To Make Beautiful

Looking at the root of this word, iḥsān, it is literally to make beautiful, to make something beautiful. And it is interesting about the three words, Islam, īmān and iḥsān: they are all on the same form in the Arabic language. There are, as an earlier chapter explained, fifteen verbal forms; these are on the fourth form, which is a doing, a making something happen. So Islam is making submission happen — one is making it happen. Īmān is making faith happen — one is making it happen. Iḥsān is making beauty happen.

Now here is an idea. There is an ethicist, an American ethicist, Chisholm, whose ethical theory was that ethics is nothing other than aesthetics: that ethics is really a branch of aesthetics. In other words, an ethical act is a beautiful act, and this is why people recognise it: what a wonderful thing that person did; that was a beautiful thing to do. There is an idea, a recognition in the human being when they see an ethical act done, that it impresses them. There is something congruous about it. The person who brings the money back, when too much money was given in the change — that is something that surprises people nowadays: hey, thank you! It is a shock. Well, there is an idea there that there is a harmony; that something is incongruous, that there is something not harmonious that occurs in an unethical act; and that what an ethical act does is return that harmony to the act itself.

Now, the word comes from ḥasan. The interesting thing is that there are many ways to say beautiful in Arabic, and one of them is jamāl. Jamāl and jalāl were discussed in an earlier chapter. Now, the Arabic word for camel is jamal: camel is from jamal, because the Egyptians say gamal — they pronounce the jīm as a hard g, gamal — so when the Europeans first heard it, they heard gamal, kamal. So camel is from jamal. Jamāl, in the Arabic language — when one says hiya jamīlah, she is beautiful, what one is saying is that her nose is beautiful. Because for the Arabs, looking at a camel, it has a very beautiful nose; so for the Arabs the beauty of the camel is the nose. Ḥasan relates to the eye. When somebody is called ḥasan, they have beauty, and it relates to the eye: ḥasanah is beauty in the eye. The Arabs have many, many words; it is a very specific language. There is a word for a table that has food on it, called māʾidah; if it does not have food, it is called khiwān. So they get very specific.

So ḥasan relates to the eye. Now, it is interesting that the idea of iḥsān is seeing. There is an idea that the human being recognises beauty: that we are beauty recognisers; that there is something within our neurological or spiritual or psychosocial character that recognises beauty. But it is not enough, according to the Islamic tradition, to recognise beauty. One must also be a beauty producer. One must be contributing oneself. And this can only occur with spiritual development.