Beauty versus Ugliness

P rophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) established the doctrines that Allah is beautiful and loves beauty (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No.131), that He is good and accepts only that which is good (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 1686), and that He loves to see the effects of His blessings and favors on people (Jami’ al-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 2963). This implies that since Almighty Allah loves beauty, He created everything perfect and beautiful. Moreover, He also wants His servants to love beauty, be beautiful, and generate beauty through words, deeds, character, garments, general outward appearance, and the cultural and civilizational creations of theirs. In doing so, however, people must subscribe to and apply only the highest heavenly standards of goodness and beauty, without contaminating them with the effects of their intrinsic inadequacies, myopia, and whims. Islam abhors ugliness with all its physical and metaphysical dimensions and features. It does so, for example, in evil speech, disposition and conduct, as in ungodly elements of culture, art and architecture. Through the infinite realm of aesthetics, Muslims are bidden to maintain the established supreme standards of beauty on earth. Islamic aesthetics in behavior, manners, thought, culture, art, and architecture is only an extension of the created and revealed heavenly artistic order, deriving therefrom its strength and identity. External beauty is the theophany of inner beauty, just as external ugliness is a manifestation of inner defects and ugliness. Beauty lies at the heart of existence. It is not simply a subjective state existing only “in the eye of the beholder”. Beauty is meant to be universal and everpresent. The Arabic most common word for beauty is “jamal”. However, related to the same word are the words “ijmal”, “jumlah” and “jamala,” which mean, respectively, “generalization, totality, and to gather or accumulate to excess.” Islam establishes that beauty is a human right and life’s standard thing. It is a necessity for the soul as the air we breathe and the food and water we consume, are for the body. Beauty is the rule and, at the same time, symbol and quintessence of goodness. Ugliness, on the other hand, is an anomaly and exception. It is equivalent to evil. In Arabic, the word “qubh” means both ugliness and evil. Beauty is additionally associated with reality and its undeniable existence, and ugliness with unreality and nonexistence. Indeed, the ugliest thing is the mere absence and perversion of Truth, and the imposition of the invented and deceitful substitutes. It is only man who can create ugliness. He does so when he turns his back on Heaven and its guidance, and becomes unable to find the correct course forward. Another word in Arabic for beauty is “husn” (“hasan” is beautiful and “hasuna” to be beautiful). The word’s various derivatives attest to the above-mentioned point of beauty’s righteousness, absoluteness, and totality. Some of the most important concepts derived therefrom are goodness and excellence (hasan), virtue and good deed (hasanah), kindness and good outcome (husna), benevolence and merit (ihsan), to do good and excel (ahsana), benefactor and doer of good (muhsin). It goes without saying that beauty, goodness, and Truth are indivisible in Islam. According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Qur’anic term “al-muhsinun,” which is normally translated as “the doers of good,” can also be translated as “those enmeshed in beauty.” Hence, such Qur’anic idioms as “Allah is with the doers of good (al-muhsinin)” (al`Ankabut, 69), and “Allah loves the doers of good (al-muhsinin)” (al-Baqarah, 195), could likewise be understood and translated as “Allah is with those enmeshed in beauty” and “Allah loves those enmeshed in beauty.” Beauty originates from the highest plane of the transcendent Presence, descending upon and engulfing the hearts of its devotees and servants. It targets the heart because the heart is not only the seat of emotions and piety, but also of intelligent faculties. With the heart, people understand and intelligently appreciate things and experiences, including beauty. As an essentially spiritual thing, beauty is most attuned to the dispositions and competences of the human heart and soul. The eyes signify no more than a lower level in the hierarchy of means and capacities for the knowledge as well as Truth acquisition and appreciation. Thus, in connection with comprehending and following Truth, the Qur’an says that it is people’s hearts by which they reason and learn wisdom, on the basis of the inputs of their ears by which they hear - and by extension, their eyes by which they see. Then the Qur’an affirms what the root cause of inappropriate visions and the lack of wisdom is: “For indeed, it is not the eyes that are blinded, but blinded are the hearts which are within the breasts” (al-Hajj, 46). The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “Verily, Allah does not look at your appearance or wealth, but rather he looks at your hearts and actions” (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 2564). In Islam, the forms and mere appearances are secondary to the spirit and substance of things, playing second fiddle to them. Form follows substance and Truth. The goal of human life is to beautify the soul through goodness and virtue and to make it worthy of offering to God, Who is the Beautiful. That is, the goal of human life is to be beautiful, live beautifully, return to the Beautiful, and be admitted into Paradise which is the highest representation of pleasure and beauty, the culmination of its bliss being beholding the Beauty of the Face of the most Beautiful and most Beloved. Plato also said that beauty is the splendor of Truth. The Age of Ugliness Following the advent of modernity as a ubiquitous way of life and modernism as its philosophical wing, things dramatically forever changed. It was a time when, generally, all religious, moral and traditional principles and values were rejected (nihilism), when sensual self-indulgence became a norm (hedonism), when nothing as regards the ultimate Truth was considered either known or knowable (agnosticism), when man and his scientific and technological legacy became deified (humanism), when nature became desacralized and turned into a mere utility (naturalism), and when religion became secularized and God either humanized or relegated to the ambit of absurdism. That was a time when beauty as a gift of God – to borrow Aristotle’s term – was compromised, and when ugliness (the absence of true beauty), at once as a concept and sensory actuality, took over and started to reign supreme. Such was the case because once the spiritual, moral, and intellectual mutinies came to pass, Truth became defiled and forsaken by the modern man once and for all. What remained was the ubiquity and abyss of doubt, uncertainty and faithlessness, constituting anything but a conducive environment for breeding and enjoying authentic beauty. As John Ruskin, the leading English art critic of the Victorian era said, “Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.” One wonders if a person does not believe in God and has no connection with Heaven, what his understanding, source and criterion of beauty could be. Indeed, one of the greatest offences against Divinity was committed when Protagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived around the 5th century BC, declared that “man is the measure of all things.” That precept denoted that people, rather than God or any revealed moral law, are the ultimate source of ontological significance and value. Protagoras is thus regarded as the first humanist. However, humanism as a systematic philosophy or a belief system did not come to pass until the European Renaissance, a period between the 14th and 17th centuries. New humanism standards of beauty, which centered exclusively on man and his existential contexts, were then born. The celebrated masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and others were not as much beautiful as they represented the watersheds and benchmarks in the cultural and ideological transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Such masterpieces were priceless, just as any other sacred symbols and objects are priceless. The mentioned polymaths are regarded as icons of Renaissance and, at the same time, “prophets” and harbingers of modernity. Notwithstanding its many great contributions to the well-being of humankind, modernity - whose precursor was Renaissance - eventually destroyed authentic beauty. Nonetheless, in order to gratify the insatiable human thirst for beauty and the beautiful, modernity provided its own alternatives, especially in the fields of art, architecture, entertainment, literature, fashion, and media. However, since such fields embodied unconsecrated worldviews and value systems, they, often served up either distorted and misleading versions of beauty, or diverse forms of outright insolent ugliness. There is even a “cult of ugliness” which is associated with the arrival of modern art and its rejection of all classical beauty ideals and its embracing of ugliness, i.e., relative and subjective beauty. “Modern art’s impulse was to destroy beauty”, was a verdict of Barnett Newman, a leading American artist of the 20th century. This “cult of ugliness”, according to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “has now also spread to the Islamic world, which knows many mosques that are in no way behind their Western counterparts in ugliness (many horrendously ugly churches). They do not, however, represent Islamic art or thought but simply external influences.” The whole thing is reminiscent of the parable of “the emperor’s new clothes”. Everybody knows there is something seriously wrong in the ways our lives unfold, but not many people dare to question the status quo for fear that they will be branded regressive and retarded. It will take a lot of institutional, rather than individual, guts to “shout” – and prove – that the emperor has no clothes. Cities and Their Architecture As a result, our modern cities are ugly because they have been converted into concrete jungles. Their forms and functions provide evidence of man’s separation from nature - yet his very self - and his professed domination over it. Cities became the physical loci of all the crimes associated with unrestrained materialism, consumerism, and hedonism as modernity’s foremost creeds. In such milieus, there is less and less space – and tolerance – for traditional and religious forms of architecture and art. Cities became necropolises of traditions and man’s innate spiritual and moral innocence. There is nothing left in the modern man with which he can genuinely beautify and regenerate his cities and the whole of his built environment. Everything he does, by and large, is superficial, hollow, and shortterm. Concurrently though, everything seems deceptively glossy and vainglorious, reflecting the character of the maker. Man’s life is increasingly becoming mechanized and programmed, with little thinking and much less emotions. Substance is as good as nonexistent. Beauty is a false glitter, and is only skin or surface-deep. No wonder that at the core of the manifesto of modernist architecture reside such dogmas as “less is more” (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), “ornamentation is crime” (Adolf Loos), “the house is a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier), and “form follows fantasy” (the slogan of deconstructivism or new modern architecture, which was opposed to Louis Sullivan’s slogan “form follows function”). Art Our modern art is either rendered for its own sake, needing neither justification nor any end to serve, or it expresses but the personal feelings and visions of artists. In the former scenario, art, inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, upholds “the autonomy of aesthetic standards, setting them apart from considerations of morality, utility, or pleasure” (Encyclopedia Britannica). In the latter scenario, art is subjective, individual, and eccentric. It is often associated with the creative and powerful rendering of personal confusion, skepticism, bohemianism, and ambiguous abstraction. Either way, art oscillates from one extreme to another, deviating from and betraying its fundamental purpose and mission. In that case, art emerges as a form of “ingenious, interesting, and charming ugliness”. It is nihilistic and subversive. For example, it is sometimes said about Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, that he was just a big show-off most of whose work is inherently trivial. Each case represents a unique piece of autobiography. To understand Picasso’s works, one must regard them as “anecdotes or snapshots of a particular moment in his life” (Germaine Greer). At best, excellent art excellently and ingeniously poses greatest life questions. Bad art does so poorly. And questions without answers remain just that: questions, and so, doubts and anxieties. Therefore, art is fine – and beautiful - only as far as it goes. Popular Culture Furthermore, our modern everyday life activities and passions are impressed with the elan vital of ugliness because they are infused with the spirit of popular culture, which is an upshot of modernity and its sacrilegious philosophical penchant. Popular culture was always linked with lower classes and poor education. Its rise could be traced back to the emergence of the