Voices of Islam (186 page)

Here is something like a meeting-point between the symbolism of the mosque and the Christian temple, as well as of the Jewish temple and perhaps of the Parsee temple. To return, however, to the acoustic function of the prayer-niche: it is by virtue of its reverberation of the Divine Word during the prayer that the
mihrab
is a symbol of the Presence of God, and for that reason the symbolism of the lamp becomes purely accessory, or one might say ‘‘liturgical’’;
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the miracle of Islam is the Divine Word directly revealed in the Qur’an and ‘‘actualized’’ by ritual recitation. This makes it possible

The Foundations of Islamic Art
17

to situate Islamic iconoclasm very precisely: the Divine Word must remain a verbal expression, and as such instantaneous and immaterial, in the likeness of the act of creation; thus alone will it keep its evocative power pure, without being subject to that attrition which the use of tangible materials instills, so to speak, into the very nature of the plastic arts, and into the forms handed on through them from generation to generation. Being manifested in time but not in space, speech is outside the ambit of the changes brought about by time in spatial things; nomads know this well, living, as they do, not by images but by speech This is the point of view and the manner of its expression natural to peoples in migration and particularly to Semitic nomads; Islam transposes it into the spiritual order
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conferring in return on the human environment, particularly on architecture, an aspect of sobriety and intellectual transparency, as a reminder that everything is an expression of the Divine Truth.

NOTES

This chapter first appeared in Titus Burckhardt,
Sacred Art in East and West,
trans. by Lord Northbourne (Bedfont, U.K.: Perennial Books, 1967; Louisville, Kentucky and Bloomington, Indiana: Fons Vitae and World Wisdom Inc., 2001). The general editor of this set thanks the editors of World Wisdom Books for permission to reproduce this chapter.

1. When Mecca was conquered by the Muslims, the Prophet fi ordered the destruction of all the idols which the pagan Arabs had set up on the court of the Ka‘ba; then he entered the sanctuary. Its wall had been ornamented by a Byzantine painter, among other fi were one of Abraham throwing divinatory arrows and another of the Virgin and Child. The Prophet covered the last named with his two hands and ordered the removal of all the others.
   

2. An artist newly converted to Islam complained to Abbas, uncle of the Prophet, that he no longer knew what to paint (or carve). The patriarch advised him to attempt nothing but plants and fantastic animals, such as those that do not exist in nature.
   

3. It can be said that Alexander was the artisan of the world that was destined for Islam, in the same way that Caesar was the artisan of the world that was to welcome Christianity.
   

4. One of the reasons for the decadence of Muslim countries in modern times is the progressive suppression of the nomadic element.
   

5. The famous black stone is set in a corner of the Ka‘ba. It does not mark the center toward which the believers turn in their prayers, and besides, it has no ‘‘sacramental’’ function.
   

6. From its inception, Islamic architecture integrated into itself certain elements of Hindu and Buddhist architecture, but these elements had come to it through the arts of Persia and Byzantium; it was only later on that Islamic civilization directly encountered that of India.
   

7. The analogy between the nature of crystal and spiritual perfection is implicitly expressed in the following formula which emanates from the Caliph Ali: ‘‘Muhammad
   

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   Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science
   

   is a man, not like other men, but like a precious stone among stones.’’ This formula also indicates the point of junction between architecture and alchemy.
   

8. Turkische Moscheen
   (Zurich: Origo-Verlag, 1953).
   

9. Rene´ Guenon,
   Cain et Abel
   in
   Le Regne de la Quantite´ et Les Signes des Temps,
   

   Paris, NRF, 1945, English translation (London, U.K.:Luzac, 1953).
   

10. See Titus Burckhardt,
    Introduction aux doctrines esoteriques de l’Islam
    (Lyon: Derain, 1955).
    

11. Analogous symbols are found in the ritual costume of the North American Indians: the headdress with bison horns, and the fringes of the garment as an image of rain of grace. The headdress of eagle’s feathers recalls the ‘‘Thunder Bird’’ which rules from on high, also the radiant sun, both being symbols of the Universal Spirit.
    

12. See Simeon of Thessalonica,
    De divino Templo.
    

13. Nudity can also have a sacred character, because it recalls the primordial state of man and because it abolishes the separation between man and Universe. The Hindu ascetic is ‘‘clothed in space.’’
    

14. Heraldry has probably a dual origin. In part it is derived form the emblems of nomadic tribes—from ‘‘totems,’’ and in part from Hermetism. The two currents mingled in the Near East under the Empire of the Seljuks.
    

15. Modern masculine attire, which has its origin partly in the French Revolution and partly in English Puritanism, represents an almost perfect synthesis of antispiritual and antiaristocratic tendencies. It affirms the forms of the body, while ‘‘correcting’’ them to fit in with a conception that is inept as well as being hostile to nature and to the intrinsically divine beauty of man.
    

16. The turban is called ‘‘the crown (or the diadem) of Islam.’’
    

17. It is not a question of canonical interdiction but of a reprobation, applied more strictly to gold than to silk.
    

18. The disputes among Islamic theological schools about the created or uncre- ated nature of the Qur’an are analogous to the disputes among Christian theologians about the two natures of the Christ.
    

19. This is the motif reproduced in a more or less stylized form on many prayer-rugs. It may be mentioned that the prayer niche is not always furnished with a lamp, no such symbol being obligatory.
    

20. The conch, which adorns a few of the most ancient prayer niches, is in fact derived as an architectural feature from Hellenic art. However, it scorns to be connected with the very ancient symbolism in which the conch is compared to the ear and the pearl to the Divine Word.
    

21. Islamic iconoclasm has another side to it: man being created in the image of God, to imitate his form is regarded as blasphemy. But this point of view is a consequence of the prohibition of images rather than a main reason for it.
    

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T
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OMMON
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Titus Burckhardt

ARAB ART, ISLAMIC ART

One may well ask whether the term ‘‘Arab art’’ corresponds to a well-defined reality since Arab art before Islam does not in practice exist for us because of the scarcity of its remains, and Arab art born under the sky of Islam is confused—and one wonders to what degree—with Islamic art itself. Art historians never fail to stress that the first Muslim monuments were not built by the Arabs, who lacked adequate technical means, but by levies of Syrian, Persian, and Greek craftsmen, and that Muslim art was gradually enriched by the artistic heritage of the sedentary populations of the Near East as these were taken into Islam. Despite this, it is still legitimate to speak of Arab art, for the simple reason that Islam itself, if it is not limited to a ‘‘racial phenome- non’’—and history is there to prove the point—does nonetheless comprise Arab elements in its formal expression, the foremost of which is the Arabic language; in becoming the sacred language of Islam, Arabic determined to a greater or lesser degree the ‘‘style of thinking’’ of all the Muslim peoples.
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Certain typically Arab attitudes of soul, spiritually enhanced by the
Sunna
(customary usage) of the Prophet, entered into the psychic economy of the entire Muslim world and are refl cted in its art. It would, indeed, be impossible to confi the manifestations of Islam to Arabism; on the contrary, it is Arabism that is expanded and, as it were, transfigured by Islam. In order to grasp the nature of Islamic-Arab art—the Muslim will naturally stress the first part of this term, and the non-Muslim the second—it is always necessary to take account of this marriage between a spiritual message with an absolute content and a certain cultural inheritance which, for that very reason, no longer belongs to a culturally defined collectivity but becomes a ‘‘mode of expression’’ which can, in principle, be used universally. Moreover,

Islamic-Arab art is not the only great religious art to be born from such a marriage; Buddhist art, for example, whose area of expression is chiefl confined to Mongol nations, nevertheless preserves certain typically Indian

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Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

traits, particularly in its iconography, which is of the greatest importance to it. In a far more restricted context, Gothic art of German-Latin lineage provides an example of a ‘‘style’’ so widespread that it became identifi from a certain moment on, with the Christian art of the West.

Without Islam, the Arab thrust of the seventh century—even supposing it to have been possible without the religious impulse—would have been no more than an episode in the history of the Middle East; decadent as they may have been, the great sedentary civilizations would have made short work of absorbing these hordes of Bedouin Arabs, and the nomadic invaders of the cultivated lands would have finished, as is generally the case, by accepting the customs and forms of expression of the sedentaries. But it was exactly the opposite that happened in the case of Islam, at least in a certain regard: it was the Arabs, nomads for the most part, who imposed on the sedentary

peoples they conquered their forms of thought and expression by imposing their language on them.
2
In fact, the outstanding, and somehow refulgent, manifestation of the Arab genius is language, including writing. It was this language which not only preserved the ethnic heritage of the Arabs outside Arabia but also caused it to radiate far beyond its cultural homeland. It was by the mediation of the Arabic language that the essential Arab genius was effectively communicated to Muslim civilization as a whole.

The extraordinary normative power of the Arabic language derives from its role as a sacred language as well as from its archaic nature, both factors being, in any case, connected. It is its archaic quality that predestined Arabic for its role as a sacred language, and it was the Qur’anic revelation that, as it were, actualized its primordial substance. Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure—very much to the con- trary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing of time by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary; the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea; and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done so as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that