Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  It was not until more than two hundred years later that the calligrapher Ibn Muqla standardised the forms of calligraphy which, when integrated within geometric pattern and arabesque, perfectly express the concept of unity at the heart of the Islamic Revelation, and, in its architectural setting, ensured that the Islamic environment was free of naturalistic images, averting the danger of descending into the glorification of the human form. The beauty of the objects of daily life served to elevate simple acts such as washing and eating, while the pleasure of conversation was embellished with poetry and stories. A rich and fulfilling theatre of life made the separate art of the theatre obsolete. Life, from the cradle to the grave, was the play and the whole society formed the cast.

  Surrounding the city and integrated within it were the orchards and gardens which provided the food and were also places of recreation and refreshment. The Qur’an and the Hadith of the Prophet instilled in Muslims as they tended nature a profound respect for the Creator and mankind’s relationship with His creation:

  Have you considered what you cultivate? Is it you that causes it to grow, or do We cause it to grow? (Qur’an, 56:63-64)

  And the earth He laid out for [His] creatures, wherein is fruit, and palm trees having sheaths, and grain with husks, and fragrant herbs. So which of the favours of your Lord would you deny? (Qur’an, 55:10-13)

  Never does a Muslim plant a tree or cultivate land from which man, bird or beast eats, but that he is rewarded for it as an act of charity. (Bukhārī and Muslim)

  The Prophet’s own love and care for the natural world is captured in many hadith:

  When the Prophet saw a donkey had been branded on its face, he said, ‘Have you not heard that I have cursed anyone who brands an animal on its face or hits it on its face?’ (Muslim)

  Abū Hurayra narrated that the Prophet said: ‘A man saw a dog eating mud out of thirst, so the man took his shoe and used it to pour water for the dog until the dog’s thirst was quenched. God thanked him and admitted him to Paradise.’ (Bukhārī and Muslim)

  Within the world of Islam there was a prodigious dissemination of trees, plants and crops. Yemeni and Syrian farmers turned Andalusia into a garden, introducing water management systems that brought to life an arid landscape. The development that took place in husbandry is captured in a number of scholarly works known as the Filāha Texts. In them we see traditional agriculture developing so that large urban centres could be supported in a sustainable manner that worked in collaboration with nature. This development of agriculture mirrored the increase in the founding of cities which accompanied the spread of Islam.

  The courts of the rulers both enabled, and were transformed by, the evolution in the crafts and husbandry. Palaces became centres of the finest craftsmanship and contained the most advanced and beautiful walled gardens. These gardens mixed ornamental and productive plants and trees. The quality of craftsmanship and husbandry produced in the courts was disseminated throughout the society. The courts were also centres for the patronage of poets and musicians, who contributed to the refinement of princes and the further civilising of society. An ancient genre of literature, the ‘Mirrors for Princes’, was adopted and developed to teach the rulers how to govern wisely, helping to educate many great sultans who advanced, maintained and protected Islamic civilisation.

  Once again, we turn to the traveller, Ibn Battūta, to give us a first-hand illustration of the harmonious city environment of merchants, husbandmen and craftsman that we have been describing. Here, in the translation of Gibb and Beckingham, Ibn Battūta gives us a picture of Damascus in the 14th century:

  Damascus … is an exceedingly noble, glorious, and beauteous city, rich in all manner of merchandise, and everywhere delightful, … abounding in foods, spices, precious stones, silk, pearls, cloth-of-gold, perfumes from India, Tartary, Egypt, Syria, and places on our side of the Mediterranean, and in all precious things the heart of man can conceive. It is begirt with gardens and orchards, is watered both within and without by rivers, brooks, and fountains, cunningly arranged, to minister to men’s luxury, and is incredibly populous, being inhabited by divers trades of most skillful and noble workmen, craftsmen, and merchants, while within the walls it is adorned beyond belief by baths, by birds that sing all the year around, and by pleasures, refreshments, and amusements of all kinds.

  THE WEST

  The Christian environment was dominated by the great cathedrals and abbeys, which towered above the world that surrounded them. Every art and craft was utilised in the creation and beautification of these houses of God. Sculptures, paintings and stained-glass windows, depicting the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints, accompanied by the chanting of the choir, created an awesome setting for the congregation to worship and glorify their Creator. Craftsmen and women working in wood, textiles, gold and other metals, produced the furnishings, garments and alter pieces, and the lecterns on which the beautifully illuminated bibles rested. The nativity and passion of Christ were brought to life in plays, enacted on stages erected in front of the churches, in which the whole community of priests, nobles and peasants participated, either as performers or audience.

  The Reformation divided Europe religiously, but the Renaissance was adopted by both branches of Christianity in different ways. Whereas the Catholics largely absorbed the new movement and used the naturalism of Renaissance art in the service of the religion, the Protestants made a clear divide between religion and culture, between the sacred and the secular, and nowhere more so than in England. With the destruction of the monasteries in the 16th century, Henry VIII not only demolished the thousand-year practice of contemplation at the heart of Christianity, but also erased much of the Christian artistic and cultural heritage.

  With the Renaissance, in both the Catholic and Protestant worlds, a fundamental change took place in the status of the artist and the nature of art itself. Until now the artist had belonged to a guild, which enjoyed similar status to all the other craft guilds, and, in the service of the Church, they had joined together to produce sanctuaries of sublime beauty. But now, it was to be the artist who would be responsible for manifesting the glorification of the human. The Renaissance artist was renamed and became the ‘artificer’, a term in Latin that had been used in theology to denote God as Creator. The term genius also changed its meaning; in ancient Rome the genius was the guardian spirit or tutelary deity of a person, now it became a part of the very soul of the person. Vasari, the famous art historian of the time, spoke of Michelangelo as a divine genius.

  Michelangelo was considered to have surpassed the ancients. He had even surpassed nature. His Pieta was so full of human pathos that it appeared to be alive. The ‘work of art’ was born, with its creator the ‘fine artist’, as distinct from the artist-craftsman. The portrait was considered to be the highest form of fine art, capturing the soul of the individual human being. Also favoured by art collectors through to the 19th century were the classical myths and stories of ancient Greece and Rome. The French artist David, in his painting of the death of Socrates, brilliantly depicts the different kinds of emotions expressed by the disciples surrounding the great philosopher, as he calmly approaches his end.

  Academies of fine arts were founded in Florence (1563), Paris (1648), London (1768) and many other cities throughout Europe and the West. Following on from the Greeks and Romans, and fundamentally contradicting the Christian code, the new humanist valued the beauty and perfection of the naked human form above everything in art, and what became known as life drawing took pride of place amongst the skills that students needed to acquire. The annual exhibition became the most important place for the artist’s work to be seen.

  In architecture, Vitruvius, the Roman writer who had meticulously recorded the principles and methods of Roman architecture, became the great authority and his work the bible for the new movement, which was transforming town and citys
cape. The villages and towns of Christian Europe had grown organically, with winding streets and every house unique in its design. By contrast, the new ‘civilised’ environment was planned from outside, with its orderly squares and crescents, identical terraced houses and lines of parallel avenues. The design for the various decorative elements were taken from pattern books, and there was little scope for the craftsman’s imagination.

  Having come under the spell of this new aesthetic, the architecture belonging to the world that had been abandoned was found to be ugly and called ‘Gothic’, referring to the barbaric Germanic tribes known as the Goths. So, if it was not possible to build anew, a classical front to cover up the offending view would be constructed. However, in England, the opportunity for the new movement to take centre stage came with the fire of London (1666), which gutted St Paul’s Cathedral and most of the city’s churches. The cathedral and all the damaged churches were rebuilt in the classical style.

  It was another fire in London 168 years later, when the Houses of Parliament were burnt down, that presaged the return of Gothic architecture in the rebuilding of the seat of Government. This was the result of the 19th century revival of Christianity in England that demanded a Christian architecture. What was named the Battle of Styles took place between the supporters of the classical and the Gothic. After a time, the animosity faded and architects mastered both styles, mainly using Gothic for ecclesiastical buildings, and classical for secular edifices. The Houses of Parliament brought the styles together, it has a classical frame with Gothic decoration. Christianity and classical civilisation had found a way of co-existing, despite their contradictions, and would continue to build their mixed environment well into the twentieth century. This accommodation would allow the entry of a third member, modern architecture.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialisation had transformed northern Europe. Bridges spanned mighty rivers, railway stations were larger than cathedrals and trains were travelling under capital cities in tunnels. New materials allowed archi-tects to do practically anything. The modern movement first developed in Germany and France, where certain architects could see a contradiction between the world that was being born, and architecture that belonged to another age. They were excited by the possibilities that had been opened up by industrialisation. They wished for a clean slate on which to create a new world, free of the baggage of the past.

  Le Corbusier’s declaration that ‘a house is a machine for living in’, resonated with a new generation of architects who began to give expression to this new machine age that would be completely at odds with everything that had preceded it. In the world before the Industrial Revolution, architects and craftsmen everywhere created their environments out of the materials around them. These materials imposed natural limits, and it is out of these limitations and the skill of the craftsman that the beauty that is typical of traditional architecture, from the most sophisticated of urban structures to the simplest of village dwellings, was created. Once these limitations were breached, the balance between the craftsman and his materials was broken and the chaos of the modern environment unleashed.

  When I was born in 1942, the population of the world was around two billion; when I reached seventy, it was passing seven billion. More than half the world’s built environment has been constructed in the last thirty years. With the industrialisation of agriculture and the rapid increase in factories, the movement of populations from rural to urban escalated, and around the year 2010 more than 50% of the world’s population had become urban, with many thousands joining the daily migration. This has led to mega-cities of up to twenty million residents, urban jungles that are choked with pollution. For centuries, the population remained remarkably stable and it only needed a 2% change of life over death to cause the population explosion. The population continues to increase, and much of the environment is now modern in structure and design. Only pockets are left of what existed before, and these have mostly been adapted to conform to the new modern way of life. It is a bleak, soulless and dehumanised landscape that now surrounds most of humanity.

  But what of the fine artist in this new commercial world? Two quite different paths opened up for them. The first was the world of advertising. Artists were commandeered, and used their considerable skills to demonstrate the wonders of products, in order to convince the public that they could not possibly live without them. Brilliantly designed, their logos and branding became a familiar part of the environment. The car became a symbol of freedom. You could be transported anywhere by airplane to discover and enjoy the world and, using the products of the burgeoning beauty industry, you too could be ever-young and beautiful.

  The other path for the fine artist continued the idea of the work of fine art that had emerged in the Renaissance. By the middle of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to rebel against their establishment. The Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris was the upholder of the principles and methods of the classical fine arts. Their standards were rigorously maintained in their annual exhibition, the Salon de Paris. The rebels were tired of the artificiality and endless repetition of the same subjects. They viewed perspective and other traditional techniques as straight-jackets that stifled their creativity. They wanted to paint the world around them as they saw it, express their own feelings and emotions in the paintings, and be free to develop their own methods. They had tuned into the spirit of the modern age and were driven by the desire to create something new, to be renowned for their originality.

  But these artists had not only rebelled against the art establishment, they had turned their backs on the morality and way of life of bourgeois society, wishing to live by their own rules. Rejected by the Academy, they sought refuge in the poorest quarters of Paris, where music-hall entertainers, circus people, prostitutes and other undesirables lived. True to their beliefs, they were prepared to suffer and starve in pursuit of their art, and many of them suffered terribly. An outraged society created a new name for them; they were called ‘bohemians’, the abusive name used for gypsies.

  I have likened what became known as the modern artist to the canary in the mine. Miners used to take a canary into the mine and one of the miners was responsible for watching the bird. If it fell off its perch, he would sound the alarm, and the miners would escape with their lives. The canary had detected lethal gas; the bird’s life had been sacrificed to warn the miners of the danger. The modern artist, like the canary, is both hyper-sensitive and a warner.

  As the nineteenth century turned into the war-stricken twentieth century, a giant emerged. Picasso experienced and expressed the cruelty, chaos and disintegration of this new century as it unfolded. His shattering of the image in his painting of the prostitutes of the Rue d’Avignon was shocking, and even his modernist colleagues were outraged at the time, believing that he was ridiculing the movement. However, he was the trailblazer, and they would come to hail the painting as a masterpiece. When Hitler’s planes bombed Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the first such blitzing of an urban centre, he was grief stricken and produced a painting that graphically expressed the full horror and barbaric cruelty of the event. However, it was through his relationship with the feminine that Picasso’s mastery as an artist and his self-obsession and cruelty as a man were fully realised. He had been classically trained and could turn his hand to anything, and as each relationship began, it heralded a new period of creativity. He once stated that women were of two kinds, goddesses and doormats. To begin with, each one was a muse for him, but once the aura faded, they had to be replaced to keep the flame of creativity burning. He left in his wake great suffering and tragedy in the lives of his women and children. Born a Catholic, he lost his faith in God and became a Marxist. But throughout his life he was obsessed with death, and as his own end approached, terror enveloped him, brilliantly captured in the final of the thousands of self-portraits he painted during his lifetime.

 
Francis Bacon cited Picasso as his reason for becoming an artist. As a young man he had been turned down by the army at the beginning of the second world war for health reasons, and had volunteered for the team that went into the bombed-out areas of London during the Blitz to recover the dead and dying. His sensitive artist’s soul was traumatised. He lived in a haze of alcohol and sadomasochism and out of this depraved and tormented man came the melting, dissolving, distorted, hideous images of his art.

  Jackson Pollock was a sensitive and a deeply disturbed soul. He penetrated through to the chaos of the world behind the glossy image of the American dream, and expressed the chaos through his art. The accumulating chaos passing through his soul turned his life into chaos. At the age of forty-four, he drove his car at one hundred miles an hour, crashed into a tree and was killed.

  Eduardo Paolozzi shows how we humans are being transformed into robots, while Tracy Emin represents the Twitter generation and the Freudian idea that anything we have inside us is worth sharing. One of her works consists of a tent in which she has exhibited the names of all those she ever slept with.

  Damien Hirst comes from a working-class Catholic family. His parents divorced when he was a child, and as a divorcee his mother was refused the sacrament of communion. He lost his faith and became an atheist. In his art he delivers a chilling message, which might be described as ‘death without redemption’, the atheist’s vision of death. In one of his works he shows us the life cycle of the fly. Maggots hatch on the head of a cow, and after a brief life are incinerated by an electric zapper that hangs above the cow’s head.