​“The letter nun in Arabic (ن) resembles an ink-pot which ‘contains’ the ink with which the archetypes of all beings are written upon the Guarded Tablet. This letter also resembles a ship which carries the possibilities of a particular cycle of manifestation upon the ‘ocean of non-existence’. The fifteenth century Persian Sufi scholar Kamal al-Din Husayn Kashifi, in his Quranic commentary, relates the letter nun to the first letter of light (al-nur) which was the first reality created by God according to the narration, ‘the first thing that God created was light’, and the last letter of al-Rahman, the Divine Mercy, by virtue of which all creation was brought forth.” 
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— Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality

God and Artistic Creativity

A Process Appreciation of Islamic Art

Farhan Shah and Jay McDaniel

Feb. 16, 2020


Fartah Shah (Norway) is a process philosopher influenced by Muhammad Iqbal
Jay McDaniel (USA) is a process theologian influenced by Alfred North Whitehead
For a process understanding of Islam, see Shah's A Process Interpretation of Islam
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An Islamic understanding of art, as developed by Seyyed Nasr and explored by Oubai Elkerdi challenges two assumptions often made by artists in the West. 

The first is that, individually and collectively, we invent the ideas that appear in our imaginations.  None of them come to us, so it seems; all are our projections, pure and simple.  The second is that novelty is a norm in its own right; as long as something is 'novel' it is good. 

An Islamic understanding of art invites us to consider the alternatives: namely (1) that when we are inspired by God, we don't simply arrive at the ideas, they come to us from the divine depths; and (2) that these ideas carry within them a norm, the production of beauty.  The idea is that God is an Artist, that the Artist is a well-spring of beauty, and that the Artist yearns for humans to create beauty on earth as it is in heaven.

Westerners may quickly caution that these two ideas are dangerous for several reasons.  They invite a simple-minded and uncritical appeal to inspiration (God gave me the idea) that forecloses criticism and honesty about agency.  They can function to stifle what God actually deems quite healthy: the human impulse to create from human resources.  And they may likewise stifle exploratory creativity that simple 'tries out new things' for the joy of it. 

There is wisdom in all of these criticisms.  A process appreciation will consider them carefully.  And yet a process appreciation will also recognize, as ought we all, that a certain Promethean impulse has entered into society that results in a will-to-power, a will-to-mastery, at the expense of a gentle receptivity to the creativity of the more-than-human word (nature) and a receptivity to the voice of holiness itself, which does indeed 'come to us' through what we process theologians call 'initial aims.'   As process philosophers and theologians we want to claim and celebrate human creatiity, but simultaneously claim and celebrate the role of the divine and beauty in creativity at its best.  This is true of creativity in art and in everyday life.

Traditional Islamic Art is an invitation to reclaim our humility and receptivity to the Other, so that we might be more deeply creative in a spiritually sensitive way.  Consider, for example, arabesque art.

​Let's say that one spiritual purpose of the arabesque is to "remove the eye from the possibility of fixing itself in one place and to remove the mind from the possibility of becoming imprisoned in any particular solidification and crystallization of matter."  We are grateful to Islamic art for introducing this form of art, this way of helping us avoid the solidification of process and change, intricacy and complexity, into something we cling to as if it were a god.  

The world is deeply beautiful, says process theology, but it is not clingable in this way.  Instead it is always moving, always changing, evanescent in a kind of perpetual perishing, amid which, as soon as something becomes, it becomes past and is replaced by something new.  We can love things, but we cannot cling to things when they pass away.

The creative and performing arts at their best are an invitation to participate in the creative side of perpetual perishing.  They are ways of being open to the calling of the new, not so that we can worship the new or worship the old, but so that we can follow and be guided by the calling One.  Seyyed Nasr seaks of this calling One as the Divine Artist.  Nasr proposes that the arts at their very best are responsive to this One, such that the artist becomes, as it were, a living pen in the hand of the divine Artist: that is, a vessel through whom the creativity of the Artists flows, such that beauty becomes available in the world.

This beauty does not need to repeat or imitate the beauty of the natural world.  It does not need to be representational.  It is instead a way of collaborating with the created beauty of the natural world by creating distinctively forms of beauty which add to what has already become.

In the West one myth of creativity is that the one who collaborates in this way must be manic-depressive and steeped in suffering. He -- and almost always they are male -- must be so possessed of the impulse to create that he gives everything up in service to the impulse.  Possession becomes obsession and all other responsibilities fall way.  The artist makes a god of his momentary impulses, falling into the shirk (Arabic: شرك‎ širk).

But Elderki gives us another image, namely that of the disciplined Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.  Murakami has found that routine or habit can be the friend of creativity.  The disciplines set the stage for the creativity.  And then, drawing from the wisdom of Nasr, Elderki adds that this creativity can be an instrument in the hand of the One who calls us, and for whom our hearts perpetually yearn.

If we think this way, then the disciplines of art can themselves be understood as spiritual disciplines, as ways of becoming available to the calling of the merciful and compassionate, in whose heart the entire universe unfolds.  It would be as if we are carried in a ship across the ocean of time by something more gracious than can ever imagine, but who seeks to guide us, and in whose heart we seek to rest.

Would we not then say, with Rumi, that the very one who is seeking us is One whom we are likewise seeking and, in a certain way, finding?  Who would need torment?  Who would need self-importance?  Are they not irrelevant when nested in the arms of the beloved?  

And yet, says Elkerdi, we would find ourselves filled with a creativity that deepens any engineering, any science, any commerce we might undertake, so that its true purpose could be realized: adding to the well-being of life on a small planet which, in its own way, is a perpetual sign of the calling One.

Why We Need Better Arts Education in the Arab World 

by Oubai Elkerdi

If the Arab world continues to under-value arts education, it risks falling even further behind developed countries in preparing students for the knowledge economy,” wrote Maysa Jalbout in her recent post titled ‘Arts education in the Arab world deserves more respect – and resources’.

Let’s build upon that. The question of the importance of the ‘arts’ has been investigated by Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind where he argues that this era demands a whole new set of skills which our rational-biased societies—madly in love with disciplines such as law, medicine, business and engineering—have thus far looked at with disdain and haughtily labelled as a “waste of time”.

According to Pink’s research, however, “the MFA is the new MBA” and the future belongs to individuals with “high-concept, high-touch abilities” who bring together design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. “These six senses,” he says, “increasingly will guide our lives and shape our world.”

In reality, the Middle East and North Africa has a long, illustrious history with the “six senses”. We see evidence of it to this day in Islamic art that covers not only sacred spaces and courtyards from Spain to China, but even objects of everyday life—such as pen boxes and utensils—which were decorated with beautiful calligraphy and ornaments so as to allow the beholder to “pierce through the veil of material existence”, to borrow a phrase from Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This personification of ‘things’ and the high-minded, spiritual relationship people had with both the sacred and the secular once defined the character of the region and the worldview of its custodians.

Pink admits: “These abilities have always comprised part of what it means to be human. But after a few generations in the Information Age, these muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.” Here we are not simply talking about the technical skills required to make quick, “15 minutes of fame” art; Rick Williams and Julianne Newton write in Visual Communication: “To become an educated person in the 21st century requires not only verbal and mathematical proficiency but also the ability to interpret, critique, create, and use visual communication on sophisticated levels.”

Our intuitive skills—our ‘cultural’ muscles—are the ones that have atrophied, and no one has described our present situation better than Beeban Kidron, who laments, “Technical access has never been greater, cultural access never weaker.”

Arts education, not just in the Arab world, is often embarrassingly technical and uncreative. Sometimes it really feels like we are training technicians, not awakening artists. Williams and Newton write: “Limiting our educational processes and cultural expressions to rational, linear techniques creates a rational bias. In doing so, we deprive our culture and ourselves of holistic development of our intuitive intelligences and of our ability to transcend basic technique and to express ourselves with creative and aesthetic sophistication in drawing and in other problem-solving activities that require creative thinking.”

There is another problem. What we have today is form without meaning, appearances without understanding, and a lot of technical jargon but no substance. The artistic genius that once dynamically intertwined form and meaning is being replaced by an art “in which sensation, not story, is king”, as Kidron would put it.

Take as an example the arabesque, which “through its extension and repetition of forms interlaced with the void, removes from the eye the possibility of fixing itself in one place and from the mind the possibility of becoming imprisoned in any particular solidification and crystallization of matter,” writes Nasr in Islamic Art and Spirituality. Repeating arches and columns in mosques and courtyards symbolize the rhythms of life and punctuate the phases of the human journey, while courtyard fountains serve both as natural air-conditioners and, through the soft sound of flowing water, remind us of how our intellectual and spiritual journey should look like: always in gentle motion and self-renewing, always life-giving. Similar observations can be made about traditional music and poetry.

We all tend to attribute the successes of the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” to places like the House of Wisdom and to the great scientists who roamed the lands and transformed the world with their open-mindedness and inventions, and, without a doubt, they all played an essential role in “pushing the human race forward”. Once again, however, this shows our rational bias and underestimation of the ‘psychological’ role that art and architecture played in generating healthy, diverse, and deeply humanistic environments from which flowed most of the region’s famous discoveries and innovations.

While it’s essential that we stress arts education in general in order to refine our inner eye, cultivate our creativity, and develop intuitive skills, it’s equally essential that we teach the history, philosophy and inner meaning of our indigenous art (and of other art forms as well). This is a critical step in taking ownership of our cultures; without a profound and continual emphasis on meaning, without beautiful substance, we become prone to intellectual colonisation and blind imitation.

In our shared imagination, a true artist is a vagabond with manic-depressive traits caught in bad habits. They are someone whose life depends on unsteady creative jolts—some successful, others only discovered and appreciated years after their death—that end up consuming her or him and leaving them at the footsteps of a grim and dramatic ending worthy of its own Wikipedia section.

This image has led us to believe that this is the ‘natural way’ of the artist. As an amateur artist and an informal student of the history and philosophy of art myself, I believe there is an alternative to this destructive, even promethean view.

Debunking the ‘creativity’ myth

In Kirby Ferguson’s view, almost everything is a remix and, in reality, “our creativity comes from without, not from within.” A similar point was made a few years ago by Elizabeth Gilbert who proposed the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius that is loaned to us “from some unimaginable source.” Throughout her talk, Gilbert gives examples of poets and musicians who described their art as something that came “at” them rather than something that came “from” them.

For the scientifically inclined on the one hand, psychology has repeatedly shown how malleable we are and how easy it is for us to be influenced by unconscious, external stimuli that affect our decision making and behaviour (see Thinking, Fast and Slow). On the other hand, “The deep mysteriousness of creativity also intimidated scientists. […] Most cognitive skills have elaborate biological histories, so their evolution can be traced over time. But not creativity—the human imagination has no clear precursors,” writes Jonah Lehrer in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. He later adds: “The birth of creativity, in other words, arrived like any insight: out of nowhere.”

Hence, the artist is not a source, but a conduit of ideas—a channel through which beauty finds its material form in this world. But how useful is this paradigm when talking about arts education?

The discipline of art

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4 am and works for five to six hours. “In the afternoon,” he says, “I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music.” By 9:00pm he is in bed and ready to sleep. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he remarks. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

This is quite interesting; in our collective consciousness, the words “art” and “discipline” are understood as antonyms. But Murakami’s discipline challenges the conventional notion that artists should lead organic, unorganized lives marked by occasional ‘awakenings’ and the usual, archetypal bohemian activities we all know.

In a 1999 article entitled ‘How Mundane Routines Produce Creative Magic’, Mark McGuinness writes: “Murakami may have been joking when he mentioned mesmerism, but as a trained hypnotist I can tell you he was bang on the money. By repeating the same routine every day, all these creators are effectively hypnotizing themselves, deliberately altering their state of consciousness in order to access the ‘deeper state of mind’ that allows them to work their creative magic.”

In other words, the artist is responsible for creating the conditions—or ‘setting up the stage’—for the creative juices to flow. This agrees with what Elizabeth Gilbert said. Thus, if I am an artist, then I am responsible for the process (the‘how’), not the result (the ‘what’).

Finding meaning through Islamic art

Everything mentioned so far is no news at all. In our previous discussion about the importance of improving arts education in the Arab world we mentioned how a rigorous study of the philosophy and inner meaning of Islamic art would offer excellent insights and a unique starting point for a deeper understanding of art and the human creative enterprise in general.

Consider the following passage from Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s book Islamic Art and Spirituality:

By being in perfect surrender to the Divine Will, the [true artist] becomes himself the pen in the hands of the Divine Artist, realizing concretely the Quranic dictum, “The Hand of God is above their hands” (48:10). He is himself like a pen with which ‘he’ writes the pages of his life as a masterpiece in both form and content, the [true artist] being himself a work of sacred art. Moreover, when he actually produces calligraphy in such a state, the pen in his hands becomes like his own being an instrument in the ‘hand of God’… But the sacred art of calligraphy in Islam was created by those who did become themselves a pen in the hand of the Divine Artisan. It is they who established the traditional norms which were then emulated by others.

This was a long quote, and I had to read it more than once to fully understand it. But it perfectly summarizes the anti-promethean worldview that brought about the unique components of Islamic art and architecture, the best of which were the works of spiritual masters who, in Murakami’s words, reached a “deeper state of mind”.

Imagine if art students, and creative innovators for that matter, were exposed to this worldview by serious teachers and mentors who believed and practiced it as opposed to simply presenting it in the form of meaningless platitudes. Imagine an art ‘curriculum’ that emphasizes discipline and self-refinement over torment and self-importance.

- July 9, 2013, WAMDA