For this project I wanted to utilize my favorite passage from the Quran, which Professor Asani frequently referenced in class:

“Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask [for help], and for freeing slaves; [and who] establishes prayer and gives zakah; [those who] fulfill their promise when they promise; and [those who] are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle. Those are the ones who have been true, and it is those who are the righteous.” —  [2:177]

We talked in class about how the Quran was so special and held so sacred because of its words — It was a scripture so beautiful that all who encountered it were immediately taken by its divinity. We also talked in class about the ritual of prayer in Islam and the significance of direction, as well as the significance of the presence of God as being all encompassing and not always necessarily linked to these directional practices.

Considering these multilayered aspects of our conversations in class regarding Islam, I decided to create a “word cloud” utilizing the very verse which proclaimed the belief in God both in relation to and in dis-relation to spatiality. I utilized a color scheme which reminded me of the sunset and the sunrise because I felt that within the idea of the sun is a sense of directionality (East and West). I utilized the figure of a circle, or a ring, instead of the more traditional word-cloud “cloud” form in-keeping with a sense of undirectionality. The ultimate conclusion to be gleaned by observers of this piece is intended by the artist (myself) to relate to these two coexisting planes — that of the necessity of direction in prayer in the Islamic tradition as well as the necessity for a belief and practice of Allah/God which is in many ways more important than this ritualistic practice of direction in prayer.