I spent a lot of time looking at art
the year before I became a Muslim. Completing a degree in Philosophy and Fine
Arts, I sat for hours in darkened classrooms where my professors projected
pictures of great works of Western art on the wall. I worked in the archives
for the Fine Arts department, preparing and cataloging slides. I gathered
stacks of thick art history books every time I studied in the university
library. I went to art museums in Toronto, Montreal and Chicago. That summer in
Paris, "the summer I met Muslims" as I always think of it, I spent a
whole day (the free day) each week in the Louvre.
What was I seeking in such an intense
engagement with visual art? Perhaps some of the transcendence I felt as a child
in the cool darkness of the Catholic Church I loved. In high school, I had lost
my natural faith in God, and rarely thought about religion after that. In
college, philosophy had brought me from Plato, through Descartes only to end at
Existentialism-a barren outcome. At least art was productive-there was a
tangible result at the end of the process. But in the end, I found even the
strongest reaction to a work of art isolating. Of course I felt some connection
to the artist, appreciation for another human perspective. But each time the
aesthetic response flared up, then died down. It left no basis for action.
Then I met people who did not
construct statues or sensual paintings of gods, great men and beautiful women.
Yet they knew about God, they honored their leaders, and they praised the productive
work of women. They did not try to depict the causes; they traced the effects.
Soon after I met my husband, he told
me about a woman he greatly admired. He spoke of her intelligence, her
eloquence and her generosity. This woman, he told me, tutored her many children
in traditional and modern learning. With warm approval, he spoke of her
frequent arduous trips to refugee camps and orphanages to help relief efforts.
With profound respect, he told me of her religious knowledge, which she
imparted to other women in regular lectures. And he told me of the meals she
had sent to him, when she knew he was too engaged in his work with the refugees
to see to his own needs. When I finally met this woman I found that she was
covered, head to toe, in traditional Islamic dress. I realized with some
amazement that my husband had never seen her. He had never seen her face. Yet
he knew her. He knew her by her actions, by the effects she left on other
people.
Western civilization has a long
tradition of visual representation. No longer needing more from such art than a
moment of shared vision with an artist alive or dead, I can appreciate it once
more. But popular culture has made representation simultaneously omnipresent
and anonymous. We seem to make the mistake of thinking that seeing means
knowing, and that the more exposed a person is, the more important they are.
*
Islamic civilization chose not to
embrace visual representation as a significant means of remembering and
honoring God and people. Allah is The Hidden, veiled in glorious light from the
eyes of any living person. But people of true vision can know God by contemplating
the effects of his creative power,
Do
they not look to the birds above them,
Spreading
their wings and folding them back?
None
can uphold them except for The Merciful.
Truly
He is watchful over all things (Qur'an, 67:19)
If God transcends his creation, it is
beyond the capacity of any human to depict him. Indeed, in Islamic tradition,
any attempt to depict God with pictures is an act of blasphemy. Rather, a
Muslim evokes God, employing only those words that God has used to describe
himself in his revelation. Among these descriptive titles are the so-called
"99 Names of God," attributes that are recited melodiously throughout
the Muslim world: The Merciful, the Compassionate, the Forbearing, the
Forgiving, the Living, the Holy, the Near, the Tender, the Wise.... Written in
beautiful script on lamps, walls, and pendants, each of these linguistic signs
provokes a profoundly personal, intellectual and spiritual response with each
new reading.
Deeply wary of idolatry, early Muslims
with few exceptions declined to glorify not only God, but even human beings
through visual representation. Historians, accustomed to illustrating accounts
of great leaders with their images captured in painting, sculpture and coin
have no reliable visual representations of the Prophet Muhammad. What we find,
instead, is the Prophet's name, Muhammad, written in curving Arabic letters on
those architectural and illustrative spaces where the sacred is invoked. Along
with the names of God and verses of the Qur'an, the name Muhammad, read audibly
or silently, leads the believer into a reflective state about the divine
message and the legacy of this extraordinary, yet profoundly human messenger of
God.
Words, written and oral, are the
primary medium by which the life of the Prophet and his example have been
transmitted across the generations. His biography, the seerah, has been told in
verse and prose in many languages. Even more important than this chronological
account of the Prophet's life are the thousands of individual reports of his
utterances and actions, collected in the hadith literature. These reports were
transmitted by early Muslims wishing to pass on Muhammad's tradition and
mindful of the Qur'an's words: "Indeed in the Messenger of God you have a
good example to follow for one who desires God and the Last Day" (Qur'an,
33:21). Eager to follow his divinely inspired actions, his close companions
paid attention not only to his style of worship, but also to all aspects of his
comportment-everything from his personal hygiene to his interaction with
children and neighbors. The Prophet's way of doing things, his sunnah, has
formed the basis for Muslim piety in all societies where Islam spread. The
result was that as Muslims young and old, male and female, rich and poor, adopted
the Prophet's sunnah as a model for their lives, they became the best visual
representations of the Prophet's character and life. In other words, the Muslim
who implements the sunnah is an actor on the human stage who internalizes and,
without artifice, reenacts the behavior of the Prophet. This performance of the
sunnah by living Muslims is the archive of the Prophet's life and a truly
sacred art of Muslim culture.
I first realized the profound physical
impact of the Prophet's sunnah on generations of Muslims as I sat in the masjid
one day, watching my nine year old son pray beside his Qur'an teacher. Ubayda
sat straight, still and erect beside the young teacher from Saudi Arabia who,
with his gentle manners and beautiful recitation, had earned my son's deep
respect and affection. Like the teacher, Ubayda was wearing a loose-fitting
white robe that modestly covered his body. Before coming to the masjid, he had
taken a shower and rubbed fragrant musk across his head and chin. With each
movement of prayer, he glanced over at his teacher, to ensure that his hands
and feet were positioned in precisely the same manner. Reflecting on this
transformation of my son, who had abandoned as his normal grubbiness and
impulsivity for cleanliness and composure, I thought to myself, "thank God
he found a good role model to imitate."
In my son's imitation of his teacher,
however, it occurred to me that there was a greater significance, for his
teacher was also imitating someone. Indeed, this young man was keen in every
aspect of his life to follow the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. His modest
dress was in imitation of the Prophet's physical modesty. His scrupulous
cleanliness and love of fragrant oils was modeled after the Prophet's example.
At each stage of the ritual prayer he adopted the positions he was convinced
originated with the Prophet. He could trace the way he recited the Qur'an back
through generations of teachers to the Prophet himself. My son, by imitating
his teacher, had now become part of the living legacy of the Prophet Muhammad.
Among Muslims throughout the world,
there are many sincere pious men and women; there are also criminals and
hypocrites. Some people are deeply affected by religious norms, others are
influenced more by culture-whether traditional or popular culture. Some aspects
of the Prophet's behavior: his slowness to anger, his abhorrence of oath
taking, his gentleness with women, sadly seem to have little affected the
dominant culture in some Muslim societies. Other aspects of his behavior, his
generosity, his hospitality, his physical modesty, seem to have taken firm root
in many Muslim lands. But everywhere that Muslims are found, more often than
not they will trace the best aspects of their culture to the example of the
Prophet Muhammad. He was, in the words of one of his companions, "the best
of all people in behavior."
Living in America, my son's role model
might have been an actor, a rap singer or an athlete. We say that children are
"impressionable," meaning that it is easy for strong personalities to
influence the formation of their identity. We all look for good influences on
our children.
It was their excellent behavior that
attracted me to the first Muslims I met, poor West African students living on
the margins of Paris. They embodied many aspects of the Prophet's sunnah,
although I did not know it at the time. What I recognized was that, among their
other wonderful qualities, they were the most naturally generous people I had
ever known. There was always room for one more person around the platter of
rice and beans they shared each day. Over the years, in my travels across the
Muslim world, I have witnessed the same eagerness to share, the same deep
belief that it is not self-denial, but a blessing to give away a little more to
others. The Prophet Muhammad said, "The food of two is enough for three,
and the food of three is enough for four." During the recent attacks on
Kosovo, there were reports of Albanian Muslims filling their houses with
refugees; one man cooked daily for twenty people domiciled in his modest home.
The Prophet Muhammad said, "When
you see one who has more, look to one who has less." When I was married in
Pakistan, my husband and I, as refugee workers, did not have much money.
Returning to the refugee camp a few days after our wedding, the Afghan women
eagerly asked to see the many dresses and gold bracelets, rings and necklaces
my husband must have presented to me, as is customary throughout the Muslim
world. I showed them my simple gold ring and told them we had borrowed a dress
for the wedding. The women's faces fell and they looked at me with profound
sadness and sympathy. The next week, sitting in a tent in that dusty hot camp,
the same women-women who had been driven out of their homes and country, women
who had lost their husbands and children, women who had sold their own personal
belongings to buy food for their families-presented me with a wedding outfit.
Bright blue satin pants stitched with gold embroidery, a red velveteen dress
decorated with colorful pom-poms and a matching blue scarf trimmed with what I
could only think of as a lampshade fringe. It was the most extraordinary gift I
have ever received-not just the outfit, but the lesson in pure empathy that is
one of the sweetest fruits of real faith.
An accurate representation of the
Prophet is to be found, first and foremost, on the faces and bodies of his
sincere followers: in the smile that he called "an act of charity,"
in the slim build of one who fasts regularly, in the solitary prostrations of
the one who prays when all others are asleep. The Prophet's most profound
legacy is found in the best behavior of his followers. Look to his people, and
you will find the Prophet.
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Dr.
Ingrid Mattson (born August 24, 1963), Ph.D. is a Muslim religious leader, a
professor of Islamic Studies and an interfaith activist. She lived and worked
in the United States beginning in 1989 for over two decades and is now the
London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University
College at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.
Ingrid
Mattson, the sixth of seven children, was born in 1963 in Kingston, Ontario,
Canada and raised in Kitchener, Ontario where she attended Catholic schools.
She stopped practicing Christianity as a teenager and “forgot about God
altogether. She credits the Catholic women religious of her youth with
providing “a fantastic education” and “a place to explore and develop this early,
youthful spirituality. She studied Philosophy and Fine Arts at the University
of Waterloo in Canada from 1982-1987. For her program, she traveled in the
summer of 1986 to Paris, France where she befriended West African Muslim students.
She converted to Islam in 1987 in Waterloo after reading the Qur’an gave her as
she put it, “an awareness of God, for the first time since I was very young.”
From 1987-1988 she lived in Pakistan where she developed and implemented a
midwife-training program for Afghan refugee women with funding from the
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). She moved to Chicago in 1989
to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago.
Mattson
is the first woman and first convert to lead the Islamic Society of North America
(ISNA). In 2001, she was elected vice president of ISNA, and re-elected for a
second two year term. In 2006 she was elected president and was re-elected for
a second term in 2008. From 1998-2012 she was Professor of
Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary, Hartford,
CT, where she also founded the first accredited graduate program for Muslim
chaplains in America. For a number of years she was also the Director of the
MacDonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford
Seminary. In 2012 Dr. Mattson was appointed the
first London and Windsor Community Chair of Islamic Studies at Huron University
College’s Faculty of Theology.
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