Allah Loves the Beauty Makers

Now, the Muslims would say that some people are born with pure hearts. The traditional Muslim scholars say that there are some people who are born with good hearts. They do not need a lot of work on their hearts. They have a type of selfless nature: they will prefer others, they will give, they will do these things. Now, a materialist might look at these things very cynically. In fact, there is a principle in philosophy called the hedonistic principle, which is that people really only do good things because it makes them feel good; so there is a type of pleasure that one derives out of doing good things. And this is the way many people will interpret a good act: that they are really doing it for themselves. From the Muslim point of view, that is almost irrelevant. In other words, the idea of doing good — if one does feel good, then that is something that God has given: that is another divine mechanism that would encourage one to do this.

And the Muslims would say that really, in a sense, a person will not be fulfilled in life until they become somebody who is a muḥsin. Throughout the Qurʾān, again and again, one comes to this idea: Allah loves the beauty makers, Allah loves the muḥsinīn:

Allah is with the muḥsinīn:

Many, many verses deal with this idea of iḥsān. Looking at the Muslim world traditionally — and arguably also many aspects of the Christian world, and of the Chinese world — one will see a desire to embellish, a desire to make something beautiful. From the Muslim point of view, that is a spiritual organ in the human being which is manifesting in the world. And so there is the idea of building a mosque that is not simply a place of worship, but where there is also something aesthetic: when the individual enters into the sacred space, they recognise something beautiful about that. And it can be in simplicity. It does not have to be massive ornamentation; no, it can be quite simple.

One of the really interesting things about the modern Muslim world is that one will notice that there is almost an absence, in much of the modern Muslim world, of this type of beauty. It is quite sad. Plastic — these plastic wall things to hang on the wall that have Qurʾān on them. In Mauritania they drink out of wooden bowls, but they always carve designs on the wooden bowl. It is not simply a bowl; one does not just make it a bowl. It is a drinking bowl, so they put on it things that are pleasurable to the eye. They have pillows there — and these are very primitive people in terms of how they are living. They have these pillows that are made out of leather, but the women design really incredibly beautiful patterns on the pillow. So the pillow is not just functional. The Bauhausian type of pure functionality has something essentially ugly in its nature. This is more than functional; it is also life-enhancing. It embellishes one's life on earth.

Now, what one will notice in the modern world is often the absence of that. Plastic. Take tea: traditionally, in the Japanese tea ceremony, part of the experience was the awesome aesthetic qualities of it — the pot itself, the way the pot is turned, the way the cups are, the way they are offered to the person. These are all aesthetic aspects of the culture. Whereas when it is just: put in the quarter, push the button, out it comes, and then there is the paper sugar poured in there, swish it around — the caffeine craving has been satisfied for the moment. There is a loss of aesthetic experience in that, completely. It becomes reduced simply to a bestial need being fulfilled. In other words, the human content there, which is deeply related to an aesthetic experience of life — it is something that makes us human. It is something that transcends our bestial or our worldly qualities and places us in the other-worldly realm. We transcend. And this is something we recognise.