Paradise Lies Beneath Her Feet
Feb 22nd, 2014 by mbprasad
Jahima came to the Prophet and he said, “O Messenger of Allah, I intend to join the expedition and I seek your advice.”
The Prophet said, “Do you have a mother?”
He said, “Yes.”
The Prophet said, “Stay with her, for verily, Paradise lies beneath her feet.”
-Source: Sunan An-Nasa’i, Book of Jihad, Number 3104
The passage above comes from the hadith and was my inspiration for this project. Due to its oral origins, the accuracy of the hadith is disputed, but I focus on the importance of this phrase for women in Islam rather than its definitive truth.
The idea of a mother as connected with the divine is significant not only because it elevates a woman’s position in society, but also because it emphasizes the importance of the mother as the first teacher of the Qur’an and an intermediary between the word of God and her child. As noted by Z. Sardar, learning the Qur’an on your mother’s lap creates a more flexible and familiar relationship than the structured, rule-oriented methods learned in a madrasa.
To express this relationship between the word of God and mothers, I interwove Islamic art, calligraphy, and female images to create the image that “paradise” is within a woman. I interpret “paradise” to mean God or Allah because of the Quranic interpretation that heaven (paradise) is being with God.
My project has three pieces painted on wood and gloss-finished. The first shows a woman kneeling and reading the Qur’an. The second panel is the same style, but portrays the side silhouette of a woman wearing a hijab. In both, I wrote Allah (الله) in their dresses and blended it into the background. This subtlety represents a mother’s connection with God and the background represents the style of mosaic and calligraphic writing often found on mosque walls. Blue and white were used to reflect the familiarity of a mother’s relationship with God’s word.
The third panel, which is the largest, uses the same color scheme and has Allah written in large calligraphy along with the Islamic moon and star. This was done to show that while He is inside of her, God is still above a mother and at the center of all.