The novelist Flannery O’Connor famously wrote: “An artist prays by creating”. The lasting bastions of Andalusia, Islamic calligraphy and religious odes augment this aspect of art as an intimate form of prayer. They reveal a past where the path of walāya (sainthood) for every human being is that of the craft. And just as God reminded Moses of his memories when he sought to remember God (Q20:33-34), the various languages of art, such as sound and fragrance, are the wings through which our past travels to the present moment.
In my previous article, How Art Liberates Land, I highlighted the colonisation of the craft of music in contemporary Muslim societies, tracing the drastic social and cultural upheavals that occurred at the turn of the 20th century. This was interlaced by a unique period known as the ‘Golden Age of Arabic Music’ in Egypt, where Arabic music and Quran recitation were twin arts that invigorated the musical culture of Egypt and the Arab world.
In this article, I would like to take a wider and more metaphysical journey into the sacredness of Craft and its importance in the vertical journey to God and horizontal cultural vibrancy and growth. Despite the current drastic changes that Muslim communities – and the world at large – face, including oppression, climate change, the age of technology and many others, the epistemological commitments of Muslims today seem to be stagnant and incapable of adapting to these developments.
Whereas the Islamic intellectual tradition, embodied in the faith’s sacred texts (beginning with the Quran and Hadith collections to countless commentaries and expositions in all religious disciplines) were at one point in time the pride of the Muslim empire and a sign of a flourishing and vibrant society, these same texts are now used as an escape from a social, cultural and political globalised reality with which the Muslim community is incapable of engaging meaningfully.
We no longer produce magnum opuses like al-Ghazali’s Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences) or Ibn ‘Arabi’s al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), which are encyclopedic expositions on reality, beginning from the material world to higher spiritual realms and culminating with the Divine Presence. Both al-Ghazali and Ibn Arabi engaged critically and creatively with the prevalent intellectual schools of their age, such as Neoplatonism, non-theism, Judeo-Christian theologies and others.
In contrast, excluding a few examples, the Islamic intellectual tradition today has not engaged with modernism and its foundational figures like Kant or Descartes, much less postmodernism or the current period to which we have transitioned today, aptly described by thinkers as meta-modernism. Lest some of my readers object that many Muslim scholars today have engaged with these aforementioned figures and schools of thought, I need to clarify that a meaningful engagement is not to dismiss or disparage Nietzsche, Derrida or Foucault as ‘godless’, but rather to decipher their words through the lens of the sacred, rooting them in Divinity.
This is precisely why Islamic metaphysics, a la Ibn Arabi, is important. Al-Shaykh al-Akbar (The Greatest Master) emphasises that there is no single faith, group or school of thought save that it must have a trace of the sacred and truth in its teachings. This was itself the prerogative that motivated Ibn Arabi to decipher the truths in Plato’s teachings, Christian theology and other works in various traditions. This Akbarian lens, that sacralises the material world as a majāz (metaphor) and doorway into spiritual reality, is not unique to Ibn Arabi but rather emblematic of the kashf (unveiling) of awliya’ (Muslim saints) throughout history, until the present day.
Ibn Arabi himself distinguishes between such saints and those ‘ulama (scholars) whose religious knowledge is obtained solely from books. He states that whereas scholars inherit the statements and actions of the Prophet ﷺ, saints inherit his breaths and spiritual states ﷺ. The subtlety here is that breaths are the medium through which our statements are born, just as our spiritual states are the movements that animate our actions to life. Also, while it is true that there have been many Muslim scholars who were also saints, Ibn Arabi included, many saints were unschooled, such as the celebrated Moroccan saint sidi Abdul al-Aziz al-Dabbagh and others.
What separates the ‘ilm (knowledge) of these ‘ulama al-rusum (scholars of outer form), as described by Ghazali and Ibn Arabi, and saints is that the latter must pass the challenge, at some point in their journey, of sacrificing all the knowledge they attain rationally from books in order to receive al-‘ilm al-ladunni (direct Divine Knowledge). This distinction is perfectly embodied in the story of Musa (peace be upon him) and Khidr, whom God describes as a servant whom “We taught directly from us” (Q18:65). In this lens, of the saint’s knowledge, sacred ‘ilm is not what is assumed today: the rational sciences of the faith but a concept that is intimately interwoven with ‘alāma (sign) and ‘ālam (world). In turn, Ibn Arabi tells us that to truly have knowledge of something is to perceive it as a sign of God.
As William Chittick, Shahab Ahmed and others have shown, a premodern reality of Muslim societies betrays the contemporary infatuation with the rational religious scholarship as the only sacred path to God. Entire verses of the Quran (e.g., “Say: ‘My Lord increase me in knowledge’ (Q20:114)) and Hadiths (e.g., “Whoever undertakes a path seeking knowledge, God will facilitate a path for them to reach paradise.”1) have been reduced to mean only these rational disciplines of religion (e.g. Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, dialectical theology, Hadith science etc). However, what we find in premodern Muslim societies is that this path of rational scholasticism was an elite journey reserved for a few who could read or write and – more importantly – could afford to study.
According to our standards today, the majority of Muslims in the past could never reach God because they did not have access to seminaries, religious classes and were apparently impervious to this modern understanding of talab al-‘ilm (seeking knowledge). As we have shown, this cannot be any further from the truth. And so, how did the craft of religious scholarship function in premodern Muslim societies and how did the majority of believers perceive the journey to God?
First, it is important to recognize that religious scholarship is one craft among many. Every human being is born with what Ibn Arabi calls an isti’dad (innate disposition). This delineates all aspects of someone’s journey to God, including their pedagogical proclivities (e.g., visual or auditory learning), talents or aptitudes and all other aspects of life. This is summarised in the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ that “each person is facilitated towards the purpose for which they have been created.”2 A wholesome society, one that is culturally, spiritually, intellectually and creatively healthy is one where each individual has the means to pursue and cultivate their disposition, very much in harmony with Plato’s exposition on the idea of ‘niche’ in The Republic.
Ibn Arabi also tells us that this isti’dad manifests in one of the five senses through which an individual solely receives ma’rifa (divine gnosis) and communication from God. Some individuals are known as ashab al-shamm (people of the scent), who receive knowledge through scents and fragrances, while others are ashab al-sam’ (people of hearing) or ashab al-nazar (people of gaze). This does not pertain only to an individual’s relationship with God, but also their connection with all of creation which is the theatre of Divine Manifestations.
Today, we have reduced this aspect of isti’dad to its psychosomatic dimensions, designating certain people as visual or auditory learners. However, in Islamic spirituality, such psychological observations are merely the tip of the iceberg for a much deeper understanding of the human being. In turn, if someone is an auditory learner, this means that – most likely – they are inclined towards some kind of craft or talent pertaining to music or sound and, more importantly, they are from ashab al-sam’ (people of hearing) with whom God communicates through sound.
As mentioned above, a society is considered spiritually, intellectually and culturally healthy if each individual has the means to cultivate their isti’dad, specifically in terms of what we regard today as a craft. We can even go as far as saying that the social imperative to make sure that all crafts are funded and sustainable is a fard kifaya (communal obligation) upon the Muslim community. For poets, painters, musicians, actors, architects, carpenters, sculptors, engineers and religious scholars to be able to pursue mastery in their respective craft is a blessing that not only benefits the individual, but the community at large.
In order to understand the social urgency of this communal obligation, we have to appreciate its metaphysical underpinnings. Islamic spirituality inherited from ancient traditions the universal maxim of ‘macrocosm/microcosm’: the universe is a large human being, and the human being is a small universe. This is corroborated by a statement attributed to Imam Ali b. Abi Talib and found in his Diwan of poetry: “The sickness and cure are within you. You assume yourself to be something small, while the entire universe is enfolded within you.” And so, just as each individual has an isti’dad (sacred disposition), so does a community or society also have an isti’dad, which consists of the collective dispositions of all its members.
In turn, like an individual’s journey to God that has to go through mastery of a particular craft for which they are predisposed, an entire community’s connection to God and the spiritual realm depends on the fulfilment and cultivation of all the crafts of its members. In other words, a community – as a macrocosm – needs to reach God through each of the five senses. In order for this to happen through the sense of hearing, for instance, the summit of all the auditory crafts (e.g., music, singing) must be occupied by at least one custodian, a master and saint of those vocations. The same also must be true for each of the other senses and talents.
If a community fails to invest and cultivate music, for example, it is not merely the dearth of musicians and songs that is the crisis at hand, but more poignantly that the entire community loses the ability to communicate with God and receive ma’rifa through sound. The same is true of the visual arts, in which the lack of communal investment renders a people bereft of the subtle gnosis of colors and shapes, likewise for all the crafts that are tethered to each of the five senses.
Unfortunately, this is precisely where we find ourselves today, at a cultural, creative and spiritual precipice where the lack of investment in the arts and its supporting institutions is merely the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper crisis, where we have collectively forgotten how to converse with God through ink, dye and sound. This manifests in a prevalence of sermons absent of oratory eloquence, the lack of colour coordination in our buildings and more poignantly the inability to dress meanings of scripture in melodies that are harmonious with and perform the emotions of the recited verses.
We should not be in any confusion about the root causes of this: our collective epistemology has been colonised, alongside our arts and land as I mentioned in How Art Liberates Land. Today, Muslim artists are conditioned to believe that their creative talent, passion and disposition is inherently corruptive, whence they feel the need to undertake the path of religious scholarship, studying Islamic jurisprudence, theology and other rational sciences for years before taking a single step towards the summit of their own craft.
Meanwhile, in the past, lay Muslims cared neither for the proofs regarding the permissibility of their crafts nor could they afford to spend years studying grammar, dialectical theology, jurisprudence and other rational religious sciences prior to pursuing mastery in their craft. The study of these disciplines was the prerogative of those whose isti’dad and passion was religious scholarship. Likewise, the carpenter, poet, musician and tailor must dedicate their entire lives to reaching the peak of their own craft. It is at each of these respective summits that one can hear the siren song, where “each has come to know their prayer and praise, which you cannot comprehend” (24:41).
