”For the Sufi, beauty is an emanation of the divine, beauty is – to use the Platonic term – an archetype, and it is this divine beauty that people love. The source of beauty is not worldly, not sensual lust; the source of beauty is the divine, and when beauty emerges and is evidenced in the world, it is like the reflection of this divine source.”

Tage Lindbom, In the Footsteps of Frithjof Schuon

Tage Lindbom (1909-2001), the ”grand old man” of Swedish conservatism, sums up in his cogent way Islam’s view of beauty. The Islamic tradition of art has been, and still is with a few exceptions, completely traditional and spiritual, imbued with Platonism and Neoplatonism. It is thus strikingly different from profane Western art as it has developed in modern times.

Plotinos (204-270), who was called Shaykh al-Yunani, or ”the Greek master”, by Muslims, has had enormous influence in the Islamic philosophical discussion of beauty, and he is generally considered more a spiritual authority than a philosopher in the normal sense. His Enneads is included in the translation of Greek philosophy that mistakenly came to be known in Arabic as Aristoteles on Teleology. It is central to understanding the view of art in Islam.

The Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi (870-950), in his work Al-Medina al-fadhila (‘The Virtuous City’), argues that beauty in a thing is ontological: the more something is like its divine archetype, which is perfect, the more beautiful it is. Al-Farabi further argues that God is the most beautiful of all things, for God’s beauty has its origin in itself and is thus absolute whereas all other beauty emanates from this source and is thus relative compared with God. The closer we come to the source, the clearer and purer is the water.

When we contemplate a beautiful thing, at the same time we contemplate God’s beauty, and it evokes our love of God and our longing – but also pain, for we are reminded of our separation from the paradise of our primeval state – the world of perfect forms.

There are thus two sides to experiencing beauty: euphoria and pain. When we contemplate a beautiful object, our heart is filled with exhilaration, we ”are lifted up”, and we experience seeing beyond the limits of the everyday world, the veil of Maya is torn and reveals something else, a world of perfect harmony and order, the world of perfect forms. But simultaneously with this happy state that transcends all limits, or shortly after this, we tend to be dispirited by a strange feeling of pain and perhaps even anxiety. It is said that a person’s ”breath is taken away” or that he ”sighs” in the face of beauty.

The cause of this pain and subsequent breathing difficulty, in the Islamic tradition, is the realization that the world of perfect forms is unattainable to man. He is captured in this flawed, imperfect world that he calls his own. ”The world is a prison for the believer,” said the prophet Mohammed on one occasion. And he also said, ”The world is wanting”.

It is also the shadowlike memories of the golden age, Paradise, before the Fall, that makes sensitive people dispirited. After all, earthly beauty, in the Islamic faith, is a reflection of the lost original state of grace. It is our exile in the world, the separation from our origins, that produces anxiety, longing and pain. It is a bit like when a person thinks back to his childhood and experiences sorrow over the fact that he has left it all behind him, that this innocence and play are lost forever, passed on to the dark realm of memories. In the same way, beauty reminds us of a lost paradise, our home before the Fall and our entry in the world.

The Persian poet Jalal al-din Rumi (1207-1273), in his most famous work, Song of the Reed Flute, expresses this painful longing. Using the image of a flute as human breath, he also shows the critical role of the fine arts.

Listen to this reed as it is grieving;
it tells the story of our separations.

Since I was severed from the bed of reeds,
in my cry men and women have lamented.

I need the breast that’s torn to shreds by parting
to give expression to the pain of heartache.

Whoever finds himself left far from home
looks forward to the day of his reunion.

The two sides of beauty, euphoria and pain, are in my view most likely also one of the reasons why modern man flees beauty. In many respects, modern man follows the principle of pleasure: what is pleasurable, comfortable is good, whereas what is unpleasurable, uncomfortable is evil. Traditional faiths, like Islam, Judaism, Tao, Hinduism or Christianity, instead teach that what is true is good, even if it is painful, and what is false is evil, even if it is pleasurable.

The consequence of this fear of the unpleasurable has therefore become fear of beauty. But if art is not beauty, because beauty is good, and good is truth, and truth is unpleasurable, then other purposes of art will have to be found. In the modern world, art is no longer in the service of beauty – no, it is free in the sense that is a ”slave” to the subjective aims and interests of the individual. Every individual artist now has to find his own arguments for his raison d´être and his own way to measure how his art is to be judged. However, when a number of artists, critics and institutions join forces, spheres are produced that share a fairly common core of values. Their permanence varies.

However, typically with modern societies, unlike traditional ones, beauty, that is, ”good art”, is distinguished from ethics – good and evil – and other criteria are invented to judge what is good or bad art. They can instead be negative criteria like ”subversive”, ”provocative” and ”shocking”.

The Islamic view differs significantly from the modern view. Generally accepted and objective criteria are used to judge art. Beauty is the end and purpose of art, and beauty is good, good is truth. In other words, the Islamic tradition does not distinguish art from ethics. All human activity falls within the scope of ethics. There is thus no understanding in Islam of ”free art” in the sense that art as such could place itself above ethical criteria. No one is entitled to place himself above ethics, to break norms and rules in the name of art. No crime, legal or moral, can be justified in the name of art. Art is not an end in itself, but instead beauty’s obedient servant. The aim of art is to sensualize beauty, which in turn, emanates from a divine source.

Islam thus fully shares the Platonic view that beauty is goodness and truth. Evil can never be beautiful; nor can falsehood. Ethics can thus never be ignored in judging a work in music, literature, architecture or painting. Its ethical value is inseparable from its aesthetic value.

The Arabic word for beauty, which is also used in the Koran, is husn, which also means ”goodness”. The word for ”ugly” is qabih, which also means ”evil”. It is impossible to distinguish the ethical dimension of a person, his ”inner” beauty, from the aesthetic dimension, ”external” beauty. Virtue is beautiful and pleasing whereas vice is ugly and repugnant.

The ugly religious buildings of our era (and sadly the mosques in the West) that pop up here and there express, with their ugliness, the separation between the beautiful and the good and thus between aesthetics and ethics, which is the emblem of the modern world. These hideous buildings thus testify more to the emptiness and anxiety of secular man than the eternal harmony and order of the Transcendental. If someone wants to evaluate the spiritual worth of people, beauty can be of help. In the Koran, it is said that ”God is always with those who do good”, but the word ihsan can also mean ”those who beautify” or ”those who make beauty”. According to the Muslim philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ugliness is a prominent feature of fundamentalist and extremist sects. True Islam is therefore beautiful Islam.

Modern man, as I mentioned, avoids beauty in the traditional sense, because of its pain and anxiety, indeed, its lack of pleasure. Beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and falsehood are conceptual pairs that are starting to fall out of use in our language in general and in cultural criticism in particular.

A good deal of modern art is meant instead to ”express” phenomena like ”the contemporary age”. These ”expressions” thus become, rather than the traditional understanding of beauty, a mirror for what is ugly both inside and around us, and thus create neither anxiety nor pain. Yet nor do they produce any euphoria or ”vision” that transcends boundaries. Paradoxically, they confirm and caress with words like ”challenging”, ”provocative” and ”shocking”.

Provocation in particular has attracted great attention in recent years. Provocation is considered to be either an end in itself or a means to stretch the limits of the freedom of expression. Provocations aimed at what is held to be sacred by Muslims have given rise to tensions between groups in society but also greater interest in Islam’s view of art and thus the traditional and early modern view of art in general. What we witnessed in the discussion on what was known as ”the roundabout dog” was, in my view, not so much an opposition between the ”Western” and Islamic view of art and way of seeing the world as one between a traditional and modern view. When we talk about Islamic art, we are talking in fact in the same breath about traditional art, which also includes Western art before modernism. We cannot talk about beauty in Islamic art without at the same time saying something about traditional art and other cultures.

The great dividing line should not be drawn between two contemporary cultures – even though each culture is undeniably unique – but rather between tradition and modernity. Medieval Western art is thus traditional and consequently shares greater similarities with Islamic, Chinese or Indian art than with the European art that developed after the Renaissance. So it is wrong to call modern art ”Western” and compare it with ”Islamic” art as if there had always been a divide between them, as if modern art had any similarities at all with pre-modern Western art? Thus, in trying to answer the question of how Islam sees beauty, one also answers the more universal question: how does traditional art in general – and sacred art in particular – see beauty?

All traditional art is founded on metaphysical principles; this holds true for Western art (before modernism), Chinese art, Islamic art and so forth. But not all traditional art is sacred. There are also profane elements found here, especially in royal cultures. Yet even these profane aspects have coloured the basic sacred tone that imbues the entire culture. The chief characteristic of a traditional culture is thus religion.

The cultures we know of have created works over millennia that most people agree to call ”good art”. Not even modern art theorists would deny the beauty of a medieval cathedral, the Taj Mahal in India, the Alhambra in Spain, or Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

But in 14th century Europe, processes were set in motion that gave rise to what we call the modern world. Now began what the Swedish sufi Kurt Almqvist (1912-2001) called Europe’s ”special development”. This article is not the place to describe the essence and uniqueness of modernity; anyone interested should instead consult Almqvist’s texts on the subject. It suffices here to present the view that Europe before modernism shared the same values as the rest of humanity, but that the European continent then broke away and took another course. Almqvist thus argues that this divide, which some see as a ”war of civilizations”, is Europe’s war against itself – against its traditional identity. As Almqvist writes, ”on the question of the spiritual ‘frame’ being different from that of the modern Western world – the world view of medieval Europe coincided with that of the Eastern world, just as the world views of the American (Indian) and African cultures coincide.”

Knowledge of this relation – conscious or unconscious – is sometimes revealed when people use ”medieval” as an adjective in common debate as a disparaging way to describe phenomena in the Muslim world. Whether one knows is or not, in Almqvist’s analysis of history, it is in fact entirely correct to connect Islam’s view of the world with that of medieval Europe. And it seems to happen instinctively. Using the word ”medieval” thus reveals how foreign modern Europe has become to its own traditional culture, science and spirituality. In line with this idea of progress, medieval art is seen as a precursor to modern art and medieval science as the first shaky step on the road to modern science.

”It is in this interpretation that the misunderstanding lies, for the difference between the old and the new view of the world is not a difference of degree in the ability to see the world ‘as it actually is’ but rather a difference of kind: traditional cosmology, religion and art were founded on totally different principles than today’s science and psychology,”, Almqvist writes.

Almqvist argues that it is not a quantitative, but rather a qualitative, difference between the traditional and the modern world. So one can not say that alchemy was a worse kind of chemistry, astrology a worse kind of astronomy and icon painting a worse kind of portrait painting. It is a question of two different universes – one traditional one, the other modern.

For the traditional person, the cosmos is a symbolic expression of God. All created things reflect some aspect of their creator. God, the source of beauty, is also the creator of the universe and thus also in some sense an artist and the source of all art. The world in itself is a work of art. Consequently, in Islam, al-Musawwir, the Designer, is one of God’s names. The world is the universal Work of Art, and Notre Dame de Chartres, the mosque in Cordoba or The Divine Comedy are representations of it.

The dividing line between traditional and modern art, according to Almqvist, is not based on time; rather the opposite – as we see today, the traditional view of the world can exist alongside the modern in the same era. Medieval Europe was in essence more like the Orient today than it is like modern Europe.

Certainly, Islamic art shares a number of characteristics with medieval Europe and other traditional cultures in the world, but it also has its own particular nature. There is something that unites the mosques in Tibet and China, in black Africa and Andalusia, in Persia, Turkey or in India. Wherever one is in the Islamic world, one has the sense of being in the same artistic and spiritual universe despite the variations in techniques, materials and so forth. This unity stretches beyond architecture to also include objects – vases, textiles, tools and jewellery – and music, like the Persian, Turkish and Arab spiritual music and recitation of the Koran – and literature, from the Arabic poet Ibn Arabi to the Persian Rumi or the Turk Yunus Emre.

What unites all these expressions of art is their origins in the spirituality of Islam: the holy Koran and the life and lessons of the Prophet. The core of Islamic art is its sacredness, that is, its symbolic nature, and thus its connection to the divine. Islamic art, as I already mentioned, includes some profane aspects, especially in royal cultures. But it is also deeply imbued with the flow of light that shines through the whole of Islamic civilization and has its source in divine revelation.

Another of God’s names is al-Jamil, the beautiful. The prophet Mohammed said that God is beautiful (jamil) and loves beauty (jamal), which means, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes in his essay ”Compassion and Love, Peace and Beauty”, that the two qualities of beauty and love are united on the divine level. This is also reflected on the human level in the way a person loves what he sees as beautiful and, inversely, sees everything that he loves as beautiful.

But what is beauty? Beauty, as Al-Farabi says, is ontological. It is not just ”in the eye of the beholder”, but is an objective aspect of reality. What is subjective in the experiencing of beauty depends obviously on the observer’s ability to take in impressions and correctly judge them. Not all people have the same abilities when it comes to understanding, appreciating and judging beauty. But beauty in itself, according to the Islamic tradition, is objective. Something that is beautiful is beautiful regardless of whether all of mankind would call it ugly, and ugly regardless of whether all of mankind would find it beautiful.

Earthly beauty is not absolute, but rather relative, just like other phenomena in the world, including mankind. God alone is the absolute beauty; all earthly beauty is relative in the sense that it is beautiful only to the extent it reflects divine beauty.