Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  These artists have been the chroniclers of the horrors of the twentieth century as it unfolded. Their works are warnings to society. But instead of heeding the warnings, society has turned them into objects of celebration, glorifying them as great works of art, and elevating them to the status of icons. The Christian artists glorified God through their work. The classical artists celebrated great men and elevating myths. In the world of the merchant the work of art itself has become the thing of value. A triptych by Bacon was auctioned for $130 million; one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings was sold for $170 million; Damien Hirst’s studio of new works was auctioned for more than $100 million, and Picasso’s Guernica is beyond price.

  ART & THE ENVIRONMENT

  The canaries in the mines did not know the reasons for their deaths. The modern artists, bereft of tradition and malformed, may not realise that what they are carrying is the ugly reflection of a cruel, depraved, chaotic, robotic, shallow, empty world, for they are in love with their creations, and believe in them as great works of art. The modern artist rebelled against the classical tradition of art, but not against the idea of the artist as the divine genius and creator. A cult has formed around them, a parody of Christ and the church. The artist is the Christ figure, whose work is mediated through the critic, who plays the role of the high priest explaining its meaning to a bewildered congregation. The patrons of the cult are the collectors, and they are served by the dealers and auctioneers. The summit is reached, in this strange world, with the canonisation of the artist through the retrospective exhibition, when the artist joins the immortals.

  Damien Hirst was canonised in 2012 with his retrospective at Tate Modern. The exhibition displayed many variations on the theme that I have called death without redemption; dead butterflies arranged like a kaleidoscope, boxes of pills, cigarette ends, dead fish, pills laid out on glass shelves, and surgical instruments accompanied by a full skeleton. The centrepiece was a human skull covered in £50 million worth of diamonds, housed in its own shrine. People queued for up to three hours to stand in front of it for a few minutes. Money and death, that was the message. The modern artist now mirrors the essence of modernity, revealing its absurdity; you must create something new and you must be able to sell it; innovation and entrepreneurship. Damien Hirst has been very successful achieving this.

  Modern art is now being housed in buildings that are designed to be in perpetual states of disequilibrium, perfectly mirroring what is inside them, and these buildings are appearing all over the world. This brings me to what, I believe, is the most alarming aspect relating to modern art. The modern artist rebelled against the established order, and became an outsider. Now the modern artist is at the heart of the establishment. The natural instinct of the general public is to recoil from their creations, but because the establishment honours them and celebrates their work, resistance evaporates. The influence of modern art is spreading throughout society and the world, and is now playing a key role in the perpetuation of the modern cult. It is programming us to be able to live in a state of chaos, to love ugliness, to enjoy disequilibrium; it is normalising the abnormal.

  One of the processes by which this aberrational world has come into being is through the shock of something that is outrageous entering the mainstream. In his book The Prince, Machiavelli enshrined the idea that the end justifies the means and that, ‘Politics has no relation to morals’. Bernard de Mandeville (d. 1733) in his Fable of the Bees promoted vice over virtue:

  Then leave Complaints; Fools only strive

  To make a Great and Honest Hive.

  T’enjoy the World’s Conveniences,

  Be famed in War, but live in Ease.

  Without great Vices, is a vain

  Eutopia seated in the Brain.

  Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch were both shocking and unacceptable when they first appeared, but then became normalised and finally celebrated.

  Now, as the escalating and multiplying crises are flooding into the gilded cage of our own making, we watch helplessly as the human tragedy unfolds, and the earth and all the living creatures upon it, groan under our weight.

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  CONQUEST & EXPANSION

  ISLAM

  The speed of the conquest which laid the foundations of Islamic civilisation has always amazed historians. Within a generation of the Prophet’s death, the Umayyad Empire stretched from Spain to the borders of India and China. These lands contained many different cultures and civilisations with established traditions, long recorded histories and deeply held beliefs, but conquest did not imply the imposition of Islam upon people of other faiths, as is indicated by the Qurʾanic verse that forbids forced conversion:

  There is no compulsion in religion; right guidance is clearly distinct from error. Whoever rejects false deities and believes in God has grasped the firmest handhold that never breaks. And God is the All-hearing, the All-knowing. (Qur’an, 2:256)

  This prohibition of compulsion is related to the way in which the Qur’an continually emphasises that in inviting to Islam, the Muslim should appeal to people’s intelligence:

  Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and fair admonition, and argue with them in the best way. (Qur’an,16:125).

  Moreover, the Qurʾan teaches that all the worlds that preceded Islam had received Revelation:

  …For each of you We have established a law and a way; and if God had willed, He would have made you one people. But [He wanted to] test you in what He has given you. So vie with one another in good works. To God you shall all return, and He will inform you about that in which you differed. (Qurʾan, 5:48)

  The Western idea that Islam was spread by the sword has been thoroughly discredited by the evidence, and is an example of placing upon Islam what actually happened in Christianity. Islam spread in various ways, but rarely by compulsion. People were attracted by the simplicity of the way of life and the example of pious Muslims. The success of Islam as an empire was also attractive to those with ambition, and living in close contact with Muslims meant that friendships were formed and marriages contracted. The conversion to Islam by members of different communities took place over several centuries, and it is worth bearing in mind that for a long time Muslims were minority rulers. The treatment of conquered peoples of other faiths, who were called dhimmis, had clearly set-out guidelines. Non-Muslims were not required to pay zakāt but they did have to pay a special tax known as jizya, according to their means. Women, children, the sick and elderly, as well as monks, slaves and the poor were exempt from paying, as were those who served in the military. In exchange for the jizya, the non-Muslims were accorded protection, freedom of worship and jurisdiction over their own affairs.

  The Muslim belief that the Qurʾan with its Messenger was the final and most complete revelation from God to all humanity, was accompanied by the clear understanding that all the worlds the Muslims encountered had a divine origin and, even in their present states, still contained valuable wisdom and knowledge. Ancient civilisations could continue to exist, fully preserved, living alongside and participating in the new civilisation.

  One of the most important principles in the spread of Islamic civilisation is the maxim in the sharia that ‘custom has the power of law’ (al-ʿādda muhakkama). This enabled wisdom, aesthetic preferences and everyday customs of a locality, that were in conformity with the revelation, to be incorporated into the sharia.

  Wisdom is as lost property to the believer – he may take it wherever he finds it. (Tirmidhī)

  It also produced a built environment that was rooted in the locality and yet fully integrated and belonging to Dār al-Islām. This was a marriage of unity and diversity, and an indication of the universality of Islam.

  This universality was also expressed in the relationship of equality between the different peoples an
d races, which is clearly stated in the Prophet’s final sermon:

  An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab any superiority over an Arab [...] a white person has no superiority over a black person, nor a black person any superiority over a white person, except in piety and good action. (Imam Ahmad)

  Warfare is an inevitable aspect of human society, and determining the conditions that justify warfare and military practice that are acceptable to Islam was a major concern for Muslim scholars and those engaged in jurisprudence. The Qur’an addresses the subject in a number of passages:

  Permission is given to those who fight because they have been wronged, and God is indeed able to give them victory; those who have been driven from their homes unjustly only because they said, ‘Our Lord is God’ – for had it not been for God’s repelling some men by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques, in which the name of God is much mentioned, would certainly have been destroyed…(Qurʾan, 22:39-40)

  Fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but do not initiate hostilities. Indeed! God does not love aggressors. (Qur’an, 2:190)

  Many hadith give guidance regarding the ethics of war:

  Do not destroy villages and towns, do not spoil cultivated fields and gardens, and do not slaughter cattle. (Sahīh Bukhārī; Sunan Abu Dāwūd)

  No one may punish with fire except the Lord of Fire. (Sunan Abū Dāwūd)

  A famous oration by the first Caliph, Abū Bakr, to his troops emphasises the responsibilities of Muslims in battle:

  ‘Stop, O people, that I might provide you with ten rules, that you might be guided in the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. Do not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially fruit trees. Do not kill any of the enemy’s flock, save for your own food alone. It is likely you will pass by people who have devoted their lives to monasticism; leave them be.’ (Tabarī)

  The care taken to protect monasteries was illustrated when Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, had his troops secure the area around Mount Athos, on which many monasteries were situated. The Sultan’s wife then presented the monks with an icon from Syria. A very different situation occurred when the 4th Crusade was diverted to Byzantium and the Catholics ransacked the monasteries.

  The sharia engaged in every aspect relating to warfare and the cessation of hostilities. Many works were written by scholars from the 9th century onwards covering every area of Islamic military jurisprudence, including: the law of treaties; the treatment of diplomats, hostages, refugees and prisoners of war; the right of asylum; conduct on the battlefield; the protection of women, children and non-combatant civilians; contracts across the lines of battle; the prohibition of the use of certain weapons; and rules regarding damage to the environment.

  The arts of battle and codes of chivalry were cultivated by the warriors of Islam. Many great warriors, such as Salāhuddīn Ayyūbī, were revered for their prowess and celebrated in literature. The Spanish author Vicente Blasco reflected that:

  Europe did not know chivalry, or its adopted literature or sense of honour before the arrival of Arabs in Andalusia and the wide[spread] presence of their knights and heroes in the countries of the south.

  The strength of Islamic civilisation was tested when the nomadic Turks and Mongols conquered the central lands of Islam, destroying Baghdad, the seat of the Caliphate, in 1258. This seeming disaster, in fact, set in motion a diaspora of scholars and craftsmen and accelerated the spread of Islam to its furthest limits. It also culminated in the conversion of the Turks and Mongols, who provided the ruling dynasties for the following centuries. The Afro-Eurasian world now returned to its pre-Islamic structure of the East Roman Empire, Persia, India and China, with Islam dominating the first three worlds and deeply affecting Chinese civilisation.

  In his seminal work Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean – an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, KN Chaudhuri shows how the Muslims played a key role in maintaining and developing the collaborative and peaceful nature of trade and exchange that was the norm between the various cultures and civilisations of Asia, and how the entrance of the Portuguese, and then the other European nations, caused massive disruption, turning it into an arena of perpetual competition and warfare.

  The European conquests have cast a shroud over the extraordinary world that preceded it; for the previous thousand years, Islamic civilisation had provided a unifying structure in which the civilisations across Afro-Eurasia could collaborate and participate. To a far greater degree than in previous worlds, Islamic society encouraged travel and was highly mobile. Pilgrims travelling to Mecca, merchants engaged in long distance trade, scholars seeking knowledge and craftsmen looking for work, all travelled the routes of Afro-Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and could expect and would receive hospitality wherever they found themselves. These networks of pilgrimage, trade, knowledge and craft engaged with, and connected into, the various cultures and civilisations, both within and outside Dār al-Islām, transcending empires and states, and producing a world where trade, ideas and technologies flowed freely.

  In stories told in the Thousand and One Nights, the reader, or as it would have been the listener, might be seamlessly conveyed from Baghdad to China. And this mirrored the reality: during the first half of the 15th century the Ming Emperor dispatched several great armadas into the Indian Ocean in order to trade and assert China’s centrality and authority over the world. These armadas were led by the Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He, and contained Chinese Muslim merchants and Chinese Muslim scribes to record the voyages, one of which included a pilgrimage to Mecca. But no territory was conquered, the trade routes were not disrupted and the armadas returned peacefully to China, enhancing the reputation of the Celestial Empire.

  The relationship between Islam and China was dynamic and multi-faceted; the Mongols brought Persian architects to build Beijing and Chinese artists to their courts in Persia; the decorative arts of China were profoundly affected by Muslim craftsmanship, as observed by Owen Jones in his ground-breaking work The Grammar of Chinese Ornament, published in 1867:

  We are led to think that this art must have had in some way a foreign origin; it so nearly resembles in all its principles the art of the Mohammedan races, that we may presume it was derived from them. It would be no difficult task to take a work of ornament of this class, and, by simply varying the colouring and correcting the drawing, convert it into an Indian or Persian composition.

  Having received knowledge and skills from the ancient worlds in building their civilisation, now, in return, all the worlds either within or bordering Dār al-Islām were enriched by this new creation. Christian and Jewish communities participated in the culture, as did Hindus and Buddhists in India, with Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu becoming the languages of civilised discourse. So great was the attraction of this culture in Islamic Spain that it elicited this lament from a Christian prelate:

  My Christian brothers admire the poetry and chivalry stories of the Arabs, and they study the books written by the philosophers and scholars of the Muslims. They do not do that in order to refute them, but rather to learn the eloquent Arabic style. Where today – apart from the clergy – are those who read the religious commentaries on the Old and New Testaments? Alas, the new generation of intelligent Christians do not know any literature and language well, apart from Arabic literature and the Arabic language. They avidly read the books of the Arabs and amass huge libraries of these books at great expense.

  Sufism had a profound impact on all the religious worlds, which in many other ways were enriched by their connection to Islamic civilisation. Indeed, one of the greatest beneficiaries was Western Christendom, which as we have already noted, was both intellectually and materially enriched.
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  The way that Jews were treated by the Muslims was very different from the treatment they received from the Christians, and this is clearly illustrated during the momentous events of the second half of the 15th century. Rabbi Yitzhak Safarti, the Chief Rabbi of the city of Edirne, sent out a letter to the Jewish communities of Europe soon after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, inviting his co-religionists to leave the torments that they were enduring in Christendom and to seek safety and prosperity in Turkey. In 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain expelled the Jews from their country, which along with the Spanish Inquisition that followed, was arguably one of the most traumatic events in Jewish history prior to the Holocaust. That same year, Sultan Bayezid II issued a proclamation ordering his officials to accept the Sephardic Jews into his country. Around 250,000 Jews came to settle in Ottoman lands, with most heading towards Istanbul and Thessalonica, which absorbed a total of 100,000 Jews. Thessalonica remained for centuries a thriving centre of Jewish culture until World War Two when it was destroyed by the Holocaust.

  A further insight into the rich pre-modern relationship between Muslims and Jews is to be found in the Cairo Genizah collection of some 200,000 texts held in the Cambridge University Library. These go back a thousand years and cover many aspects of the life of the Jewish community. They reveal Muslims and Jews collaborating in long-distance trading ventures. Among the texts is the record of a dispute which divided the Jewish community in Cairo when the son of the great philosopher Maimonides was their leader. The dispute was resolved by the Mufti of Cairo, the Muslim religious leader at the time, who was invited to arbitrate between the sides. For most of its history under Islam, Jewish culture flourished; Jews fully participated in trade and the crafts, were famous as physicians, and played a prominent role in administration, even providing several viziers, the highest position under the sultan. Jewish communities were woven into the fabric of the world of Islam. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the harmony that for the most part existed between Muslims and Jews when Islam dominated the Afro-Eurasian world.