Islam's missing artists

[Rasputin]

Was the Golden age of Islam a reality or a myth?

First Part

[Rasputin]

Second Part

bn Arabi's gift to the world was his tremendous love for tolerance, in its various forms. He was born and contributed to a society that was thoroughly cosmopolitan and tolerant; Muslim Spain was great because it was tolerant and provided the fertile ground for such greats as Ibn Arabi to emerge from. The resurgence of knowledge and its 'zenith' is preceded by tolerance. Its 'nadir' is preceded by intolerance.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt considers Ibn 'Arabi as a heretic and they inspired a law banning publication of his Meccan Revelations. Ibn 'Arabi sexual code is ranked heresy by Imam Ibn Taymiyya, who complained, `They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!'. Poets like Fakhroddin Iraqi, Awhadoddin Kermani and Abdul Rahman Jami, who received from Ibn 'Arabi a language of dialogue with which to develop their understanding of an intricate subject already central to their very being: eros, desire, and the frontier between erotic and mystical consciousness, are now alien to Islamic culture.

During the Golden Age, there was a particularly strong tradition of rationalists, the Mutazilites. They stressed a human being's inherent free will countering the predestinarians, who taught that everything was foreordained. The Mutazilites carefully cultivated an 'enlightened moderation' and allowed for the growth of knowledge and, in their active promulgation and acceptance of Science as a part of the religion doctrine, they brought to the Islamic world her Golden Age. This guidance was advanced by renowned thinkers such as Avicenna, Al-Raazi, Al Ma'ari and Omar Khayyam; each of whom would later be remembered for the striking global contribution to the field of art, science and logic.

The decline set in when the puritan Al-Ghazali began to undermine this rationalistic tradition and instead push for dogma over thought, obedience over free will and the primacy of doctrine. It was the beginning of the end as Al-Ghazali strove to put a stop to the tradition that had cultivated the greatest of Islamic thinkers and instead stifle the unbridled creativity of the Islamic world.

Thus the civilization of Islam began to falter as 'Destiny' persevered over reason and logic and lenient ecclesiastical and priestly control once again tightened over the free Muslim people. With the will of Allah sufficing to explain everything, risk no longer mattered and Muslim commerce began to dramatically suffer. The banking and finance capitals that could have emerged in the coastal cities and regions of Alexandria, the Yemen and Sumatra, as rivals to Europe, were stemmed in their infancy. Muslims who could not take out insurance on fate, where risk aborted an infant financial industry that could have provided commercial support to trade and sea-faring voyages were instead confined to the Meditteranean, a Muslim lake, instaed of venturing out like Christopher Columbus.

Any belief that employs "guardians of truth'' on shaping the landscape of intellect will implode. It is said that 'Crutches of faith are introduced when reason sink exhausted.' It is a paradox that when the curtain of dogma was descending within the Islamic lands, killing free thinking, it was slowly and steadily rising in Italy and northern Europe. The Islamic world was being eclipsed because of the internal philosophical challenges of orthodoxy and dogma was gaining.

The creativity and vitality of the golden cities were being sapped as uniformity stifled intellect so that by the time the overwhelming advances of the Mongols and the Inquisition happened, the intellectual defenses had already deserted Islam.

When the Spanish began to reconquer their peninsula from centuries of Muslim rule, the Islamic kingdoms of Cordoba had descended to a few petty Islamic sultanates. In the great expulsion following the Reconquista, the Camelot of Islam, and of Judaism and Christianity, was carefully ripped asunder; intellectually and physically bankrupted. To this day one of the two great traditions of Judaism still remembers Cordoba with the nostalgia and longing that persisted over the centuries for it was during the Jewish golden age of Spain (under Muslim rule) that their greatest philosopher, Maimonides, composed his acclaimed commentaries. In Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world, the Mongol capture was the culmination of a century of moral and intellectual decay. The Mongol may have plunged the sword into the world of Islam but it was the Muslim rulers themselves, in their denial of their earlier vaunted traditions, who vanquished their armor.

The Islamic world is capable of sublime creativity, truth and reason, as its own history evidences. However, as always, Muslims have to take charge of their destiny and pierce through the recrimination to find the key to their civilization's renewal. Truth, tolerance, responsibility and the primordial nature of love once again have to be the founding values of the Muslim world for a renaissance to once again come about.

Al Farabi wrote Kitab al Musiqa patronising music; later, orthodox schools thought music as the destroyer of soul, a sidetracker of faith and disbanded it, making soul meaningless; devouring a Muslim soul of its very soul. Contentment was considered wicked; one could only be joyful in heavens! The choices became too narrowed; for heavenly pleasure the worldly pleasures became empty, life came to rust, stagnation became part of the mind set. The decay, once it sets in, takes innovation out of societies. It is the madness and rush for invention that creates societies to flourish.

Society is the name of living in totality with all facets of human life that include erotica, music, art and culture. It is either all together that a free mind progresses within, or it is a devastatingly destructive intellectual black hole a society gets sucked in. Guardians of truth are always able to destroy efforts of enlightenment in the name of sanctity of the holy message and legislation of morality. The choices are free and clear - either adapt to the heavenly bliss and wait for life after death, or assume present life to new more acceptable and tolerable ways; one needs to achieve a minuscule part of the heavenly deal here in this world. The day Muslims started postponing everything for 'life after death,' the progress and enlightenment scurried past them.

The hyper-orthodox may today need to closely look at the message of Shaykh al-Akbar Mohiyoddin Ibn 'Arabi. They consider him somewhat dangerous and chancy, but his message of love will undoubtedly shape the foundation of an innovative and charitable version of thinking in the forthcoming Islamic societies.The future belongs to the great Ibn 'Arabi and heretics like him; they were well ahead of their times, but today the time of orthodoxy is dead, and in this new day and age, their message of love and hope is the only hope. No 'Golden Age' is possible without free minds and no renaissance shall ever materialise without the daVincis and Bachs. Let us rediscover our Kindis and Ibn Arabis.

O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames.
My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaa'ba,
and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take,
that is my religion and my faith.