I thank Elyna for pushing me this one:
Finding the Prophet in his People by Ingrid Mattson
Ingrid
Mattson is a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary. She is
Vice President of the Islamic Society of North America.
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 mosque 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 mosque, 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.
—————
I’d stay to share some of my thoughts on this, but Maghrib’s just in.
Public speaking exam tomorrow. Wish me luck.
Enough said here.
Ps-I hope everyone had a great time at the gathering tonight. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it. Tak jadi balik kampung, but something else came up. Next time, Insya Allah.
