Mystical Musings: Understanding Islam Through the Arts

Introductory Essay 

Throughout my life, I have heard many endings to the phrase “Islam is…”. Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is a way of life. Islam is a political instituion. Islam is a plague on the world. Islam is just like every other Abrahamic faith, as good and bad as that may be. Islam is charity. Islam is legalistic. Islam is praying five times a day. But this semester was the first time I ever heard the phrase: “Islam is an aesthetic experience”.

As someone who identifies as neither a good artist, or a good Muslim, this class redefined what I consider to be Islam and to be art, and what I consider to be both. In my blog, “Mystical Musings: Understanding Islam Through the Arts”, I attempt to better redefine my own conception of Islam and my own conception of art. Growing up, I was exposed to a very rigid, albeit loving form of Islam. I was raised a Sunni Muslim, and my parents, like many other recent immigrant parents, clung to their faith as a distinguishing feature among the masses of people in the United States. Islam was a checklist. You pray five times a day, don’t drink, don’t pursue premarital relations, give charity, and be a good neighbor. However, as a Pakistani-American, I also got an exposure to the cultural elements of Islam that I didn’t realize were inherently “Islamic” in nature. I grew up sitting in the backseat of my mother’s car and she sweetly sung along to nasheed, but I still felt slightly guilty playing American music throughout the house. Our walls were adorned with calligraphy, but I was once admonished for doodling eyes in the corner of my paper during Sunday school. I narrowed my eyes at the idea of relatives back home celebrating milad-un-nabi, and rolled my eyes as I watched fights break out in our extended family group chat over some Youtube scholar or another.

As I grew older, I grew more defensive of my Islamic identity. I wasn’t the best Muslim. But I was proud to be Muslim, especially politically. I worked closely with my congregation to help fight for greater political representation, increase their voter registration, and  fight for more acceptance. I became more critical of hardline Islam and embraced a more liberal interpretation, but my go to phrase would be “that’s not Islamic, that’s cultural”.

This class, however, broke down my one line of defense. It taught me that everything was cultural, and that everything was Islamic. It taught me that aspects of my Pakistani culture were intrinsically Islamic, even. For instance: the ghazal. I had a rudimentary understanding of the ghazal, but I didn’t realize its religious significance. I had always viewed it in an entirely secular sense, with the eternal “you” meaning a lover. But after spending a week in class on the concept,  I realized that like many other themes of this class, it had the ability to be entirely religious in its “secularity” and that its artform blended the two beautifully. Similarly, I had fallen prey to the popular “secularization” of Rumi and forgot about his power and influence as a mystic. So much of what I had grown up hearing, both through my parents and through my iPhone, had suddenly become integral to my relationship with Islam. 

That’s why I chose to focus so much on the literary and poetic aspects of devotional Islam for my blog posts, because of it’s significance to me personally, and the ability for it to be interpreted in so many ways. This course taught me to consider the Quran a work of literature, as opposed to simply a book of doctrine. Similarly, it taught me to view poetry as a tool of devotion, as opposed to inherently secular “art”. 

I also wanted the idea of the debate of “authenticity” to be a big part of my portfolio, as it’s something I have always struggled with, and as it’s a concept this class particularly challenged. What parts of Islam are authentic? What is man-made? Similarly, what is “authentic” art? Growing up, I always had a very hardline view of  what “art” was. I was never a fan of art museums, and was that edgy eighth grader that claimed rap wasn’t a form of poetry. Similarly, I had a very hardline view of what was “Islamic” and what was “cultural”. Anything I disagreed with wasn’t art, just as anything I disagreed with wasn’t Islamic. However, a small part of me always knew I was wrong, and that my disagreement over concepts stemmed from ignorance. I didn’t always understand art, and I wasn’t good at it–so it scared me. Similarly, I didn’t consider myself to be a good Muslim and I knew I was wilfully ignorant of a lot of scripture, so it also scared me. 

“Mystical Musings: Understanding Islam Through the Arts” was my way of reckoning with the idea of authenticty and culture, and a way for me to better understand both art and Islam. We begin with my first piece, and perhaps my favorite, the reverse poem. In writing the reverse poem, I wanted to pay homage to the literary tradition of Islam, as well introduce my viewer to the tenous idea of “authenticity”. 

Some feminist scholars claim that patriarchy was read into the Quran by those that initially interpreted it. Personally, I’m torn at this claim. On one hand, I completely agree. There are numerous verses and claims that twitter-mullahs have made about a “woman’s place” in Islam that I fundamentally disagree with, and I know people have taken their sexist liberties with interpreting them. However, in honoring different “truths” through my poem–was I also somehow honoring the patriarchal version? By challenging the authenticity of those interpretations, am I somehow reaffirming that individuals are allowed to interpret the Quran in a sexist manner if they wish to do so, and believe so is correct? I tried to visually represent these internal conflicts in the reverse poem, by not telling the reader to read the poem in any specific way or making a moral claim that it being read one way was more superior than the other. 

This brings me to my second piece, my visual depiction of debate over what can be considered “Islamic art”. Again, I hoped to grapple with the idea of authenticity. Is arabesque art inherently Islamic, or was it too, simply conscribed with Islamic-ness? This was intended also to be an example of the conflict between “culture and religion”. In a way, I was hoping for the reader to extrapolate the chicken and the egg debate beyond Arabesque art and Islamic art into the Arab world at large and Islamic practice. How much of what we consider to be Islamic practice today is actually just historically Arab practices that we’ve codified into religion? When drawing this piece, that question definitely came to be–but as did my confusion over it. I know that’s a bad thing, but now that my cultural defense has been weakened, I don’t necessarily know how to articulate why it’s a bad thing. Nonetheless, I hope for this piece to build upon the theme throughout my portfolio that much of what we consider to be “authentic” is up for debate. 

No piece better depicts that idea than my third piece, the hadith tree. I initially intended to draw some branches of the tree to be visually weaker than others–but I decided that I wanted to deviate from the direct idea of authenticity and being critical of contemporary Islam into a piece that paid direct testament to my idea of authencity and my upbringing. All of the hadith “leaves” were hadiths that my parents taught me growing up. To me, they are authentic, not just because they have been theologically verified through the isnads and chains of transmission, but because my father, someone I consider to be the most genuine and authentic Muslim, practices them as such. Most are loving, and those that aren’t, are instructional for your health. Thus to me, they are in essence Islamic, and thus, authentic. 

Next, we  have my pen and paper drawing depicting how Islamic reform is played out on the bodies of women, which again touches on ideas of authenticity and culture. In class, I noticed that it was traditionally female practices of Islam, like attending Durgahs or listening to nasheed, that Salafi reactionaries found to be bidah. Similarly, through daily life, it’s hard not to notice that it is those that are most visibly Muslim (aka women) that are subject to the most critism. Essentially, the authenticity of women’s Islam is what is most commonly put in question, and I wanted to depict this most aptly in a piece. To be completely honest, a large part of why I didn’t consider myself to be a good Muslim wasn’t just my failure to complete the basic tenant of Islam, but also because I didn’t “look” like a “good” Muslim, or what I was taught a good Muslim should look like. So I wanted to depict that as well. I intentionally chose that the more “Western” side would be covered in Urdu and that the more “Islamic” side would be covered in English to challenge the idea that Pakistan and America’s Islam are somehow monolithic, and that women all across the world, no matter your place or residence or piety, will always be challenged for their intepretations and “authenticty” of Islam the most. 

My next piece also deals with ideas of “authenticity” and is based on what became my second-favorite reading of the semester, My Son the Fanatic. Although, to be completely honest, I didn’t entirely understand the story on first glance, I felt it encapsulated my struggle between culture and Islam almost perfectly, as I hoped this painting would as well. The warring “fanatics” in different colors were intended to represent the internal conflict many Muslims in the West, me included, face in their expression of their faith and balancing feelings of belonging with feelings of authenticity. Who is authentically a Muslim? Is it the man who practices Islam to an extreme, but is extremely judgemental in the proccess? Is it the man who shirks all traditional practice, but is kind to those that society is not kind to? I hope my piece properly depicts the struggle between these two questions. 

Finally, my portfolio culminates with my depiction of Kishwar Naheed’s We Sinful Women in the form of digital protest art. Honestly, this one kinda came out of left field in terms of the continued “authenticity” theme,  but I wanted my last piece to be something that allowed me to pay testament to the revolutionary themes of poetry, as well as to the ideas of feminism in Islam, all in the unqiuely cultural context of Pakistan. So I decided to take one of the poems that was included in the feminist anthology and make it into a poster, inspired by the Aurat March of Pakistan. I found the Aurat’s March to be incredible inclusive, and incredibly Islamic, in its execution. You had women from all backgrounds coming together and fighting for a better Pakistan. Many did so on explicitly religious grounds, while others did so on more secular grounds–but they all fought for a more equal, and thus in my opinion, Islamic society. I wanted this final piece to be a reaction to the reactionary movements that led to the Aurat March in a sense. 

I wish I could tell you that this portfolio helped me answer the question of what an “authentic” Islam is, or what is disticntly “cultural” over “religious”, but I can’t, and I’m sorry if it didn’t for you either. However, I hope that reading this portfolio helped blur the lines between these distinctions, and reaffirmed the revolutionary nature of asking questions and fighting back against norms that I find integral to a productive and fulfilling practice of Islam, which it did  for me in the creation proccess. 

Thanks for reading!

For this week’s piece, I engaged with the anthology of Urdu Feminist Poetry titled We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry, translated by Ruksana Ahmed. The anthology of poems was created in order to subvert the idea that the tradition of Urdu poetry was dominated by only men. It traced the origins of Urdu poetry and its slow transition from something of mere aesthetic significance to the political powerhouse of Iqbal, and sets the stage for the feminist poetry that follows. Poetry that both embraces and defies literary expectations. The author writes about Fahmida Riaz, who made the deliberate choice to use more “accessible Indic language” in her poetry, and avoided Sanskritized or Persianized words that India and Pakistan’s governments manufactured to increase difference (Ahmed 4).

I couldn’t think of a better parallel to this anthology than the 2018/2019 Aurat Marches in Pakistan. They shared the revolutionary spirit of these poets. They subverted the idea that politics or protest is a masculine art form, and attempted to be as inclusive as possible in nature. In order to honor the writings of Pakistan’s feminist poets and show that the fight for equality is never ending, I decided to make depict one of the poem’s as a protest poster. The women of Pakistan cannot be put in a box, they cannot be suppressed or defined. They are liberal and conservative. Critical and acceptance. Muslim and not Muslim. But above all else, they are powerful. I chose the poem, “We Sinful Women”, and made a slogan; “hum gunaygar auratein qhamosh nai raenge” or “we sinful woman will not stay quiet”. In creating the design, I wanted to make sure that it was as inclusive as I could make it, and made the deliberate effort to choose women who appear to be different levels of “sinful” (whatever that’s intended to mean), and those of different skin tones. Moreover, I chose this slogan in specific because I felt like it spoke most to the poem, and the idea that women cannot be silenced with moralistic terms like “sinful” or “dirty”.

For this piece, I was inspired by our reading My Son the Fanatic in Week 13 by Hanif Kureishi. The short story is centered around an immigrant father’s concern over a change in his son’s behavior. Throughout the story, we learn through bits and pieces that his son has become more religious, to the point where he could be considered a “fundamentalist” or a “fanatic” for his devout following and submission to Islam. Throughout the story, we see the son challenge the father for his unIslamic practices, and the father grow increasingly frustrated with his. son. But it all escalates once the son disrespects his father’s “friend” on the basis of her occupation as a prostitute, which pushes the father into a blind rage. The story ends with the father violently beating the son, and the phrase “who is fanatic now?”

I specifically chose to use paint, as opposed to any other artistic material, in the piece because of its inherently bold and messy nature. The word fanatic is bold. It holds power. It has the ability to cast a judgment on others practice, but by inverting the color and the depiction of the two figures, we turn that judgement into a guessing game–who is a fanatic? Who has the power to call the other out? I intentionally depicted both figures as somewhat ominous and out of place to connect to Kureishi’s writing about alienation and xenophobia growing up as a Pakistani Muslim in the UK. Neither figure is accepted by the viewer on first glance. Both are considered strange and ominous, even though one may try as hard as they can. We don’t know who the true fanatic is, because both can be considered fanatic for different reasons: one for their devotion to a dogmatic, fundamentalist Islam, and the other for their blind acceptance of Western society.

This week, we moved our discussion away from the historic and general intersection of culture, art, and Islam, to its interpretation and impact in contemporary Islam—with a specific focus on the role of women and the impacts of colonialism in Islamic practice. We learned about how the latest wave of legalistic Islam was hypothesized to come as a reaction to colonialism and the perceived “secularization”. Moreover, we learned how women have become an ideological battleground between Salafi/Wahhabi interpretations and more lenient, Sufi-based interpretations, for many women were typically limited to practice forms of Islam that Salafi reactionaries found to be bidah (ie attending Durgahs and taking part in birthday celebrations of the Prophet). Ultimately, it seemed that no matter what a woman does–it will always be bad. Secular countries like Turkey worked to deny women their agency in practicing their faith by refusing to allow them to wear the hijab, because it serves as an overt aesthetic representation of their faith, and is considered “backwards”. In the same light, “modernity” is directly tied to how a woman dresses. Often times, people lament how “modern” the Muslim world used to be and point to photos of women in miniskirts as their evidence. On the flip side, women are also constantly berated for not following “proper Islamic dress codes”, and can be forced to cover by the men of their family. A woman’s piety is tied directly to her appearance, and it ends there. No matter how pious, righteous, or godly she is–all of that is swept away the appearance of her bare legs. In order to depict this catch-22 situation, I drew the following picture:

I was inspired by the woman marching at Pakistan’s Aurat March (Women’s March) in this photo. I was further inspired by this week’s reading by Charlotte Weber. Often times, Western feminists seek to “liberate” Muslim women, but in the process, they are denying Muslim women their own self autonomy. Weber outlines how Western feminists made the veil into a “quintessential symbol of a women’s subordinate status”, and misunderstood the level of social capital Muslim women yielded within the home (132). She outlines the “responsibility” that Western feminists felt towards their Eastern sisters, and the inherent superiority they felt in their elevated status as more “progressive” (Weber, 40). They continued to treat Muslim women as a monolith, and assumed that they all had a singular perception of the veil–which could not have been further from the truth. I drew this drawing in order to further showcase that these ideas of aesthetic liberation further trap women, and can be considered seldom different from shaming a woman for not covering to begin with.

In Week 4, we learned about the role of the Prophet in Islam and Islam as a religion of models. One of the greatest roles of the Prophet was his role as a “walking Quran”, with his lifestyle and teachings being codified in Sunnah and Hadith. I found the mechanism in which Hadith, or the sayings and lessons of the Prophet that expanded upon the Quran, to be one of the most interesting parts of the course so far—because it’s been a concept I’ve struggled with independently for a few years.  For how could we be sure it was the truth, especially when considering the fallibility of man?

The chain of verification, and the secondary re-verification, reassured me that Hadiths were far more valid than child me had previously known. The three classifications of hadith as strong, medium, and weak, also particularly interested me, because why would someone insist on believing in a hadith that is known to be weak? Learning more about the isnads and the chains of transmission, I realized that it was considered a literal tree of communication—with some branches being stronger than others. That’s why I decided to draw a tree, to also reference the motif of nature as knowledge, and the ability to being able to “grow” and “tend” to your spiritual knowledge.

I specifically chose this pencil and paper method of art because I thought it spoke most to the theme of knowledge and learning, which I feel ties directly to Hadith and Sunnah, because they’re both meant to be mechanisms of knowledge and learning. I imagined that, at some point, a companion sat to write down the actions or sayings of the Prophet, so I felt it would only be appropriate if it was in this format. Some branches are longer than others to also indicate discrepancy in how many people were involved in the train of transmission, with the assumption that the fewer the people, the more trustworthy they had to be—which is why those branches are thicker.  Finally, I decorated the “leaves” of the tree with common Sunnah, to showcase how they were spread and encouraged throughout all of the Muslim world.

This week in class, we discussed the symbolism of art in mosques and diversity of mosques throughout the world, watched a documentary that outlined the diversity of art in the Islamic world and debated the origin of the concept of “Islamic” art in section.

While watching the film, I struggled with the concept of an “Islamic world” at all, particularly when they discussed the difference between the world’s “Islamic” art and “secular” art, because presumably if such a world existed, all the art in it could be considered Islamic to some degree. A similar complexity arrived in our debate in our weekly section, where we unpacked the opposing viewpoints of Necipoglu and Nasr on  significance of Islamic decor. Necipoglu asserts that there is no such thing as “Islamic” art, and that the arabesque, or repeating geometric pattern, that adorns is simply secular art that has been exoticized by the Western world, and subsequently, by the Arab world. Essentially, she argues that we cannot ascribe intent onto art that was meant to be purely decorative, especially because we cannot associate a singular artistic form with Islam. Nasr, on the other hand, stated that arabesque art is specifically Islamic because of its devotional nature, a notion that most of our class agreed with.

A question I had throughout this discussion was–what came first? Was it that arabesque art came first and then was ascribed an Islamic value after it was popularized and “orientalized” by the West, or was it that the initial artists created the art with devotion and Islam in mind and then it became popularized? In order to encapsulate the age old conundrum of what came first, I decided to depict it in an arabesque chicken in an egg. By placing the chicken IN the egg, I hope to depict the fact that we really truly can never know which came first, but a hope that we can continue to appreciate the artistic nature of Islam regardless,

In week 3, we discussed the sacred nature of the Quran, and the complexities and controversies in its codification and translation.  Moreover, we reflected on the importance and beauty in its recitation and calligraphy, and watched the film, the Koran by Heart.

Throughout the week, I struggled with the idea of a single translation of the Quran. As a Muslim myself, I’ve always felt that Islam and the Quran is up to an individual’s interpretation of both—but also, I recognize the need for at least some unification in the basic translation and understanding of the Quran. We learned the importance of vocalization and punctuation in the text, which can lead to significantly different interpretations and translations of the text—a concept I both appreciated and struggled with tremendously.  This made me wonder—why is one translation more valid than another? How do we know what the original punctuation was intended to be? However, despite this confusion, I know that what makes one translation valid, or what people consider to be valid is support for that translation. Our beliefs and understanding of the Quran is rooted in our community’s beliefs and understanding. Due to the patriarchal tradition within the world at large, often times translations and interpretations of hadith have been used to reinforce sexist traditions or read systems of inequality into text that did not previously exist.

In order to depict this confusion for different “truths” in Islam, I wrote the following “reverse” poem, or a poem that can be read forwards and backwards and have a different or opposite meaning.

A woman is half a man.

So don’t believe it if you hear

That equality should exist.
For as the essence of Islam has taught us

A woman is not to be trusted.

Her word is twisted and

I refuse to listen when people say

It is a mistranslation

Of our holy book

For that is a disrespect

To what our community leaders have told us

Close your ears to

Feminist nonsense.

What they call

Islamic truth is

Nothing beyond western drivel

They try and tell us it is

Scripture says

Men and women are equal.

They lie.