ‘civilizations’ that have dazzled many Mus- lims and have defeated their spirits, are nothing but an ignorant and godless system at heart, and this system is erroneous, hollow, and worthless in com- parison with Islam
...
. We ought not to be defeated to such an extent that we start looking for similarities with Islam in current systems and in some current religions, or in some current ideas; we reject these systems in the East as well as in the West. We reject them all, as indeed they are retrogressive and in opposition to the direction in which Islam intends to take humankind.’’
7

Such strikingly similar points of view from a conservative Muslim Brother- hood activist and an ostensibly progressive Iranian thinker remind us that the

Introduction
xix

current confrontation between postcolonial Islam and the West is not only political but also cultural. As we have learned from recent debates in the United States over funding for the Public Broadcasting System and the National Endowment for the Humanities, culture wars are just as often fought over art and philosophy as over political ideologies. Certainly, there is much in Western secular culture that is profane and antireligious, and draws one’s attention away from the spiritual and toward the material. But have the jeremiads of modern Muslim revivalists led to anything more cultur- ally significant than a resurgent Islamic political activism? Have new schools of literature, music, or design developed, for example, among the different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood? Has there been a renaissance of Islamic arts, letters, or architecture to counteract the allegedly decadent cul- tural expressions of the West? In Iran, the Islamic Revolution created new markets for edited works of classical Islamic scholarship and produced a vivid poster art based largely on political themes. In addition, the works of Iranian filmmakers have appeared at Cannes and even in Hollywood. But has the offi- cial cultural environment of the Islamic Republic been conducive to an artis- tic and intellectual renaissance in general? The jury is still out on these questions, but most observers would probably respond in the negative. Cre- ativity in today’s Islam is more a product of the margins than of the center.

The Egyptian-American legal scholar and culture critic Khaled M. Abou El Fadl has noted that all too often, the image of Islamic culture among non- Muslims is associated not with beauty, but with everything ugly, unpleasant, and inhumane. ‘‘In these popular perceptions, Islam is a legalistic religion whose numerous laws vitiate the need for morality or ethics or for a sense of beauty. The encounter is rendered frustrating when a Muslim jumps up in the midst of a discussion and declares, ‘Beauty is a corruption, and that is why there is no law in Shari‘a which commands that we should care for beauty’.’’
8
If the image of contemporary Islam that Abou El Fadl describes is accurate, then the attempt by conservative Islamic ideologues to separate Islam retroactively from the spiritually corrosive effects of globalization and Westernization seems analogous to a doctor’s attempt to amputate a gan- grenous limb after the gangrene has already entered the bloodstream.

Virtually every Muslim in the world knows the saying of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty’’ (
Allahu jamil wa yuhibbu al-jamal
). If this is the case, then where is the sense of beauty in con- temporary Islam? Where is the sense of the spiritual aesthetics of form, sub- stance, and expression that used to be characteristic of the arts of the Muslim world? While examples of beauty can still be found in modern Islam, it often appears, as Abou El Fadl suggests, that ugliness is taking over. First- time visitors to the Middle East often remark on the stark contrast between the elegance and majesty of premodern Islamic mosques and their ungainly modern counterparts, which are often lit garishly at night by green neon lights. Traditionally, mosques on the island of Java in Indonesia were built

xx
Introduction

without minarets, following South Indian architectural models. In the twen- tieth century, Indonesian Muslim reformers, returning from the Middle East, sought to correct this ‘‘problem’’ by attaching new minarets to preexisting structures. In the Javanese city of Demak, there is a mosque dating to the fif- teenth century
CE
, which the locals believe was constructed by the
Wali Songo,
the nine saints who fi brought Islam to Java. This old mosque, which is topped by a low-slung tiled roof that shades the prayer hall and outer portico, is a place of peace and contemplation that evokes an immediate sense of spirituality. However, due to the zeal of modern reformers, a steel minaret that looks like an oil derrick now stands next to the mosque and utterly ruins the visual effect of the original building. In 2005 I visited Bosnia- Herzegovina as a member of an interreligious delegation headed by the Arch- bishop of Canterbury. Outside the city of Mostar, we saw a mosque under construction, endowed by donors from abroad, whose squat onion dome and arched portico made it look more like a crouching spider than a place of spiritual retreat and contemplation. A British Muslim scholar in the del- egation wryly observed that it must have been a present to Bosnia- Herzegovina from the Klingon Empire of the
Star Trek
television series.

In an ironic correspondence that deserves its own separate analysis, the word that best describes the attitude of modern ideological Islam toward beauty and art is ‘‘Philistine.’’ The dictionary defi ition of a Philistine is a materialistic person who is indifferent to or disapproving of artistic and intel- lectual achievements and values. In the city of Cairo, Egypt, there is a museum of Islamic art that contains some of the finest examples of Islamic artisanship to be found anywhere in the world. In this museum one can see beautifully illuminated Qur’an manuscripts from the Mamluk period (thir- teenth to sixteenth centuries
CE
), embroidered textiles, carved woods, and pottery from the Fatimid period (tenth to twelfth centuries
CE
), and works of brass, mosaic, and calligraphy from different periods of Egypt’s Islamic his- tory. What surprised me as I visited this museum on several occasions was that it was almost always empty, save for the occasional Western tourist or researcher such as myself. Once when I visited Cairo, I hired an Islamist cab driver to take me to the places in the city where I was conducting research. He was an intelligent man and I enjoyed our discussions and debates about Islam and Egypt as we made our way through the heavy Cairo traffi One day, I needed to visit the Islamic art museum, so I bought my driver a ticket, thinking that he might enjoy the chance to learn something about Egypt’s Islamic artistic heritage. After passing through the first exhibit hall, I discov- ered that he had disappeared. Two hours later, as I exited the building, I found him sitting at the entrance of the museum, chatting with the ticket- taker. When I asked him where he had gone, he replied in an offhand way that he found the entire museum uninteresting.

This is what it means to be a Philistine. What makes the Islamist cab driv- er’s behavior culturally significant is the contrast that one observes in Cairo

Introduction
xxi

between the Museum of Islamic Art, which is virtually empty, and the Egyp- tian Museum, which contains pre-Islamic art and is always crowded. Even more significant is the fact that the Egyptian Museum is filled not only with foreign tourists but also with large numbers of Egyptian visitors, including Islamist families with men wearing neatly trimmed beards and women veiled in
hijab.
Clearly, Pharaonic art is considered part of Egypt’s cultural heritage in a way that Islamic art is not. One of the conclusions that I drew from this paradox was that the Philistinism of Egyptian Islamists is due, at least in part, to the ideological influence of religious fundamentalism. When one visits the artistic remains of the Pharaohs, one is led to recall the stories of the Prophets Joseph and Moses in the Qur’an. Although the Pharaohs were pagans, the cultural artifacts of their past can be legitimized on both nationalistic grounds (as the original Egyptian civilization) and on religious grounds, because the Pharaohs are protagonists in the stories of the Prophets that have been told to popular audiences throughout Islamic history. However, when a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist looks at the cultural artifacts of the Fatimid or Mamluk periods of Egyptian Islamic history, he or she merely observes the artifacts of Shiite ‘‘heretics’’ (the Fatimids) or cruel Turkish despots who oppressed the Egyptian people (the Mamluks). Typically, the fundamentalist observer overlooks the fact that the artistic themes in the Museum of Islamic Art are more Qur’anic in spirit than the artistic themes in the Egyptian Museum. Because the scriptural literalism and constricted historical vision of fundamentalism make little or no room for artistic imagination, the modern Islamist perspective can be nothing but Philistine in its approach to art and culture. This attitude is not unique to Islam, or even to Islamic fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is just as Philistine when it is found in Christianity or Judaism as well.

In an essay entitled, ‘‘Pearls of Beauty (on Re-Finding Our Lost Civiliza- tion),’’ Khaled M. Abou El Fadl discusses from the inside of Muslim experi- ence the same dilemma that Jacques Berque noted nearly 30 years earlier as a sympathetic outsider. In the following passage from this essay, Abou El Fadl suggests that both the nostalgic classicism and the Philistinism of modern Islamic culture are consequences of a postcolonial sense of cultural deprivation and inferiority:

The nomads of the Lost Civilization live frozen in fear—the fear of gazing at the corpse, confronting their loss, and relinquishing their grip over the fossils of antiquity. The chains of their once-glorious memories have condemned them to the mortification of an unrelenting redundancy. Old words and thoughts are uttered like chants in a sanctuary of hallowed memories. They supplicate in the name of a bygone oasis and every mirage becomes their prophecy. Finally, the nomads either settle in their makeshift shelters of ignorance or, if they search the oceans, they dare not open a single shell lest the pearls of perception reveal to them the full extent of their ignoble destitution and agonizing reality.

xxii
Introduction

Yes, we are the displaced children of the Civilization of the Word, pariahs in the world of thought and literacy. We are the outcasts of the unthinkables and unmentionables, subsisting on the scraps of hardened ideas. We’ve forgone the pearls of knowledge in fear of being distracted from our sanctimonious memo- ries. Even the word of God is preserved as a memory and not as a thought to be engaged, in search of the pearls it conceals and then reveals. But the life of a word is measured by the pearls that mark its development, not by the shrines that honor its memory.
9

The chapters that were chosen for the present volume of
Voices of Islam
are all premised on the idea that Islamic civilization has been, and remains, the quintessential Civilization of the Word. In the divine discourse of Islam, as it is expressed in the Qur’an, the concepts of being, reality, and existence are conjoined in the terms,
al-Haqq
—the Truth—and
al-Haqiqa
—Reality, the Real, the ‘‘I am what I am’’ (to paraphrase the Bible), which connote God in the act of self-revelation. In
Surat Yasin
(Qur’an 36), a chapter of the Holy Qur’an that is believed to have an especially powerful surplus of meaning, God says of Himself: ‘‘We bring dead things to life and We deter- mine their pasts and their futures; and We have contained all things in a self-revealing paradigm’’ (Qur’an 36:12). The translation of the Arabic phrase
imam mubin
in this verse as ‘‘a self-revealing paradigm’’ is derived from the French Islamic scholar and Qur’an translator Rene´ Blache`re, who saw in the concept of
imam mubin
a justifi for the popular belief in Islam that the paradigm for all knowledge is contained in the Qur’an.
10
The value of this concept for the present discussion lies in the fact that although the Qur’an comments on moral beauty more often than on aes- thetic beauty, aesthetic beauty is still highly valued in the Qur’anic paradigm because God is the self-revealing Creator (
al-Khaliq
), Originator (
al-Bari’
), and Fashioner of Forms (
al-Musawwir
). ‘‘To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names’’ (Qur’an 59:24). Despite the famous hadith that proclaims, ‘‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty,’’
al-Jamil,
the Arabic term for ‘‘the Beauti- ful,’’ is not one of the Divine Names in the Qur’an. However, as the Fash- ioner of Forms and Possessor of the Beautiful Names, beauty continually flows from God through His act of self-revelation.