Voices of Islam (183 page)

It is understandable that the smiling grace of Islamic architecture should have appeared to many Christians as something worldly and ‘‘pagan’’; the volitional perspective envisages the ‘‘here below’’ and the ‘‘beyond’’ only as levels of existence that mark separation and opposition, and not as universal essences that unite and make things identical. In Renaissance art, virtue becomes crushing, lugubrious, and tiresome; beside the Alhambra, the palace of Charles V in Granada seeks to be grave and austere, but only achieves a heaviness and an opacity, which banish all higher intelligence, contemplation, and serenity.

After looking at the Alhambra for hours, it became clearer than ever to me that Islamic art is contemplative, whereas Gothic art is volitional, not to speak of the Renaissance, in which the volitional becomes worldly, hypocritical, sensual, and ostentatious. For Charles V the Alhambra was worldly because it is beautiful and joyful, and to this apparent worldliness, he opposed the dull, oppressive, and completely unspiritual ostentatiousness of his palace. Here, ugliness and stupidity wish to pass themselves off as virtues: namely, seriousness, strength, and otherworldliness. The otherworldly is seen purely in ‘‘volitional’’ fashion, as something negative and not as something spiritual that reveals itself in creation.

After the Alhambra and the Alca´zar of Seville, I have never seen anything that appeased my spirit more than the Mosque at Co´ rdoba, and I have seldom seen anything that so aroused my indignation as the Christian addition to this mosque. The Catholicism of the Renaissance shows itself here in its most horrible form, a proof that exotericism is aware of only a fraction of the devil’s power, and indeed beyond certain limits allows it free play: to be precise, in those realms which concern the Intellect. There is only one ancient and beautiful Madonna there, and one other good old picture. But enough of this.

Islamic art shows in a very transparent way how art should repeat nature— understood in the widest possible sense—in its creative modes without copying it in its results. It is abstract, but also poetical and gracious. It is woven out of sobriety and splendor. The style of the Maghrib (Islamic Spain and North Africa) is perhaps more virile than are the Turkish and Persian styles; but these—and especially the latter—are by way of compensation more varied.
3

Islamic Art
3

The spiritual intention of Islam is brought clearly to view in its art. Just as its art captures the all-pervading and the all-inclusive, and avoids narrowness of every kind, so does Islam itself seek to avoid whatever is ugly and to keep in sight that which is ‘‘everywhere Center.’’ For this reason, it replaces, so to speak, the ‘‘cross’’ by the ‘‘weave.’’ A center is a center only at a defi e point, it rejects the cross as ‘‘association’’ (
shirk
). It wishes to dissolve a priori every individualistic entanglement. It knows only one Center: God. Every other ‘‘center,’’ such as the Prophet Muhammad, or Islam itself, is loosened as in a rhythm or in a ‘‘weaving.’’ The Ka‘ba too is in its center a world- containing web.

NOTES

This chapter will also appear in the forthcoming volume,
Frithjof Schuon on Universal Art: Principles and Criteria,
edited by Catherine Schuon (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2007). Slight editorial changes have been made to the original for consistency of style and for purposes of clarification. The general editor of this set thanks the editors of World Wisdom Books for permission to reproduce this work.

1. For instance, the chanting of the Qur’an, which can be in various styles, is an art. A choice can be made between one style and another, but nothing can be added to them. One can chant the Qur’an in certain ways, but not in others. The modes of chanting express different rhythms of the spirit.
   

2. Outside of the Far East, there are scarcely any but the Muslim people who possess calligraphies equivalent to the Chinese ideograms, thanks not only to the richness and plasticity of the Arabic characters but also to the concentration—due to religious reasons—of the pictorial instinct on writing alone.
   

3. Persian miniatures integrate things in a surface without perspective, and thus in a sense without limits, like a piece of weaving; it is this which makes them compatible—at any rate as ‘‘worldly’’ objects—with the Islamic perspective. In a general way, Muslims distrust any ‘‘materialization’’ of religious subjects, as if in fear that spiritual realities might become exhausted through an excess of sensory crystallization. The sculptured and dramatic imagery of the Roman Church has indeed proven to be a two-edged sword; instead of making it ‘‘sensitive’’ and popular, the Church ought to have maintained in it the hieratic abstraction of Romanesque statuary. It is not the sole obligation of art to come down toward the common people; it should also remain faithful to its intrinsic truth in order to allow men to rise toward that truth.
   

2
‌

T
HE
F
OUNDATIONS OF
I
SLAMIC
A
RT

•

Titus Burckhardt

‘‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty.’’

—The Prophet

Unity, in itself eminently ‘‘concrete,’’ nevertheless presents itself to the human mind as an abstract idea. This fact, together with certain consider- ations, connected with the Semitic mentality, explains the abstract character of Islamic art. Islam is centered on Unity, and Unity is not expressible in terms of any image.

The prohibition of images in Islam is not, however, absolute. A plane image is tolerated as an element in profane art, on condition that it represents neither God nor the face of the Prophet;
1
on the other hand, an image ‘‘that casts a shadow’’ is only tolerated exceptionally, when it represents a stylized animal, as may happen in the architecture of palaces or in jewelry.
2
In a general way, the representation of plants and fantastic animals is expressly allowed, but in sacred art stylized plant forms alone are admitted.

The absence of images in mosques has two purposes. One is negative, namely, that of eliminating a ‘‘presence’’ which might set itself up against the Presence—albeit invisible—of God, and which might in addition become a source of error because of the imperfection of all symbols; the other and positive purpose is that of affi g the transcendence of God, since the Divine Essence cannot be compared with anything whatsoever.

Unity, it is true, has a participative aspect, insofar as it is the synthesis of the multiple and the principle of analogy; it is in that aspect that a sacred image presupposes Unity and expresses it in its own way; but Unity is also the prin- ciple of distinction, for it is by its intrinsic unity that every being is essentially distinguished from all others, in such a way that it is unique and can neither be confused nor be replaced. This last aspect of Unity reflects most directly the transcendence of the Supreme Unity, its ‘‘Non-Alterity’’ and its absolute Solitude. According to the fundamental formula of Islam: ‘‘There is no

6
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

divinity other than God’’ (
la ilaha illalah
), it is through the distinction of the different planes of reality that everything is gathered together beneath the infi te vault of the Supreme Unity: once one has recognized the fi te for what it is one can no longer consider it ‘‘alongside of’’ the Infinite, and for that very reason the finite reintegrates itself with the Infinite.

From this point of view the fundamental error is that of projecting the nature of the absolute into the relative, by attributing to the relative an autonomy that does not belong to it: the primary source of this error is imagination, or more precisely illusion (
al-wahm
). Therefore, a Muslim sees in fi tive art a fl grant and contagious manifestation of the said error; in his view the image projects one order of reality into another. Against this the only effective safeguard is wisdom (
hikma
), which puts everything in its proper place. As applied to art this means that every artistic creation must be treated according to the laws of its domain of existence and must make those laws intelligible; architecture, for example, must manifest the static equilibrium and state of perfection of motionless bodies, typifi in the regular shape of a crystal.

This last statement about architecture needs amplifi n. Some people reproach Islamic architecture with failing to accentuate the functional aspect of the elements of a building, as does the architecture of the Renaissance, which reinforces heavily loaded elements and lines of tension, thus conferring on constructional elements a sort of organic consciousness. But according to the perspective of Islam, to do so implies nothing less than a confusion between two orders of reality and a lack of intellectual sincerity: if slender columns can in fact carry the load of a vault, what is the good of artifi

attributing to them a state of tension, which anyhow is not in the nature of a mineral? In another aspect, Islamic architecture does not seek to do away with the heaviness of stone by giving it an ascending movement, as does Gothic art; static equilibrium demands immobility, but the crude material is as it were, lightened and rendered diaphanous by the chiseling of the arab- esques and by carving in the form of stalactites and hollows, which present thousands of facets to the light and confer on stone and stucco the quality of precious jewels. The arcades of a court of the Alhambra, for example, or of certain Northwest African mosques, repose in perfect calm; at the same time they seem to be woven of luminous vibrations. They are like light made crystalline; their innermost substance, one might say, is not stone but the Divine Light, the creative Intelligence that resides mysteriously in all things. This makes it clear that the ‘‘objectivity’’ of Islamic art—the absence of a subjective urge, or one that could be called ‘‘mystical’’—has nothing to do with rationalism, and anyhow, what is rationalism but the limitation of intelligence to the measure of man alone? Nevertheless that is exactly what the art of the Renaissance does through its ‘‘organic’’ and subjectively anthropomorphic interpretation of architecture. There is but one step between rationalism and individualistic passion, and from these to a

The Foundations of Islamic Art
7

mechanistic conception of the world. There is nothing of that sort in Islamic art; its logical essence remains always impersonal and qualitative; indeed, according to the Islamic perspective, reason (
al-‘aql
) is above all the channel of man’s acceptance of revealed truths, and these truths are neither irrational nor solely rational. In this resides the nobility of reason, and consequently that of art: therefore to say that art is a product of reason or of science, as do the masters of Islamic art, does not in any sense signify that art is ration- alistic and must be kept clear of spiritual intuition, quite the contrary; for in this case reason does not paralyze inspiration, it paves the way toward a non-individual beauty.

The difference that divides the abstract art of Islam from modern ‘‘abstract art’’ may be mentioned here. The moderns fi d in their ‘‘abstractions’’ a response that is ever more immediate, more fluid, and more individual to the irrational impulses that come from the subconscious; to a Muslim artist, on the other hand, abstract art is the expression of a law, it manifests as directly as possible Unity in multiplicity. The writer of these lines, strong in his experience of European sculpture, once sought to be taken on as a hand by a Northwest African master decorator. ‘‘What would you do,’’ said the master ‘‘if you had to decorate a plain wall like this one?’’ ‘‘I would make a design of vines, and fill up their sinuosities with drawings of gazelles and hares.’’ ‘‘Gazelles and hares and other animals exist everywhere in nature,’’ replied the Arab, ‘‘Why reproduce them? But to draw three geometrical rose patterns, one with eleven segments and two with eight, and to link them up in such a way that they fill this space perfectly, that is art.’’