Islamic Aesthetic Quotes

If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who special- ize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe.

The universe and the events in it are thus perfect examples to imitate. However, no matter how perfect the example is, everyone will draw and interpret objects according to their abilities. Charles Lako, commenting on aesthetics once said, that the magnificent scene at sunset would remind a farmer of the rather unaesthetic thought of dinner; the physicist, not of beauty or ugliness, but of the rightness or wrongness of the analysis of a matter. Thus, for Lalo, the sunset is beautiful only for those who are aware of beauty. Therefore, only those who see with God and hear with God can appreciate the beauty that spreads throughout existence as their senses are tuned to the spiritual realms.

I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean?

Heaven's eucharistic irruption into earthly space and time prompted classical Lutheranism not to join the Reformed and Anabaptists in their campaign of iconoclasm which rendered Christian churches little different in external appearance from Islamic mosques. While conceding the adiaphorous quality of images representing various aspects of the Incarnate Life, as early as his conflict with Karlstadt the Reformer defended the appropriateness of the crucifix and sculptures of Mary with the Christ Child. Orthodox Lutheran architecture and church decor attested the confession of our Lord's presence among His own in the means of grace, forging a style which goes hand in hand with precious doctrinal substance. Increasing accommodation to the North American Puritan milieu over the past century has led to a loss of the genuinely Lutheran understanding of the altar as a monument to the atonement, which is Christ's throne in our midst. ... If our chancels' decoration (or stark lack thereof) bespeaks the absence of our Lord and His celestial companions, can we be surprised at waning faith in the real presence and at waxing conviction of the rightfulness of an open communion practice? A deliberate opting for Puritanism's aesthetic barrenness can only make the reclaiming of Lutheran substance an even harder struggle.

Rhetoric is not a substitute for image but it is the most flawless way of expressing meaning or truth. Through it the meaning of beauty and the aesthetic values of Islam are revealed. What is beautiful in Islam is what cannot be represented. It is what escapes the sensual and what transcends sensory perception. Beauty is lofty and supreme; it cannot be contained in a sensory form, nor can it be evaluated by the senses. Artistically, this means that aesthetic value is not contained in the ‘image’ or ‘form’ but in its meaning, and that beauty can be found only in infinity, which cannot be represented or in what cannot be ‘given form’.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

they will live aesthetic lives in the caves of Pakistan and Afghanistan, not requiring huge financial resources. Secondly, and most important, they won’t care. Jihadists have a singular goal that they believe their Allah has demanded of them. They also believe that their Allah has provided to them the weapons to accomplish that singular goal. The Jihadists will readily conclude that, if it is necessary to destroy the world’s richest consuming nation (and also the world’s only military superpower), in order to conquer the rest of the nations in the world for Islam, so be it. If one thinks like the Jihadists, one understands their actions, past, present, and future, from the belief that Muhammad has demanded: “I command by Allah to go fight all the people of the world until they confess there is no God but Allah, and I am his messenger…” (From      the Hadith recorded by Sahih Al-Bukhari, Islam and Terrorism, Dr. Gabriel).

Apostasy was the major justification for terminating internal opposition throughout the history of Islamic empires. That is why we have heard of whole tribes and groups being eradicated for apostasy. Muslim philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were killed or exiled for apostasy and thus, the Muslim world stood still in all scientific and aesthetic fields.

In every manifestation of life, whether in animals or plants, I saw a lesson, and I detested, how much did I detest, one-dimensional intellects. I lived fighting the pedantic morals of the pirates of intellect, of the traditionalists, and of the bureaucrats. I lived defending the beauty of thought and the art of reason for it is not reason alone that the pirates detest but the aesthetics of reason.

As for me, I admire above all Noble Drew's aesthetic, his unique and special blend of Afro-American, Native-American, High Magical, and Oriental symbolism and imagery - as well as his courage, his martyrdom, and his revolutionary stance against "Pharaoh." By Americanizing the prophetic spirit he injected our culture with a kind of folk Sufism. On the esoteric level, anyone who loves Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice is a member of the "Asiatic race" and the Lost/Found Moorish Nation of North America.

European converts to Islam were more vulnerable to extremist groups because many lacked this lifelong socialization. Many came from deprived social backgrounds and were primed to be drawn to aggressive, militant strains of anything, from local gangs to local extremist ideologues. They were quick to subsume their personal grudges against family and society into transnational political grudges against the West. Cuspert fell readily into the arms of shadowy German jihadist figures who promised that extreme stance. In fact, Cuspert didn't convert to Islam so much as initiate himself straight into a radical Islamist group called The True Religion. It was as though he had pressed a button and changed the aesthetic theme of the WordPress site of his life from gangsta to mujahid; the chaotic structure and violent impulses were all the same, but were now overlaid with Islamist imagery and themes. Suddenly causes like Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan mattered to him deeply, and Germans, Westerners, and a broad swath of humanity became "unbelievers" who were complicit in Muslim suffering. His old friends on the Berlin rap scene were devastated, and furious. They were from "good enough" Muslim families and were adept at living and rapping about the painful contradictions. They didn't turn to violence. They all knew where the lines were. His record producer later complained bitterly about Cuspert's betrayal: "He disgraced everyone, all of the Muslim MCs. He ruined the community. May Allah forgive him. But we don't.

The steady state theory is aesthetically and philosophically pleasing to many people, to whom it is a matter of regret that observations indicate that it is not the correct model.

What can ‘art’ mean in a culture where the primary organ of perception is not the eye or the ears, but the heart? It requires a shift from the visible to the sensible, in which attention is directed not outwardly toward the object, but inwardly, within the heart. This shift – from the eye as an organ of (potentially rational) verification to the heart as one of (necessarily perceptual) validation shifts the aesthetic from one located between a disinterested subject and object toward an aesthetic located between an interested subject and an object made malleable through the performance of perception. The Quran scarcely differentiates between material and immaterial perception: external receptors, the eyes and ears, function indivisibly with the heart, the internal sensory organ. This enables a heart-perception of the unseen that unbalances and confuses the distinction of the senses. Whereas a visually mimetic model of representation requires light to expose material reality, in the Quran light can simultaneously show and blind, sometimes at the same time.