On Beauty, History, Science, and Love

Random Reflections 03

My main format of posts on Instagram, a medium for sharing highly produced images, is to post mini-essays of 500 to a 1000 words on carousels. Starting from this post, I’ll compile related ones in a sub-2000 word reflection essay for Substack as well.

On Beauty

إن الله جميل يحب الجمال

“Allah is beautiful and loves beauty” (Hadith in Muslim)

There is a beauty to beauty. There is a soft stir in the heart at the sight of a blooming rose, a calmness that comes from its fragrance, a smile that tugs at the edge of the mind when walking under its bushes formed into a surrounding arch. There is stillness in the cacophony of relentless thought as the rays of the rising sun bounce off the rippling crests that flow with the constant current of the Bosphorus.

If arousal excites the body, beauty calms the heart and stills the mind. Beauty is the gentility of a delicate hand placed against a heaving chest, the softness of a warm embrace against a trembling breast, the soothing of a gentle hum that finally brings a tormented mind needed rest. Beauty is a divine reprieve, a moment where the hand of God reaches into the heart of man and gives it a moment of peace.

Beauty is subtle, delicate, sophisticated. Beauty is calm and still and rest incarnated. Beauty is a fleeting, miniscule glimpse of God Himself – for all manifest beauty is a thirst-quenching rain that forms from a single drop descended from the endless ocean of His beauty.

So, what, then, is beauty in a world that commodifies any thing that man would seek from his own nature? When beauty becomes a luxury, everything beautiful is bought and sold. First, the world must be emptied of beauty. Cities must be turned into sprawling landscapes of blocks of cement where the colors of the setting sun are blocked by the towering grey of concrete jungles.

Absent of color except a medley of browns and greys; absent of fragrance except the smell of exhaust smoke from a thousand cars; absent of melody except the horns of traffic and the barking of stray dogs. Man is stripped from beauty; and a man stripped from the experience of beauty is a man stripped from the glimpse of God.

Artificial smell trapped in an aerosol can is not beauty. Canned music blaring though $250 headphones is not beauty. Frozen images of landscapes never visited scrolled through in quick succession is not beauty. Beauty cannot be trapped. It cannot be manufactured. It cannot be bought, and it cannot be sold.

We live in a time when only the rich experience beauty in its rawness, and the rest of us are sold cheap imitations for a monthly subscription of $9.99.

Perhaps we have to create our own beauty. Perhaps ours is the task of using the ugliness of our surroundings as the canvas for the beauty we are to form from our own minds. Beauty in everyday smiles; beauty in laughter and song; beauty in growing flowers and curating gardens. Perhaps the greatest act of rebellion in a world that has turned beauty into a luxury is to share the beauty we create ourselves.

Perhaps ours is the age in which we become beautiful in ourselves so that those who see us have a glimpse at the hand of God.

History, Romanticism, and Love

About a year ago, I taught a class on Islamic history at the local masjid. In my first session, I was greeted by wide-eyed anticipation of stories and anecdotes about the greatness of Islamic empires, treasures to be gleamed from a lost past, and almost mystical truths revealed from the secrets of a lost civilization. This was the first time I realized that, for many Muslims, diving into Islamic history is like diving into the middle of the Pacific in hopes of recovering the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis.

“They’re going to be sorely disappointed,” I thought to myself. And I was right.

By the end of the class, the excited group of almost 60 students had dwindled to a mere twenty-some regulars, all of whom seemed confused about what to do with what they had learned. How, they thought, do we love such a complicated civilization? This is not the Atlantis they had hoped for, not the mystical-magical-mythical promised land, the Garden of Eden, the heaven on earth bruised and battered and broken and burned by the disastrously dastardly diabolical demons of the viciously wicked West.

They had come seeking Atlantis, and what they found was, instead, themselves: humans in all the depths of their complications. They encountered the horrors of a torturous slave trade and the beauty of a vibrant welfare system; the systematic oppression of tyrant kings and the magnanimity and generosity of philanthropist merchants. They found cruelty with benevolence; sagacity with imbecility; oppression with liberation; enormous hate with tremendous love.

And it confronted them with a question that has reverberating consequences through all of life: how can we love something so utterly imperfect?

Love and pride are such tainted concepts today. We have to pretend that what we love is perfect; or, rather, that its imperfections don’t matter. We can only love perfect victims, perfect rulers, perfect parents, perfect lovers, perfect heroes – even perfect selves. One is only allowed love if he is free from fault. Only the flawless deserve mercy, and the flawed only deserve ire and blame. We then struggle to love our history in the same way we struggle to love our parents, our spouses, our friends – even our very selves, since we are most acquainted with our own deep imperfections.

And, yet, there is only one perfect human – the Rasul (SAW). And there is only one perfect being – Allah the exalted and magnificent. To only have love for the perfect, then, is to love no one, since every person, every family, every society, every civilization, suffers from serious flaws in their character. Instead of acknowledging the need to imperfectly love the imperfect, we minimize the flaws of those we love, pretend that they are perfect in what matters and imperfect in things that don’t.

But this is serious imperfection in love and the root of our desire to find a mystical-magical perfection in a deeply human history of Islamic civilization. True love is not love that finds no fault in the beloved – it is love that beholds the beauty and the ugliness; the cruelty and the kindness; the generosity and the selfishness. It is to see all the flaws along with all the merits and only then to declare love. True love is not blind: it sees farther and deeper and wider than mere infatuation – rather, true love is in acceptance.

In the end, the worth of Islamic civilization is not because it was better or wiser or greater or perfect; the worth of Islamic civilization is that its highest, most core value is the love of the one and only Perfect. And it is the imperfect struggle of imperfect people to love the Perfect that is, in the end, the kind of imperfection that is worthy of love.

Science, Ethics, and Love

علم بے عشق است از طاغوتیان

علم با عشق است از لاہوتیان

Science without love is satanic,
Science with love is divine;

- ʿAllāmah Iqbāl, Javidname

If you read the history of the 20^th century, you’ll find that some of the most evil regimes of the past hundred years have been the most scientifically inclined. The Third Reich was a highly scientific regime, investing significant manpower, effort, and wealth in advancements in science and technology. Similarly, the Imperial Japanese regime, which perpetrated some of the most horrific acts of violence and pillaging in East Asian history, was obsessed with scientific advancement.

The same French regime that slaughtered a million Algerians boasted its great scientific credentials, and technological advancement was the main tool of plunder for the Imperial British regime. Today, we see advancements in science and technology fueling mass murder, ethnic and religious cleansing, modern slavery, and evil of every kind. It has given rise to a new age adage which speaks a lot of truth: “science asked if it could, but never asked if it should.”

Iqbāl was a keen observer of the ruthlessness with which advancements in scientific knowledge were leveraged to create brutal technologies for war and oppression. Having spent years in England and Germany, as well as keeping up to date with the developments in Europe during its most violent half-century, Iqbāl could clearly see the shortcomings of the Western approach to an almost religious reverence to the empirical methods of science.

To Muslims, however, science and its methods have often garnered a mixed reception. Some rush to embrace Western methods – including entirely failed projects of so-called “ethical deliberation” on technological advancement – arguing that the Muslim world is the prey of Western imperialism simply because it has fallen behind in technology. Others, however, are rightly weary of whole-heartedly embracing the very mechanism by which their lands have been looted, plundered, and enslaved for centuries.

To Iqbāl, the solution is neither rejection not embrace; it is love. When Iqbāl speaks of love in this couplet, he doesn’t simply mean an ethical obligation to do good to others. Rather, he means the most ideal love: love of Allah. Science embraced for the sole purpose of gaining power, he says, is a satanic art. It will only lead to further destruction, further suffering, further estrangement from Allah. But to reject it all together is also do exactly the same.

The answer lies in imbuing the Western scientific project with an element that will radically transform it. I’ve written before that the base of all Western thought is humanism – that the human, not God, is the center of the universe; and that all good is done for, by, and of the human. By reducing the moral universe to the human, and by reducing the human to the material, the Western world produces a scientific project that is self-obsessed and self-absorbed. Narcissism is a natural consequence of a philosophy that places the self at the center of the universe.

Iqbal’s answer, then, is to displace love of self with love of Allah – and by doing so, taking a scientific project that is rooted in self-aggrandizement and turning it into a project that sees itself as an act of loving worship of the Divine. Every new discovery is an unveiling of God’s majesty; every new technology is a desire to be beneficial to His servants; every new application of a theory is a done out of duty to be His representatives (khalifah) on earth.

Science without the love of God is narcissistic hedonism. Science that is borne out of the love of God is an act of worship. The ethical failures of modern technology are not simply failures of ethics; they are failures of an entire way of imagining the relationship between man, God, and the universe.

*couplet translated by Arberry and edited by me. Arberry chooses to translate “ilm” as science, since the section is largely about the failures and terrors of modern scientific developments in Europe and its responses in the East.