During his stay in Spain in 1932, the Urdu-language philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal wrote one of his most famous poems, Masjid-e-Qurtaba. The experience of the journey—and of his visit—there becomes a historical and spiritual contemplation of Islam as it is tested by time. The poem appears in his collection Bāl-e-Jibrīl, Gabriel's Wing. In the few stanzas retained here, he presents the sanctuary as follows:

By affirming that the monument's majesty is the same as the believer's, Iqbal invites us to think and to see aesthetics in Islamic heritage not as a mere adornment, but as an objectification of faith and of religious, spiritual, and moral virtue. The stone of Cordoba stands not by mortar, but by Love—this "pure permanence" that reconciles sensible form and ethical demand.

How easy it is, in the light of this poem, to open the theme of our conference on "ethics and aesthetics in Islamic heritage," since in this place nothing arrests the gaze and the eye opens onto infinity. For it knows neither where to stop nor where to begin. In these innumerable pillars, the mind lets go of every form; it no longer fixes itself; it moves on and abandons itself in an endless forest. But how are we to read and grasp the intelligibility of this artistic perception of infinity?

Within the European philosophical tradition, the apprehension of Islamic aesthetics has been profoundly shaped by the reading proposed by Hegel in his Aesthetics. He recognizes in Oriental art the beauty of ornamental refinement, exemplified by the arabesque, yet he sees it as proof that, here, the Idea is incapable of fixing itself in a concrete form. The infinite repetition of motifs is, in his eyes, the mark of a spirit which, by escaping into abstraction, does not succeed in grasping the spiritual reality of the human being. For him, even if Oriental art is characterized by the Spirit's effort to express the absolute, it does not possess an adequate sensible form, which generates a persistent imbalance between the Idea and the artistic figure. As he puts it, Islamic art therefore belongs essentially to the sublime, the absolute being conceived as an abstract unity before which the individual is not yet able to affirm himself as a free subject. Islamic art manifests an authentic and historically established spiritual orientation, but it remains, for Hegel, a pre-classical art. It is an unvollkommene, unangemessene, vorbereitende Kunst—that is, an unfinished, incomplete, inadequate, preparatory art. It is not able to attain the accomplished unity of form and subjective freedom that defines Greek classical art and, later, Romantic art. This inability to figure the Absolute prevents the conscious unity of form and content, the condition of accomplished art. This vision deeply marked nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism. Even today, it shapes certain judgments about Islamic artistic aesthetics. Yet it must be acknowledged that the work of art historians—whether from East or West, North or South—has largely moved beyond this view. Oleg Grabar has shown, for example, that Islamic ornament is not compensatory: it does not replace an absent representation; it organizes aesthetic experience itself; it is a central structure for the production of meaning; it is an active mediation between the work, space, and the viewer. Contrary to the Hegelian perspective, Islamic art does not seek to "say the Idea" in a form, but to place the subject in a dynamic relation with space and the visible. The historian Gülru Necipoğlu, for her part, has established that Islamic abstraction is conceptual and intellectual, not primitive or merely symbolic in the Hegelian sense. In The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture, she shows that geometry and repetition express a sophisticated visual rationality, not a primitive stage of art.

By sounding and scrutinizing Islam's philosophical, theological, legal, and spiritual heritage, other scholars have also shown that it offers original perspectives for thinking the link between ethics and aesthetics, and that it possesses concepts of its own that translate a singular apprehension—one that the Hegelian philosophical vision cannot reach, imprisoned as it is within a Eurocentric reading of the world. Our conference is thus situated in the light of this fertile ground of readjusted knowledge and renewed recognition. But to do so, it is first necessary to identify and remove a difficulty—no minor one—without which our ambition would risk reproducing, in another form, Hegelian Eurocentrism. For are not the very words we have used to formulate our theme historically and geographically situated? Do they not lead us away from that singular and specific gaze on Islamic heritage that we wish to study?

Indeed, how have we translated "ethics" and "aesthetics" into Arabic? The terms aḫlāqiyya and ǧamāliyya seemed to us the most appropriate. However, these are modern neologisms, which we do not find as such in Ibn Sīnā, in Fārābī, or in Ġazālī. They translate an eighteenth-century problematic and belong to philosophical distinctions between aesthetics and the beautiful, ethics and morality.

If in Arabic "aesthetics" and "the beautiful" derive from the same root ǧa.ma.la, French draws on different etymologies: beau comes from the Latin bellus, which refers to the harmonious, the pleasing, a quality of the object or of experience. The beautiful is a value. Aesthétique, by contrast, comes from the Greek aisthēsis, which refers to the idea of sensation, of perception. In the eighteenth century, in a foundational and founding work, Baumgarten defined it as the science of sensible cognition; aesthetics refers to a theory of sensibility, of feeling, of perceptual experience. In this framework, it cannot be reduced to the beautiful, for aesthetics can include the ugly, the sublime, the shocking, the ambiguous, the disturbing. It can be invoked just as well to express the sacrality of a place—whether a mosque or the Kaaba itself—as to express resistance to a social or political order, or again an ambivalent relation to violence or blood—as in the aesthetics of martyrs. Moreover, for Baumgarten, aesthetics is not limited to art, but embraces the whole field of knowledge that does not fall under a rational, logical, distinct science, and which includes in particular mnemonics (105, 241), astrology, physiognomy, mantics, and so on. What he calls the analogon of reason (analogon rationis) refers to the faculty of sensible cognition. It does not produce conceptual and distinct knowledge, but organizes the sensible coherently, according to its own logic. In relation to the beautiful, the difference is both structural and epistemological. Aesthetics refers neither to a property of being—whether harmony or proportion—nor to a metaphysics to contemplate. Aesthetics is the way in which the sensible knows.

As for ethics, French again draws a decisive distinction by differentiating it from morality. Where Arabic uses the root ḫa.la.qa both for ethics and for morality, French relies on two different etymologies that make the differentiation explicit: morale comes from the Latin mōres, "customs," and designates socially established rules of conduct. In Cicero and Seneca, mōs/mōrēs designates conduct in conformity with the virtues and laws of society. Thus morality prescribes what one must do in order to conform to usages or to collective virtues. In modern philosophy, morality is universalized with the Kantian categorical imperative, but it remains normative. Ethics, by contrast, comes from the Greek ēthos, "character." Aristotelian ethics is practical: it aims at eudaimonia, the good life, by forming character through habit and reason. It concerns inner formation and the development of personal dispositions. In modern philosophy, it is reflective and contextual; it is bound up with the autonomy of the subject and with judgment. In Paul Ricœur's words, it is the aim of the "good life, with and for others, in just institutions," a masterful definition that underscores the relational and political dimensions of ethics. Ethics is also affirmed there in a teleological dimension—that of the good life—since it orients existence toward fulfillment, an end, prior to any rule, whereas morality first introduces the normative demand. To translate Aristotelian ethics, Arabic philosophers used the word aḫlāq, while the word aḫlāqiya is used in the modern sense to translate the critical and reflective dimension of ethics.

From these etymological considerations, we note that the Arabic terminology retained for the title of our conference actually inscribes it within a problematic that is not, at first sight, connected to a heritage-based inquiry. It does not immediately call for drawing on classical Islamic sources in order to think the relation between ethics and aesthetics. To be sure, the terminology does not exclude, from an Islamic standpoint, questioning the experience and expression of the sensible. It makes it possible to account for the pursuit of happiness, the desire to live well, the will to render visible a positive relation to others, to shape interreligious or intercultural dialogue grounded in aesthetics with multiple sources. It may also refer to questions concerning the artist's responsibility, the limits of transgression, the ethics of representing ǧihād, violence, or the sacred, or again the aesthetic uses of technologies. All of this is possible, but all of this belongs to a modern and contemporary problematic that does not invite us to begin from Islamic heritage itself, as the primary source—which, let us admit it, is no small paradox.

A paradox all the more significant since many medieval Muslim thinkers addressed questions concerning the intertwining of beauty, sensibility, art, and perfection, and were able to forge concepts for their treatises in philosophy, theology, law, medicine, optics, or rhetoric. One may think, for example, of the notions of ǧamāl, ḥusn, zīna, or iḥsān. Do they not say something specific about the intertwining of "ethics" and "aesthetics"? And how has this relation, in the believing Muslim world, been able to express a particular thought about God's transcendence and to shape a distinctive spiritual or mystical path?

The question has been explored in the philosophy of art, and the work of ʿAfīf Bahnasī has notably shown that Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, the tenth-century philosopher of Baghdad, was not only a man of letters but also a theorist of the beauty of forms. Calligraphy has been read as a junction between the perfection of nature and the spirituality of the soul. In Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, indeed, it is not a mere technique for transcribing Qurʾanic verses; it is the site of a fusion between metaphysics, psychology, and the plastic arts. In his famous Risāla fī al-Ḫaṭṭ wa-l-qalam (Epistle on calligraphy and the reed pen), he lays foundations that transform writing into a genuine "phenomenology of spirit." Contrary to Hegel, who saw in calligraphy an incompleteness, an impoverishment, al-Tawḥīdī speaks of "spiritual geometry" (Handasa rūḥāniyya). He gives it a definition that has become famous: "Writing is a spiritual geometry, although it manifests by means of a bodily instrument." With calligraphy, the beauty of the letter rests on proportion (tanāsub) and measure (tasāwī). Like geometry, it seeks perfect balance (iʿtidāl). This geometric perfection reflects the harmony of the universe created by God. By drawing a perfect line, the calligrapher imitates the precision of divine creation. But that is not all: the movement of the hand is only the result of a process that begins in the soul. The beauty of the stroke is the direct reflection of the purity of the scribe's soul. If the soul is troubled, the line will be hesitant; if the soul is in harmony with its Lord and with its character, the line will be firm and graceful. Thus aesthetics meets ethics (aḫlāq). The calligrapher must cultivate his inner virtues so that his hand becomes a faithful instrument of the "inner light." For Tawḥīdī, the pen is the interpreter of the Intellect. In other words, calligraphic aesthetics is "intelligible" before being "sensible." The admiration felt before a beautiful manuscript is not only visual; it is a recognition by the intellect of the wisdom and light deposited in calligraphic forms. This coherence, this intertwining of aesthetics and ethics, is articulated through concepts that refer at once to technical and aesthetic qualities: wāḍiḥ, clarity, is that of the letter which must be legible, for divine truth does not tolerate obscurity. sahl, fluidity and ease, is that of the stroke which must seem natural, without excessive effort, reflecting the generosity of nature. tašrīf, ennoblement, concerns the way letters rise or join and must evoke a hierarchy and a nobility of form. From a theological point of view, calligraphy is the art of making visible the Word of God, the Qurʾan. Scripture becomes a bridge between the visible world (šahāda) and the invisible world (ġayb). Calligraphy is the human effort to give revelation an adornment worthy of its divine source. If one had to summarize in a few words, it becomes clear that for Tawḥīdī, calligraphy is the art in which aesthetics—the beautiful form—ethics—the discipline of the soul—and theology—the revelation of the Word—are one. It is a "spiritual geometry," the sensible trace of the uncreated Word through the mediation of the human intellect.

If the art and beauty of calligraphy are thus integrated into an ethical and spiritual dimension, does beauty nonetheless not maintain ambiguous, even dangerous, connections with sensibility and the mind, by distracting—or even leading them astray? The question is posed by Plato, and with even sharper acuity by Plotinus in the Enneads (I, 6), since he emphasizes that sensible beauty can become an ontological distraction, and that the soul, by letting itself be fascinated by visible forms, risks forgetting its own intelligible origin. How has this vision of an aesthetics that leads the soul astray been addressed by our philosophers and spiritual masters of Islam? And since we were speaking of Plato, does the Qurʾanic critique of poetry—and that famous verse in which poets are seen as those who "wander in every valley" and "say what they do not do"—not express suspicion toward the aesthetics of the word, toward rhetoric, capable of masking falsehood or, worse still, immorality? For the beauty of poetic form can serve to make vice attractive—an ultimate threat to society.

Many Muslim thinkers thus warned against any sensible beauty that can become an obstacle to ethical and spiritual life. Aesthetics is "dispersion." Thus the terms zīna (adornment) and zuḫruf (ornamentation) were presented as forms of deception or distraction (lahw) that draw one away from truth. Deception, because external gilding can conceal inner ugliness. Going astray, because the pleasure of the eye distracts the heart from its orientation toward the One God. For a Sufi master such as al-Huǧwīrī in his Kašf al-maḥǧūb, zīna is always suspect. For him, the adornment of the world is the veil par excellence and therefore constitutes the very negation of the spiritual unveiling that is the object of the Sufi quest. It is therefore hardly surprising that he advocates an ethics of stripping away, in which beauty must never be an "adornment of appearance" (zīnat al-zāhir), but rather a "transparency of being." In Huǧwīrī, any ornament that does not come from the heart is an idol interposed between the believer and his Creator. Al-Ġazālī (d. 1111), in the same vein, castigates the vanity of those court scholars and jurists draped in their robes of display. In the Iḥyāʾ, he denounces this luxury of dress as the shroud of their own spiritual emptiness: by tending so carefully to worldly adornment, they only display the abyss that separates them from the heavenly realities they nevertheless claim to serve. By taking the money of the poor to cover themselves in gilding or to live in rich palaces, they commit an injustice.

Before him, Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba, though a subtle theorist of love and beauty in The Ring of the Dove, belongs to a moral anthropology in which sensible beauty is fundamentally ambivalent. It is not only zīna, ornamentation, that poses a problem, but ǧamāl, beauty itself. In Ṭawq al-ḥamāma as in al-Aḫlāq wa-l-Siyar, it appears first as a trial (fitna), liable to tip the soul into hawā, disordered passion, and to "subvert" reason through the senses. Bodily beauty is never innocent: it fascinates, but it deceives; it attracts, but it can blind the intellect if it is not strictly subordinated to moral virtue. Hence the ascetic discipline of the gaze by which Ibn Ḥazm sets out to dissect its illusion: fa-in aʿǧabta bi-ǧamālika, fa-tafakkar fī istiḥālatika fī al-qabr ǧīfatan muntinatan yahrubu min qurbihā, wa-fī ṣayrūratika haraman qabīḥan — "If you admire your beauty, think of what you will become in the grave: a decomposing corpse from whose proximity one flees, and of what you will be in old age: a broken and ugly being."

This stance is not only moral; it rests on an implicit epistemology: the sensible is a site of danger for reason, and beauty—far from being a path toward the true—must be held in suspicion, watched, disciplined. But is this distrust of sensible beauty the mark of all medieval Islamic thought? Must ǧamāl really be seen as a danger to reason, or can it, on the contrary, become a path toward the true and the good? It is precisely at this point that the perspective of al-Fārābī (d. 950) opens—and, more radically still, that of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240).

In the Kitāb al-Siyasiya, al-Fārābī understands zīna as the reflection of divine splendor. For the philosopher, ethics and aesthetics are profoundly linked, because their relation is structural to the nature of being. Beauty is the expression of perfection and, as such, refers to God himself—absolute Beauty, absolute Perfection. The more a being approaches its perfection, the more beautiful it is; conversely, ugliness is only the manifestation of defect or imperfection. Moreover, since abstract philosophical demonstration is not accessible to everyone, aesthetics becomes an instrument in the service of ethics: through imitation (muḥākāt) and through imagination, poets and artists translate intelligible truths into sensible forms, making truth accessible to the greatest number. The beauty of images, poems, and works of art thus makes ethical principles desirable and intelligible, encouraging citizens to practice virtues and to avoid vices. Aesthetics is here subordinated to the moral and political end of the virtuous city: it "clothes" ethics so that it may reach all individuals. This mediation does not proceed only through the visible but also through the audible. In the Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-Kabīr, Fārābī develops a genuine psychology of music. He thus distinguishes certain melodies capable of acting upon character (al-alḥān al-muʾaṯṯira), calming or exciting the passions. In his Obituaries of Eminent Men, Ibn Ḫallikān reports the legend attesting that Fārābī mastered the maqāmāt, musical modes, and their effects (al-taʾṯīr): invited to the court of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo, Fārābī was asked to take his place according to his rank. Displaying an unusual assurance, he sat beside the emir himself. Questioned about his talents as a musician, he produced an instrument of his own invention and asked: "What emotion would you like me to awaken in the audience?" He began by playing an air that unleashed irrepressible laughter among the courtiers. Changing mode, he played another melody that plunged the assembly into irresistible sadness. Finally, he played a harmony so gentle that a veil of lethargy fell over the gathering, sealing the courtiers' eyelids in an invincible sleep. He took advantage of it to leave, discreetly. Thus, because it acts upon character, music cannot be reduced to mere pleasure. It has a therapeutic and ethical function: it restores the soul's balance and fosters inner harmony, an indispensable condition for virtuous conduct.

As for Ibn Arabī (1165–1240), he breaks with the moral critique of worldly superficiality, or with the critique advanced by early Sufis of beauty as a path of misguidance—a critique that al-Ġazālī adopts, at least in part. His reading of the ḥadīth, "God is Beautiful and He loves beauty" (inna Allāha ǧamīlun yuḥibbu al-ǧamāl), refers to the ontological structure of being. God is Beautiful in His essence; He loves beauty because He manifests in it; and He loves the one who recognizes Him in forms. zīna is not merely an adornment; it is that through which God makes the world apparent, legible, lovable. It is not an ornament external to being; it is the visible form of a divine Name. In Ibn Arabī, salvation does not come from the form itself but from the quality of the gaze (naẓar) one casts upon it, which sees in it God's self-revelation, divine manifestation (maẓhar or taǧallī). Thus, for Ibn ʿArabī, the real danger is for the one who stops at the form and absolutizes the veil instead of passing through the form in order to recognize God there; salvation, before being penal or reward-based, consists in not being veiled from God, in seeing God in forms without imprisoning Him within them. It lies in taḥqīq, spiritual realization, in kašf, unveiling, in maʿrifa, subtle knowledge. Yet ethics (aḫlāq) is not peripheral for him; it is the very condition of right unveiling. For the veil is not in the form, but in inner dispositions. Ethics, because it is theomorphic—that is, what conforms to the traits of God—helps purify intention and rectify the gaze.

Arabic aesthetic terminology, far from being fixed, is therefore a terrain of tensions and debates. This lexical plasticity calls for philological vigilance and demands from us constant attention to diachrony: each term is a historical trajectory whose plurality of meanings must be identified, sometimes even within the writings of a single author. For even if certain Sufi authors warn against the dispersal produced by aesthetics, they also conceive it as a path of perfection that opens the human being to paradise. Confronted with warnings, critiques, and condemnations—ancient and contemporary—some, sometimes the very same authors, nevertheless saw in the link between aesthetics and adab, understood as literature, culture, and an ethics of beautiful action, the way to overcome the ambivalence between ethics and aesthetics. For if art is educated and formed by nobility of spirit, after the model of beauty embodied by the Messenger of Islam, whose body of ḥadīths sing the noble virtues (makārim al-aḫlāq), then it has the capacity to bring the individual back toward inner harmony. As the excellent work conducted under the direction of Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Luca Patrizi, Francesco Chiabotti, and Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek has brought to light, adab thus appears as the place of convergence between an ethics of behavior, an aesthetics of form, and knowledge as spiritual education. It articulates the beautiful and the good, formal perfection and moral rectitude. Initially linked to the figure of the literate man, versed in ancient poetry, eloquence, and the memory of great tribal epics (ayyām al-ʿArab), adab was transformed, through contact with the Persian legacy, into an ideal of distinction and savoir-vivre, becoming the very name of refinement (ẓarf), politeness, and the forms of civility proper to courtly milieus. The famous ḥadīth of the Messenger of Islam, "addabanī rabbī fa-aḥsana adabī (My Lord taught me adab and brought it to perfection within me)," constitutes its founding matrix by making adab the principle from which the unity of the beautiful, the good, and the true is thought, transmitted, and lived. Thus the adīb knows how to give his actions and his words a beautiful form. Ethics becomes an aesthetic performance: it is not enough to be good; one must be so with elegance, with measure and refinement. ḥusn, as beauty and goodness, is revealed in gesture and chosen speech. It is not morality abolished but morality transfigured, the mirror of divine beauty. In this framework, adab requires mastery of rhetoric (balāġa). It is not reducible to Aristotelian rhetoric; rather, following Ǧurǧānī, it is "the adequacy of discourse to the requirements of the situation." It is not the words that are beautiful, but the way they make meaning appear. The beauty of language is not a mere ornament; it is the condition for transmitting wisdom. Knowledge poorly presented lacks adab. But adab also aims to instruct while pleasing. It is imṭāʿ wa-muʾānasa. imṭāʿ, because it consists in providing pleasure—yet an active pleasure that sets intelligence and sensibility in motion. muʾānasa, because it creates intimacy; it breaks intellectual or existential isolation; it expresses the warmth of exchange. Literary aesthetics serves to make moral and intellectual knowledge "tasty" to the soul. Finally, adab shapes the gaze and sensibility. To appreciate beauty—whether that of a poem, a garden, a Mosque–Cathedral, or a face—one must have been educated. The person of adab (muʾaddab or mutaʾaddib) is not merely polite or courteous; he is well brought up. It is a cultivated aesthetics: sensibility is not only instinct; it is an art that is learned. The adīb is the one capable of perceiving, in literary, pictorial, or cinematic works of art, the subtle nuances (laṭāʾif) of beauty and ethics expressed there. The link between adab and aesthetics makes it possible to resolve the tension between sensory pleasure and moral rigor: adab imposes the notion of balance (iʿtidāl), a category that is at once aesthetic, through the harmony of proportions, and ethical, through the mastery of passions. Thus the ideal of the human being in classical Arab culture is that of one who realizes the fusion between nobility of character (ḫuluq) and the beauty of cultural expression.

In the Arabic tradition, beauty (ǧamāl) is often understood as a moral or spiritual attribute, and virtue (ḫuluq) as a form of perfection or inner beauty. In this sense, the beautiful and the good respond to one another in action, creation, and perception. To work on one's ḫuluq is to sculpt one's character so that it reaches balance (iʿtidāl). In his celebrated dictionary al-Muḫaṣṣaṣ, Ibn Sīda shows that "beauty (ǧamāl) is at once moral beauty and physical beauty (al-ḥusn fī l-ḫuluq wa-l-ḫalq)." In the light of the lexicon at his disposal in his time, he lists terms related to beauty: radiance (nāḍir), resplendence (bahǧa), a spectacle that fills the eyes (bahāʾ), flamboyant color (mashbūb), grace (ġarāniq), cleanliness (ǧahāra), elegant grace (ṭalāwa). In Sufism, this work on character is essential: it is not only a matter of imitating the Prophet's aḫlāq, but also of donning and assimilating the traits of God (al-taḫalluq bi-aḫlāq Allāh), which is far from easy and which, in an author such as al-Ġazālī, always results from God's will and therefore from a given grace.

Thus Islamic heritage presents the beautiful, the just, and the true according to a plurality of registers that do not exclude one another but respond to one another. Sacred texts and theological reflection posit beauty as an emanation of the divine: in Sufi mysticism in particular, aesthetic experience is a path of spiritual knowledge, in which the sensible becomes transparent to truth. Fiqh, for its part, inscribes aesthetics within a concrete normativity, by framing artistic practices and regimes of perception within an order of life and shared social values. As for falsafa, it effects a decisive mediation between Greek heritage and Arab thought, by conceiving beauty as a form of intelligibility of the real, perceived by the intellect as a reflection of the truth of the world's order.

Silsalah-E Roz-O Shab, Naqsh Gar-E Hdsaati: the chain of days and nights is the sculptor of events, writes Muhammad Iqbal in Gabriel's Wing. Through these verses dedicated to the Mosque of Cordoba, the poet recalled that human works, when inhabited by a spiritual vision, pass through time and continue to question history. It is in this spirit that this conference intends to situate itself: to think through the articulations between ethics and aesthetics in Islamic heritage, taking the measure of their tensions as well as of their promises, and recognizing in beauty not a mere ornament of meaning, but one of the sites where, across the centuries, the human relation to the true, the just, and the divine is played out.

From Verb to Virtue: Ibn Ḥazm and the Aesthetics of Discourse

Ali Mostfa

Language as an Ethical and Aesthetic Demand

In this paper, I propose a reflection on language in Ibn Ḥazm, approached as the site of an ethical demand and an aesthetics of discourse whose modern relevance remains intact.

Approaching Ibn Ḥazm through language sheds light on how he conceives the very status of Islamic norms within uṣūl al-fiqh, that is, the principles of Islamic legal theory. The hypothesis guiding my reflection is as follows: for Ibn Ḥazm, language is never a neutral medium. It is at once the condition of possibility of juridical normativity, the locus of access to truth, and the support of an aesthetics of discourse grounded in the responsibility of the sign.

From the normative text to the affective sign, the theologian thus unfolds a single requirement: never to say more than the sign authorizes, and never to generate an obligation without linguistically established proof.

Signs of Love and the Discipline of Meaning

From this perspective, my argument draws on excerpts from two works belonging to markedly different registers: al-Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām, a systematic treatise on the principles of Islamic legal theory, driven by the ambition to refound uṣūl al-fiqh and Islamic legal normativity in response to the juristic schools that preceded it; and Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (The Ring of the Dove), a work devoted to love and its manifestations. At first glance, nothing seems to connect these two texts except the fact that they come from the same author—an author who, very early on, develops a keen attention to the stakes of language, and even more to the question of the sign and the meaning to which it refers.

Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (The Ring of the Dove) is often presented as a literary work that gathers observations, narratives, and analyses devoted to love and its manifestations. Yet it also offers a privileged field for observing—upstream from the juridical discourse Ibn Ḥazm will later develop—how the author (a poet in the fullest sense) thinks about the sign, signification, and the conditions of their readability, within a register in which a demand for linguistic exactitude is elaborated independently of any explicit normative aim.

To illustrate what I am suggesting, I will linger on the opening of chapter II of Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah, entitled Bāb ʿalāmāt al-ḥubb ("Chapter on the Signs of Love"). Ibn Ḥazm opens it with the following words (translation by Gabriel Martinez-Gros):

Love has signs that the discerning man detects and that any intelligent person notices. The first is prolonged contemplation of the beloved. The eye is the wide-open gate to the soul: it probes its secrets, expresses its most intimate thoughts, and serves as the interpreter of the inner forum. Thus one sees the lover who looks at the beloved never blink, move whenever the beloved moves, turn away when the beloved turns away, take the direction the beloved takes—like the chameleon that always follows the sun.

The aesthetic order of this brief passage—like the twenty-nine other chapters that make up The Ring of the Dove—immediately establishes that love is given neither through proclamation (taṣrīḥ, explicit declaration) nor through action (fiʿl, act). Love is manifested and read through signs (ʿalāmāt, signs). It thus belongs to a regime of observable and legible indices, yielding an interpretation of the love experienced that admits neither ambiguity nor doubt.

In this sense, the discourse of love obeys, in Ibn Ḥazm, a requirement close to that which governs normative discourse—as we will see shortly: to assert nothing unless the sign can function as proof. The tension that arises between the sign (ʿalāma) and the meanings it authorizes can be resolved only on the condition that one posits a logical and non-arbitrary relation between the sign and the meaning to which it refers—a relation that leaves no room for doubt, the implicit, or interpretation. In other words, Ibn Ḥazm grounds the intentionality of meaning in the signs themselves: the sign is here the locus of an intentionality immanent to it, not the support of an external intention projected onto it. It thus makes possible the appearance of the invisible (al-bāṭin, the hidden) within the manifest (al-ẓāhir, the apparent), without ever allowing signification to detach itself from the sign that founds it.

In this passage, the eye is far more than a merely poetic motif. It functions as a fully-fledged semiotic index and constitutes the keystone of Ibn Ḥazm's dispositif, as the point from which interiority becomes legible without ever being directly exposed. The sustained gaze, the absence of blinking, and the body's orientation toward the beloved are all observable markers from which meaning imposes itself. In other words, meaning is nothing other than what the eye—both as organ and as sign within the text—legitimately allows one to infer. This relation is comparable to that which links, in a regulated grammatical construction, a noun and its epithet. Ibn Ḥazm himself makes this analogy explicit in the two-line poem that immediately follows the chapter's prelude:

My eye rests on none but you; it seems that what is said of the magnet's properties applies to you.
My gaze follows you wherever you go, whatever movement you make—just as, in grammar, the epithet follows the qualified noun.

The poetic image thus confirms, in an explicit mode, what the prose text had already established. Just as an epithet cannot detach itself from the noun it qualifies, meaning cannot detach itself from the sign that founds it. The gaze neither precedes love nor exceeds it; it is a regulated index of it, grammatically bound to what it signifies.

From Text to Norm: The Primacy of Discourse in al-Iḥkām

This economy of the sign—and the stakes of intentionality already at work in the discourse of love—finds its most systematic and rigorous theoretical formulation in al-Iḥkām.

I have focused my reading on volume 7 of al-Iḥkām, and more specifically on chapter 37, entitled fī dalīl al-khiṭāb ("On the evidentiary force of discourse"), where Ibn Ḥazm develops a central reflection on the primacy of discourse (awlawiyyat al-khiṭāb). The chapter's main thesis is that the Islamic norm never exists independently of its linguistic formulation: it is neither anterior to language nor deducible from considerations external to the text. It takes shape only through the utterance itself.

Ibn Ḥazm's approach rests on the theory of tawqīf (the original fixation of language), understood as God's original institution of language, grounded in the Qurʾānic verse according to which God "taught Adam all the names" (Q 2:31). Ibn Ḥazm mobilizes this verse to refute the thesis of iṣṭilāḥ (linguistic convention), according to which relations of signification between words and things would be the product of human agreement. Words, in his view, were instituted by God to express determinate meanings; their relation to meaning is therefore not arbitrary but logical and natural.

From this point onward, the error consists in attributing to an utterance a meaning other than the one for which it was instituted. The apparent meaning (ẓāhir, the manifest sense) is the condition of any normative validity. This requirement illuminates the earlier analysis of the eye as sign: just as the eye signifies only what it actually allows one to see, normative discourse, for Ibn Ḥazm, produces meaning only within the exact limits of its enunciation—any interpretive extension constituting a methodological excess.

This conception of language grounds, in Ibn Ḥazm, a genuine epistemology of certainty. All juridical normativity is subordinated to a prior linguistic condition: discourse signifies only what it was instituted to signify, and nothing beyond. Language therefore does not merely transmit the norm; it strictly fixes its limits, excluding any extension based on analogy—precisely because Ibn Ḥazm rejects analogy insofar as it introduces into the Law an inference external to the text, akin to conjecture and thus to an illegitimate addition to a Revelation held to be complete.

It is from this standpoint that Ibn Ḥazm distinguishes himself from earlier juridical approaches, which he criticizes and refutes in the name of a demand for certainty that structures his entire intellectual project. The decisive question that drives him can then be formulated as follows: how does one move from language to obligation, from text to ḥukm (juridical ruling), without ever leaving the regime of proof?

Proof, Sources, and the Rejection of Interpretive Drift

This linguistic rigor rests on inseparable principles, foremost among which are dalīl (proof) and burhān (demonstration), which organize Ibn Ḥazm's response to earlier juristic schools, notably the Andalusī Mālikī school. Any normative claim thus involves a relation to truth (al-ḥaqīqa, truth) which, for Ibn Ḥazm, necessarily passes through the word—as sign (ʿalāma), as bearer of signification (dalāla), and ultimately as locus of proof (dalīl). Without this articulation, no obligation can be legitimately established.

It is important, however, to specify what proof means for Ibn Ḥazm. He determines the proofs of prescriptions to be four in number: the text of the Qurʾān; the text of the Sunna—that is, what is reported from the Prophet; the consensus of the community's scholars as a whole; and a dalīl (proof) derived from these three sources. According to him, there exists no other legitimate means of accessing knowledge of religious prescriptions outside these forms. On close inspection, these proofs are all directly or indirectly tied to the textual naṣṣ.

From this perspective, al-Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām stands out as one of the treatises in uṣūl al-fiqh that effects a radical reduction of normative procedures, methodically dismantling qiyās (analogical reasoning), istiḥsān (juristic preference), ʿamal (established practice), and taqlīd (juridical imitation), as they appear notably in al-Shāfiʿī's al-Risāla or Mālik b. Anas's al-Muwaṭṭaʾ. This orientation later opens the way to a renewed mobilization of reason and to its rigorous articulation with the text. In this regard, a title such as Ibn Rushd's Faṣl al-maqāl (Decisive Treatise, 1198) can be regarded as a significant witness to this evolution.

Intentionality: From the Speaker to the Discourse

This linguistic rigor directly entails a decisive reflection on intentionality (qaṣd, intention) in the production of juridical norms. For Ibn Ḥazm, intention is not a psychological disposition prior to discourse that the interpreter might reconstruct. It has normative value only insofar as it is inscribed in the utterance itself. In other words, the juridically relevant intention is not the intention of the speaking subject, but the intention of the discourse (qaṣd al-khiṭāb).

Consequently, any attempt to ground a norm on an external, derived, or contextualized intention is, for Ibn Ḥazm, methodologically inadmissible insofar as it is not explicitly readable in the text. Intention does not precede language; it is an internal property of the statement, inseparable from its formulation.

The enunciative context—what modern pragmatic linguistics calls the "co-text," that is, circumstances, presumed aims, or even the accumulation of commentaries—cannot, in Ibn Ḥazm, produce normative effects. Any intention that exceeds the manifest meaning (ẓāhir) of the discourse remains, in principle, juridically inoperative.

When Scripture Becomes Normative

This requirement also appears in the way Ibn Ḥazm conceives the relation between language and obligation. The Qurʾān, in his view, is not a discourse that is exclusively normative: it contains descriptive, narrative, and exhortative statements, parables, promises, and threats—none of which, as such, produces a juridical norm. Normativity emerges only through an explicit imperative form (ṣīghat al-amr) or a clear and unambiguous prohibition (nahy ṣarīḥ).

The same rigor governs his treatment of the Sunna, structured according to a precise typology: Sunna-as-utterance (qawl, saying), Sunna-as-act (fiʿl, act), and Sunna-as-approval (taqrīr, approval). Among these forms, only the Sunna-as-utterance has, in itself, normative scope—provided that it takes an explicitly prescriptive formulation.

It follows that, for Ibn Ḥazm, neither the Qurʾān nor the Sunna is normative "as a whole." Any normativity founded on interpretive slippage belongs not to proof but to a methodological fault.

Human Language, Adamic Language, and the Ethics of Saying

Pursuing the argument further, one can discern in Ibn Ḥazm a decisive distinction between human language and Adamic language, articulated on the basis of the Qurʾānic reference according to which God taught Adam all the names (Q 2:31). The former, assumed by human speakers, is exposed to error, ambiguity, and interpretation: the system of signification rests on human usage of words, which opens the possibility of deviation and misunderstanding in interpretation. The latter, by contrast, presents itself as immediately true, without mediation or the possibility of divergence; it is, par excellence, the language of the indubitable, where the word coincides with the thing.

Once language is human, it can no longer claim such immediacy of truth. It must be subjected to the test of proof before any normative claim. Though a deposit of divine origin, human language thus requires a constant discipline and vigilance in the face of error. It is at this precise level that, for Ibn Ḥazm, the ethical demand of saying takes shape: grammar is not a neutral science but a discipline of truth that ultimately falls under a requirement of faith.

N.B. The text I am presenting retains its oral character. It is intended to be revised and refined for possible publication. I will include only the essential ideas here. Further details may be added on the day of my presentation.

Introduction

After several days devoted to preparing our presentation, we realized that it calls for a more precise and more pertinent title, namely: Metamorphosis of the Beautiful, from Plato to al-Fārābī.

Indeed, it is a comparative investigation that will allow us to identify the originality—if there is originality at all!—of al-Fārābī's approach to the beautiful. And this comparison can only be conducted with Plato, for reasons we will soon understand.

Al-Fārābī has partial knowledge of Plato—we shall return to this. He offered an overview of Plato's dialogues in فلسفة أفلاطون واجزاؤها ومراتب اجزائها من اوّلها لآخرها (The Philosophy of Plato, Its Parts and the Hierarchies of These Parts, from the First to the Last). Admittedly, neither the beautiful nor its various declensions (jamāl جمال, jamīl جميل, etc.) are mentioned there. Yet the uses of the beautiful found in al-Fārābī's other writings belong within the extension of Plato and Platonism.

Let us begin by saying that this notion of the beautiful is among the most paradoxical in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy. At once omnipresent and elusive, it oscillates between sensible experience, moral value, and metaphysical principle. From Plato to al-Fārābī—and this is what justifies the title of our presentation—the beautiful does not disappear, but undergoes profound transformations: a genuine conceptual displacement. From an Idea contemplated and desired in Plato, it becomes, in al-Fārābī, a principle of order, perfection, and finality, inscribed at once in the cosmos and in the city. It is precisely this displacement that we would like to examine with you.

Our general problem is therefore the following: How does the Platonic beautiful pass from a separate Idea and object of contemplation to become, in al-Fārābī, a principle of order and perfection inscribed in the cosmos and in the city?

I. The Beautiful in Plato: an Idea that sets the soul in motion

In Plato, the beautiful (τὸ καλόν) is never a purely aesthetic category. It belongs fully to metaphysics and to the formation of the soul.

In the Symposium, Diotima's discourse is presented as an ascent: the soul rises from the beauty of bodies to that of souls, to that of laws and sciences, until it attains the contemplation of Beauty itself. This Beauty is neither relative nor changeable. On the contrary, it is eternal, intelligible, and separate.

"Indeed, the one who has been guided up to this point by the instruction concerning matters of Eros—who has contemplated beautiful things in their proper succession and order—because he has now reached the highest end of the mysteries of Eros, will suddenly catch sight of something wondrously beautiful: precisely that, Socrates, which was the goal of all his previous efforts—an entity that, first of all, is not subject to change, that neither comes to be nor perishes, that neither grows nor diminishes; an entity that, moreover, is not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, beautiful at one time and ugly at another, beautiful in one relation and ugly in another, beautiful here and ugly there, beautiful for some and ugly for others… No: it will appear to him in itself and for itself, eternally united with itself in the unity of its form, while all other beautiful things partake of that beauty…" (Symposium, 210e–211b)

The Beautiful, as described by Diotima in the Symposium, is grasped first through sensible realities (bodies, souls, actions, works), but these realities are only a stage toward elevation and toward the contemplation of the Idea of the Beautiful—defined as eternal, immutable, and identical with itself.

Yet if, in the Symposium, the soul detaches itself from the sensible in order to advance toward the Idea of the Beautiful, in the Phaedrus the soul is seized by a divine madness that tears it from its ordinary condition. Where Diotima thinks eros as a rational mediation toward the intelligible, the Phaedrus thinks it as the shock of the Beautiful awakening the memory of the Ideas. Plato adds here a decisive determination: the beautiful is the only Idea that remains visible in the sensible world. It acts as a spiritual shock, awakening the soul's memory and producing eros—that desire which presses toward the true and the good. The beautiful is here anagogic: it raises.

"Beauty was radiant to behold in that time when, mingled with a blessed chorus… we enjoyed a blessed and divine vision; when we were initiated into that initiation of which one may say it leads to the highest blessedness. We celebrated it in the integrity of our nature, sheltered from all the evils that awaited us later… This beauty shone among those apparitions; and it is still that beauty which, after returning here below, we grasp with that sense of ours that provides the clearest representations, while it itself shines with the most intense brilliance… The one whose eyes are filled with the visions of old—when he happens to see a face of divine aspect, a happy imitation of beauty, or the form of a body—begins by shuddering, for something of his former dread returns. Then he turns his gaze toward that object and venerates it as a god…" (Phaedrus, 250b–251a)

This passage highlights, with remarkable clarity, the anagogic function of the beautiful. Beauty comes to us from an ontological "before": it refers to the time when the soul, still pure, participated in a blessed and divine vision of intelligible realities. The vocabulary of initiation (τελετή) and blessedness assigns to the soul a vision far removed from mere knowledge: it is a total experience of the soul—at once cognitive, affective, and spiritual.

After the fall into the sensible and into bodies, beauty retains an exceptional privilege: it remains visible. It still "shines" here below and allows itself to be grasped by sight and sense. This visibility has nothing to do with a degradation of the soul; it is a luminous trace of the intelligible within the sensible. The Beautiful thus appears as the mediator par excellence between the two worlds, sensible and intelligible.

The Beautiful therefore takes on an essentially anagogic meaning: it does not hold the soul in the fascination of the sensible; rather, it tears the soul from immanence and orients it upward, toward its principle and origin. Eros, or desire, is born precisely from this tension: desire provoked by the visible, but immediately directed toward the invisible—toward the true and the good. The Beautiful is thus the passage through which the soul resumes its ascent.

In the Republic, finally, Plato assigns the beautiful an educational and political dimension. The beauty of forms, rhythms, and discourses contributes to the formation of the just soul. But it remains subordinate to the Good, the supreme principle and the foundation of intelligibility:

"Must we not seek out those craftsmen who display a natural talent enabling them to track the nature of what is beautiful and graceful, so that—like those who inhabit a healthy region—the young may benefit from everything, and so that, whatever the provenance of what emanates from beautiful works to strike their eyes and ears, they may welcome it like a breeze that brings health from salubrious lands, and from childhood be imperceptibly disposed to resemblance, love, and harmony with the beauty of reason?" (Republic, III, 401c–d)

Here, beauty is no longer the object of a metaphysical erotics as in the Symposium or the Phaedrus; it is anchored in an educational and political reflection.

→ Thus, in Plato's works, the beautiful is articulated in three main ways:

• The beautiful as Idea: the beautiful is fundamentally an intelligible, eternal, and immutable Idea. Sensible beauties are only imperfect and changeable participations in it.
• The beautiful as the motor of philosophical desire: the beautiful is partially visible in the sensible world and is what arouses eros—desire which, far from stopping at the perceived object, guides the soul toward its principle: the true and the good.
• The beautiful as mediator between sensible and intelligible: the beautiful appears in sensible forms, but, through an anagogic movement, refers the soul back to the intelligible order of the Ideas.

Conclusion on Plato

The Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Republic bring to light the singular status of the beautiful in Plato's work. The beautiful is not an aesthetic category; yet it can be read as a central metaphysical notion, inseparable from the Idea of the Good and from the formation of the philosophical soul. Although visible in the sensible world, it nonetheless orients the soul beyond that world, toward the intelligible. The beautiful thus appears as a mediator: it links the sensible to the intelligible, desire to knowledge, affective experience to truth.

One essential consequence must be emphasized: the beautiful, as Idea or sign of the Idea, is thought within a horizon of separation. Even when it is seen in the sensible, the beautiful never ceases to refer to a reality ontologically superior to it. The beautiful is what calls the soul out of the world, what turns it away from immanence and orients it toward the transcendence of the intelligible. It is the "Good beyond being" as one reads in Republic VI, 509b: ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας.

It is precisely this point—the status of the beautiful as mediation oriented toward transcendence—that opens the way to a new question: what becomes of the beautiful when the emphasis is no longer on the separation of the Idea, but on the order of the world itself, on the rationality of the cosmos, and on the finality of human existence? Put differently: how are we to conceive the beautiful when it refers no longer primarily to a beyond of being, but to the very structure of being and of reality?

→ It is to this reconfiguration of the beautiful—indebted to Plato, yet inscribed within another ontological framework—that al-Fārābī's thought will invite us.

II. The Arabic reception: an indirect and already transformed inheritance

At the beginning of Arabic philosophical activity (early 9th century), Plato, as we said, is only partially accessible. He is often known through:

• Aristotle,
• Neoplatonic summaries,
• paraphrases and adaptations.

The overview of Platonic dialogues given by al-Fārābī in فلسفة أفلاطون واجزاؤها ومراتب اجزائها من اوّلها لآخرها (The Philosophy of Plato, Its Parts and the Hierarchies of These Parts, from the First to the Last) is somewhat perplexing. We do not know whether al-Fārābī truly read these dialogues—which seems highly unlikely—or whether he knew only summaries that reached him through late Platonism. In any case, the new context of Arabic philosophy gradually modifies the approach to the beautiful. The beautiful ceases to be thought as a separate Idea and is integrated into an ontology of order and perfection.

Within this context, a decisive factor will drive this modification: the meteorite called the "Theology of Aristotle." It is not, by any means, a work by Aristotle, but an Arabic adaptation of certain passages from Plotinus' Enneads, chiefly Enneads IV, V, and VI, translated and reworked in Baghdad in the 9th century. This Theology was attributed to Aristotle for reasons that remain historically difficult to determine.

With this Theology, one can speak of a major accident in the history of philosophy: emerging Arabic thought received, under Aristotle's name, a Neoplatonic metaphysics of emanation in which the supreme principle is beyond being, and from which the world proceeds by degrees.

Without entering into details that can be discussed later, it must be said that the effects of this accident were decisive and lasting. Our "Platonic beautiful" was profoundly transformed.

This confusion—for it is indeed a noteworthy confusion—deeply oriented ontology and, with it, the understanding of the beautiful.

In the Theology of Aristotle, the beautiful is no longer a separate Idea to be contemplated (in the Platonic sense), but the radiance of the intelligible within being, proportional to its degree of participation in the One. Beauty thus becomes inseparable from ontological perfection, hierarchical order, and the completion of form.

In other words, the beautiful is no longer what tears the soul out of the world; it is what manifests an entity's ontological completion. The more unified, ordered, and complete (tāmm) an entity is, the more beautiful it is. Ugliness is never a positive principle; it is a privation of form and unity.

This Neoplatonic ontology, wrongly attributed to Aristotle, led Arabic philosophers to think that Aristotelian metaphysics itself included:

• The radical transcendence of the Principle: the first principle is not a being, but the source of being, absolutely separate from all that is.
• An emanationist schema: according to this schema, the world does not proceed from the Principle by voluntary creation or by efficient causality, but by necessary emanation or procession: from the Principle's perfection flows, by superabundance (jūd), a chain of realities that become ever more determinate. This causality is non-temporal and non-intentional. Received as Aristotelian, it suggested that supreme causality in Aristotle belonged to a hierarchical unfolding of being, and not only to final causality.
• A hierarchy of beings grounded in perfection: emanation implies an ontological hierarchy: each being possesses a lesser degree of perfection, unity, and intelligibility than the level that precedes it. Beings are hierarchized not by accident, but by their proximity to the Principle. In this framework, an entity's value—and notably its beauty—is measured by its degree of ontological perfection and by the completeness of its form.

How does all this bear on al-Fārābī's conception of the beautiful?

The beautiful is now integrated into the order of being: it is no longer an autonomous Idea, but an index of perfection, legible in the cosmos, in the soul, and in political order. The beautiful will be approached not as a separate reality, but as a function of order, harmony, and finality.

Let us move toward further details and implications.

III. Al-Fārābī: from the contemplated beautiful to the realized beautiful

First, some preliminary remarks on the beautiful in al-Fārābī:

To begin with, our philosopher wrote several treatises on rhetoric and poetry. One might therefore expect that the notion of the beautiful would belong to these two arts (ṣanā'iʿ - صنائع). This is not the case, for an obvious reason: like all philosophers from the 5th to the 12th century, rhetoric and poetics fall, for al-Fārābī, under logic and are integrated into what is called the expanded Organon. One speaks of a rhetorical or poetic syllogism just as one speaks of a demonstrative syllogism (burhānī). Rhetoric occupies a particular place: it is concerned with the logic of the plausible, which brings it close to dialectic, to the point that it can be considered a prolongation—indeed a "replica"—of dialectic. But it is also an action-oriented discipline whose main aim is to persuade the listener. It is precisely this double status—logical and practical—that allows philosophers such as al-Fārābī to attach poetics to rhetoric and, through it, to the deductive disciplines. Without this dual affiliation, poetics would probably not have found its place among the logical treatises of the Organon. Poetic imagination (التخييل الشعري) is thus tethered to logical reasoning. The result is that the beauty a poem can arouse is largely sacrificed or relegated to a secondary zone.

Next, we know that al-Fārābī wrote a major treatise on music (كتاب الموسيقي الكبير). Here again, music, as a discipline, belongs for him to mathematics and thus to theoretical knowledge. He assigns music a privileged place within a rational science grounded in mathematical and acoustical principles, not in mere aesthetics or beauty.

Finally, the beautiful in al-Fārābī finds its place—logically, as we shall see—in the contemplation of the order and beauty of the cosmos and in the relation of this cosmos to its First Principle.

It is certain that the beautiful (al-jamāl, al-ḥusn, etc.) is not for him an autonomous concept; it is always bound to notions such as unity (الوحدة), proportion (التناسب), coherence (الانسجام), completion (الاكتمال or التمام), perfection (الكمال), order (النظام), and finality (الغاية).

The beautiful is not an Idea, we said, but the visible effect of an entity's perfection.

A text by al-Fārābī will help us grasp his conception of beauty:

والجمال والبهاء والزينة في كل موجود هو أن يوجد وجوده الأفضل. ويحصل له كماله الأخير، وإذا كان الأول وجوده أفضل الوجود، فجماله فائت لجمال كلّ ذي جمال، وكذلك زينته وبهاؤه. ثمّ هذه كلها له في جوهره وذاته؛ وذلك في نفسه وبما يعقله من ذاته. وأمّا نحن، فإنّ جمالنا وزينتنا وبهائنا هي لنا لأعراضنا لا بذاتنا، وللأشياء الخارجة عنا، لا في جوهرنا. والجمال فيه والكمال ليسا هما فيه سوى ذات واحدة، وكذلك سائرها.

Translation: "Beauty, splendor, and ornament in every being consist in this: that its existence is the most excellent existence, and that it attains its ultimate perfection. If the First possesses the most excellent existence there is, then His beauty surpasses every beauty belonging to what is beautiful, and likewise His ornament and His splendor. Moreover, He possesses all these perfections in His substance and essence, for they reside in Himself and in the intellection He has of Himself. As for us, our beauty, ornament, and splendor belong to us only as accidents and not by our essence; they depend on things external to us and not on our substance. In Him, beauty and perfection are nothing other than one and the same essence, and the same holds for all His attributes."

The text lays down a universal rule from the outset: beauty, splendor, and ornament are conditionally linked to the perfection of being. It then distinguishes a substantial beauty proper to the First Principle—whose existence is fully complete—from an accidental beauty proper to the human being, dependent on external factors. Divine beauty, inseparable from essence, coincides with ultimate perfection, whereas human beauty remains contingent and non-essential. A fundamental bipartition results between a necessary and ontological beauty and an acquired and relative beauty, each belonging to a distinct register of metaphysics.

Yet these two beauties—necessary and contingent—can communicate remarkably well.

Indeed, this conception is inscribed in an emanationist framework: the closer a being is to the First Principle, the more it participates in order and intelligibility, and thus in beauty. Ugliness is never a positive principle; it is a privation of order and form.

الموجودات كثيرة، وهي مع كثرتها متفاضلة. وجوهره يفيض منه كل وجود، كان كاملا او ناقصاً. وجوهره أيضًا جوهر، إذا فاضت منه الموجودات كلها بترتيب مراتبها، حصل عنه لكلّ موجود قسطه الذي له من الوجود ومرتبته منه. فيبتدئ من أكملها وجودًا ثمّ يتلوه ما هو أنقص منه قليلا، ثم لا يزال بعد ذلك يتلو الأنقص إلى أن ينتهي إلى الموجود الذي تخطى عنه إلى ما دونه تخطى إلى ما لم يمكن أن يوجد أصلاً

"Beings are many and, despite their multiplicity, they are hierarchized. From His essence proceeds every being, whether perfect or deficient. His essence is such that, when all beings emanate from it according to the order of their ranks, each being receives from Him its share of existence and its relative rank. This begins with the most perfect being, followed by what is slightly less perfect, and then successively by beings ever more deficient, until one arrives at the being beyond which what is inferior cannot exist at all."

This passage implicitly establishes an ontological aesthetics: an entity's value depends on its share of existence, determined by its proximity to the First Principle. The hierarchy of beings is thus a hierarchy of perfection and, consequently, of beauty. The beautiful is not an added quality, but the effect of order, form, and the completion of being. Conversely, what is deficient in existence is also deficient in beauty.

IV. Cosmic beauty and political beauty

This objectification of the beautiful is especially manifest in two domains.

1. The cosmos

The world is beautiful because it is rationally structured. Beauty results from proportion, harmony, and the hierarchy of beings.

2. The city

A clarification: al-Fārābī almost never explicitly says "the city is beautiful," but he provides all the ontological and political criteria that allow us legitimately to speak of a beauty of the city.

Political beauty is therefore structural: it resides in the harmonious arrangement of the city's functions, laws, and practices.

The city is well ordered. In al-Fārābī, the virtuous city is beautiful because it reproduces a rational order analogous to that of the cosmos. Order is not decorative; it is the condition for the city's correct existence. A disordered city is deficient in its very being. Now, in al-Fārābī's ontology: degree of order = degree of perfection = ground of the beautiful.

Here al-Fārābī appeals to the metaphor of the body:

وأجزاء المدينة الفاضلة تشبه أعضاء البدن التامّ الصحيح، الذي تتعاون أعضاؤه كلّها على تتميم حياة الحيوان وعلى حفظها عليه. (آراء، ص. 96)

The parts of the virtuous city resemble the organs of a perfectly healthy body, all of whose members cooperate in completing the life of the living being and preserving it.

The city is hierarchically structured.

إن السبب الأوّل نسبته إلى سائر الموجودات كنسبة ملك المدينة الفاضلة إلى سائر أجزائها. فإنّ البريئة من المادّة تقرب من الأول، ودونها الأجسام السماوية، ودون السماوية الأجسام الهيولانية، وكلّ هذه تحتذي حذو السبب الأوّل وتؤمّه وتقتفيه، ويفعل ذلك كلّ موجود بحسب قوّته (آراء، ص. 99)

The relation of the First Cause to the rest of beings is the same as the relation of the king of the virtuous city to all its parts. Beings free of matter are closest to the First; next come the celestial bodies; beneath the celestial bodies come hylomorphic bodies. All follow the model of the First Cause, orient themselves toward it, and take it as their guide; and each being acts in this way according to its own power.

Al-Fārābī grounds here a political hierarchy with ontological scope by bringing the city's order close to the order of the cosmos. Just as beings unfold according to their degree of proximity to the First Cause, the virtuous city is structured according to a rational hierarchy, at the summit of which stands the ruler. This hierarchy is not merely functional or political; it is aesthetic in the ontological sense of the term. The city's beauty lies not in its appearance, but in the correctness of its order, in the proportion between its parts, and in their common orientation toward a unifying principle.

The city is oriented toward happiness (saʿāda). Here al-Fārābī insists on the criterion of finality. A city becomes virtuous—and thus structurally beautiful—when it takes happiness as its objective. This is, of course, true happiness, i.e., the ultimate perfection of the human being.

Political beauty is here teleological: it is measured by the adequation between means (institutions, laws, hierarchy) and the supreme end (happiness).

The beautiful therefore is no longer contemplated: it is seen in the just organization of social functions and in the harmony among citizens.

Another text shows to what extent the beautiful is not an Idea but is embodied in the actions of each member of the virtuous city:

الذي يهوى لنفسه الخير، الذي هو في الحقيقة خير وليس يكون إلا خيراً فاضلاً، ليس خيرا فاضلا في فكره، بل خيرا فاضلا في خلُقه وأفعاله. ويُشبه أن تكون فضيلته وخلقه وأفعاله على مقدار قوة فكره على ما له من استنباط الأنفع والأجمل. فإن كان إنّما يستنبط بفضيلته الفكرية من الأنفع والأجمل ما هو عظيم القوّة مثل الأنفع في غاية فاضلة مشتركة لأمّة أو لأمم أو مدينة ممّا شأنه أن لا يتبدّل إلاّ في مدّة طويلة، فينبغي أن تكون فضائله الخلُقيّة على حسب ذلك. وكذلك إن كانت فضائله الفكريّة إنّما يقتصر بها على الأشياء التي هي أنفع في غاية خاصّة وعند وارد خاصّ، ففضيلته أيضًا على مقدار ذلك. فكلّ ما كان من هذه الفضائل الفكرية أكمل رئاسة وأعظم قوّة كانت الفضائل الخلقية المقترنة به أشدّ رئاسة وأعظم قوّة.

Translation: "The one who desires for himself the good that is truly a good—his good is ultimately the virtuous good. This is not a virtuous good merely conceived in thought, but a virtuous good embodied in character and actions. His virtue, character, and actions are proportional to the strength of his intellect in deriving, by means of his intellectual virtue, what is most beneficial and most beautiful. If, by his intellectual virtue, he derives from what is beneficial and beautiful something of great power—such as what is most beneficial with respect to a shared virtuous end for a nation, nations, or a city, of the sort that would not change except over a long duration—then his moral virtues ought to correspond to that. Likewise, if his intellectual virtues are limited to things beneficial to a particular end and in a particular circumstance, his virtue too is proportioned accordingly. The more perfect and powerful these intellectual virtues are in leadership, the more perfect and powerful are the moral virtues associated with them." (We emphasize.)

This is a text of great importance because it shows that the virtuous city is a city that prioritizes happiness. This happiness is conceived as a good embodied in actions, not as an abstraction. Moral virtues are proportioned to intellectual virtues, and their concord conditions the perfection of political action. This lexical field of proportion, harmony, and perfection places us directly within al-Fārābī's conception of beauty as rational order, where the correctness of the relations between thought, conduct, and the common end grounds the very beauty of the city.

By way of conclusion: Metamorphosis of the Beautiful—continuity and rupture

We can now measure the transformation undergone by the notion of the beautiful from Plato to al-Fārābī.

There is continuity, because:

• the beautiful remains linked to the good, as we have just seen in the last text;
• it retains an educational function. A slight difference should be noted here: in al-Fārābī, the beautiful no longer elevates the soul through the shock of contemplation; it educates through rational order, preparing the human being for virtue and happiness. Al-Fārābī says in K. al-Mūsīqī al-kabīr:

ولمّا كان كثير من الهيئات والأخلاق تابعة لانفعالات النفس وللخيالات الواقعة فيها، على ما تبيّن في الصناعة المدنيّة، صارت الألحان الكاملة نافعة في إفادة الهيئات والاخلاق ونافعة في أن تبعث السامعين على الأفعال المطلوبة منهم، وليس إنّما هي نافعة في هذه وحدها، لكن وفي البعثة على اقتناء سائر الخيرات النفسانية، مثل الحكمة والعلوم

"Since many dispositions, moral characters, and actions follow upon the soul's passions and the images that occur within it— as has been shown in the political discipline—perfect melodies therefore become beneficial for dispositions and morals. They are beneficial insofar as they incite listeners to perform the actions required of them; but they are also beneficial in inciting the acquisition of other goods of the soul, such as wisdom and the sciences."

This text underscores the educational function of the beautiful through the role of harmonious melodies. Because moral dispositions and human actions depend on passions and images that affect the soul, beautiful forms—here, perfectly proportioned melodies—act as instruments of moral formation. Their efficacy lies not in the sensible pleasure they provide, but in their capacity to order the soul, to dispose it to rational obedience, and to orient it toward higher goods such as wisdom and science. The beautiful thus becomes, in al-Fārābī, an indirect but powerful pedagogical means: by habituating the soul to harmony and measure, it prepares access to virtue and, consequently, to happiness. In the same way that it is fitting to teach philosophy to the people by taking the path of imitation, persuasion, and imagination—through rhetoric and poetics—so too must music be able to be a "representation" or "imitation" of something extra-musical, which is nothing other than the philosophical archetypes (miṯālāt ūlā).

• it participates in the elevation of the human being.

But one can also speak of rupture between the two philosophers. With al-Fārābī's virtuous city:

• we pass, first, from the beautiful as Idea to the beautiful as realized perfection;
• we pass, next, from inner experience to objective order;
• we pass, finally, from erotic ascent to cosmico-political rationality.

→ The beautiful is no longer what tears the soul away from the world; it is what makes the world intelligible and inhabitable.

The metamorphosis of the beautiful, from Plato to al-Fārābī, should not be understood as an impoverishment, but as a profound philosophical reconfiguration. By integrating the beautiful into an ontology of order, finality, and the city, al-Fārābī transforms a contemplative notion into a structuring principle of reality.

In his commentary on Plato's Republic, Ibn Rochd comments on the main points of the community of women in paragraphs 138 to 145 (Ibn Rochd-Eddarouri fi essiyassa, 1998, p.123-126), the main points, that is, without details. For fear that a devil might be hiding in the details: the gods and myths of Plato and Aristotle are omitted.

At the beginning of the paragraphs dedicated to the community of women, the philosopher began (§ 138-139) to suspect the difference of nature (tiba'a) between men and women. Then, when it is difficult to find differences of tasks between the tasks done by men and those done by women, one concludes that women are also capable of doing them. Women: philosophers, wise, guardians and warriors. If not, women will be destined to reproduction and raising children, tasks that men are spared by nature. This question of human nature (Platon 2004, 453a sq), becomes a question of tasks, and in the tasks one inquires about the most important and noble ones: the activity of war and that of governing.

However, even if 'woman is not entirely different from man in her nature,' activities can be distinguished from woman to man, as those that are distinguished in the world of nature from the female to the male. Thus, activities are attributed according to the belonging to a certain gender, that is to say according to whether the task is in accordance with the nature of the gender. The fact that one gives birth (Ibid., 454e ; Ibn Rochd, §139) while the other conceives, does not in any way affirm that the two differ in the exercise of the same occupations related to the city. The proof according to Averroès is the belonging to humanity and having the same goal in their existence (el-ghaya el-insaniya) (In Rochd : §140), then, he sees nothing that could exclude women from the possibility 'that there are among them philosophers and governors'.

It is worth noting that the paragraphs of Averroes do not follow the logic of those of Plato. The one in 457a was for Plato a conclusion, but for Averroes (§141) it was a principle from which the distinction between men and women began. Of the tasks assigned to women, making war and guarding the city, they should only be given a 'lighter share than men, given the weakness of their gender' (Plato, 2004, 457a). Except that they should only be concerned with these tasks and nothing else. A condition that marks both the impossibility for women to perform several tasks at the same time, hence their double fragility and weakness. A detail that is absent in the text of Averroes.

Women, however, excel in specific activities, mostly domestic. Averroes is content with the example of the art of weaving when Plato cites alongside it 'the making of pastries and cooked dishes, arts in which the female sex seems to show its value and where it would be quite ridiculous to consider it inferior' (455d). The activities carried out by human beings are the same in nature, they only differ in degree of involvement and application. Is this degree itself not the effect of some kind of nature? A vicious circle. Yet, in an ambiguous sentence, Averroes spoke of two forms of Laws that refuse to allow women to govern (to be the Head of the city, the height prietshood in Rosenthal's translation, 1969: 165 and Lerner, 1974: 58; El-Imama el-koubra in the Arabic translation, Ibn Rochd, 1998: 125): those that, realising the rarity of wise women in their societies, prohibit the female sex from accessing power, and others that even if it is possible to find among them intelligent and courageous women, exclude them by preventing them from any command. This reminds us of the problem of the woman-imam, that of leading the prayer, described by Ibn Rochd in Bidayat el-mojtahid wa nihayat el-moq'tasid (Ibn Rochd, 1994: 354-355) by specifying that he is only content to report the common ideas on the matter. However, it is known that the woman in the texts of the Sharia'a (Muslim Law) is intellectually deficient.

So, in all the Laws, whatever the development of society, women are prohibited (ruling out) from any access to authority. Nature eliminates scarcity, the majority crushes the minority. Natural history leads us to accept such a finding: the females defend and guard their young against predators (Ibn Rochd, 1998 : § 143), social history, instead of correcting, it distorts the finding: women are assigned to reproduction, to raise and breastfeed, and to serve their husbands, they are, finally, like plants (Ibid : §144), which wait to be watered and fed. They will be an additional burden on their husbands and a cause of the poverty of our cities, since they only exercise the least and the simplest activities, such as the less indispensable ones, weaving for example. This condemns them to a lower position in the affairs of the city. Who is to blame? society or nature? When nature allows women the means of their equality with men, society comes to deprive them of it. Society constitutes a kind of regression with respect to nature. It distorts the original form, it denatures.

Between society and nature comes the gift. Nature provides the woman with a gift in relation to the man. It is up to society to develop it or to spoil its beauty: Socrates said: 'There is no occupation, my friend, in the administration of the city that belongs to a woman because she is a woman, or to a man because he is a man, but the natural gifts are distributed in the same way in both sexes.' (Platon, 2004, 455e). Certainly, in these activities, 'the woman is a weaker being than the man,' yet, 'there is, I think, as we affirm, a woman who is gifted for medicine, and another who is not, and such a woman who is gifted for music, and such another who is not a musician by nature.' (Ibid. : 456a). Except that for the guarding of the city, this natural aptitude shared by the man and the woman retains its strength for the former while it becomes weaker for the latter (Ibid. : 456b). How can it be made stronger? Through education. Education can restore nature to the female gender that has been deprived of these gifts. It is not, continued Socrates, 'against nature to grant the women guardians an education through the art of gymnastics and music.' (Ibid., 456b ; Ibn Rochd, 1998, §145).

If in the first part (Ibid. : 452 a) Plato puts music before gymnastics, in the last paragraph, the opposite is adopted, whereas Averroes kept music before gymnastics. The notion of nature in Socrates (Plato, 2004 : 453e and 545d) has two meanings: at the beginning it indicates everything that is in accordance with the biological sex, of which there are two: male and female, and then the notion will designate what makes a man and a woman a human being, when for example their souls are capable of medicine, that is to say, inner qualities and not morphological differences between the male and the female.

Averroes, probably as an observer of his time, does not limit himself to summarising the sentence of Plato, he even adds a comment based on an experience of him as a faïlassouf (Ibn Rochd: §140):

« it is not impossible that women are in some activities more efficient, as is though in respect of the art of practical music. for this reason it is said that melodies are perfect if men invent them and women perform them.» (Rosenthal, p.165).

« thought it is not impossible that women should be more dilgent in some activities, such as is thought concerning the art of practical music. That is why it is said of melodies that they are perfected when men produce them and women do them well. » (Lerner, p. 58)

Is it a light task for women to play the melodies, 'given the weakness of their gender' (457a)?

Like Plato, Ibn Rochd acknowledges that women are generally better at some tasks, but when Plato mentions cooking and weaving, he emphasises that women are better at playing music. For some readers, the interpretation of this important fragment depends on the type of task that Ibn Rochd has in mind (Melkbeek, 2021, p.15-16). For others, it is a matter of essential identity (Belo, 2009, p. 8), in which the difference is maintained at the biological level rather than the intellectual level. Nevertheless, this universal intellectual ability is restricted, as we find in The Decisive Treatise, which attempts to draw a line between the different ways of achieving certainty.

The learning of wisdom, for example, is a difficult task for those who are familiar with images (examples), since they cannot grasp the truth of faith or wisdom by rhetorical or sophistical methods, either because of a defect of nature (Fitra) or because of their customs or, finally, because the conditions for their learning are lacking (Ibn Rochd, 1997, § 47, p.109). The more so since religion makes a distinction between the apparent and the hidden, the exoteric and the esoteric.

An historian of the time of Ibn Rochd tells us that in Cordoba: 'there were, in the eastern suburb of the city alone, one hundred and seventy women engaged in transcribing the Koran in Kufic script.' (Abd El-Wahid Merrakechi, 1893, p. 315-316). Transcribing a text and playing music are light tasks compared to writing and composing. These women are in the realm of execution and interpretation, they neither invent nor produce. They are there to attest to a void. Instead of writing, they transcribe; instead of composing, they interpret. Meta-writing is the domain of the ulama, just as the art of governing is the monopoly of men, just as composition is the lot of musicians. In music theory, the voice of women is associated with that of children in soprano voices, while the tenor is male. A difference between the low and the high. A light voice against a heavy voice. If women are accepted among men, it is by concession for the good of the city.

In The Republic, 'the art of gymnastics exists for the body, and the art of music for the soul' (Plato, 2004, 376 e). These two means are used to impose a certain order between the body and the soul. The body precedes the soul only as nature precedes culture. Music is used to develop what gymnastics has ignored: harmony; and gymnastics is used to omit what music can generate: softness. Certain harmonies must be eliminated, which, along with speech and rhythm, constitute the three elements of melody (Ibid. : 398d), funeral dirges, and 'the mixed and sharp lydian harmony and a few others of the same kind,' because 'they are indeed useless, even for women who must be decent, not to mention men (…) Furthermore, there is nothing more unbecoming for the guardians than drunkenness, softness and laziness.' (Ibid. : 399 a). These 'soft harmonies that are conducive to drunkenness, of the ionian or lydian type, which some call relaxed harmonies,' are ineffective for men of war.

It is the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies that must be adopted because 'these two harmonies, the violent and the voluntary, will best imitate the accents of those who suffer and those who are happy, of those who are wise and those who are courageous.' (Ibid., p. 399 d) The same goes for instruments, we only keep 'the lyre and the cithara, which are useful in the city' (Ibid., 399 e), against the flute, while giving preference 'to Apollo and the instruments of Apollo (= the lyre), rather than to Marsyas and the instruments of Marsyas (the flute).' Aristotle takes up the idea of his master, because 'the flute does not have an ethical effect but rather an orgiastic one (Aristotle, 2015, 1341a 15).' The goal is to purify the city of all that is 'lux and amollissant,' to establish between 'the excellence of discourse and harmony, the grace of gesture and rhythm' a certain complementarity from which 'excellence of character' (Platon, 2004, 400e) will result, against all euphemism, a clear sign of a lack of reflection.

The guardian and the guardianess need 'a genuine reflection of a character that combines the good and the beautiful.' In short, we are asked, with Plato, for a certain complementarity between the two arts: of war -gymnastics- and of music. Aristotle, following his master, recognises that 'every art and every education ultimately aim to complete nature.' (Aristotle, 2015: 1337a 5). Complementarity in which music has no other end than to develop in the individual, the future guardian of the city, an impassivity to soft and feminine harmonies. It is therefore dangerous not to pay more attention to teaching music to children, 'because rhythm and harmony, more than anything else, penetrate to the depths of the soul, touch it with a force of great power, bringing grace to it, and then imbuing it with this grace.'

The training in music for the guardians comes after the recognition of the virtues of the free citizen, (Plato, 2004, 402 c) 'the forms of moderation and courage, of liberality (quality of the free man) and magnanimity, and of the other virtues that are their sisters, as well as the forms that are their opposites.' Art has a moral and political effect here. Women should not produce music, because it is very possible that their music will be imbued with softness and passivity, it will be affected by a feminine frivolity given the weakness of their gender. A perfect art comes from a complementarity between an inventor and an executant. Art is the work of a free man.

After enumerating the three parts of the domestic administration (the function of master, that of father, and that of husband (Aristotle, 2015, 1259 a 40)), Aristotle concludes that 'the male is indeed more capable than the female of governing, except when his constitution is against nature' (1259b 5-10), and 'it is by nature that there is in most cases a commander and a commanded. For it is in a different way that the free man commands the slave, the man the woman, the man the child. All these people have the different parts of the soul (the rational and the irrational): the slave is totally devoid of the faculty of deliberation, the woman has it but without authority, the child has it but it is incomplete.' (Aristotle, 2015: 1260a 10-15).

The two genders also differ in terms of virtues, such as temperance, which 'is not the same in women and men, nor is courage or justice, as Socrates thought it was, but in one there is a courage of a leader, in the other a courage of a subordinate.' (Aristotle, 2015: 1260a 20) A subordinate is a mere executor, and no longer a prescriber, his courage is to try to interpret what the master has ordered. Even when he creates, his work remains of second order. Just like those women who are content to play music instead of composing it. The virtue of their task is a virtue of subordination.

Again, music occupies an important place among the disciplines to be taught, alongside letters, and gymnastics (Ibid., 1337 b 25) and graphic art. And when gymnastics 'develops courage,' it is music, not for pleasure, that 'leads a life of leisure nobly, for it is the principle of all, let us repeat it once more' (Aristotle, 2015, 1337b 30). That is, the goal of all labouring life is the life of leisure. Music belongs to the life of free men. Another reason for education in music, 'just as gymnastics gives a certain quality to the body, music gives a certain quality to the character by habituating its listeners to be able to enjoy pleasures (Aristotle, 2015, 1339a-25) rightly,' and 'that it contributes to a wise life of leisure.'

In rhythms and melodies (Ibid., 1340a-15), in a theory of imitation, one will find, for example, similarities with 'the true nature of anger and gentleness.' Music will be the means to judge 'honourable customs and beautiful actions,' love, hatred...etc., it will give 'the soul a certain character,' since 'our soul is akin to harmonies and rhythms. This is why many among the wise claim that the soul is a harmony (the Pythagoreans) or that it has a harmony (Plato).' But its learning 'must not be an impediment to later activities nor degrade the body and render it unfit for military and civic exercises' (Ibid., 1341a -5).' And the Dorian harmony (Ibid., 1342 b-15) will have this ethical effect on the minds of the young, since it is a mean, that is to say a virtue, against the excesses of the other harmonies. Generally, music provides relief accompanied by pleasure, even purification: 'purifying melodies provide men with innocent joy.' Music must be composed by men for the young, invented by free spirits, free souls, to purify still young spirits. And the women? that their nature condemns them to be commanded, oblige them to listen to, to perform music?

In Ibn Rochd's sentence, music will only be perfect when it is invented by men and performed by women. Perfection, as we all know, is an attribute exclusive to the divine, as in The Decisive Discourse, in which only complete knowledge (atam), the good knowledge of the creation (san'á) of the creatures -beings- allows the complete knowledge of their creator (their demiurge) (Ibn Rochd, 1997, p. 86). The incompleteness of knowledge engenders ignorance and arrogance. God remains unknown if our knowledge of his nature remains imperfect. His creatures, men and women, must perfect their knowledge together in order to have a good knowledge of him, that is to say, their creator. A good knowledge is a good path to the knowledge of God. Music, a spiritual and virtual knowledge, since it is the result of an harmony that arouses in the soul the good feelings, the most noble, must be created by men and performed by women. Music will remain imperfect when men compose and play it. But is it imperfect when it is played or created by women? absolutely not. It will become imperfect when it is composed by women. The task of women is to perform music not to form it. Neither to form nor to do, but to Per-form and to par-do. A balance ? Or a balance of difference?

To reconcile the masculine and the feminine as one reconciles between faith and falsafa? as fire and water in Bachelard, 'United, these two elements create everything.' (Bachelard, (1942) 2021, p.117)?

Introduction

Hello, and thank you to everyone who organized this event and made it possible for us to gather here today for these exchanges.

Today, I would like to share a few reflections on the work of Ibn Barraǧān of Seville (d. 1141), a disciple of Ibn Massara (d. 931) and a forerunner of the emergence of the intellectual Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240).

The reading I propose today approaches his work through the ethical questions raised by the environmental crisis we are currently experiencing.

Over the course of the twentieth century, humanity entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene. This means that humanity has become a geological force, capable of transforming climate, soils, and oceans, and exerting unprecedented pressure on terrestrial ecosystems. In the field of environmental ethics, scientists and philosophers have established a causal link between anthropocentrism and the ecological crisis. As early as 1967, Lynn White, Jr., in his article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crises," advanced this idea. Very recently, Allen Thompson wrote that environmental crises occur when we treat everything in the non-human world as having no intrinsic moral significance, as if we had no moral duties toward nature.²

The term Anthropocene suggests a causal relationship between human action and the disruption of natural environments. Yet if human beings can have a negative impact on their environment, does this not conversely imply that adopting a respectful relationship—ethical rules of life—between human beings and the created world could help bring the destruction of ecosystems to an end and restore balance?

In this regard, might Ibn Barraǧān's work not offer insights for our time?

Ibn Barraǧān first lived in Seville, where he studied the Islamic sciences as well as arithmetic, logic, philosophy, astronomy, astrology, and medicine.³ At a certain point in his life, he left to live in the countryside, 17 km west of Seville. There he led a contemplative life, moving from muḥaddiṯ to muʿtabir⁴. He devoted himself to agricultural activities such as the olive harvest⁵ and paid heightened attention to the natural world.

Thanks to the efforts of several scholars (Denis Gril, José Bellver, Ḥasan al-Qārī, Amina Gonzalez, and more recently Yousef Casewit), Ibn Barraǧān's work is now better known.⁶ Our study is based on the reading of his two commentaries:

His shorter commentary: al-Kitāb Iḍāḥ al-ḥikma bi-aḥkām al-ʿibra (The Book of Clarifying Wisdom by Means of the Principles of Symbolic Transposition from the Sensible to the Intelligible).

His major commentary: Tanbīh al-afhām ilā tadabbur al-kitāb al-ḥakīm wa-taʿarruf al-āyāt wa-l-nabaʾ al-ʿaẓīm (Alerting Intellects to Meditate on the Signs and the Momentous News [of the Day of Judgment]).⁷

Upstream, he received multiple influences, such as that of his master Ibn Masarra.⁸ And the Ismāʿīlī influence of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-ṣafā). The notions of the Universal Servant (al-ʿAbd al-kullī) and the Particular Servant (al-ʿAbd al-juzʾī) attest to this,⁹ concepts that would later be taken up and reworked by Ibn ʿArabī.

I. Nature as a Site of Disclosure, a Book to Be Deciphered

The visible and the invisible: when creation becomes a source of instruction.

For Ibn Barraǧān, correspondences¹⁰ exist between the visible world (al-wujūd) and the knowledge of the Preserved Tablet (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ)¹¹, between Qurʾānic verses and human anatomy¹². Divine self-disclosure occurs in three loci: the human being, creation, and revelation.¹³ After Ibn Barraǧān, representatives of philosophical Sufism would express this idea through the terms "al-Qurʾān al-takwīnī" (the cosmic Qurʾān) and "al-Qurʾān al-tadwīnī" (the written Qurʾān).¹⁴ The believer is therefore required to seek guidance in three complementary books: Revelation, Creation, and the Self.¹⁵

Contemplation enables the believer to move from the invisible to the visible, and through the reading of signs to return to the origin, the Creator: "The act points to its agent; what is ordered points to the One who orders; the created points to its Creator; what is raised points to the One who raises; what is established points to the One who establishes; the plant points to the One who makes it grow."¹⁶ And the totality of testimonies refers back to the copy of the Mother of the Book (Umm al-Kitāb).¹⁷

Ibn Barraǧān articulates unity and multiplicity by drawing a parallel between water—one in its principle yet generating multiple life—and God, One and Creator of all things.¹⁸ This pattern also grounds his conception of revelation: the descent (nuzūl) of verses makes manifest what was hidden.¹⁹ For this exegete, every existing thing here below is a sign (āya) of a higher reality.

Around the age of forty, Ibn Barraǧān refers to himself as "muʿtabir fī āyāt Allāh" (contemplator of the signs of God). The term muʿtabir is built on the consonantal root ʿ-BR, which conveys the idea of passing, crossing, traversing; it also yields ʿabbara (to interpret, to explain), the noun ʿibra (example, lesson, reminder)²⁰, and finally the word iʿtibār.²¹ Here he draws inspiration from his master Ibn Masarra, who in his Epistle on Symbolic Transposition (Risālat al-iʿtibār)²² wrote that "[God] commanded us to carry out a symbolic transposition (iʿtibār) [of His signs]."²³

Ibn Barraǧān calls for an effort of attentive consideration (tadabbur) of the verses or signs (āyāt), in order to interpret them by symbolic transposition (iʿtibār).²⁴ He cites Q 88:17–21: "So remind; you are only a reminder" (fa-ḏakkir innamā anta muḏakkir).²⁵ He emphasizes that the Qurʾān is an invitation to remember what one has forgotten.

The signs he interprets in his commentary are sometimes immeasurable: he compares the Qurʾān to a blazing sun, and the Prophet Muḥammad's aḥādīṯ to a brilliant new moon.²⁶

Sometimes they are minuscule: such as a mosquito²⁷ or the eggs of ants.²⁸

The bee, for him, is a source of instruction. He observes that nectar becomes honey through the work of the workers, and draws from this an insight into the way God brings all things from the unmanifest to the manifest.²⁹ Likewise, as the bee gathers, the believer extracts from contemplation of creatures the ingredients of healing. Healing consists in feeding on remembrance (ḏikr) and drinking from reflection (fikr): God has placed healing in His signs, in their correspondences and resonances.³⁰

With regard to plants, Ibn Barraǧān draws a parallel between their life cycle and that of human beings.³¹ He writes: "We drive (the cloud) to a land dead [from drought]; then We send down water upon it; then We bring forth from it every kind of fruit. Thus shall We bring forth the dead. Perhaps you will remember."³²

Ibn Barraǧān aligns spiritual realities with a network of vegetal metaphors and develops a moral and theological allegory of the "forbidden tree," understood as an arboreal structure of sin. The proliferation of faults leads to forgetting the divine covenant, to negligence in remembrance (ḏikr).³³ Vegetal nature here serves to map the human moral life.

For the Andalusian commentator, nature has no ontological autonomy. Every natural phenomenon is a direct manifestation of divine agency. Nature is thus God's visible discourse—a symbolic language addressed to those who hear and reason. Contemplation of the natural world can provide an instruction (ʿibra): a means of passing from what one sees to what is absent from sight, and of learning about the life to come.³⁴

II. Contemplating Creation, Caring for It

Ibn Barraǧān repeatedly states that everything in Creation sings God's praise, and that all that is in the heavens and all that is on the earth prostrates itself to God, willingly or unwillingly.³⁵

He also refers to the creation of the human being (bašar) from clay, to the injunction addressed to the angels to prostrate themselves before this being (Q 38:71–72), and to Iblīs's refusal—created from fire—to prostrate himself before him.

In striking pages, he evokes the prostration of shadows: "Have they not seen that the shadows of everything God has created incline to the right and to the left, prostrating (suǧǧadan) before God in all humility?" (Q 16:48).³⁶

All of creation bears witness to God's oneness and His absolute dominion, while believers are called to meditate on these signs in order to strengthen their faith and their submission.³⁷

But what, for this commentator, should the human posture be within Creation? How, according to Ibn Barraǧān, should the believer inhabit this world?

Ibn Barraǧān repeatedly recalls that God is the Living One, the giver of life³⁸, who encompasses all existence and all names.³⁹

He is also the cultivator, the gardener, on a planetary scale.⁴⁰ He brings forth from the earth a crop of diverse colors; it then withers, yellows, and He reduces it to crumbs.

He is the One who disperses and fertilizes: "His mercy fertilizes the clouds in the air," and He sends down from them sweet and pure water.⁴¹

He is the One who makes human beings grow like plants and returns them to the earth⁴²: "And it is God who has made you grow from the earth like plants" (Q 71:17).

God is the true cultivator, yet He also uses us to cultivate the earth. In the Tanbīh we read: "He makes use of us and accomplishes His wonders through our actions."⁴³ Working the land reminds human beings that they are servants, not masters.

However, our stay in this world must not make us forget God: we must not become attached to things here below.⁴⁴ In this world, goods are presented to us under deceptive appearances… Yet this is only the fleeting enjoyment of life, and the best place of return is with God.

He writes: "We should take nothing from this world except with moderation."⁴⁵ This posture of renunciation and asceticism enables us to avoid the world and its snares.

Repeatedly, the world is described as a place of purification, a mosque.⁴⁶ God created water as a means of purification that nothing defiles, except what changes its color, odor, or taste—and His Throne was upon the water.⁴⁷

We are thus called to contemplate, to take from the world only with moderation, and to purify ourselves during our sojourn.

III. Is Contemplation of Creation a Call, or a Reminder?

This world as a threshold for contemplating the Hereafter.

For the Sevillian, the human being—distracted by the world and by multiplicity—sometimes becomes forgetful of self and of God.⁴⁸ Just as God sends down from the sky knowledge that revives hearts after their spiritual death and enables them to remember and no longer be heedless,⁴⁹ so too God sends down water as a reminder of Paradise.⁵⁰

Creation is a reminder. In Iḍāḥ al-ḥikma he writes: "Each time your eyes fall upon a creature (…) remember the Creator."⁵¹

The Qurʾān is a call to contemplate the signs, to decipher the book of the cosmos. God's self-disclosure through Creation is a theophany. Yet this meditation, more than a discovery, is a remembrance of what we already know.⁵²

Ibn Barraǧān comments on: "Its gathering (ǧamʿahu) (in your heart and its fixation in your memory) is upon Us, as well as the manner of its recitation" (Q 75:16). The point is to gather⁵³—to bring together scattered fragments of what we knew before our arrival on earth.

This world is a reminder of Paradise: the entire universe, all existence, is filled with remembrance (ḏikr). It is incumbent on us to recall what has been forgotten or lost. We do not learn today what we did not previously know; rather, we now remember the knowledge that was given to us on the day He took a covenant (ʿahd) with each soul before Creation.⁵⁴ It is not a matter of learning what we ignore, but of remembering what we once knew.⁵⁵

The function of our sojourn in this world is to allow us to glimpse Paradise. In the Tanbīh, he writes that honey evokes the Nile, the river of honey in Paradise; milk evokes the Tigris, the river of milk in Paradise; water evokes the Sayḥān, the river of water in Paradise.⁵⁶ Concerning the Euphrates, the river of the wine of Paradise, he writes that the pleasures of this world lead to the loss of reason and to distancing oneself from the path of God and from prayer.⁵⁷

Ibn Barraǧān reprises a prophetic ḥadīth: "The most excellent is to worship God as though you see Him," and adds: "If you do not see Him, He sees you." He invites his readers to carry out every action with sincere intention and to turn toward God with sincerity (al-niyya).⁵⁸

In sum, according to the exegete, the task is to remember God at every moment, to orient one's thoughts, actions, and desire toward Him.

For Ibn Barraǧān, knowledge is acquired through praise and contemplation. Reflective contemplation (tafakkur) is a door God has left open, giving access to remembrance (taḏakkur) of this generative knowledge known previously, on the day of the pact (miṯāq) and the entrusted deposit (amāna).⁵⁹ Reflective contemplation enables access to remembrance—to recall what, one day, we knew.

This world prefigures the other world. This world will perish; only the Face of God will remain.

Ibn Barraǧān warns his readers: on the Day of Resurrection, this earth will be replaced by another.⁶⁰ Life is a cycle to be lived, and the earth has no value in itself.

In the Tanbīh, he cites Q 29:64: "Truly, the Hereafter is the real life—if only they knew!"⁶¹ God, he continues, will change the earth into another earth; the earth and the sky will be transformed; the sun, the moon, and the stars will be extinguished; the mountains will be displaced… (…) The same will be true of believers and scholars.⁶² This world will pass; it is not eternal; it is a foretaste of Paradise.⁶³

Thus, for Ibn Barraǧān, this world has no intrinsic value. He cites a ḥadīth: "This lower world, compared with the Hereafter, is comparable only to what one of you draws from the sea when he dips his finger into it; let him consider, then, what he draws out."⁶⁴ For Ibn Barraǧān, the earth is not an end in itself: it is a passageway, a space for spiritual preparation. One is to worship not the earth, but God.⁶⁵

In Iḍāḥ al-ḥikma, Ibn Barraǧān writes that those who worship the sun, the moon, or any other idol will not find the Lord. Only believers who have sought refuge in God—God will come to them, and they will recognize Him.⁶⁶ He condemns all idolatry: contemplation of nature allows one to glimpse the world to come and to receive spiritual teachings, but it is not an end in itself.

What does not perish is the Face of God. He cites Q 2:115: "To God belong the East and the West. Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God, for God is All-Encompassing and All-Knowing."⁶⁷ "All things must perish, except His Face."⁶⁸

Conclusion: Why Might This Vision Ground an Ethic of Respect for the Natural World?

A comparative reading of these two commentaries allows us to discern Ibn Barraǧān's account of the human relationship to the natural world and his ethical posture toward the created order.

A first fundamental lesson is humility. In Ibn Barraǧān's thought, the smallest creature can become a source of instruction: human beings do not dominate creation; they must accept a posture of learning within it. Contemplation of the natural world therefore requires self-abasement and the stripping away of arrogance.

For the Andalusian mutaʿbir, one can glimpse Paradise only by renouncing the will to dominate nature. This vision contrasts sharply with modern representations of progress marked by desacralization, objectification, and even the instrumentalization of the natural world.

Creation retains a mediating value, without ever becoming an object of idolatry⁶⁹ or veneration in itself. Ibn Barraǧān insists on an essential point: creation is a sign, a medium, not an end in itself. It teaches, orients, and prepares—but it must never become the ultimate object of contemplation. Only the majesty of God may be contemplated for its own sake. If nature is beautiful, it is by resemblance to Paradise.

The task is to learn to read the world without becoming attached to it: to live within creation without being lost in it; to perceive God through it without confusing the sign with what it signifies.

Contemplation is not, here, a simple intellectual exercise; it is a source of ethical knowledge—an inner reminder that illuminates good and evil and generates a posture of detachment.

In his commentaries, Ibn Barraǧān calls for a life of sobriety, prayer, and attentiveness to the world—oriented not toward appropriation or hoarding, but toward learning and inward transformation: "We should take nothing from this world except with moderation." Without making the preservation of nature an autonomous finality, this theocentric perspective nonetheless profoundly transforms the human relationship to the world. Through renouncing domination and reorienting desire, it fosters a more just and measured relationship to the living, whose effects can contribute—indirectly yet decisively—to the balance of the natural world.

Ġaḍḍ al-baṣar as a Paradigm of an Islamic Aesthetic: Interpretations and Perspectives

Wael Tahhan

Introduction

This paper forms part of a broader body of research that seeks to identify the epistemological foundations of an Islamic aesthetic—conceived, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggests, on the basis of an Islamic cosmology understood as a coherent ensemble of knowledge, values, and worldviews. This entails relocating the aesthetic question beyond the Hegelian horizon, which tends to assimilate it to a philosophy of art grounded in a linear conception of history and a geo-historical hierarchy of the beautiful. The challenge, therefore, is to effect an epistemological shift: from an aesthetic confined to art history to an aesthetic understood as a genuine perceptual culture, in Wendy Shaw's terms, capable of producing forms of sensory knowledge. It is within this framework that our analysis takes as its point of departure the notion of mastery of the gaze (ġadd al-baṣar), in order to think the aesthetic from within the fields of knowledge in Islam and to open a dialogue with other Islamic sciences.

Sources and Structure

We draw on Sunni Sufi readings of a corpus of Qurʾānic verses and ḥadīṯs, especially in the writings of al-Ġazālī, al-Muḥāsibī, and al-Qušayrī. The argument unfolds in three stages: first, an account of ġadd al-baṣar in its normative and ethical dimension; second, an examination of its interpretations and its potential for outlining a perceptual culture grounded in ethical principles such as moderation, original nature, temperance, and the rejection of the superfluous; finally, a consideration of these hypotheses through the lens of Islamic art.

Ġadd al-baṣar as a Normative and Ethical Imperative

Ġadd al-baṣar—translatable as the lowering, restraint, or mastery of the gaze—is a moral obligation explicitly formulated in the Qurʾān, notably in Sūrat al-Nūr, through two verses (24:30–31) that enjoin men and women to "lower their gaze" (yaġuḍḍū min abṣārihim). This injunction is reinforced by numerous ḥadīṯs of the Prophet that explicitly call for mastery of the gaze, such as the report stating that "the gaze is one of Iblīs's arrows."

In fact, the verse does not command "lowering the whole gaze," but lowering "a part" of it. This formulation suggests that the injunction does not aim at abolishing sight, but at regulating it. This semantic nuance between naẓar and baṣar is significant: al-naẓar, as the linguist Ṣāliḥ al-Sāmirrāʾī notes, simply refers to directing the eye toward a specific direction, whereas al-baṣar implies, more strongly, the perceptual completion of that operation. The Qurʾān reinforces this distinction when it says of the disbelievers: "You see them looking at you, but they do not see" (al-Aʿrāf, 7:198), indicating that there can be naẓar without genuine ibṣār—in other words, a gaze without effective perception.

Modalities of the Gaze and the Qurʾānic Vocabulary of Perception

Islam classically distinguishes two types of divine signs (āyāt): written signs (āyāt mastūra), namely the Qurʾān, and visible signs (āyāt manẓūra), namely the created world. This distinction sheds light on the Qurʾānic use of naẓar, rather than baṣar, when it calls believers to "look" at God's visible signs, since naẓar designates an invitation to contemplation that may—or may not—culminate in baṣar, that is, in accomplished perception.

Arabic also differentiates other modalities of looking (taḥdīq, ramq, laḥẓ) and distinguishes ruʾyā, a form of perception that can extend beyond ordinary spatio-temporal experience, as in dreams or inspiration. Finally, there are notions that are not strictly sensory, such as al-baṣīra (inner vision) and al-firāsa (spiritual intuition), to which we will return.

From Chastity to an Ethics of Attention

The primary meaning of ġadd al-baṣar refers to refraining from any gaze likely to arouse sexual desire, aiming at the preservation of chastity and purity. Yet the Qurʾān and various ḥadīṯs attribute broader implications to the notion: not looking into other people's homes, not coveting others' possessions, nor directing toward others a gaze of superiority or contempt, among other applications. These usages belong to a more encompassing ethic in which mastery of the gaze is embedded in renunciation of the superfluous and of idle curiosity (al-faḍūl). The Prophet expresses this in a ḥadīṯ: "Part of a person's perfection in Islam is leaving aside what does not concern him."

Al-Ḥāriṯ al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), one of the earliest Sufi authors, goes so far as to claim in the Risālat al-mustaršidīn that every calamity that enters the heart necessarily arises from the effects of the superfluous (al-faḍūl). He specifies that the superfluous has several paths of entry into the heart, among which one of the most powerful is precisely the gaze. Ibn ʿAṭiyya al-Andalusī likewise states that sight is the widest gate of the heart and the deepest route by which the sensible enters it. One may thus speak of a veritable hold exerted by the gaze, to the point that several Sufis cite this line of poetry: "All accidents have their origin in the gaze."

Sufi Deepenings of Ġadd al-baṣar

In the Sufi tradition, however, mastery of the gaze has prompted more far-reaching interpretations that touch various aspects of sensible life. It consists in diverting the gaze from everything that distracts from the remembrance of God, as al-Ġazālī underscores in the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. One may also cite the story of Ḥassān ibn Abī Sinān, whose attention was entirely absorbed by the beauty of a richly decorated room; realizing that he had allowed himself to be diverted by the created work rather than by the Creator, he imposed on himself a year of continuous fasting as penance.

Toward an Aesthetic Dimension of Ġadd al-baṣar

To identify more concretely a potentially aesthetic dimension of ġadd al-baṣar, we propose bringing into relation a ḥadīṯ, a Qurʾānic verse, and a Sufi interpretation. Among the most frequently invoked ḥadīṯs on mastery of the gaze is the saying addressed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib: "O ʿAlī, do not follow one glance with another: you are not blamed for the first, but you have no right to the second." The Qurʾān also presents humanity as constituted in a register that precedes physical existence, known as the world of the Primordial Covenant (ʿālam al-ḏarr), where God addressed human beings while they were still spirits: "Am I not your Lord?" and they replied: "Yes" (al-Aʿrāf, 7:172).

Read in parallel with this ḥadīṯ, this foundational scene constitutes, in Sufi hermeneutics, a coherent starting point for thinking the dynamics of the gaze and its mastery. The attraction elicited by a beautiful object then finds its justification in the first glance, insofar as it belongs to an innate (fiṭrī), involuntary, and unpremeditated inclination oriented toward the infinite beauty before which souls have already been placed in the extra-temporal register of ʿālam al-ḏarr. The first glance may thus be understood as a non-intentional aesthetic attraction, motivated by an innate "aftertaste" of infinite beauty. As al-Ġazālī recalls, love of beauty is innate and already inscribed in human nature, which helps clarify the moral justification of the first glance as tolerated in the ḥadīṯ.

The second glance, by contrast, exits the field of pure aesthetic attraction and enters that of normative obligation (taklīf). It marks the moment when the beautiful shifts from an aesthetic register to an ethical one, and when desire turns away from the sign—understood as an āya, that is, an indication calling to ḏikr—in order to fix upon the object as such, thereby losing its ultimate reference. Whatever the object of this beauty, natural or human-made, it is, in the theological perspective—especially in Ashʿarite doctrine—considered above all a creation by God, since God creates even the acts of the servants, including the works they produce.

Beauty as Remembrance and the Discipline of Attention

The encounter with beauty thus resonates with an originary event of the past, inaccessible to reflective memory and to discursive rationality. The very idea of this encounter can nevertheless become a sensible matter, capable of being reactivated by a spiritual taste, depending on its degree of refinement and its capacity to restore, in the present instant, an attunement to the horizon of absolute beauty. Thus Ḏū al-Nūn al-Miṣrī (d. 245/859) said of the divine address "Alastu birabbikum": "It is as though it still echoes in my ear." Al-Qušayrī also reports in his Risāla a saying attributed to al-Junayd: asked why souls are moved by a beautiful voice (al-samāʿ), he said that when God addressed the beings of the Primordial Covenant with the words "Alastu birabbikum," the souls tasted a sweetness whose memory is reawakened upon hearing a beautiful voice.

In this context, beauty is assigned a clear function: to recall God, one of whose Names is al-Ǧamīl ("the Beautiful"). Hence, any relation to beauty that does not lead back to this divine remembrance may be regarded, in the Sufi reading, as a faulty experience and calls for a discipline of attention. Al-Niffarī expresses this in al-Mawāqif wa-l-muḫāṭabāt through a divine saying: "O servant, if you do not look at Me when you look at a thing, then you have looked only at it."

Yet this gesture of renunciation—voluntary and mastered—produces in itself a spiritual pleasure of a higher order, surpassing the pleasure abandoned, as indicated by the ḥadīṯ qudsī in which God says: "Whoever leaves [the gaze] out of fear of Me, I will replace it with a faith whose sweetness he will find in his heart." This is a kind of pleasure to which the famous saying attributed to Ibrāhīm ibn Adham also points: "If kings knew the joy and happiness we are in, they would fight us with swords to wrest it from us." This process of refining taste thus opens a third horizon: the preservation of innate (fiṭrī) taste, oriented toward the beatific vision of God on the Day of Resurrection, evoked in Sūrat al-Qiyāma (75:22–23).

In this perspective, as ʿAlī al-Ǧifrī—a contemporary figure of Sunni Sufism—recalls, beauty appears as an oscillation between the memory of a first exposure and the constant desire to return to it, until the promised vision of God. All worldly beauty lies between these two poles, within a circular temporality in which attraction to the beautiful is understood as a lack seeking fulfillment. Worldly beauty becomes an intermediary, not an end in itself; mastery of the gaze thus belongs to a discipline of the self: not a mere abstention, but a displacement that mobilizes sensible beauty as a passage toward supreme beauty and toward a more noble pleasure. In other words, it is a passage from beauty as veil (ḥiǧāb) to beauty as path.

Connected Beauty and Detached Beauty

On this basis, we propose a distinction between two modes of aesthetic experience in Islam: connected beauty (ǧamāl mawṣūl) and detached beauty (ǧamāl mafṣūl). Connected beauty denotes an experience in which the pleasure of perception remains linked to God, and in which recognition of this beauty as created by Him and loved by Him becomes a vector of remembrance (ḏikr). The beauty of the world is thus requalified as a set of signs, or āyāt. In this framework, mastery of the gaze consists not only in lowering it before any beauty that does not lead back to this connection with God, but also in this: the very act of restraining the gaze becomes an aesthetic experience in its own right, as suggested by the ḥadīṯ concerning the superior pleasure granted.

By contrast, detached beauty corresponds to an undisciplined pleasure situated outside this epistemic frame. Such states produce intellectual and perceptual imprecision (zayġ, even ġafla), a condition the Qurʾān describes as having eyes yet not truly seeing (7:179).

Baṣar and Baṣīra

If connected beauty manifests as a sign (āya), Sufi authors propose a reading according to which every āya possesses both an outward meaning (ẓāhir) and an inward meaning (bāṭin), as al-Ġazālī notes in the Iḥyāʾ. Thus, if outward beauty is perceived by ocular vision (baṣar), inward beauty is accessible only through inner vision (baṣīra).

Baṣar and baṣīra derive from the same root but belong to different registers: the former designates sensible vision, whereas the latter refers to an intelligible faculty. Al-Ġazālī describes this inner vision in al-Risāla al-laduniyya as the heart's capacity to penetrate the realities of things and to unveil their meanings. The Qurʾān emphasizes this distinction when it states: "It is not the eyes that become blind, but the hearts within the breasts" (al-Ḥaǧǧ, 22:46). In the Sufi perspective, access to baṣīra presupposes mastery of outward vision and renunciation of the superfluous and of temptation—conditions for opening to an inner vision. Al-Ġazālī also insists in the Iḥyāʾ that whoever is deprived of inner vision cannot taste true aesthetic pleasure. He writes, in this regard, that "there is an immense difference between one whose admiration is limited to ornaments drawn on a wall and one who loves the inward beauty of the Prophet's figure."

Firāsa, Inner Light, and True Perception

Alongside baṣīra, Sufis recognize the existence of many other extra-sensory perceptual capacities, among which is al-firāsa, often translated as "spiritual intuition." It is cultivated through self-mastery and the discipline of the sensible faculties, but it may also be a divine gift, as al-Qušayrī suggests in his Risāla. The Prophet thus declared: "Beware the believer's firāsa, for he sees by God's light."

In Sufi thought, this light of vision corresponds to divine love, by which realities are grasped without the need for prolonged sensible observation. It is in this perspective that the meaning of the famous ḥadīṯ qudsī becomes clear: "When I love him, I become the hearing by which he hears and the sight by which he sees." For Sufis, God's becoming the servant's "sight" designates precisely this inner light, through which things are perceived in their truth, and from which follows the possibility of tasting the true beauty of things.

Conclusion: An Islamic Perceptual Culture and the Horizon of Islamic Art

In conclusion, one may argue that an Islamic aesthetic, understood in this perspective, proposes a specific perceptual culture grounded in an economy of attention that aims to limit dispersion and to secure a fully inhabited presence in the present, sustained by the remembrance of God—the very purpose of human existence according to the Qurʾān (Q 51:56). Where modern and postmodern aesthetics tends to valorize intensification of attention, immersion, and at times sensory saturation, this approach instead privileges perceptual sobriety, rejection of the superfluous, and a disciplined gaze, consistent with Islam's ethical horizon. In this respect, al-Ġazālī recommends habituating the child, from an early age, not to prolonged exposure to a multiplicity of forms and colors, so as to preserve attention and avoid dispersion of the heart.

Within this logic, as numerous studies have shown—and as one finds, under various formulations, in the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Gülru Necipoğlu, and Wendy Shaw—a large part of Islamic art, despite the richness of its forms and motifs, does not aim at a prolonged capture of the gaze, but rather at its passage and orientation. Minarets, for example, orient the gaze along an ascending vector, from below to above. Likewise, in calligraphy, the act of seeing proceeds through a gradual progression, in a perceptual dynamic that organizes reading as a sensory itinerary. Ornaments and geometric motifs, through repetition, shift the experience from an isolated detail toward rhythm and totality. These forms lead the observer beyond the visible frame toward a continuity that the imagination can extend—potentially to infinity. This continuity may imprint itself as an inner image that the subject reactivates, up to a sensory saturation comparable to that of a musical motif. Al-Ġazālī underscored this persistence of the perceived form in the imagination by noting that the image of the observed object does not vanish when the gaze turns away: one who looks at the sky and the earth continues to see their image within himself.

Islamic art may thus be understood as a pedagogy of perception grounded in training the gaze and refining taste. The work functions less as an end in itself than as an intermediary (wāsiṭa), in which beauty manifests without seeking to capture attention in a closed and prolonged fixation, but by leading it back toward a broader horizon. It thereby inscribes itself within a coherent ensemble of values and prescriptions articulated with the teachings of Islam and, more particularly, with the mastery of the gaze presented here—forming an integrated aesthetic and ethical corpus.

The "New Veils": A Way of Articulating Ethics and Aesthetics in Tunisian Society

Introduction

The body is a fundamentally ambivalent reality, situated at the intersection of subjective experience and social order. It is never a purely biological given, but a social and symbolic construction, invested with cultural meanings that structure the individual's relationship to self and to others.

In the religious sphere, and more particularly in Islam, the body is subject to a specific normative framework. These prescriptions can be understood as "technologies of the self," that is, practices through which individuals act upon their bodies and conduct in order to conform to a moral and spiritual ideal. In this sense, Islamic dress norms participate in a process of bodily discipline aimed at forming a pious subject. The body thus becomes "a privileged space for self-discipline and self-management, but also a social showcase that makes visible the believer's performance." Clothing becomes a site where beliefs and religious understandings are expressed.

In contemporary Tunisian society, the hijab has become increasingly visible in public space, especially since the 2000s. This visibility has been accompanied by a marked diversification of forms, styles, and uses of the veil—developments that cannot be explained solely by a "return to religion" or by a logic of normative conformity.

The hijab is now embedded in complex dynamics at the crossroads of religious prescriptions, fashion logics, social norms of respectability, and individual strategies of self-presentation.

In this context, women's religious dress becomes a privileged site for observing transformations in the relationship to the body, faith, and modernity. This raises a central question: how are ethics and aesthetics articulated in clothing practices associated with the hijab? How do Tunisian women manage to reconcile Islamic requirements of modesty with contemporary norms of visibility, femininity, and sartorial creativity? In what ways do these practices simultaneously express forms of conformity to religious norms and active strategies of reinterpretation and appropriation? Studying the hijab thus allows us to interrogate, more broadly, the contemporary reconfigurations of religion in Tunisian social space.

Adopting a socio-anthropological approach, we seek to show how the contemporary hijab is part of a logic of self-staging in public space, where women negotiate their appearance in order to reconcile social expectations, religious norms, and the desire for recognition. The growing aestheticization of the hijab testifies to a specific form of female agency, in which adherence to religious norms does not preclude innovation.

Methodology

In order to analyze the articulation between ethics and aesthetics through wearing the hijab—or what are often called the "new veils"—in contemporary Tunisian society, this study adopts a qualitative approach, particularly suited to the investigation of symbolic practices, subjective meanings, and processes of identity construction.

The fieldwork was conducted with Tunisian women wearing the hijab, aged 18 to 40, residing mainly in Tunis, the capital. This site was chosen because of the increased visibility of the hijab in urban public space and the diversity of dress styles observed since the 2000s.

The sample was constructed through a strategy of reasoned diversification, taking into account variables such as age, educational level, occupational status, and socio-cultural milieu, in order to capture the plurality of experiences and discourses.

To gain an in-depth understanding of the meanings Tunisian women attribute to the hijab in their relationship to the body, modesty, and spirituality—and of the way they negotiate tensions between religious prescriptions, social norms of respectability, and contemporary fashion logics—this study relied on three research techniques:

• Ethnographic observations: conducted in different public spaces (universities, workplaces, shopping centers, social events), enabling analysis of dress styles, social interactions, and the concrete uses of the hijab in everyday life.
• Semi-structured interviews: carried out with 15 participants, making it possible to explore individual trajectories, motivations for wearing the hijab, representations of the body, modesty and aesthetics, as well as the tensions experienced between religious and social norms.
• Visual analysis: examining photographs, social media content, and specialized shop windows in modest fashion, in order to apprehend aesthetic trends and the cultural circulations of the hijab.

Body Covered, Meanings Revealed: The hijab in Tunisian Women's Experience

In Tunisian society, from the 2000s onward, one can observe a significant transformation in women's dress practices, marked by the emergence of reworked forms of the hijab. These new expressions of veiling are distinguished by greater attention to aesthetics, stylistic diversity, and their integration into contemporary fashion codes. The hijab thus ceases to be perceived solely as a normative religious marker and becomes a hybrid object, located at the intersection of the religious, the cultural, and the social.

From this perspective, the reworked hijab establishes a compromise between the imperatives of fashion and Islamic dress prescriptions. It resembles a style that might be described as "baroque," characterized by a richness of colors, cuts, and designs, drawing both on local cultural heritage and on dress influences from other cultural worlds, Eastern and Western alike. In public space, it is not uncommon to see young women carefully made up, pairing, for instance, a long flowing skirt with a shirt and a tailored jacket. These clothing choices express an assumed coquettishness, making it possible to articulate modernity and religious references without renouncing aesthetic appeal.

The discourses collected from participants illustrate this dynamic of appropriation. Dora (25, holder of a master's degree in mathematics, single and seeking employment), veiled for two years, explains that she has maintained her previous style while integrating the khimar, ensuring at the same time that she chooses longer, looser garments. She states: "I like being fashionable and I buy what I like and what catches my attention. I don't want to dress just anyhow." This testimony highlights a stylistic continuity rather than a rupture, with the veil being integrated into an already constituted clothing identity.

Similarly, among working women such as Raja (35, teacher, married) or Imen (25, holder of a master's degree in economics, single and a civil servant), trousers are preferred for their practical and functional dimension. As Imen puts it: "Given that I work with men, I feel more comfortable wearing trousers and a long tunic; it's more practical." Here, clothing appears as a tool for adapting to professional space, enabling women both to respect certain norms of modesty and to meet the constraints of everyday life.

These contemporary forms of the hijab are mainly adopted by educated women, generally urban, who seek to reconcile religious commitment with adherence to modernity. This choice appears to result from an individual and reflective demarche, oriented more toward self-affirmation than toward strict submission to religious prescriptions. The plurality of veiling styles is therefore not the outcome of a uniform application of Islamic norms, but reflects personal preferences that are evolving and contextual. In this view, the veil is no longer limited to a function of concealing the body; it also participates in a renewed form of social visibility.

The adoption of these new dress forms produces a double distinction. On the one hand, veiled women distinguish themselves from unveiled women by claiming a chosen Muslim identity, free from family constraint or rigid ideological adherence. This identity affirmation crystallizes primarily around the headscarf, a symbolic element intended to cover the hair and to signify adherence to a particular interpretation of religious prescriptions concerning appearance.

On the other hand, these women also distinguish themselves from those who adopt forms of veiling deemed stricter, such as al-libas al-shar'i, the 'abaya, or the niqab. By opting for more flexible and aesthetic styles, they claim an understanding of Islam perceived as more modern and open. In their view, the sacred texts—the Qur'an and the Sunna—do not impose a single dress model, leaving room for interpretation so long as the principles of modesty and ethics are respected.

Young veiled women thus seek to construct a self-image combining modesty, femininity, and modernity. They wish to be perceived as elegant, respectable, and sincerely practicing. Nour (22, student, veiled) remarks: "I don't see why a veiled woman can't follow new clothing trends. Personally, I like others to find me elegant and chic; it strengthens my confidence in myself and in my decision to wear the veil."

However, certain clothing practices—such as pairing a headscarf with very tight trousers or with form-fitting and transparent garments—give the impression of a gradual loss of the hijab's initial meaning, now perceived as a cultural object or a mere trend. This gap is underscored by Jihene (34, unveiled, married, homemaker), who says: "I can't understand why some young women wear the veil while dressing in a very seductive way. Even though I'm not veiled, I feel more mohtachma than they are."

In Islamic thought, the body is conceived as the site of a permanent conflict between spiritual aspiration toward God and instincts that must be mastered. It is also the theater of virtue's triumph and a reflection of internal struggles aimed at purifying al-nafs (the soul). This purification proceeds through several stages:

• al-nafs al-ammara bi-l-su' (the soul that incites to evil),
• al-nafs al-lawwama (the self-reproaching soul),
• and finally al-nafs al-mutma'inna (the tranquil soul), considered the highest spiritual degree.

Meriem's example illustrates this spiritual trajectory. Although she decided to veil with the aim of concealment and restraint, she still felt the desire to attract attention and appear beautiful, which was reflected in wearing fitted clothes and using makeup. She interprets this tension as the expression of al-nafs al-ammara, which must be subdued. Her dissatisfaction and self-reproaches correspond to the phase of al-nafs al-lawwama, prior to attaining the tranquil soul.

This spiritual process helps to explain why some participants move from fashionable veiling styles to stricter dress forms such as the 'abaya, the jilbab, or the niqab. This choice aims at closer conformity to an Islamic ethics of dress centered on modesty and on a quest for coherence between outward appearance and inner journey.

Body, Modesty, and Modernity among Tunisian Women

Clothing choices cannot be understood independently of the meanings social actors attribute to their bodies. In Islam, these meanings are largely structured by the notion of 'awra, a central principle of bodily and sartorial ethics. Drawing on an analysis of Ibn al-Qattan al-Fasi's work Al-Nazar fi ahkam al-nazar bi-hassat al-basar, Eric Chaumont highlights the existence in Islam of a genuine "deontology of the gaze" that grounds Muslim "dress ethics," according to which the body's visibility is morally and socially regulated, and the gaze is considered to carry normative effects. 'Awra is defined relationally: it delineates what must be concealed depending on the nature of the social bond, especially in relation to unrelated men (non-mahrams).

Dominant juridical interpretations thus establish precise criteria for women's clothing (looseness, opacity, sobriety, absence of ostentation), embedded in a broader ethics of modesty (haya'), considered a central value of Islam and a branch of faith. Modesty, far from being a simple outward behavior, is understood as an inner moral disposition acquired through learning and orienting the whole of social, bodily, and relational practices.

In contemporary societies, this ethics of modesty also functions as an identity marker and a principle of demarcation vis-a-vis norms perceived as Western immodesty. In Tunisia, it intersects with local notions such as hishma, 'ib, and haram, which frame women's behavior and contribute to the social regulation of respectability and purity.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's reflection on modesty (haya') and dress ethics, developed in Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din, provides particularly fruitful conceptual tools for analyzing contemporary hijab practices. Al-Ghazali does not reduce clothing to a formal juridical prescription; rather, he situates it within an overall moral and spiritual approach grounded in intention (niyya), restraint, and the search for balance. This makes it possible to move beyond a strictly normative reading of the veil and to consider the hijab as a lived practice, in which appearance becomes the extension of an inner disposition.

For al-Ghazali, modesty is an inner virtue stemming from a constant awareness of the divine presence (muraqaba) and manifested in the way one moves, speaks, and dresses. Applied to contemporary hijab practices, this conception makes it possible to move beyond a strictly normative reading of the veil. Wearing the hijab is not reducible to applying a uniform legal rule; it is embedded in a lived experience in which outward appearance is the prolongation of an inner disposition.

Current forms of the hijab can thus be interpreted as attempts to reconcile modesty, femininity, and inscription in modernity—provided that aesthetics do not tip into ostentation (tabarruj). Yet this plurality generates internal tensions: some women consider beauty and Islam compatible, while others, claiming a more rigorist interpretation, hold that contemporary hijabs do not meet the criteria of the "true hijab" as defined by the Qur'an and the Sunna.

Al-Ghazali's emphasis on moral intention thus sheds light on the plurality of dress practices observed today. The same hijab style may carry distinct ethical meanings depending on the wearer's motivations: spiritual affirmation, the pursuit of social respectability, a search for identity coherence, or, conversely, a desire for self-exposure. The diversity of contemporary hijabs therefore refers not only to a plurality of tastes, but also to differentiated ways of living modesty and spirituality in specific social contexts.

Finally, the Ghazalian conception of the body as a deposit entrusted by God helps us understand that the contemporary hijab does not necessarily entail the invisibilization of the female body. The body is not denied; it is framed by an ethics of restraint aimed at regulating its visibility in public space. The hijab thus appears as a mediating device between corporality, spirituality, and social order, contributing to the structuring of interactions and to the construction of a moral framework founded on respect and dignity. In light of this perspective, the contemporary hijab can be understood as an evolving ethical practice, arising from a process of interpreting and reappropriating religious norms, articulating faith, modernity, and inscription in the social world.

Conclusion

The contemporary hijab is part of a process of sartorial recomposition that can be analyzed as a form of symbolic "bricolage," articulating traditional references and modern aesthetic codes. Far from opposing tradition and modernity in a binary fashion, this dynamic testifies to the veil's inscription within logics of cultural circulation and the globalization of fashion, in which religious norms are continually reinterpreted in light of contemporary social contexts.

Although dress norms are largely structured by religious prescriptions, their implementation nevertheless appears differentiated, varying according to individual trajectories and socio-cultural contexts. As Najoua Kefi emphasizes, these norms are never applied uniformly; rather, they are subject to multiple adaptations and appropriations.

Accordingly, the key issue lies less in the garment as an object than in the ways it is worn and the meanings attributed to it. It is these differentiated uses of the hijab that give rise to specific forms of regulating appearance, situated at the intersection of social and religious norms and exercised both by instances of authority and by individuals themselves.

Introduction: Zamalek as a Laboratory for an Aesthetic Islam

Since the 1960s–1970s, the island of Zamalek has gradually established itself as a major artistic center in Cairo. The presence of Helwan University's Faculty of Fine Arts, local and international artists, and art collectors has undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of this hub, which today includes around twenty contemporary art galleries—SafarKhan, Ubuntu, Misr Gallery, ArtTalks Gallery, and others. Zamalek is not the only exhibition district: Downtown, with galleries such as Townhouse and Mashrabia, is also known for contemporary art shows. Yet while Downtown galleries played an important role during the 2011 revolution, this was not the case for those in Zamalek, whose themes and ethos appear more aestheticizing than socially and politically engaged. In that respect, the use of religion is not the same: in Downtown it is more subversive. One encounters a fragmented, ironized religiosity, hybridized with profane symbolism. It presents itself less as a spiritual horizon than as an object of inquiry—particularly since 2011, when religion has been associated with a triangle of power and symbolic violence that art seeks to denounce. By contrast, Zamalek's galleries offer a different horizon. The works are less conflictual, more aesthetic than political, more meditative than critical. Why? Probably because the audience is more international—Zamalek has been a residential district since the nineteenth century, and it is now the neighborhood of expatriates and embassies, whereas Downtown is more student-oriented and "bohemian."

In this artistic space, religion is understood as an identity and aesthetic resource. The question of modernism and orientalism, once a central and fiercely debated artistic problem in the previous century, is now largely surpassed here. Artists travel and exhibit in European capitals; one can discern surrealist or minimalist influences; yet the contemporary art shown in Zamalek is hybrid, situated in-between—an international aesthetic serving a local environment and local concerns. One could speak of contemporary art globalized in its forms but deeply local in its questions and obsessions.

It is within this framework that Islamic cultural codes are mobilized.

Among Zamalek's best-known galleries is SafarKhan, founded in 1968 by Roxanne Petridis. It was initially a venue for selling art objects and Islamic antiquities, until Sherwet Shafei joined the gallery in 1989 and restructured it into a reference point for Egyptian modern and contemporary art, drawing on a deep knowledge of modernist artists. The link to the modernist period is affirmed, yet the ambition is to unearth contemporary Egyptian talent. SafarKhan therefore brings together both modern and contemporary works. During Ramadan, it offers a cultural event—Ramadan Collective—which foregrounds more explicitly spiritual dimensions. ArtTalks, founded in 2009 by Fatenn Mostafa-Kanafani, an art historian and specialist of Egyptian modernism, promotes twentieth-century Egyptian modern art, supports emerging and mid-career contemporary artists, and above all seeks to educate the public in Egyptian art history through seminars, conferences, publications, and various mediation initiatives. Ubuntu Art Gallery opened in Zamalek in October 2014. Its curatorial strategy differs from SafarKhan's: it is not centered solely on Egyptian modernity but on an intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue. With its "ubuntu" philosophy, it highlights cultural interdependence, diversity, and sharing—so that religion is integrated into social or identity-related themes. Ubuntu has exhibited works featuring spiritual motifs or references to Islam, but in a transversal, indirect way, as in exhibitions on Ramadan lanterns and on calligraphy. Zamalek also hosts around ten smaller, lesser-known yet dynamic galleries that mount regular exhibitions of painting, drawing, and visual arts—Art Corner, al-Masar, Yassin Gallery, Picasso Art Gallery, and the very recent Cairo Gallery founded in 2024 by the artist and writer Ahmed Shawky Hassan.

Most recently, the exhibition "Mawlana the Lover of God" has opened at Demi Gallery (since 10 February).

If SafarKhan claims an infra-spiritual dimension for each of its exhibitions, others—such as Liwan Gallery—do not make such a claim.

How should one read the religious or spiritual philosophy of these galleries? If Zamalek functions as a mediating space between tradition and contemporaneity, between religious heritage and an international plastic language, between local reference and global reception, how is Islamic heritage presented there in relation to Islamic faith? Is it merely a cultural referent, or does one find an engagement with Islamic faith: the pillars of faith—īmān, which refer to a doxa—and the pillars of Islam, which refer to praxis: the profession of faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, zakāt… And what of Islam's Book—sacred writing—and calligraphy as a major aesthetic and mystical expression of Islam?

For us, questioning Zamalek's art galleries and the place they grant to Islamic heritage is not incidental. The artist is always the mirror of their time. Here, the artist expresses how Islam is situated and understood in Egyptian society today—articulating a vision, a relationship to the Islamic epic, a poetics, a theology. The artist is also a prophet: their message both deciphers and anticipates. As Walter Benjamin wrote, "Each epoch dreams the one to follow," adding that "it forgets to transmit its dreams." The artist's vocation is precisely to transmit these dreams—or these nightmares. Finally, the artist is never neutral. Even if art in Zamalek is less overtly engaged than in Downtown, behind the aesthetics of an atmosphere lies an ethics: a spiritual vision, a relation to the profane, a relation to the religious, to the spiritual, to God.

To scrutinize how Islamic heritage is invested with ethical and aesthetic meaning, we visited over the past year the various exhibitions held in Zamalek's galleries; we also consulted the galleries' websites, which archive a large share of the works exhibited over the last ten years.

How can the results of this inquiry be summarized?

1. The Islamic dimension is largely a minority presence, but it is not absent; it becomes especially visible during Ramadan, with exhibitions devoted to Islamic themes, such as "Ramadan Lanterns," "Dhikr," or "al-Maqam." Often, the cultic dimension is presented as belonging to the past. One does not see the practice of worship today; when it appears, it is as if to show the trace of what no longer exists. By contrast, Islamic symbols and architecture are mobilized to sketch a cultural environment rather than a religious one.

2. The second point concerns text—writing, speech—in other words, calligraphy. Across the galleries one always finds calligraphic works on display; but what do they say? Which Qurʾanic verses are exhibited—and what message? We shall see that while classical calligraphy is present, abstract calligraphy dominates: letters interweave to the point that it is not always possible to discern a text. The letter is sacred, but the word is not. The letter carries a spiritual message, separating it from any literalism that can also become idolatry: a calligraphy made of letters without a text.

3. Third, ethical or political engagement on religious questions is less powerful than in Downtown, but it is still present—particularly through critiques of the physical or symbolic violence associated with certain forms of Islamism.

Islam: More Cultural Than Religious

The notion of "Islamic art" has been the object of discussion and debate among art historians. In a strict sense, it would mean identifying art produced within a normative religious framework and serving a cultic function—for example, fundamental elements of the mosque, or decorations specific to prayer spaces, or objects integrated into a setting with an explicitly Islamic identity. In art history, however, the category "Islamic arts" has more broadly designated artistic productions from societies shaped by Islamic civilization—whether they express faith, political power, scientific knowledge, or a way of life. This terminological choice avoids restricting such production to a strictly confessional definition and highlights the cultural, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of works united by a common cultural horizon, marked by Arabic calligraphy, geometric and vegetal motifs, and a particular relation to ornament, writing, and space.

In Zamalek's art galleries, pictorial and sculptural production does not fit this definition—even when works mobilize symbols, motifs, or scenes associated with Islam. Why? First, because these are contemporary creations produced within a globalized artistic field, where Islam is no longer an all-encompassing civilizational framework but a reservoir of signs, forms, and references. Second, the vast majority of artists exhibited in Zamalek do not work in continuity with normative artistic traditions (learned calligraphy, arts of the book, Islamic decorative arts), but rather through appropriation, displacement, or personal re-reading. Islamic motifs are often decontextualized and hybridized with international plastic languages (abstraction or photography), and are thus freed from their ritual or institutional functions. Moreover, these works aim neither at a cultic function nor at a normative representation of faith. Islam rarely appears as a coherent doctrinal or cosmological system; it is more often invoked as cultural memory, symbolic horizon, or poetic material. We are therefore dealing with an expressive and reflexive approach, not the production of an art embedded in a continuous religious tradition. Finally, Zamalek's very framework—private galleries, the contemporary art market, the international circulation of works—places these productions within a global economy and reception foreign to the historical logics of Islamic arts. Islam becomes one language among others, not the structuring matrix of artistic form.

In this sense, Zamalek's works belong less to "Islamic arts" than to contemporary art that works with an Islamic referent—hence the fundamental gap between their status and the classical museum definition of the arts of Islam. One might speak of a reconfiguration of Islamic aesthetics.

Among the resources and signs present, one naturally finds the question of the human relation to God: Who is God? What do I know of Him? While this question is mainly addressed through calligraphy, a painting by Omar El Nagdi (1931–2019), currently exhibited (January 2026) at al-Masar gallery, expresses that God is light—He who illuminates the heavens and the earth. The painting is titled Allāh Nūr al-Samāwāt wa-l-Arḍ; yet far from a solar light, it conveys the harshness of the believer's relation to this God of light, in a manner characteristic of Sufism.

Omar El Nagdi (1931–2019) — al-Masar
الله نور السموات و الأرض

The painting appears almost mineral: the material is thick, rough, gouged. Against this ochre ground, akin to desert stone, the calligraphic inscription emerges—الله نور السموات والأرض, "God is the light of the heavens and the earth." Yet rather than a luminous or celestial aesthetic, light appears here only through matter's struggle with shadow. The lower forms reveal no face, no body: the human being seems swallowed by the earth. Nothing is fluid; everything is heavy, hampered, almost painful.

The contrast is radical: the Qurʾanic word affirms universal light, yet the painting shows the opacity of the path toward it. Light is not given as immediate clarity; it is sought in darkness, extracted from a thickness of night. Here the painting touches Sufi experience: not easy illumination, but asceticism, an erosion of the self, a slow disintegration of the ego's forms. Divine light does not abolish the hardness of existence; it passes through it, works it, burns it. The verse is not illustrated but interpreted: God is light, yet for the human being that light is first a trial. It reveals by consuming, purifies by abrasion.

A second dimension to probe is prayer. What is striking—and what contrasts with certain typical orientalist paintings—is that prayer is not presented in a canonical form. One sees worshippers, but it is a Sufi prayer practiced with a misbaha, as in the work of the painter Mamdouh Ammar.

Mamdouh Ammar (1928–2012), ArtTalks, 2016.

Here one notices that the misbaha does not have 33 beads and that the red bead carries no particular meaning. The painter sees and depicts a prayer, but he does not master its codes—or he expresses the loss of those codes.

With Ibrahim Khattab, we encounter a calligraphic work entitled Prophet's Prayer.

Ibrahim Khattab, Prophet's Prayer, 2021.

The letters of the ṣalāt ʿalā al-nabī intertwine until they form a central presence, as though the word itself were giving birth to the prophetic figure. One can scarcely distinguish the text; the repetition proper to dhikr transforms the phrase into vibration, shifting from language to presence. The frontal mass then acts like a barzakh, a site of intersection between the invisible flow of the Word and its crystallization in the sensible world. The swirling fiery reds and blue-greens simultaneously suggest the burning love and the universal mercy attributed to Muḥammad. The prayer upon the Prophet thus appears not as a simple homage but as a participation in a "Muḥammadan reality" that inwardly shapes the one who pronounces it. The painting does not represent a text; it shows what happens when the word descends into being, until the human person becomes a living calligraphy.

It is also worth noting that the mass representing Muḥammad resembles the dome (hubba) of a mosque.

Another praying figure appears in the dervishes of Rana Chalabi, exhibited at SafarKhan in 2022.

Rana Chalabi, Dervish Mint, 2022.

Chalabi's canvas does not depict a mere dancer but the body's quest toward a spiritual orbit: the dervish becomes the axis around which movement is organized. The erased face expresses fanāʾ, the disappearance of the ego sought in samāʿ. The vertical headdress seeks to connect heaven, while the circular skirt figures the created world—making the dancer a true barzakh, a spiritual mediator between this world and the next, between the visible and the invisible. The sober yet vibrant colors convey a mastered inner intoxication rather than emotional ecstasy. The painting shows that the human being becomes a center not by self-assertion but by allowing oneself to be traversed.

In another work from 2024, Dervish Cream:

Rana Chalabi, Dervish Cream, SafarKhan, 2024.

The contrast with the previous representation is immediate: the face appears, slightly inclined upward, eyes closed, as if seized in an inhabited interiority. Whereas the first dervish figured the pure effacement of fanāʾ, this one manifests baqāʾ, "subsistence" after extinction. Something of the subject returns, but transfigured. The intense red of the sikke introduces a spiritual warmth, almost an inner ember, where the other canvas remained in sobriety. The circular movement remains cosmic, but it no longer abolishes the person; it carries the person, as if consciousness now participates in the rotation instead of dissolving in it. Chalabi thus moves from a mysticism of effacement to a mysticism of inhabited presence: no longer only the human being traversed by God, but the human being awakened in God.

Pilgrimage is also evoked, but we found it only as a nostalgic expression of the period when Egypt produced the kiswa, the black cloth draped over the Kaʿba during the pilgrimage—before production was ensured, from 1962 onward, by Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed Saber offers a painting exhibited in 2024.

Ahmed Saber, Al Kiswa, 2024, SafarKhan Gallery, November 2024.

He juxtaposes two symbolic registers. Above, fruits (apples) float among translucent veils suggesting abundance, blessing, and the promise of life. Set in an almost unreal space, they represent a spiritual or mythical world, the invisible source of what nourishes human beings. Below, men carrying the covering, dressed in white and wearing red tarbūsh, embody collective ritual and the transmission of the sacred. The white clothing and tarbūsh assert Egyptian cultural identity. The work thus stages a dialogue between spiritual gift and human effort in pilgrimage, nature and tradition, showing that this pillar of Islam rests at once on what is received and on what is carried together. Yet the painting, made in 2024, is also nostalgic: the scene belongs to a world that no longer exists.

A further question arises: by calling the painting al-Kiswa, the artist signals the erosion of the meaning of words. The men are not carrying the kiswa—a black cloth—but the manḥal, a secondary, ornamented fabric not produced by Egypt; and one can make out the mahmal, a richly decorated ceremonial palanquin carried at the head of Egypt's pilgrimage caravan, which accompanied the kiswa but never covered the Kaʿba.

Another example of pilgrimage painted by Ahmed Saber, in a very different style:

Ahmed Saber, Paon Manhal, 2021, SafarKhan exhibition "Al-Maqam" (2022).

In an expression that is at once surreal and mystical, the camel is replaced by the peacock, which in Islamic symbolism evokes the fall, pride, nostalgia for paradise, and a wounded fiṭra. The colors give the scene both its desert-like and its vintage atmosphere.

Beyond these paintings that draw on the pillars of Islam, the Islamic referent is mostly tied to memory and history. It points to a heritage visuality, to a Muslim Egyptian identity, before it becomes a specifically confessional, exhortative, or Islamically normative representation. The works depict an atmosphere anchored in Islamic history; they show medieval Cairo, yet the viewer remains outside the mosques. These mosques are part of an environment, the trace of a history, but the viewer does not inhabit them. One example is the work of Hend Hegazy exhibited at Yassin Art Gallery.

Hend Hegazy, 2023.

Her works unfold within an Egyptian, Arab cultural context: monumental minarets, a colorful and sensitive local atmosphere, but without explicit religious manifestation.

With Hebah Nabeih, we find a painting that revisits the temporality of Islamic Cairo.

Maze of Life.

With Maze of Life, she shows how a poetics of time dialogues with the city's cultural and spiritual referent and with Islam. One can see a kind of labyrinth that suggests the complexity of choices, detours, and unforeseen moments that traverse an existence, of which the medieval city is the symbol. In this sense, time is not simply chronological; it is qualitative. The viewer is invited to perceive—or half-perceive—passages, bifurcations, repetitions, and pauses, as so many stages of a lived life. It is a departure, a human journey—inevitable—in which each choice, each detour, each ordeal carries value and meaning: a necessary passage before finding the ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, the straight path.

With Another Moon:

Nabeih, Another Moon.

Nabeih does not depict a calendar or a specific religious event, but a repeated full moon that establishes a cyclical temporality, resonant with implicit Islamic markers. She expresses both return and continuity—yet another moon—and transformation and novelty—it is another moon. The cosmic and temporal cycle recalls the Islamic lunar calendar and the ritual experience of time as something that returns and renews itself. Minarets and domes function as landmarks in the maze of life, guiding through pictorial time and space. Here mosques are not invoked to represent the call to prayer or the place of worship; they operate rather as architectural and poetic symbols. They anchor the landscape within an Islamic world and give it a precise cultural horizon (Islamic Cairo). At the same time, the cyclical moon rises above these sites of worship, reminding us that natural time and religious time answer one another and overlap.

With Fathy Afifi:

Fathy Afifi, Ubuntu Gallery, October 2025.

We enter a culturally Islamic universe, walking through the city. At the turn of streets and gates, we discover its inhabitants—its worshippers, here its sleepers. Yet mosques remain landscapes that overlook life; they are not places of life. One does not enter them. We are not in the place where canonical prayer is performed. The only prayer repeatedly exposed across several exhibitions and by different artists is that of the dervishes in their rounds, or that of a Sufi praying while playing the flute.

In the 2025 exhibition "People and the City" at Demi Artgallery, Youssef Mekawy presents an Islamic urban universe in which all creation participates in festivity and dance—human beings, animals, and angels alike.

Youssef Mekawy, Demi Artgallery, 2025, exhibition "People and City."

We see a vibrant and dynamic scene, where color and abstract, symbolic forms intertwine to create a dialogue among the human, animal, and spiritual worlds. A multitude of stylized human figures appears, along with landscape elements, houses, mosque domes, animals, and subtler evocations of transcendence through spiritual symbols. It is an art that pays tribute to the human figure by representing it in the form of alifs—the symbol of unity, verticality, and spirituality. By transforming people into alifs, Mekawy gives each individual a spiritual dimension, suggesting that every human being is part of a greater whole, an integral part of the divine totality. The mixture of warm colors (yellow, orange, red) and geometric forms evokes elements of Islamic architecture, particularly tilework patterns, often associated with places of worship and spiritual reflection. These shapes allow Mekawy to link people to their cultural and architectural environment while remaining within a free abstraction. Animals (gazelles, birds) and figures that seem like angels add a cosmic dimension. Birds, for example, often symbolize the soul seeking transcendence—a recurring theme in Islamic art where spiritual elevation is central. They may also evoke Qurʾanic verses or Islamic concepts such as the mystical journey (the miʿrāj of Muḥammad), or spiritual creatures close to the divine. Angels, as intermediaries between the divine and the human, reinforce this link between earth and heaven, between the human and the sacred. The city here is celebrated as a place of festivity, joy, freedom: an exuberant exteriority rather than a silent interiority—a search for the divine through bodily expression.

In the same exhibition, Gamal Maleka (2023):

Gamal Maleka, Demi Artgallery, "People and the City," 2023.

This urban scene is marked by a crowd that seems to move or gather in public space, oriented toward the city's heart. The mosque is clearly evoked, with a majestic dome and minarets rising into the sky. The blurred contours of the mosque can be read as a metaphor for the vulnerability of traditions under the pressures of time and modernity. Represented here in an almost washed-out manner, the mosque seems to suggest that Islamic religious and cultural heritage is not as stable as one might think. It may also reflect the challenge of preserving the integrity of that heritage. The color contrast between the grey mosque and the warm tones of modern buildings and the crowd reinforces the idea of a sharp separation between yesterday and today—a temporal distance and discontinuity between a religious world of the past and the city's present reality. The people are in motion, as if in a pilgrimage, heading toward the sacred.

Calligraphy, or Sacred Writing Decomposed

This colloquium highlighted the importance of calligraphy in Islamic art, as an expression of transcendence and through the aesthetic it deploys to reach the depth of sacred speech. It is doubtless through calligraphy that Zamalek's galleries most clearly reveal their anchoring in Islamic heritage. Many of them make room for it, and Picasso Gallery regularly exhibits renowned Cairo calligraphers. Exhibitions themselves also become spaces where calligraphy is unfolded.

At the exhibition Dhikr, for example, one finds calligraphic works by Mohammad Hassan:

Mohammad Hassan, 2010 — "Bismillah."

Mohammed Hassan, 2024 — Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ.

Alongside classical calligraphy that respects established criteria, one also finds abstract calligraphy—such as certain works by Ibrahim Khattab.

Ibrahim Khattab, Abstract Calligraphy, 2022.

The calligraphy resembles a hāʾ, a mīm, an inverted wāw, and a rāʾ or perhaps a tāʾ marbūṭa, but it carries no meaning. It is a warm, colorful expression, purely aesthetic—or aestheticizing.

The same is true of the following calligraphies:

Ibrahim Khattab, Abstract Calligraphy, 2017 — no semantic content.

Ibrahim Khattab, Abstract Calligraphy, 2024.

Sometimes one can make out a word, as here: ʿabīr, "fragrance."

Ibrahim Khattab, Abstract Calligraphy, 2015 — ʿabīr: fragrance.

During the 2025 Ramadan exhibition Dhikr, Mohammad Hassan exhibited the following work at SafarKhan:

Mohammad Hassan, "خط معاصر" (Contemporary Calligraphy), 2023, shown at SafarKhan (Dhikr, 2025).

In this contemporary calligraphy, one can sense the shahāda, but it no longer appears as a readable sentence; it becomes a field of forces. The letters are still there—strokes, curves, the thrust of the lām-alif, the breathing of the hāʾ—but they no longer allow themselves to be deciphered: they intertwine, overlap, disperse in a continuous movement that dissolves the boundary between writing and texture. The eye recognizes a sacred text, but can no longer pronounce it. We are no longer in reading; we are in presence.

Theologically, the gesture is decisive. The shahāda is normally the clearest of utterances: it distinguishes, affirms, cuts—there is no god but God. It establishes separation between the true and the false, the worshipped and the idol. Here, however, graphic distinction disappears. Words melt into a visual unity that no longer lets the elements of the phrase appear. Writing ceases to be informative and becomes ontological: it no longer says oneness; it makes oneness felt.

The work thus translates plastically a classic shift in spiritual theology: from discourse about oneness to experience of oneness. As long as the phrase is legible, consciousness stands before it; when the letters fuse, the gaze can no longer analyze—it must inhabit. The intellect loses its distinctive bearings and is led toward a unitive perception. Calligraphy then functions as an apophatic pedagogy: God is affirmed through the profession of faith, but His unity exceeds any literary expression. The eye searches for words and finds only a movement without beginning or end, as if speech were returning to the silent source from which it comes. One could say that the painting stages the very limit of religious language. The shahāda remains—it is neither erased nor denied—but it is rendered nearly indecipherable to signify that divine oneness cannot be possessed by the formulation that proclaims it. Writing no longer teaches; it absorbs.

With Aly Sirry, we find the same theme:

Aly Sirry, 2017, exhibition "Calm Chaos," ArtTalks.

The work presents an abstract, dense, gestural calligraphy, dominated by dynamic red strokes on a light ground, structured by a textured grey rectangle. Legibility is deliberately broken: we are faced with writing liberated from its linguistic function. The signs clearly evoke the Arabic alphabet, but they are fragmented, stretched, superimposed. Calligraphy no longer carries verbal meaning; it becomes rhythm, movement, and matter. The forms sometimes appear incised or scratched, intensifying a sense of urgency and tension—typical of Aly Sirry's approach: using writing as a visual structure rather than as a readable message. The grey rectangle offers a stark contrast: it introduces a zone of silence, almost neutral. It can be read as a censored space, an absence of speech, or a meditative pause before the chaos of signs.

At Demi Artgallery, Antonella Leoni's papyrus exhibition brings together calligraphy and the dervish.

Demi Artgallery, Antonella Leoni, 2025.

This work by Antonella Leoni, made on papyrus, combines Arabic calligraphy and a dancing figure in a composition of strong spiritual resonance. The blue calligraphy—legible and fluid—provides visual and symbolic stability, evoking wisdom and sacred speech. The dervish's silhouette, sketched and almost dissolved into the material, embodies movement, inner quest, and mystical surrender. The textured papyrus ground, with its aged tones and irregular traces, reinforces the idea of memory and temporality. The work creates a harmonious dialogue between writing, body, and matter, where spirituality is lived as much through gesture as through word.

Antonella Leoni, Demi Artgallery, 2025.

This papyrus painting stages the shahāda through monumental calligraphy dominated by the word huwa ("He"), which refers to divine oneness. The intense red expresses the force of faith and spiritual intensity, while the textured ground, with its diffuse hues, evokes an ancient support loaded with memory. The small black inscriptions, repeated like a whisper, create a litany effect that reinforces the work's meditative and sacred dimension. The composition favors movement and verticality, transforming religious speech into a living pictorial gesture. The artist thus fuses calligraphic tradition with a contemporary plastic language to offer a sensitive, inward reinterpretation of Islamic creed.

We are therefore faced with a mystical, Sufi-oriented aesthetic turned toward God—one in which calligraphy oscillates between classical forms and abstraction.

What, then, of artists' engagement with a particular vision of Islam?

Artists Committed to Critiquing Traditionalism and Despiritualization

In the introduction, I noted that Downtown galleries are more engaged than those of Zamalek from a political standpoint. In 2025, for example, one could see a photographic exhibition devoted to Gaza, whereas in Zamalek there was no allusion to the war in Palestine. Yet political engagement in relation to religious questions is not absent here—particularly with regard to Islamist violence.

Kareem El Qurity's painting "The Golden Imam" is significant in this respect.

Kareem El Qurity — كريـم الـقـريـطي, El Imam.

Kareem El Qurity was born in Cairo in 1982 and graduated in painting from Helwan University in Egypt. In this work, the figure is the imam Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Dhahabī (1915–1977), an al-Azhar scholar and recognized specialist of tafsīr, who served as Egypt's Minister of Awqāf (Religious Endowments) and authored, among other works, Al-Tafsīr wa-l-Mufassirūn, a standard reference on the history of Qurʾanic exegesis. In July 1977, he was kidnapped and murdered by the extremist group Takfīr wa-l-Hijra, which he had criticized and which considered him a symbol of al-Azhar's institutional Islam—an institution the movement violently rejected. The golden background refers to the epithet al-Dhahabī, which literally means "the Golden" / "of gold." The work is thus a tribute to an imam who became a victim of violence. The artist was born five years after the events, but he documented them, and his painting also reveals the density of his culture.

Another theme is Islam and secularization. The question of secularization re-emerged with renewed acuity during COVID, which emptied houses of worship and suspended mūlids. In a 2022 exhibition entitled al-Maqam—which the gallery loosely translated as "from ascension to illumination"—Ahmed Saber (born in 1987) expresses an anxiety: the erasure of Islamic customs and beliefs. He articulates the desire to commemorate the mawlids, beginning with that of the Prophet.

Ahmed Saber, Al-Mouled, SafarKhan exhibition, 2022.

The mūlid appears here as a time of celebration and play—a suspension of ordinary life in which collective joy, popular sociability, and religious expression are woven together. The presence, on the left, of a woman dressed in black introduces a visual and symbolic dissonance. Turning her back to the rides and the festive space, she stands at a distance from the celebration. The body and the direction of the gaze become meaning-bearing operators. By turning away from the festival—and, by extension, from the playful and communal dimension of the ritual—the female figure materializes a rupture with the religiosity of mūlids. The black garment, contrasted with the celebration's chromatic liveliness, participates in a visual economy of opposition: it inscribes the figure in a register of withdrawal, closure, and refusal. The face, as the painter shows it, is not merely individual expressivity; it gives form to what one might call an "ideological affect"—a normalized sadness produced by a rigorist and disenchanted reading of religion. The mūlid thus appears as a site of knowledge and tension, where struggles over the legitimate definition of "religion" become visible. The painter condenses a critique of Salafi ideology, known for denouncing mūlids as illegitimate or deviant practices.

In another painting, Ahmed Saber depicts the Islamic sociability implied by the mūlid.

Ahmed Saber, Before al-Mouled, 2021, SafarKhan exhibition "al-Maqam."

In this painting, Sufi friendship is not merely represented; it is offered as a relational experience. The scene renders visible a form of spiritual sociality in which bonds among Sufis are built in and through the ritual preparation for the festival. The green background functions as a major symbolic operator: it inscribes the mūlid within an Islamic horizon while opening an eschatological dimension, recalling at once sanctity, hope, and the continuity of the invisible world.

The ritual shown by the painter is not the strict purification that precedes canonical prayer, but an aesthetics of the body: grooming and self-preparation—shaving—appear as relational gestures performed in a logic of mutuality and friendship. Here shaving is not ascetic but ordering: it participates in a bodily beauty that becomes a site of mediation for spiritual and social bonds, a space where ethics, aesthetics, and communal belonging are articulated. The mūlid can then be thought as a time of co-presence, sharing, and mutual recognition, where friendship constitutes a central modality of religious life.

In the contemporary context marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the state's ban on mūlids, this representation takes on a critical force. What is at stake is not only the defense of a ritual practice, but the illumination of the potential loss of a form of Islamic solidarity. The disappearance of the mūlid would then appear as an assault on the very conditions of production and transmission of social and spiritual bonds, revealing how deeply ritual is a site of knowledge, relation, and cohesion.

Finally, a last painting, by Mohamed Taman, addresses the relationship between women, Islam, and culture. Its title is Cello under the Veil.

Mohamed Taman, Cello under the Veil.

Here we find an engaged art that uses the full-body female garment to pose a question and provoke reflection through a paradox: a fully veiled woman—reduced to a faceless silhouette, without eyes—occupies the space, while between her gloved hands appears a stringed instrument whose golden surface becomes the only area of light and almost the sole place of expression. Everything in the figure signals closure: the niqāb abolishes physiognomy, effaces the reciprocity of the gaze, withdraws from the body its social and expressive dimension; the black gloves, by preventing direct contact with the strings, make musical execution technically impossible. And yet the paradox is that it is precisely from this impeded body that the music that should be impossible seems to arise—if one follows a radical Salafi ideology. The painting thus organizes a series of reversals: what should speak—the face—falls silent, and the instrument becomes the woman's true voice; the opaque material of the garment encloses, yet the instrument gives back an opening and a freedom. Visible constraint allows an invisible freedom to appear. Even if her skin, gaze, and touch are hidden, she plays. The work stages a radical paradox of freedom: it resides in an inner presence irreducible to external conditions. If the painter asks whether inner expression can be prevented—whether inner musicality can be stopped by external constraint—his answer is clearly no.

This surprising painting is therefore, in my view, a way of associating freedom with a traditionalist Islam—against what such an Islam would claim.

Ethics and Aesthetics of Islam in The Forty Rules of Love

Rumi, Shams, and the Poetics of Spiritual Transformation

Laure Zeghad

The Forty Rules of Love (French: Soufi, mon amour) entered my life the way Shams of Tabriz entered Rumi's: suddenly. The book passed from hand to hand before landing in mine. Then, a few days later, I came across a call for papers: "Ethics and Aesthetics in Islamic Heritage." Elif Shafak's novel immediately seemed the obvious choice. The novel offers a fictional retelling of the encounter between the poet Rumi and the Sufi dervish Shams of Tabriz, while linking this medieval story to a contemporary narrative centered on Ella. Ella functions as a narrative device through which a Western reception of Sufism is staged.

Drawing on references to the Qur'an and to mystical poetry, the novel questions the place of Sufism in the Western imagination while advancing a vision of spirituality grounded in inner transformation, tolerance, love, and conflict. Far from any dogmatic discourse, The Forty Rules of Love brings ethics and aesthetics together as inseparable dimensions of a single search for meaning.

Ella embodies the "ideal" woman: a committed mother, she runs the household, takes care of her children (perhaps too much), and prepares home-cooked dinners every evening. She invests herself fully in her life—yet she is bored. Regretting that she cannot work, she becomes an assistant to an assistant at a publishing house. One day, her supervisor sends her a manuscript: she must read it and write a summary. Strangely, the story of Shams and Rumi moves her, and she contacts its author, Aziz. From that precise moment, Ella's life takes an unexpected turn: Shams's Sufism upends her contemporary values, and Aziz's charm does so as well. The story of Shams and Ella unfolds in parallel, on different timelines. Unwittingly, Shams and Rumi affect Ella's life in all its dimensions.

How does the figure of the Sufi poet embody an aesthetic and ethical stance? How do the whirling dervishes' dance and poetry become forms of resistance? What cultural stakes does this representation raise in contemporary literature, especially for a Western readership?

The novel sustains a constant dialogue between a Sufi spiritual ethics and its aesthetic embodiment, offering a unified vision of Islam grounded in the transformation of the self and in poetic experience—thus creating a Sufi aesthetic. Aesthetics here does not appear as decorative narration, but as an ethical vector granting access to an embodied and transmissible spirituality.

I. Religious and Historical References: The Novel as a Bridge

In an interview for Radio France, Eric Geoffroy suggested that "Islam was lived as a whole: of course there was, above all, the spiritual dimension, since a religion without a spiritual message is no longer a religion but an ideology; and therefore the esoteric, spiritual dimension was lived together with the ethical dimension" (Geoffroy 2014). This observation should be taken up in order to highlight the many religious references mobilized by Elif Shafak. Religion is not dissociated from spirituality; the two converge to convey a message.

1. Rumi and Shams: between myth-making and historicity

The relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz belongs to a literary and spiritual tradition that exceeds strict historicity to reach a mythic dimension—much like other foundational narratives of love, from Aristophanes' myth to the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice. The story of Shams and Rumi is presented as a transformative event capable of crossing cultures and centuries.

From the beginning of Aziz's manuscript, the novel explains their meeting to the reader: in 1244, the two souls encountered each other and upended one another's lives—"it also marked the beginning of a strong and unique friendship that Sufis of later centuries have compared to the union of two oceans" (Shafak 2010, trans. D. Letellier, Kindle ed., p. 29). Rumi—relegated to the rank of an "average cleric"—moves toward an engaged mysticism. Great figures, such as the apothecary and perfumer Farid al-Din 'Attar, discern in him a man of importance: "this boy will open a door in the heart of love and kindle a flame in the hearts of all mystical lovers" (Shafak 2010, p. 29). The spiritual bond that unites them exceeds any simple master–disciple relationship. It is a spiritual communication that transcends body, language, and even the dream world.

In this way, the novel reconfigures the master–disciple relation as a universal model of transformation.

2. The Qur'an and exegesis

The Forty Rules of Love is interwoven with many references to the Qur'an. These are not mobilized in a normative perspective; rather, they serve as supports for a spiritual and symbolic reading of the sacred text.

Adam's name, for example, is invoked to speak of human beings on earth: "The children of Adam have been honored with such great knowledge that neither mountains nor skies could bear it… That is why the Qur'an says: 'We offered the trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains; they refused to bear it and were afraid of it, but man undertook it.' Having assumed so honorable a position, human beings should not aim lower than what God intended for them" (Shafak 2010, p. 141).

Elsewhere: "Moses was an exemplary man… But there was a time when he greatly needed a companion to open his third eye, and that companion was none other than Khidr" (Shafak 2010, p. 272). The presence of Moses or Khidr inscribes the narrative in a spiritual continuity while emphasizing the importance of inner transmission. This episode functions as an explicit parallel to the relationship between Shams and Rumi: the spiritual guide is not the one who possesses knowledge, but the one who opens the inner eye.

Finally, the novel suggests that religious wars stem largely from a "linguistic problem" (Shafak 2010, p. 211). The Tower of Babel exemplifies this: misunderstanding arises from a linguistic failure—an inability to move beyond literal meaning toward a symbolic and ethical understanding of the religious message.

In sum, the novel argues that religious conflict is born of misunderstanding.

3. Religious plurality in the novel

The novel stages a religious plurality deeply anchored in its historical setting: a space of cohabitation among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Difference is not presented as an obstacle but as a spiritual richness.

The character Kerra suggests that if everyone ate the same way, sang together, shared the same superstitions, and dreamed the same dreams at night, the world would hold together far better. Yet she also touches on a decisive point: the plurality of religions. "I have known Christian babies with Muslim names, and Muslim babies fed on the milk of Christian mothers. Our world is a great liquid in which everything flows and mingles" (Shafak 2010, p. 234).

Kerra—formerly Christian and converted to Islam—embodies this religious hybridity. She never stops thinking of the Virgin Mary, who comforts her. Shams asserts that faith cannot be reduced to belonging. This stance challenges rigid identity categories and proposes an open conception of spirituality.

Spiritual identity has no fixed affiliation: "Neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Muslim—Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. My place is placeless, a trace beyond tracing" (Shafak 2010, p. 239). Rumi suggests that religion can become an identity that does not truly represent us. By expressing the wish to transcend religious boundaries in order to access a universal spiritual experience, the novel makes Sufi Islam a space of dialogue founded on the essence of traditions rather than on their outward forms.

4. Contemporary transposition and Western reception

As a reminder, Ella functions as a narrative device for the contemporary reception of Sufism. Critical of religions and atheist, she sees religion as a source of conflict: "with their unparalleled arrogance and their self-proclaimed belief in the supremacy of their way of seeing things, religious people got on her nerves" (Shafak 2010, p. 211). She gradually enters a process of spiritual questioning as she discovers the story of Shams and Rumi.

Her evolution is not a religious conversion but a shift in ethical and existential outlook. Through reading Aziz's manuscript, Ella confronts a spirituality that undermines her certainties about marriage, love, and individual freedom. The medieval narrative acts as a catalyst linking the spiritual stakes of the thirteenth century to the fractures of the contemporary world.

Following Antoine Faivre, the similarities between Sufism and esotericism—understood as a set of "forms of thought"—are numerous. Francesco Piraino highlights several convergences: metaphysical knowledge, philosophy, elitism, initiation, esoteric transmission, and inner transmutation (Piraino 2024, 73). In these resemblances, the reader recognizes Ella's initiatory path: despite her skepticism, she is compelled to confront religion.

Through this novel, the story of Shams and Rumi raises the question of religion's place in the contemporary world. It serves as a catalyst for thinking about present-day fractures.

From this perspective, religion prompts an ethical reflection: it invites us to reconsider individual and collective responsibility, as well as a coexistence grounded in love and tolerance.

II. Sufi Ethics: An Inner Spirituality

In The Forty Rules of Love, Sufi ethics appears as an experience of inner transformation. Through the relationship between Rumi and Shams, the novel stages a morality grounded in love and the Sufi path. This ethics invites the reader to rethink individual responsibility toward the other. Elif Shafak offers a contemporary reworking of Sufism in which ethics becomes a principle bridging the spiritual and the social.

1. Love as the founding principle

In Shafak's work, love is the central ethical principle around which the entire spiritual itinerary is organized. Far from being defined as an affective or romantic feeling, love is presented as a force capable of overturning the established order, revealing the being in its deepest truth, and destroying the ego.

"It's always the same: when you tell the truth, people hate you. The more you speak of love, the more they hate you" (Shafak 2010, p. 46). Such contradictions compel the reader to question love itself as a radical experience, irreducible to ordinary moral categories. Philosophically, one often says "there is only a step between love and hate." Love attracts hatred because it shatters illusions—something we see with Ella, who begins to feel hatred toward her husband as she discovers love for Aziz. "Either pure love or pure hate": no compromise is possible between the two. This duality is pervasive. "Love is the water of life, and a beloved is a soul of fire" (Shafak 2010, p. 449).

In The Forty Rules of Love, love exceeds language: "Most problems in the world come from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Never take words at face value. When you enter the zone of love, the language as we know it becomes obsolete" (Shafak 2010, p. 90). The novel insists on the paradoxical and, at times, violent character of this spiritual love.

Yet Shams seeks to spread the word of love: "the only caress is the one that fills our hearts." Love does not manifest through codified outward gestures, but through a transformation of the heart. Natural metaphors suggest that Sufi love transcends language and renders inherited conceptions obsolete: "the universe turns differently when fire loves water" (Shafak 2010, p. 449). The present moment most powerfully exemplifies this love.

Ella's experience transposes this ethics into a contemporary framework. Her resistance, turmoil, and anger in the face of love reveal how difficult it is to receive such an experience; it calls into question social, marital, and moral norms. The novel thus juxtaposes two modalities of Sufi love: one concerned with teaching and transmission, embodied by Shams; the other, lived by Ella, as an inner trial in a secularized world.

2. Hermeneutical Sufism: from apparent meaning to hidden meaning

The Forty Rules of Love advances a conception of Sufism as a practice grounded in the passage from apparent meaning to hidden meaning. This distinction structures Shams's stance toward religious prescriptions and toward the Qur'an. Whereas jurists and scholars focus on the textual letter, the Sufi claims an inward reading attentive to the spiritual dimension of the message: "Scholars who focus on the Sharia know the outer meaning. Sufis know the inner meaning. Saints know the inner meaning of the inner meaning" (Shafak 2010, p. 68).

The novel criticizes a normative approach to religion, deemed superficial when limited to mere observance. The metaphor of swimming illustrates this hierarchy of interpretations by opposing those who remain at the surface to those who dive into depth. Shams denounces such superficiality: "those who like to swim near the surface are satisfied with the outer meaning of the Qur'an." The radicality of his words explains the hostility he provokes within the Muslim community.

The interpretation of certain terms—especially those evoking relations between the sexes—also participates in this Sufi hermeneutics. By proposing a reading grounded in the principles of masculinity and femininity, the novel invites the reader to move beyond literal interpretations that can be used to legitimize domination. It evokes the batn (inner meaning) and the sura An-Nisāʾ: "The third approach is an esoteric reading, the batn. If you read An-Nisāʾ with your inner eye open, you will see the verse does not speak about women and men but about femininity and masculinity. For every man has a share of femininity, and every woman has a share of masculinity." "The Qur'an is a shy young bride" (Shafak 2010, p. 254): the reader must tame it, discover it, study it—never content with the surface.

This inward reading of the Qur'an becomes an ethics of discernment. By integrating a plurality of interpretations across the major legal schools of Islam (Shāfiʿī, Ḥanafī, Ḥanbalī, and Mālikī), Sufism appears as an ethics of discernment grounded in the interpreter's individual responsibility. According to Henry Corbin, Sufism is an "imamology without an Imam, a diverted Shiʿism" (Cavagnis 2012, 115). This suggests that Sufism rests on a lived interpretation of the sacred text, in which meaning is revealed not by institutions but by transformation.

3. Asceticism, quest, and transformation

The spiritual quest constitutes a pillar of Sufi ethics. Shams's path is marked by an asceticism rooted in humility and self-stripping. Asceticism may be defined as a discipline imposed by the will in order to strive toward an ideal—whether moral perfection or artistic/intellectual creation (CNRTL, s.v. "ascèse").

Everyday objects—such as the wooden bowl Shams uses for begging—take on symbolic value: they recall the necessity of renouncing pride and vanity. Asceticism is accompanied by a strong capacity for resilience in the face of suffering, which is not conceived as a fatality but as a stage of the inner path and a search for God: "I have searched East and West, up and down, for God" (Shafak 2010, p. 54).

The shared dream between Shams and Rumi illustrates the intensity of their spiritual bond: "Finally, guided by a sinister intuition, I approached the well and looked into its dark waters, far below." That Rumi dreams the same as Shams suggests a communion of souls that exceeds physical space and is grounded in a shared spiritual intuition. This dimension reinforces the idea that transformation is not a purely intellectual learning process, but a lived experience—often painful.

Sufi spirituality, as staged in the novel, appears as a process of deconstructing the ego in pursuit of inner unity. The transformations of Ella and Rumi follow an ethical logic: accepting loss in order to reach a truth of the self.

In this sense, spiritual transformation is a painful inner process that unites Shams and Rumi and connects Ella to their legacy.

4. Ethical conflict between orthodoxy and mysticism

The novel foregrounds a major conflict between, on the one hand, an orthodox conception of Islam linked to social conformity and, on the other, a mystical approach centered on inner experience. Shams embodies this tension as sage, provocateur, and heretic at once. Maurice Barrès defines Sufism as follows: "from this comes that indefinable poetry of Sufism which is, depending on the man and the hour, sometimes the outpouring of a supreme pity at which orthodoxy need not be alarmed; sometimes the bold effort of man to identify with God by annihilating himself in Him" (Barrès 1922, 131).

An onlooker declares: "And those Sufis—they have such a bad influence! How dare they call themselves Muslims when they speak of things Muslims should not even think about?" (Shafak 2010, p. 197). The accusations directed at Sufis testify to a fear of transgression and a distrust of all spirituality. By asserting that evil can take unexpected forms—"sometimes it comes as a gambler inviting us to bet; sometimes it is a young and beautiful woman trying to seduce us… Satan can also take the most unexpected forms, such as that of a wandering dervish" (Shafak 2010, p. 330)—Shams destabilizes established moral categories.

The episode of wine, especially provocative, illustrates this trial. Because Rumi is renowned as a man of faith, the people are outraged to see him consume alcohol, which is forbidden. Yet the point is not to deny the prohibition, but to reveal what it conceals: "If the wine drinker is deeply kind, it will show when he is drunk. But if he harbors anger or arrogance, they will appear—as is the case for most people" (Shafak 2010, p. 313).

Through Sufi ethics, The Forty Rules of Love stages an inner spirituality grounded in symbolic interpretation, the transformation of the ego, and love. This ethics does not merely propose an alternative to Islam; it initiates a reflection on individual responsibility, spiritual freedom, and the possibility of dialogue between tradition and modernity. The novel presents Islam as a plural space traversed by internal debates. Yet this ethics is not articulated only discursively: it is also conveyed through poetic choices. Spiritual experience finds its expression in an aesthetic in which narrative, voices, and images converge in the process of inner transformation.

III. Sufi Aesthetics and Poetics: Beauty as a Path

Since Antiquity, reflection on aesthetics has generated many debates. Art was criticized when artists were accused of producing "an imitation three degrees removed from nature" (Glicenstein 2022). Such critiques helped ground a questioning of art's social function and utility. From the eighteenth century onward, the philosophy of art emerged out of aesthetics, understood as a theory proper to art itself: "there would be an internal logic to creation and to its appreciation that cannot be understood outside the central principle of the autonomy of the artistic sphere" (Glicenstein 2022). The novel's aesthetics offers an internal link with Sufi spirituality that cannot be separated from its ethics.

1. A mirrored narrative construction: an aesthetics of transmission

One of the novel's most significant features lies in its mirrored narrative construction, which, in itself, gives form to the aesthetics of Sufi thought. The novel embeds a medieval narrative within a contemporary plot centered on Ella, establishing a play of reflections between two temporalities and two spiritual experiences.

This narrative device is not a mere formal technique; it materializes a Sufi principle: inner transmission. Shams's "forty rules," scattered throughout the novel, structure both the historical narrative and Ella's existential itinerary. Ella becomes an indirect recipient. Through her reading of Aziz's manuscript, Shams is positioned as a spiritual master, while Ella becomes a disciple in transformation.

Aesthetically, The Forty Rules of Love is structured around several elements:

• The epistolary exchange between Aziz and Ella.
• The natural elements marking each part—water, earth, fire, and emptiness—associated with different stages of the spiritual quest.
• The multiplication of narrators, giving voice to marginalized figures (prostitute, beggar, disciple) and contributing to a fragmentary aesthetics that reflects the plurality of spiritual experiences.
• The novel is divided into five parts, echoing the number of letters in the word "Soufi."
• Each chapter begins with the letter "B," linked to the opening prayer of the Fātiḥa in the Qur'an; it signifies opening—what grants access to something greater.

In this way, the novel's form mirrors the mystical approach: proceeding through detours, fragments, and resonances. Linear, doctrinal discourse is not prioritized.

2. Sufi symbolism and the imaginative world of the elements

The poetics of The Forty Rules of Love rests on a dense network of symbols drawn from the Sufi imagination, with natural elements in the foreground. Water, earth, fire, and emptiness are not merely decorative motifs; they are symbols through which inner transformation is thought.

Water, frequently associated with knowledge and spiritual transmission, is invoked to designate Shams's destiny. The comparison with stagnant water refers to both transmission and destiny: "Knowledge is nothing but stagnant water at the bottom of an old jar if you do not let it flow. For years, I prayed to God to grant me a companion with whom to share the knowledge I have accumulated within me… In a vision at Samarkand, I was told to come to Baghdad to fulfill my destiny" (Shafak 2010, p. 79). In Islam, water represents the purification of humanity and sustains life; the point of this comparison, then, is the transmission of knowledge so that people may be purified (Faruqui 2001). From the opening pages, the movement of water also evokes Shams's destiny: the surface may seem calm, yet the slightest ripple can disrupt that calm—so that a simple stone, skipping across the water, can have far-reaching consequences.

Fire, by contrast, embodies the intensity of mystical love and the violence of transformation: "Love is the water of life, and a beloved is a soul of fire" (Shafak 2010, p. 449). Symbolically associated with Shams, whose name means "sun," fire appears as an ambivalent force, both illuminating and destructive. Traditionally linked to hell in Islamic imaginaries, it is here re-invested as the metaphor of a burning love that can consume the self to reveal one's essence. Light—sometimes linked to fire—guides the soul's movement toward truth and recalls philosophical motifs such as Plato's cave allegory. The novel suggests convergences between spiritual and philosophical traditions around knowledge: "Rumi's eyes follow Shams as a sunflower follows the sun. Their love for each other is so visible and intense; what they share is so unique" (Shafak 2010, p. 253). The sunflower becomes an image of the human being turning toward the sun, toward luminosity.

Finally, travel runs through the entire narrative as a central metaphor of the Sufi quest. It designates both geographical displacement and inner movement, underscoring the inseparability of soul and body in spirituality.

3. The aesthetics of the Sema: the moving body and ecstatic experience

The Sema ceremony is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO, "Sema ceremony, Mevlevi"). Dance occupies a central place in the Sufi aesthetics staged by Shafak.

Dance is presented as an embodied prayer in which the body becomes the medium of spirituality. Christine Kossaifi relates Rumi to Leibniz's theory, which holds that elements merge into the totality while retaining their constitution: they are links contributing to a whole. "Rumi and Leibniz converge in the perception of correspondences that unite microcosm and macrocosm: man is the mirror of the universe, whose logical organization is in turn reflected in him. Such is one of the symbolisms of Rumi's sacred dance" (Kossaifi 2002, 239). Sacred dance thus becomes an embodied staging of cosmology: the dancer's body, through circular movement, reenacts the order of the universe and offers an invisible harmony. It is not a mere aesthetic performance but an act of knowledge, enabling human beings to find their place within the cosmic order and their bond with the divine.

The novel also highlights the social misunderstanding that surrounds this practice. Perceived as entertainment or exhibitionism, dance generates incomprehension and even suspicion. Shams's anger at applause and at a king's financial reward underscores the danger of an aesthetics detached from ethics: when dance becomes an object of social recognition, it loses its spiritual dimension. "The Sema is a spiritual dance performed for love and love alone" (Shafak 2010, p. 351). External recognition does not matter because it can inflate a person's ego. This depth permeates the dancing gesture.

The conflict between inner experience and outward gaze reveals a fundamental tension between aesthetics and spectacle. The mobility of the Sema inscribes itself within a poetics of performance. Through their geographical movements, dervishes are often presented as foundational figures of Sufism; they introduced a bodily dynamic grounded in crossing and movement. In the study of artistic practices, some authors prefer the notion of "scene" to that of the "art world" to better account for the diversity of sound practices (Aterianus-Owanga, Gaulier & Navarro 2022, 254). This notion of "scene" resonates with the Sema as a form of choreographic expression.

Ultimately, the novel argues that Sufi aesthetics cannot be separated from its ethics: beauty has meaning only insofar as it leads to love and inner transformation.

4. Rumi's poetics: language, music, and poetry as spiritual mediations

Rumi's transformation is one of the novel's major culminations. Before encountering Shams, Rumi is above all a scholar. After his companion's disappearance, poetry becomes for him a creative space shaped by absence, pain, and love. Loss acts as a poetic motor that brings forth a hidden voice.

Rumi's poetry—scattered throughout the novel in quotations—is presented as a language of the unsayable. It expresses what discursive language cannot grasp. Spiritual truth can be spoken only through images and rhythms. Music is personified: the sound of the ney, a reed flute "that sounds like the lover's sigh for his beloved" (Shafak 2010, p. 348), materializes the experience of longing. The novel extends this poetics into a contemporary context through the character of Aziz: the creation of a Sufi foundation and interreligious musical collaborations in Córdoba, Spain (Shafak 2010, p. 415) testify to a desire to create a space of dialogue. Music and poetry thus become sites of cultural mediation.

The novel's recourse to allegorical storytelling—through tales featuring symbolic figures—reinforces this poetic dimension. The story of the grape sellers functions as an ethical condensation, reminding us that spiritual essence lies not in outward form but in the interior. Three sellers of grapes—yellow, green, and red—argue over the value of their varieties. A Sufi mocks them, mixes the three bunches, and explains that what matters is the fruit's essence, not its outward appearance. Christians, Jews, and Muslims are like these grape sellers: while they argue over versions of religion and external forms, the Sufi concentrates on the essence of spirituality.

Thus, the Sufi aesthetics staged by Shafak is inseparable from her ethical project. Dance, poetry, music, and narration are not mere literary ornaments; they are paths into a spiritual experience grounded in transformation. By conceiving beauty as a path toward divine love, the novel proposes a poetics of interiority capable of dialogue with contemporary questions of coexistence.

Conclusion

In The Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak offers a fictional reading of the encounter between Rumi and Shams. She elaborates a poetics of transformation in which ethics and aesthetics intertwine to think an embodied and transmissible spirituality.

The figure of the Sufi poet embodies an inseparable ethical and aesthetic posture. Rumi is not only a thinker; he becomes the focus of all gazes. His poetic speech, born of absence and loss, becomes an aesthetic experience and an inner trial through which ethics is lived. Sufi poetry functions as a language of the unsayable, capable of translating the transformation of the self. Aesthetics is not merely ornamental; it acts as a vector of ethics.

From this angle, the dervishes' dance and poetry appear as forms of resistance—to the rigidity of identity affiliations and to religious norms. The movement and poetry of this dance open a symbolic space in which interpretive plurality becomes an ethical responsibility. They constitute critical practices that intertwine spirituality, embodiment, and politics.

Finally, this representation raises major cultural stakes for contemporary literature and for Western readerships. By using Ella as a figure of reception, the novel probes the often conflictual relations between "the West" and Islam. Sufism presents itself as a space of cultural mediation, able to hold together spirituality, ethics, and aesthetics in an accessible language without simplifying them.

However, this opening also exposes tensions: it raises the question of Western reception of "Eastern" spirituality, between fascination and reappropriation. The novel invites readers to move beyond an exoticizing reading of Sufism in order to recognize its critical and universal scope.

Ultimately, The Forty Rules of Love suggests that Sufism can be understood only through the unity of ethics and aesthetics at its core. Between tradition and modernity, West and East, interiority and the social world, Sufism becomes a passageway founded on the transformation of the self. Shafak inscribes her work within a contemporary reflection on living together, offering a privileged space for dialogue and symbolic resistance.

Bibliography

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• Barrès, M. (1922). Mes Cahiers, t. 14, 131.
• Cavagnis, J. (2012). "Corbin, Hadot, Foucault: A Dialogue with Qu'est-ce que la philosophie islamique ? by Christian Jambet." Cahiers philosophiques, 128(1), 111–115.
• CNRTL. "Ascèse." Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales.
• Faruqui, N. I. (2001). "Islam and Water Management: General Principles." In Water Management in Islam.
• Geoffroy, E. (2014, March 2). "Le soufisme avec Eric Geoffroy" [radio interview]. Radio France.
• Glicenstein, J. (2022). "Introduction: Ethics and/or Aesthetics?" Marges, 34(1), 10–17.
• Kossaifi, C. (2002). "Sacred Dance and Monadological Harmony: Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz." Bulletin de l'association Guillaume Budé, 2, 239.
• Piraino, F. (2024). "Chapter 3: The Origins of Sufism in Western Europe." In Le soufisme en Europe : Islam, ésotérisme et new age, 73. Karthala.
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Introduction

The field of ethics belongs to the study of values, or axiology, which has been a fundamental component of philosophy since ancient Greece. It includes knowledge such as logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Ethics, with its aesthetic component, is considered a common practice in all human experiences, through which societies are built towards the better, the good, and the best. The most important question that arises is: How can ethics be linked to beauty and perfection? Does this require an aesthetic view of existence and life? Is connecting and combining the aesthetic and ethical perspectives a way to achieve justice and moderation, and thus what is good?

In Ibn Arabi's thought, there is a call to embody the divine names in order to resemble the origin and achieve divinity in the world, through the perfection that combines the attributes of majesty and beauty existentially, and the "laws of virtues" socially. The most important question that arises is: Is the Sufi call to embody the attributes of the Truth what makes it a complement to religion? Can this field of gnosis be considered the aesthetic manifestation of religion? Is gnosis, with its revelatory approach, the foundation for the aesthetic rule of morality? What is the place of aesthetic meanings—majesty—in the construction of tasteful practices between individuals and religions?

1. The ethical between the aesthetic and the theological

In the Middle Ages, art was linked to the sacred in order to create harmony with religion and elevate the human self in terms of faith. The origin of the presence of religion is the existential relationship between God and the world—humanity. The triumph of the medieval theological view turned art into a subject of questioning, particularly with regard to the issue of representation, through the following questions: If representation is a creative act, could it not be considered an imitation of the divine act? Is the issue of imitation what led to some reservations about creative artistic practices?

Islamic art has a deep connection to religion, but this characteristic should not negate its universal nature. The most important creation that crystallized this art is "architecture." Afif Bahensi believes that Islamic art has experienced prohibition and repression, which has hindered its integration because historically there has been a cautious attitude towards representation, paving the way for Western centrality as if it were the origin of art. These reductive attitudes towards Islamic art have resulted in, as he says:

"The belief that plastic art, as defined by the West in the Greek era, the Renaissance, the Baroque period, and even today, is the only legitimate form of art."

1. The view of Arab and Islamic art as decorative art did not rise to the level of the correct image of art according to Western art.
2. The reason for the absence of plastic arts in Arab countries, as was the case during the Renaissance, is attributed to Islam's prohibition of figurative representation, which gave way to abstract Arabic calligraphy.

The fundamental question that arises in this context is: Is Islamic decorative art more valuable than plastic art (depiction)? Does reducing Islamic art to its abstract and decorative dimensions diminish its status and creativity?

The status of art — beauty between caution and fear

Reducing art to its quantitative aspect limits its meaning to what is apparent and superficial, which differs from its essence as depiction and formation, or approximation of what is transcendent and sublime. The quantitative dimension makes art attached to physicality, i.e., to what is material. In contrast, the Islamic gnostic view, with its spiritual dimension, works to expand the space of creativity by combining art, religion, and philosophy. This trinity is the basis of the discursive discourse of art, and it cannot be reconciled with quantitative measurement, because the power of this vast space lies in its being a repository of the spiritual.

Therefore, in Islamic art, there is a plastic art practice that resulted from Muslims' interest in Arabic calligraphy, architecture, cities, and places of worship. Claude Obeid believes that Islam prohibited the depiction or imitation of the sublime and transcendent, which led to an interest in basic practices, the most important of which are:

1. Calligraphy as a tool used to write the words of the Holy Quran, which became the basis for aesthetics embodied in the field of architecture.
2. The unity of Islamic arts, which is to present an aesthetic religiosity, as it is based on ideological and spiritual concepts.

3. The mystical meanings of aesthetic values

The contemporary moment has seen a resurgence of religion in order to rebuild existential and moral ties with the transcendent divine. This return is not a political reduction of religion, transforming it into a fixed social project, but rather an effort to understand it according to mystical meanings. In this context, Toshihiko Izutsu developed a thesis on the possible relationship between God and man in the Qur'an through four determinants:

1. The existential relationship between God and man has meanings specific to creation and human destiny.
2. The communicative relationship between God and man, which has a non-linguistic basis founded on worship.
3. Linguistic communication between God and man, which relates to the status of revelation, i.e., the word of God.
4. The ethical relationship between God and man, which relates to the God of mercy or the "moral God."

The moral relationship between God and man in Islam constitutes the problematic depth of religious meanings, defined by concepts such as gratitude, disbelief, faith, thankfulness, mercy, etc. Regarding this, the moral foundation states: "The most prominent legacy of religious thought that arose in the Semitic world, whether in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, is that the concept of God is ethical in essence. The relationship between God and man must also be ethical in nature. In other words, God behaves towards man in an ethical manner, that is, as a God of justice and goodness, and man is expected to respond to this divine initiative in an ethical manner as well. It is a crucial and delicate moment in the structure of a religion such as Islam that humans truly respond in the correct moral manner. It is not merely a question of human good or evil, as it was in the pre-Islamic era. Morality was an integral part of religion, and religion as a whole is rooted in it and certainly depends on the moral response of humans."

The value relationship between God and man—the world—is defined in moral responsibility, whereby man works to respond aesthetically to divine discourse by practicing just and good deeds. This concept, developed by Toshihiko based on the moral image of God, is not unique to Islam but is also present in Christianity and Judaism, that is, in the Abrahamic religions in general. Humans must work to actualize this moral image in the world through their multiple relationships with the Creator in order to spread the values of justice and goodness. This is because morality complements and completes religion; it is not merely a distinction between good and evil. It has a universal dimension shared by all religions and identities. What is the nature of humanity's response to this universal divine value? What is the path to establishing existential bonds with God?

If ethics are inherent in religious discourse in general, what are their spiritual determinants as ethics? How are they socially circulated? Is art, as an aesthetic perspective on reality, the ideal way to present these meanings in a tasteful manner that complements religion itself?

It should be noted that Islamic aesthetics includes a rich vocabulary related to religion, such as the dot, the letter, the crescent, the arc, the cube (the Kaaba), circles... In other words, there are geometric shapes with symbolic meanings, embodying meanings and beliefs related to the universe and life. Islamic mysticism's interest in the aesthetics of shapes and the symbolism of letters (the initial letters of the surahs) is intended to express the spirit of religion and its hidden meanings through aesthetic ethics. This is embodied in the shapes of letters, which are characterized by their tendency toward circularity and, therefore, perfection. Ibn Arabi crystallized this by drawing circles and multiple shapes in his books to express the truth of the universe, represented by the perfection of the circle, whose origin is the line, and the latter's origin is the point.

The essence of life, according to the "Great Sheikh," is its aesthetic nature, represented by its tendency toward circularity, from the leaves of trees to human beings. This is because all beings strive for perfection, and thus for the divine meaning, or the womb of existence, where the being is a point or a sperm. This aesthetic use extends to everyday and social use, with attention paid to places of worship in order to encourage meditation, making these "circular" shapes a catalyst for tastes, desires, and morals, as is the case in the methods of circumambulation and remembrance circles. This combination of Sufi meditation and worship is evident in Eastern Sufi art, particularly Buddhist art, as represented in the "Mandala."

In Ibn Arabi's experience, these rounded shapes take shape through the images of letters to highlight their esoteric meanings, which symbolize existential truths. In his book Al-Mim, Al-Waw, and Al-Nun, he highlights the importance of the rotation in these letters, which determines their honor because the first is the last. He says: "The M, W, and N, whose last is their first, have neither first nor last. Know, may God guide you, that letters are a secret of God Almighty, and knowledge of them is among the most noble sciences stored with God."

The honor of these letters lies in their rounded shape, with the M pointing downwards, the W pointing upwards, and the N originating from the letter L, which consists of two letters: A and the hollow of the L. The latter is the lower nun. This is what the Great Sheikh says about these rounded letters: "What appears of it in the number is only half a circle, like what appears of the heavens and like what appears of creation, for the creation of the world is spherical, half of it is visible and half of it is unseen."

Theology of Manifestations

Souad Ayada addresses Sufi theology through the idea of manifestations, emphasizing that Sufism is the practice of what she calls "Islam of manifestations," combining the transcendent meanings of monotheism with analogical meanings. Looking at truth from only one perspective is a fall into what she calls "reductionist epistemology," which has resulted in religious intolerance as a rejection of contemplative mediation, i.e., the practice of shaping realities into images and ranks, and thus hostility toward representation.

Souad Ayada believes that the possibility of constructing an Islamic aesthetics is most strongly present in Ibn Arabi's treatment of the theory of existence and ethics, through the following issues:

1. The idea of manifestations, as a metaphysical horizon for God's relationship with the world, defined by existential media and ranks.
2. The assertion that, in the gnostic perspective, God is moral, based on the attribute of mercy (mercy preceding wrath).

The concept of divine mercy occupies a central place in Ibn Arabi's thought, derived from divine wisdom, manifested in various forms in the practice of the prophets. Ibn Arabi's purpose is to return this concept—mercy—to its divine origin, that is, to the divine names manifested in the world, and the existence of the prophets is nothing but the actualization of this mercy in the world. This manifestation brings the existential meanings of truth out of their abstraction, because, as Suad Ayad sees it, abstract reduction is based on an authoritarian moral religion.

5. The aesthetics of manifestations or aesthetic composition

The aesthetics of gnostic ethics are guided by the laws of virtue and the avoidance of vice. Through these laws, a merciful existence is achieved, through which the human soul is refined to embody acts of goodness and benevolence by awakening a hidden and mystical world, which is the world of feelings shared by all people and all religions. With this feeling, aesthetic composition is achieved as a free creative act, subject neither to reason, nor to the senses, nor to ordinary imagination, but rather to free and creative imagination. With the latter, Sufi aesthetics is built outside of any interest or benefit, because the world of feelings expands to include the other and the dissenting through scientific companionship as a spiritual and emotional relationship.

In scientific companionship, the spiritual relationship with others is directed toward coexistence, thereby liberating humans from doctrinal authority by developing human tastes aesthetically, connecting them with life and its spiritual meanings. Ibn Arabi crystallized this aesthetic approach to life in his encounter with an image-maker from Konya, saying: "I was impressed by what I saw in Konya, Greece, in an image-maker we had tested, who benefited us in his craft with his imagination, which he did not have. One day, he painted a bird and concealed a flaw in it that was imperceptible, and he brought it to us to test our judgment of painting. We had a falcon, and when he saw it, he released it from his hands, and it ran towards it with its feet, imagining that it was a bird in its image, with the colors of its feathers. Those present marveled at his skill, and he said to me: What do you say about this image? I said to him: It is perfect, except that there is a hidden flaw... I said to him: Her legs are slightly too long in proportion to the image. He stood up, kissed my head, and said: I did that on purpose to test you."

The encounter with the image-maker from Konya reflects a judgmental attitude toward the act of image-making, as expressed by the "Great Sheikh" in his statement about what was missing from the image-maker's picture, namely the spiritual component, or life, symbolized by the hair. The life of the picture is in the body, which is nothing but a form, as image-makers define it, but its meaning lies in its hidden depth, which is those feelings that cannot be depicted, but are the subject of feeling because they are the source of manifestations. Ibn Arabi calls on the image-maker to adopt the "balance of image-making," because, in his view, it is necessary to connect image-making with manifestation in order to adopt the divine name of the image-maker. He says: "From this name they take, and it is the source of image-makers' skill in the balance of good images..."

A bishop of the daughters of the spirit, unemployed
You see on her the lights of law

Beauty stripped of embellishments carries in its gaze the divine secret of enlightenment, stripped of the cosmetic enhancements women add to their bodies. This is what makes her—the system—the embodiment of moral perfection, for with her knowledge and refinement, she is a model of pure goodness.

As a result, aesthetic knowledge combines "constancy and color": It is specific knowledge about "Ibn Arabi" as "stability in color," meaning that it is a collection of tastes whose source is the people of the face. The people of the hands only take it through the mediation of the people of the face, just as the people of the face only obtained it from those images, they did not obtain it from the face. The reason for this is that those sciences have different tastes, and the face has no difference.

The owners of the face are described as the people of manifestation, for they are knowledgeable about the truth in its entirety (its unity), while the owners of the hands are the people of detailed truths. The owners of the hands have no choice but to take from the owners of the face in order to preserve what Ibn Arabi calls "the moderate viewer," in order to preserve the gift of names in creativity. For this reason, the "Great Sheikh" of Konya warned of the importance of this gift—the gift of names—for image-makers, because the power of creativity is the combination of majesty and beauty, of permanence and color, as long as the aesthetic goal is gnostic, which is to follow the movement of manifestations.

Conclusion

Basing ethics on what is spiritual and aesthetic is to build a universal vision of existence and truth, beyond identity-based isolation, because an aesthetic view of life makes humans beings who belong to humanity and its majestic ethics—aesthetics. It is that beautiful belonging, an identity open to others, beyond any ideological fanaticism, and belonging to humanity and to the universe in general, which is to preserve and protect life, not to destroy it through killing or violence, by making it a "work of art," as Michel Maffesoli sees it. This deepens the judgmental view based on moderation, in which ethical practices are embodied aesthetically and tastefully.

Maghrebi Francophone Fiction and the Promotion of an Islamic Heritage in Constant Evolution

Under the Sky of Oran by Najib Redouane as an example

Paper presented by: Noureddine Fadily — Hassan I University of Settat (Morocco)

General framing

From its very beginnings, Maghrebi literature written in French has attached particular importance to Islamic heritage, which more decisively shapes both the characters' motivations and the narrative's overall direction.

Under the Sky of Oran is a novel by Najib Redouane that revisits Algerian history before and after colonization. This historical backdrop provides the stage for human and existential situations, while also offering the reader an invitation to discover religious practices and rituals that define the protagonists' spiritual well-being—at once a source of comfort and a yearning for freedom and for justice, both individual and collective.

Purpose of the study

The analysis seeks to clarify two complementary dimensions:

• To examine the Islamic landscape in terms of rituals, relationships, and practices, considering both their durability and their transformations.
• To foreground the aesthetics of Islamic heritage as it is shaped and narrated in the novel.

The Islamic landscape in the novel

Beyond the historical information it conveys, the novel traces Algerian culture through its attachment to religious values and its cautious encounter with modernity. Religious reference points permeate cultural practices specific to Algerian society and to its Arab-Muslim identity.

The narrative alternates between moments of joy and periods of sorrow. Happy and painful occasions alike provide opportunities to return to religious rituals that constitute an unmistakable identity. Weddings, engagements, religious feasts, and funerals punctuate the story's chronological unfolding, functioning as a background that resonates with the broader Arab-Muslim civilizational horizon.

An example of a somber event

As the deceased is accompanied to a final resting place, funeral rites come to the fore as a way of presenting local customs.

The first stage is the washing of the dead. Those who perform the washing must purify themselves beforehand. The unclothed body is placed on an elevated table, oriented toward Mecca. While the deceased's private parts are covered with an opaque cloth, the washers begin with the left hand, slide a piece of fabric underneath, remove all traces of blood, gently empty the abdomen, pack wounds with cotton, and cleanse the teeth, mouth, and nose.

It is imperative to start on the left side before moving to the right, and to proceed from top to bottom during the ablutions, beginning with the head and face. For the ritual to be properly carried out, it is advised not to turn the body face-down against the table. This solemn moment is performed with particular attentiveness, accompanied by Qur'anic recitations and devotional invocations.

The body is washed with soap, dried three consecutive times with clean white cloths, and wrapped in a white cotton shroud. Before enclosing the body in the shroud, the washers perfume it with musk. A whole sequence then follows:

"The three sheets were slipped under the remains, their corners sprinkled with musk, then folded one after the other—the left panel first, then the right, and so on for each layer. The whole was secured with strips that they tied at the head, the sides, and the feet." (Under the Sky of Oran, p. 204)

The next stage is to transport the body to the mosque. In a room in the basement, a man stands facing the coffin and chants Qur'anic verses. Farewells are said at the end of this recitation. Immediately afterward, the community awaits the funeral prayer, performed before the coffin that contains the body and is draped in a cover embroidered with Qur'anic verses. Following the prayer, the shroud is placed in the ambulance, and a procession heads to the cemetery, where the body is laid in the grave before being covered with stone slabs and earth. The burial takes place as the Qur'an is read, followed by prayers of leave-taking.

An example of a joyful event

Accounts of joy are likewise tied to religious feasts and make visible cultural practices rooted in ancestral traditions. The narrative recalls the protagonists' happiness as the Feast of Sacrifice approaches and is celebrated. The sheep is the emblematic animal, and selecting it is done with meticulous care: one ensures it is uninjured by lifting it from the hindquarters and palpating the lumbar vertebrae and tail. Once the ideal ovine animal has been chosen, it is brought to the home and welcomed with ululations.

The ritual slaughter begins after the Eid prayer. The sacrificial area is set up beside a pit (called mejra) that serves as a drainage channel to facilitate the immolation. The debbah slaughters the sheep, on whose forehead a patch of henna has been placed. At the same time, people hurry to remove the blood spilled during the slaughter, and "set about cleaning the offal and preparing the first day's meal, reserved for charcoal grilling of el-fwad: skewers and melfouf. Meanwhile, the men carried the heads and feet to an oven to treat them with fire and thus remove any remaining fleece. To celebrate this family feast in grand fashion, dinner included a tagine with bouselouf and couscous with osbane." (Under the Sky of Oran, p. 111)

The aesthetics of Islamic heritage

The novel's construction gradually and chronologically reveals "the novel's capacity to draw temporal and historical links—links that can be understood as symbolic, as ties that figure, over time, the relations of the self to itself, of the self to others, and of others to others, within the evident singularity of contemporary representations." (Jean Bessière, The Contemporary Novel, or the Problematics of the World, p. 149)

Muslim identity forms the narrative's pivot. The continuity of religious practices and the attachment to Muslim rituals make the story a crossroads where tradition and modernity intersect. The older generation remains closely bound to Muslim values; through its actions, teaching, and learning, it ensures both the prominence and the endurance of an Islamic heritage in constant evolution.

Siham AMRAOUI

Axis 1: Ethics and Aesthetics in Islamic Heritage: History, Language, and Philosophy

Sufi Ethics and Dystopian Aesthetics in Naguib Mahfouz's The Journey of Ibn Fattouma

The novel opens with a sentence that functions as a metaphysical threshold: "Life and death, dream and wakefulness: phases the bewildered soul passes through step by step, gathering signs and clues, groping in the ocean of darkness, clinging stubbornly to a hope that is renewed, and smiling enigmatically" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 5). With this incipit, Naguib Mahfouz immediately warns the reader: Ibn Fattouma's journey (Qindil's journey) will not be a simple geographical displacement on a physical map. From the outset, it is an oneiric and spiritual architecture. The "stages" mentioned are not mere cities, but maqāmāt—stations in the soul's bewilderment before a world that has lost its meaning. The journey is thus presented not as a conquest of space, but as a navigation through an "ocean of darkness" in search of a light that the material world seems to have extinguished.

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma was published in 1983, a period marked by profound political disillusionment in the Arab world—and in Egypt in particular—following Sadat's assassination and the exhaustion of the major twentieth-century ideologies. The work represents a radical metamorphosis of the classical genre of the Arabic riḥla (travel narrative), notably parodying the famous fourteenth-century travels of Ibn Battuta. Yet whereas Ibn Battuta journeyed through geographical space to document the unity of Dār al-Islām, Mahfouz's protagonist travels through historical time. The novel (1983) traces the spiritual and political quest of Qindil, a man disenchanted with his homeland, who sets out in search of an ideal society called Dār al-Jabal. Along the way, he crosses a series of symbolic lands, each named "Dār," representing different institutional models: tribalism (Dār al-Mashriq), theocracy (Dār al-Ḥayra), liberalism (Dār al-Ḥalba), and totalitarian security (Dār al-Amn). Each "Dār" initially appears as a utopia, but ultimately reveals its internal contradictions, moral decay, and spiritual emptiness. The novel becomes a philosophical allegory in which the failure of each system reflects the deep crisis of meaning in human existence.

Mahfouz abandons the social realism of his earlier works (such as The Cairo Trilogy) in favor of a universal allegory structured around exile from Dār al-Islām. Qindil thus explores the "ruins" of human history, visiting lands (Dārs) that function as archetypes of failing political systems: Mashriq's primitive tribalism, Ḥayra's absolute authoritarianism, Ḥalba's capitalist freedom, and Aman's communist security. Each land is a "false utopia": a political experiment that promised happiness but delivered only corruption and spiritual emptiness.

To grasp Mahfouz's critical strategy fully, it is essential to situate his narrative at the intersection of two conceptual axes: the ethics of the Sufi path and the aesthetics of dystopia. Sufi ethics—particularly in thinkers such as al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabī—is not a doctrine of withdrawal but of disciplined inner transformation (tazkiyat al-nafs), whereby truth is reached through progressive stages of unveiling (kashf). Against this inward ethics, Mahfouz constructs an outward aesthetics of deception. Each Dār seems to embody a utopia—peace, equality, security—yet is revealed to be a dystopia in disguise. The term "utopia," coined by Thomas More in 1516, originally designated a "no-place" (from the Greek ou-topos): an ideal society that exists nowhere. Its dark double, dystopia, emerges when those ideals are betrayed—when the promise of justice becomes a mechanism of oppression. Mahfouz's genius lies in staging this betrayal repeatedly, making the reader complicit in the hope—and the disillusion—generated by each political system. The novel is therefore not merely a critique of external regimes; it is a meditation on the impossibility of earthly salvation without inner transfiguration.

To understand this trajectory, one must recognize that Mahfouz—trained as a philosopher—deploys mysticism not as an escape from reality, but as a critical weapon, a tool for denouncing the failures of materialist and institutional worldviews. The journey functions as a "waking dream," to borrow Ernst Bloch's concept (Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, p. 3): a dream not of evasion, but of confrontation. Significantly, the novel begins with a scene that blurs the boundaries between memory and dream, suggesting that Qindil narrates not only a journey but a symbolic vision shaped by a deep historical trauma.

We posit that the political corruption observed in the cities is the symptom of a deeper illness. The state's outward tyranny is merely a projection of the inner disease of the human heart. Consequently, the text operates on two levels: a psychoanalytic level, where the cities represent the collective "return of the repressed" (the violence and neuroses of history), each Dār repeating—pathologically—the unresolved tensions of human history, from primitive violence to hypermodern control; and a Sufi level, where repetition signals not the failure of evolution but a disorientation of the heart. Healing, as Mahfouz suggests, does not lie in institutional reform.

This brings us to the central questions of our analysis:

• How does the dystopian aesthetics deployed in the depiction of each Dār reveal the internal contradictions and ethical decay of institutional systems?
• In what way does Sufi ethics offer an alternative vision of justice that transcends political reform?
• How does the narrative silence surrounding Dār al-Jabal function as a strategy for protecting the utopian ideal from corruption?

Our argument unfolds in three stages:

1. The geography of dystopias.
2. Sufi ethics: diagnosing diseased hearts.
3. Dār al-Jabal / Al-Bidāya: a protected utopia in the Invisible.

I. The Geography of Dystopias: "Retrotopias" and the Return of the Repressed

This section analyzes the failure of the cities visited by Qindil not simply as geographical places, but as a pathology of human history. We argue that the Dārs represented in the novel are not steps toward progress; they are manifestations of historical regression.

1. Cities as "retrotopias" (Zygmunt Bauman's analysis)

The cities through which Qindil passes—Mashriq, Ḥayra, Ḥalba, Aman, al-Ghuroub—function as what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls "retrotopias": "It is this double negation of 'Morean' utopia—negation of its negation—that currently generates 'retrotopias': visions which, instead of being linked, like their 'ancestors,' to a not-yet-born and therefore nonexistent future, take root in a lost/escaped/abandoned past that nonetheless continues to exist in ghostly form" (Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia, p. 13). Bauman argues that when a society loses faith in the future and becomes unable to imagine a new horizon, it inevitably turns toward the past, recycling old models to provide a false sense of security. Mahfouz's cities perfectly match this diagnosis: they are worlds that, unable to envisage a genuine future, regress into historical repetitions.

Mashriq (The Land of the Rising Sun)

This land represents a regression toward primitive tribalism and pure instinct. It reflects the "return to tribes" described by Bauman as a reaction to the confusion of the modern world. In Mashriq, society is organized around pagan moon worship and a sexual permissiveness that precedes the establishment of moral law:

"Fām puffed himself up: 'He brought architects and workers from Dār al-Ḥayra, and furnished it with the finest furniture and works of art that Dār al-Ḥalba prides itself on producing…' I paused for a moment of silence before saying: 'Sayyid Fām, tell me about your religion…' 'The people of al-Mashriq worship the moon. On the night of the full moon the divinity appears in its perfection, and they gather in the desert to pray around the priest; then they perform the rituals by dancing, singing, getting drunk, and making love…'" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 21).

This is humanity's childhood, where "primitive" instincts are fully unleashed—illustrating the stage prior to culture that Freud evokes when he writes that "it is impossible not to see to what a great extent the edifice of civilization is built upon the renunciation of instinctual satisfactions, and how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction … of powerful instincts" (Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 28). Qindil observes a society that has not yet acceded to reason, representing the oldest and rawest stage of human association.

Ḥayra (The Land of Confusion)

Ḥayra represents a return to the feudal model of the God-King and sovereign inequality. Here, regression is political: the ruler claims absolute divinity, declaring, "The land of Ḥayra is the land of Gebel" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 43). This city recycles the historical trauma of absolute monarchy and despotism. It is a retrotopia that seeks stability through the subject's total submission to a deified authority, effectively canceling human autonomy and repeating the "nightmare of history" in which power is centralized in a single terrifying figure.

Aman (The Land of Security)

Aman is a critique of the totalitarian security state (in parallel with a failed communist model). Bauman notes that in the absence of a viable future, societies often trade freedom for security, creating a closed system: "the spirit of utopia … is to reconcile, at last, security and freedom—an achievement that the original vision and its first negation did not attempt, or failed to accomplish" (Bauman, Zygmunt, p. 16). Aman offers justice and employment for all, but at the price of annihilating the individual. Qindil is told—while being shown the Citadel—that "This is the court of history. Here the enemies of the people have been sentenced to death" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 111). It is a society where individual freedom is punishable by death and where "the law is sacred!" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 113). Here the state replaces God, and the "horizon" is deliberately closed by government to prevent any vision beyond the material world.

2. The Freudian Dream: History as Neurosis

We now move from a sociological analysis of "retrotopias" to a psychoanalytic reading. If the Dārs are regressions, they function in the narrative as "anxiety dreams." We propose that Qindil's journey is not merely spatial exploration but a descent into the traumatic memory of the human species, in which the "repressed" elements of history return to haunt the present.

The return of the repressed

Freud posits that civilization is built upon the repression of primitive instincts, particularly aggression and immediate gratification (Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 28). However, the "uncanny" (das Unheimliche) emerges when what has been repressed reappears: "If psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed into anxiety by repression, it follows that among anxiety cases there will be a group in which it can be demonstrated that what is frightening is something repressed that has returned" (Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, p. 56). In The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, the cities visited by Qindil represent precisely such a return.

• Mashriq (the primitive): In Dār al-Mashriq, Qindil confronts humanity's "infantile," uninhibited stage: nudity, moon cult, and the absence of moral law—where one hears: "We know neither eternity nor paradise; we have only the night of the full moon!" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 29). This is not a "new" society, but the resurgence of primordial instincts that modern civilization (represented by Islam or Western liberalism) believed it had overcome.
• Ḥayra (the despotic father): In Dār al-Ḥayra (the Land of Bewilderment), repression takes the form of the "God-King." This society embodies the traumatic memory of the "primordial father": the absolute tyrant who demands total submission and whose authority is maintained through the spectacle of violence (heads on stakes). Freud argues that the "compulsion to repeat" (Wiederholungszwang) is a feature of neurosis, whereby the subject unconsciously repeats a traumatic event: "The automatism of repetition … the man suffering from traumatic neurosis …" (Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, p. 23). Ḥayra is a historical repetition of the trauma of tyranny.

The novel suggests that humanity is trapped in a neurotic cycle. Mahfouz is famously attentive to time's passage and to the mutability of civilizations; yet in these cities, time does not lead to progress—it loops back to violence.

Just as Freud maintained that the unconscious ignores time and that the repressed remains unchanged, Bloch notes: "The only function Freud recognizes for the unconscious is to collect what has been rejected elsewhere. Or, at most, it would be an Id encircling the conscious like a closed ring: a sort of inherited instance, transmitted by tribal memory and enveloping the conscious human being" (Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, p. 61). The Dārs exist in a suspended temporality in which ancient crimes (war, slavery, idolatry) are perpetually replayed. Through a Freudian lens, we understand that Qindil does not travel toward "new" places; he uncovers an archaeology of human suffering. The failure of these societies is the symptom of their inability to assimilate their own history, condemning them to repeat it as dystopia.

II. Sufi Ethics: The Guide and the Diagnosis of Diseased Hearts

Having established that the novel's political systems operate as neurotic repetitions of history, we now turn to the Sufi remedy. Mahfouz suggests that the political failure of these cities is fundamentally a spiritual failure.

1. The journey as unveiling (isfār): an aesthetics of allegory

A. The initiatory structure of the journey (safar)

The narrative structure of The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is not merely picaresque; it is initiatory. We should interpret the journey (safar) through its etymological and mystical link to unveiling (isfār). As al-Qushayrī and Ibn ʿArabī note, the word safar (journey) shares a root with isfār (unveiling / dawning). The Sufi tradition holds that a journey is so named because it "unveils the character of men" (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 135). Ibn ʿArabī further explains that it is also linked—both in its sense of travel and its sense of lifting a veil—to danger: the first because of the obvious perils inherent to any journey, and the second because, in times and places where it is customary for a woman to veil her face, her unveiling is an ominous sign of something troubling (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 135).

Qindil's passage through the Dārs is thus a pretext for an inward revelation. He is not a tourist observing foreign customs; he is an "individual outside the world," to borrow Louis Dumont's concept of the renouncer—one who deliberately separates from the social order in order to diagnose its pathologies and seek an absolute truth no earthly city can contain (Elmarsafy, Ziad. Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, p. 4). He lifts the "veil" of political rhetoric imposed by leaders (Ḥayra's God-King, Aman's technocrats) to expose the repressed reality of human suffering and the underlying corruption.

B. The structure of the maqāmāt (stations) and the closure of the horizon

Mahfouz subverts the traditional Sufi structure of the maqāmāt (spiritual stations). In classical hagiography, the traveler ascends from station to station (repentance, patience, trust), drawing ever closer to God. In the novel, each city (Dār) represents a "petrified station" (maqām), defined by Ibn ʿArabī as follows: the station is the fruit of the efforts of those who follow the spiritual path; it is generally permanent, accompanying the disciple along the path and disappearing only if certain circumstances justify its removal. In reality, the station is acquired through works; it implies striving, reaching, seeking. Through the station, gnostics attain perfection. It is a good never taken from them, never hidden or veiled; it is constant (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 244). In Mahfouz, the "station" is no longer a rung in spiritual ascent; it becomes a stage of historical arrest. Mashriq is frozen in the station of primitive instincts; Ḥayra is frozen in the station of authoritarian idolatry.

The circularity of Qindil's journey—constantly seeking a perfection that eludes him, often ending in prison or exile—illustrates what Fredric Jameson calls the need for "utopian closure" (Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia, p. 290). The traveler feels he is advancing, but he is trapped in a loop of "retrotopias" because these societies refuse to open themselves to the Transcendent. They are closed horizons that try to force the absolute into a material and political form—inevitably producing dystopia.

C. Ibn ʿArabī's contribution: the infinite journey

To break this closure, Mahfouz mobilizes Ibn ʿArabī's metaphysics.

• The infinite journey: For Ibn ʿArabī, the journey toward Truth (ḥaqīqa) "has no end, neither in this world nor in the hereafter." In the prologue of The Secrets of Voyaging (Kitāb al-Isfār), he adds: "In reality, we never cease traveling—from the moment we and our roots are created—without end" (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 43). If the earthly world (the Dārs) appears as a dystopian loop, it is because it denies this infinite nature of the quest. The cities attempt to say "We have arrived" (we are the perfect state), whereas Sufi ethics is that of perpetual movement.
• The return to the self: At the end of his own spiritual path, Ibn ʿArabī realizes that "the journey he had made was only within himself, and it was toward himself that he had been guided" (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 3). Likewise, Qindil's journey is a return to his own "heart."

III. Dār al-Jabal: The Utopia of the Invisible (The Theoretical Pivot)

In this crucial section, we show how Mahfouz transcends the dystopian impasse of the Dārs by shifting the very concept of utopia from the political map into the domain of the Invisible (al-ghayb).

1. A protected utopia: the strategy of the unsaid

A. "Saving repression": a utopia outside the text

Unlike the detailed sociological and political descriptions provided for Mashriq, Ḥayra, Ḥalba, and Aman, the land of Dār al-Jabal (Gebel) is never described in the manuscript. It remains structurally "outside the text." The novel ends precisely at the moment of arrival, at the foot of the mountain, when the caravan leader declares: "This is where the caravan ends" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 96). The text refuses to cross the threshold. We argue that this silence is not a lack of imagination, but a deliberate narrative strategy.

B. Protecting the ideal: from "eutopia" to "u-topia"

Had Mahfouz described Dār al-Jabal, he would inevitably have made it finite—and therefore corruptible. As Bauman observes, when utopian projects are fixed to a specific topos (a state or sovereign territory), they tend to lose their future-oriented momentum and regress into "retrotopias," recycling past models of security or tribalism (Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia, p. 13). If Gebel were described as a concrete city, it would risk resembling Aman (communist security) or Ḥalba (capitalist freedom), both of which fail to deliver "total purity." By leaving Gebel undescribed, Mahfouz protects it from becoming a retrotopia.

We interpret Gebel through the concept of "anticipatory consciousness." Jameson argues that the authentic utopian function is driven by an anticipatory consciousness that reaches toward what has not yet come to pass, because it refers to real possibilities not yet actualized, since they have not yet fulfilled all the conditions of their realization (Jameson, Fredric, The Politics of Utopia, p. 8). Such realization is often accompanied by a "melancholy of fulfillment," since reality never matches the dream.

Gebel is thus a "wish-image" (Wunschbild) that guides the traveler while refusing to congeal into a material "fact," in Bloch's sense: "interested wishing is the 'melody of the drive'; it is what liberates the will and whispers to it what it must will" (Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, p. 51). It remains a u-topia in the strict etymological sense (from Greek ou-topos): a "no-place," a place that exists nowhere in the physical world and therefore cannot be corrupted by history.

2. The passage to kashf (direct unveiling)

A. Beyond political reason

The necessity of access to kashf at Dār al-Jabal is structurally different from access to the previous cities. Whereas Mashriq, Ḥayra, and Aman can be analyzed through sociology or political science (Freud/Bauman), Gebel resists rational categorization.

Definition of kashf

In Sufi doctrine—especially in Ibn ʿArabī and al-Qushayrī—kashf ("unveiling") is a state of direct divine disclosure attained not by the intellect but by the "unveiling of the heart" after spiritual struggle. Kashf enables human beings to transcend the boundaries of sensory perception and reasoning, opening insight into the essence of God—an access pure reason alone cannot achieve (Hidayatulloh, Taufik. Ibn ʿArabī's Hermeneutics, p. 65). It is a knowledge that bypasses sensory and rational faculties, allowing divine truths to pour directly into the heart.

The limits of reason

Mahfouz suggests that political reason—the reason that built Aman's and Ḥalba's failed systems—is insufficient for the final stage. As Ibn ʿArabī maintains, one who confines himself to rational arguments cannot receive divine knowledge; the spiritual world lies "beyond the intellect" (Abrahamov, Binyamin. Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Sufis, p. 159). Qindil cannot enter Gebel as a mere traveler; he must "unveil" it.

B. Ghuroub as a chamber of ascetic discipline (khalwa)

Before reaching the mountain, Qindil must cross Dār al-Ghuroub (the Land of the Setting Sun). Within the narrative economy, this land functions as a Sufi khalwa (spiritual retreat).

Purifying the heart

In Ghuroub, the Sage teaches that those preparing for Gebel must draw out "hidden powers" from within themselves and purge "depraved desires" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 91). This echoes the Sufi practice of tazkiya (purification of the soul), a prerequisite for receiving maʿrifa (gnosis).

C. Not "The End" (nihāya), but "The Beginning" (al-bidāya)

The most important structural element of the novel is the title of its final chapter. Instead of ending with "The End" (nihāya), Mahfouz titles the last stage "Al-Bidāya" ("The Beginning") (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 95).

The metaphysical cycle

This choice transforms the narrative from a linear geographical quest into a metaphysical cycle. In Sufi cosmology—particularly in Ibn ʿArabī—the journey toward the Real has no end: "the journey has no end, neither in this life nor in the hereafter" (Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging, p. 7). Arrival at the mountain's foot is not a conclusion but the beginning of a higher cycle of existence.

An open horizon

The manuscript ends with Qindil standing at the foot of the mountain, gazing at a summit "that rose to the clouds and defied the will" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 134), where the caravan stops. By refusing to write "The End," Mahfouz suggests that true utopia is not a destination one reaches and possesses (which would make it a static retrotopia), but a perpetual beginning—an infinite opening toward the Divine.

3. The sovereignty of al-ghayb (Sufi transcendence)

A. The final seal: the limits of the text and the authority of the Invisible

The novel ends not with political victory nor with the colonization of a new land; it concludes with a theological resignation that operates as an epistemological shift. The manuscript closes with a Qurʾanic formula: "Only He knows—He who knows what is hidden and what is manifest" (ʿĀlim al-ghaybi wa ash-shahāda) (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 135).

Transfer of authority

By invoking this Qurʾanic attribute of God, Mahfouz transfers the authority of "Truth" from the human narrator (Qindil / the traveler) to the Divine. The text acknowledges its own incapacity to grasp the Absolute.

The two worlds

This ending rests on the Ghazālian distinction between the World of the Visible (ʿĀlam al-Shahāda, perceived by the senses) and the Domain of the Invisible (ʿĀlam al-Ghayb, perceived by the light of the heart): "This relation is of the same nature as that which exists between the visible world and the invisible world. By the visible world—also called ʿĀlam al-Shahāda—I mean the world perceived by the senses; and by the invisible world—also called ʿĀlam al-Ghayb—I mean the world perceived by the light of the spirit. The heart belongs to the invisible world, while the members of the body and their activities belong to the visible world" (al-Ghazālī. Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn: The Revival of the Religious Sciences, p. 241). Qindil has traversed the shahāda (the visible political systems of the Dārs) and found them insufficient. The ending indicates that the solution lies beyond the physical map, in the ghayb—a domain "without limits" and infinite in contrast to the finite visible world.

Conclusion

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma functions not only as a picaresque novel but also as a "waking dream" (Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, p. 3) in Bloch's sense: a narrative structure that does not flee reality but reshapes it through the projection of a "wish-image" (Wunschbild) (Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, p. 51). Through this dreamlike prism, Mahfouz diagnoses the neuroses of history.

• Drawing on Freud, we established that the cities visited by Qindil (Mashriq, Ḥayra, Ḥalba, Aman) are not progressive stages of evolution but pathological repetitions. They illustrate the "discontents" of civilization, in which social order is purchased at the high cost of repressing spiritual freedom and instinctual life, generating a collective neurosis.
• These societies also function as "retrotopias" (Zygmunt Bauman): unable to project a viable future, they regressively recycle past models—tribalism, feudalism, or totalitarian security—to ward off the anxieties of the present.

Our analysis revealed the need for a theoretical division of labor in order to capture the full scope of the novel:

• Pathology (the Dārs): We used psychoanalysis to decode the sickness of the Dārs. These cities operate through a mechanism of pathological repression: they suffocate spiritual needs in order to maintain rigid political control. Yet, as Freud explains with regard to the Unheimliche (the uncanny), what is repressed inevitably returns in the form of symptoms—violence and hypocrisy (Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, p. 23).
• Remedy (orientation): Psychoanalysis reaches its epistemological limits at the gates of Gebel. To grasp Mahfouz's proposed solution, we turned to Sufism. The remedy is not political but ontological: an orientation toward the Invisible (al-ghayb). As al-Ghazālī teaches, healing the "diseased heart" is not a change of regime, but purification (tazkiya) that enables the perception of the "Domain of the Invisible" beyond the corrupted visible world.

The novel demonstrates that political systems fail when they attempt to embody the utopian ideal fully in the material world, transforming it into a "closed horizon" (Fredric Jameson). To address this problem, Mahfouz employs a narrative strategy that we define as "saving de-repression" (dé-redoulement).

• Mechanism of protection: Unlike the pathological repression present in the Dārs, "de-repression" is a deliberate literary act in which the author "represses" the description of Utopia (Dār al-Jabal) by leaving it outside the text. By keeping Gebel "off-text," Mahfouz protects the Ideal from the corruption of time, language, and historical decay.
• From utopia to u-topia: This strategy aligns with the definition of u-topia as a "no-place." Gebel is not a place to be colonized; it remains a pure aspiration. By refusing to describe it, Mahfouz prevents it from becoming finite and corruptible. It remains the "not-yet" (Noch-Nicht) described by Bloch—a real possibility that has not yet manifested in history.

The convergence of Sufi ethics (Ibn ʿArabī) and the philosophy of hope (Bloch) culminates in the novel's open ending.

• The horizon of kashf: The journey ends not in political victory but in spiritual opening. Access to truth is no longer a matter of geographical travel but of kashf (revelation). The true city is not built by force; it is revealed to the purified heart.
• The eternal cycle: The final sentence—"Only He knows—He who knows what is hidden and what is manifest" (Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, p. 136)—is the ethical key of the work. By anchoring ultimate utopia in the Invisible (al-ghayb), Mahfouz frees it from the inevitable failure of human history. The journey is transformed from a linear quest into an infinite cycle (al-bidāya / the beginning), ensuring that even if political systems collapse, the human aspiration to the Absolute remains an indestructible and eternal promise.

Yet if Mahfouz anchors the utopian horizon in the Invisible (al-ghayb), it is not to close the narrative but to reopen it. The dystopian ruins Qindil encounters are not an end in themselves; they are the soil from which something else may emerge—something unexpected. In Derrida's terms, what matters is not the future in the ordinary sense, but the à-venir: a future-to-come that is irreducible to any institutional scheme.

Can the Sufi ethics of interiority and detachment still offer—amid the ruins of failing systems—the necessary conditions for imagining a justice that has not yet come to pass?

Bibliography

• Mahfouz, Naguib. Le Voyage d'Ibn Fattouma. Translated by Martine Houssay, Anchor Sindbad / ACTES SUD, 2021.
• Bloch, Ernst. Le Principe espérance. Translated from German by Françoise Wuilmart, 3 vols., Gallimard, 1976–1991.
• Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Polity Press, 2017.
• Freud, Sigmund. Malaise dans la civilisation. Translated by Ch. and J. Odier, Payot, 2010.
• Freud, Sigmund. "L'inquiétante étrangeté." Essais de psychanalyse appliquée, translated by Marie Bonaparte et al., Gallimard, 1933.
• Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyiddīn. The Secrets of Voyaging: Kitāb al-Isfār ʿan Natāʾij al-Asfār. Translated by Angela Jaffray, Anqa Publishing, 2015.
• Jameson, Fredric. "The Politics of Utopia." New Left Review, no. 25, Jan.–Feb. 2004.
• Jameson, Fredric. Archéologies du futur: Le désir nommé utopie et autres sciences-fiction. Translated from English by Nicolas Calvé, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2007.
• Abrahamov, Binyamin. Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Sufis. Anqa Publishing, 2014.
• Al-Ghazālī. Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn: The Revival of the Religious Sciences. Vol. 1, translated by Fazlul Karim, Islamic Book Service, 2008.
• Elmarsafy, Ziad. Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
• Hidayatulloh, Taufik, et al. "Ibn ʿArabī's Hermeneutics as an Alternative Religious Exegesis for Contemporary Urban Muslim Communities." Akademika, vol. 30, no. 1, 2025.

Mohamed Ben Mansour
ENS de Lyon

Defining Beauty in Islam: Oscillation Between Submission and Transgression of Ethical Norms

"Variations on the Good and the Beautiful, the Sayable and the Unsayable"

Introduction

A double judgement

• Aesthetic: the beauty of images and metaphors, figures of speech, and the architecture of the verse.
• Ethical: respect for—or transgression of—ethical norms: morality and religious prescriptions.

Guiding questions

• Is the moral dimension superior to aesthetic considerations?
• Can ethics and aesthetics be separated when judging a line of verse or a poem?

I. The School of Beauty

Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān, p. 31

سموتُ إليها بعدَ ما نامَ أهلُها ... سموَّ حبابِ الماءِ حالاً على حال

فقالتْ: سَباكَ اللهُ إنَّكَ فاضِحٌ ... أترى سُمايَ الناسِ حولي أَوِ النا

فقلتُ: يمينَ اللهِ أبرحُ قاعداً ... ولو قطعوا رأسي لديكِ وأوصالي

Translation by Pierre Larcher (Arabica, vol. 40, no. 1, March 1993, p. 122) — rendered here in English:

1. I rose to her when her people had fallen asleep,
Like bubbles of water, little by little.

2. "May God take you!" she said to me, "you are my disgrace!
Do you not see the watchers and the people all around?"

3. "By God," I replied, "I will not move from where I sit,
Even if they cut off my head before you—and my limbs."

⇒ An ethico-political controversy.

Ibn Rashīq, Kitāb al-ʿUmda — Chapter on the new and the unprecedented

بابُالمخترعُوالبديع المخترعُمنُالشعرُهوُ:ماُلمُيسبقُإليهُقائلهُ،ولُعملُأحدُمنُالشعراءُقبلهُنظيرهُأوُماُيقربُمنهُ،كقولُامرئُالقيس: سموت إليها بعد ما نام أهلها ... سمو حباب الماء حالا على حال فإنهُأولُمنُطرقُهذاُالمعنىُوابتكرهُ،وسلمُالشعراءُإليهُ،فلمُينازعهُأحدُإياه.

"In poetry, al-mukhtaraʿ (the unprecedented) refers to whatever has been invented by a poet—something for which none of his predecessors produced an equivalent or even a close analogue. This is the case with Imruʾ al-Qays's line:

'I rose to her when her people had fallen asleep, / Like bubbles of water, little by little.'

Imruʾ al-Qays was the first to bring forth and coin this poetic image. Once other poets acknowledged this, none could claim its paternity."

Al-ʿAskarī, Kitāb al-Ṣināʿatayn

وضر ٌب منه آخر، ومنه قول امرئ القيس: سموت إليها بعد ما نام أهلها ... سمو حبابِ الماءِ حال على حال فحذفُحرفُالتشبيهُ.

"He omitted the comparative particle."

Ibn al-Muʿtazz, Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ

ومما يستحسن له، وإن كان شعره حسناا جيداا،

"Among his fine compositions—even though his poetry as a whole is of very high quality…"

Al-Āmidī, al-Muwāzana

He considers it "the most beautiful and eloquent of the verses devoted to concealing one's movement and slipping quietly into women's quarters."

وماُقيلُفيُإخفاءُالحركةُوالدبيب أبلغُولُأبرعُمنُبيتُامرئُالقيسُهذا.

II. The School of the Good

⇒ A moralizing approach.

⇒ Content determines form.

Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ

ويعاب عليه تصريحه بالزنا والدّبيب إلى حرم الناس. والشعراء تتوقّى ذلك في الشعرُ وإن فعلتهُ:

"He has been reproached for speaking explicitly of adultery and for stealing quietly into other people's womenfolk. Poets are supposed to refrain from evoking such situations in their poems, even if they have lived them— as this tercet shows:"

1. I rose to her when her people had fallen asleep, / Like bubbles of water, little by little.

2. "May God take you!" she said, "you are my disgrace! / Do you not see the watchers and the people all around?"

3. "By God," I replied, "I will not move from where I sit, / Even if they cut off my head before you—and my limbs."

⇒ To silence debauchery and libertinage (the register of the ineffable, the unsayable).

Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ (taken up by al-Marzubānī in al-Muwaššaḥ)

كان من الشعراء من يتأله في جاهليته، ويتعفف في شعره، ول يستبهرُ بالفواحش ول يتكلم في الهجاء ومنهم من كان ينعى على نفسه ويتعهر. منهم امرؤ القيس، قال:

"In the pre-Islamic period, some poets devoted themselves to piety and practiced restraint in their poetry: they did not boast of obscenities and did not indulge in invective against others. Others—Imruʾ al-Qays among them—vaunted such matters publicly and committed adultery. It is he who declaimed:

'I rose to her when her people had fallen asleep, / Like bubbles of water, little by little.'"

⇒ Anachronistic readings and retrospective judgement.

⇒ The prism of propriety.

The philosophical sphere

• Moralizing Aristotle's Poetics.
• Total subordination of aesthetics to ethics.
• Rejection of every form of transgression.
• A radicalized aesthetics.

Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Talḫīṣ Kitāb al-shiʿr

فمثال ما ورد من ذلك في الفجورُ قول امرئ القيس:

"An example of what appears in this regard in licentious discourse is Imruʾ al-Qays's statement:"

1. I rose to her when her people had fallen asleep, / Like bubbles of water, little by little.

2. "May God take you!" she said, "you are my disgrace! / Do you not see the watchers and the people all around?"

3. "By God," I replied, "I will not move from where I sit, / Even if they cut off my head before you—and my limbs."

III. What Purpose(s) for Poetry?

a. Reforming morals and conduct

⇒ A pedagogical and ethical instrument.

Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-akhlāq (French trans. M. Arkoun, Traité d'éthique, p. 95)

"One will require him to know the finest profane traditions (akhbār) and the finest verses that have such an educational function that, through repeated recitation, memorization, and quotation in conversation, all the previously mentioned qualities are consolidated within him."

Ibn Rashīq, al-ʿUmda

"Everything was once composed in prose until the Arabs felt the need to sing, in poems, their noble customs and the distinction of their lineage; to preserve the memory of their honorable battles, their dwellings endlessly abandoned, their valiant horsemen, and the greatness of soul of exemplars of generosity—so as to incite souls to liberality and guide subjects toward the acquisition of virtues."

Excluding certain genres

• Sentimental (love) poetry: Averroes, Talḫīṣ Kitāb al-shiʿr — it is "nothing other than an incitement to debauchery." Therefore, children should avoid this kind of poetry and learn from poems that call to courage and generosity.

⇒ Aesthetics at the service of ethics.

b. Beyond good and evil: poetic efficacy

⇒ Aesthetics at the service of aesthetics.

⇒ Poetic efficacy.

Qudāma b. Jaʿfar, Naqd al-shiʿr

وعلىُالشاعرُإذاُشرعُفيُأيُمعنى-ُُكان-ُُمنُالرفعةُوالضعةُ،والرفثُوالنزاهةُ،والبذخُوالقناعةُ،والمدحُوغيرُذلكُمن المعانيُالحميدةُأوُالذميمةُ،أنُيتوخىُالبلوغُمنُالتجويدُفيُذلكُإلىُالغايةُالمطلوبةُ.

"Whatever the nature of the subject the poet undertakes—noble or base, obscene or decent, handled with extravagance or restraint, concerned with sincere praise or deceitful praise, and other praiseworthy or blameworthy themes—he must strive, in treating it, to reach the utmost degree of perfection."

Qudāma b. Jaʿfar, Naqd al-shiʿr (continued)

فإنيُرأيتُمنُيعيبُامرأُالقيسُفيُقوله:

فِمثلُحُبْلى قدِ تَحَمَّلْتُها ... مُحْوِلِ قَدْ ألهيتُها عَنْ ذِي تَمائمِ

إذا ما بَكى مِنْ خَلْفِها انْصَرَفَتْ لَهُ بِشِقٍّ وتَحْتي شِقٌّ مُثْقَلُ

"Some criticize Imruʾ al-Qays for having said:

1. 'Like another—pregnant—nursing a one-year-old son, wearing talismans: / like you, I would visit her at night, distracting her from him.'

2. 'When he cried behind her, she would turn her upper body toward him, / while her belly, beneath me, remained firm.'

They also point to the vulgarity contained in these two lines. Yet vulgarity in the subject matter, in itself, does not erase the quality of the poetry when it is well-crafted. It is like fine carpentry: its excellence is not diminished by the poor quality of the wood itself."

c. Beyond the poet's convictions

⇒ Belief / unbelief.

⇒ Sounding the invisible.

Al-Ṣūlī, Akhbār Abī Tammām

وقد ادعى قوم عليه الكفر، بل حققوه، وجعلوا ذلك سبباا للطعن على شعره، وتقبيح حسنه، وما ظننت أن كفراا ينقص من شعٍر، ول أن إيماناا يزيد فيه.

"Some accused him of unbelief—indeed, they asserted it as fact—and made that a pretext for attacking his poetry and disfiguring its beauty. Yet I do not think unbelief diminishes poetry, nor belief increases it."

Al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī, al-Wasāṭa bayna al-Mutanabbī wa-khuṣūmih (French trans. A. Trabulsi, La critique poétique des arabes…, p. 84)

"If lack of religious sense were an affront to poetry, if false belief lowered a poet's rank, then one would have to eliminate Abū Nuwās's dīwān and erase his name from the classes of poets. The same penalty would have to be inflicted—above all—on the Pre-Islamic poets, who, in everyone's view, were pure unbelievers. One would also have to deem as deaf-mutes, or as miserable stutterers, poets who dared hurl satires against the Prophet and his companions, such as Kaʿb b. Zuhayr, Ibn al-Zibaʿrā, and others. But the two things are different: religion is independent of poetry."

عارا على الشعر، وكان سوء العتقاد سبباا لتأخرُ الشاعر، لوجب أن ي محى اس م أبي نواس من الدواوينُ، ا لو كانت الديانة وي حذف ذكره إذا ع دّت الطبقات، ولَكان أولهم بذلك أهل الجاهلية، ومن تشهد ُ األمة عليه بالكفر، ولوجب أن يكون كعب ال وأضراب هما ممن تناول رسو َل هللا صلى هللا عليه وسلم وعاب من أصحابه ِز بن زهيرُ وابن ّ بَ ْعرى ب ، ْكماا ِكا اء ا خرسا وب مفحمين؛ ولك ّن األمرين متباينان والدين بمعزل عن الشعر.

Conclusion

Introduction

During the second half of the twentieth century, many musical forms of protest emerged in the United States against a capitalist and racist system that marginalized large segments of the population. These groups also typically expressed a rejection of religion, which was seen as part of that very system. One need only recall John Lennon singing, "imagine no religion." Hip-hop, rap, and punk rock represent some of the most radical expressions of this phenomenon, which developed largely in suburban and inner-city contexts.

In this paper, we will examine how, within marginalized Muslim communities in the United States, these musical styles likewise developed—eventually extending into more electronic forms such as trap and into harsher genres such as punk rock. Yet unlike the original rap or punk rock scenes, the adoption of this culture in marginalized Muslim communities does not often entail a rejection of religion. On the contrary, in many cases it involves a reassertion of Muslim identity that connects with anarchist currents within Islam, culminating in what has been called taqwacore, which combines "piety" (understood in a very particular way) with the rebelliousness of hard rock. In this way, a disruptive aesthetic becomes a vehicle for the expression of a countercultural ethic.

In what follows, we will:

1. Describe these movements by analyzing their lyrics.
2. Show how they have spread to European countries, including Spain, as well as to Muslim-majority, African, and Asian contexts—Indonesia in particular.
3. Note how, and in what ways, these artists consider this kind of music compatible with being Muslim. We will examine how they root this rebellious, oppositional aesthetic and these musical forms in values they regard as authentically Muslim—especially the demand for equality and justice against capitalist inequality—and how they connect their rejection of power with anti-hierarchical elements of Islam.

Rebel Music: Hip-Hop, Rap, and Punk Rock

A brief description is in order, even at the risk of oversimplification. "Hip-hop" refers to a broad culture of rebellion against the system, in which a musical style plays a central role but which extends beyond music alone. It emerged in the Bronx block parties of the 1970s. It is commonly said to rest on four pillars. The first is its musical component, MCing (rap), characterized by rhythmic recitation of protest texts. Unlike musical genres in which melody predominates, the text here is fundamental. The second, DJing, consists in isolating and repeating instrumental rhythmic sections of songs by using two turntables. These were not merely devices for playing music; they enabled new sounds and rhythms to be produced by manipulating the record by hand in particular ways. This made possible the third pillar: the distinctive dance associated with the genre, known as breakdance. Finally, graffiti culture, the fourth pillar, made protest visible on the walls of cities and on trains.

Hip-hop rap evolved and gave rise to what is known as "trap," a similar but more synthetic music, often using autotune. Its origins are usually located in the southern United States—Atlanta in particular—at the end of the 1990s or the early 2000s. Alongside rap's social critique and identity emphasis, it introduces themes such as drugs, money, and street-level hardship.

Punk rock, for its part, relies on drums and distorted electric guitars, pushing music and voice to extreme decibel levels. Its themes convey deep rebellion, political and social critique, and anti-authoritarianism. Although its underground origins differ from those of hip-hop, hybrids have emerged, such as punk-rap. A detailed discussion of the musical and thematic crossovers currently taking place would take us too far from our aim.

It is, however, important to note how punk, according to David Pearson, "experienced musical stagnation in the late 1980s and violent confrontations with right-wing and hypermasculine elements within its own ranks," yet achieved a revival in the 1990s through the incorporation of Latinos and even gay protest. In its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, most punk was situated on the political left, though a minority adopted Nazi aesthetics and was violently expelled.

The triumphalism of U.S. success as the world's hegemonic power contrasted with "internal conflicts around patriarchy, the oppression of Black people, immigration, and other social issues," including dramatic economic inequalities. Punk would deepen this radically critical stance toward liberal capitalism.

The Adoption of Rebel Music by Muslim Artists

Muslim rap and trap

Hip-hop within the Nation of Gods and Earths (Five Percenters) movement

No discussion of this topic would be complete without mentioning the Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as the Five Percenters. This African American movement emerged in Harlem in the 1960s as a split from the Nation of Islam associated with Malcolm X. The Five Percenters adopted Islamic language and symbols, but developed a thoroughly heterodox doctrine: they teach that "Allah" is the Black man, regarded as the original father and creator, and that the Black race possesses a superior wisdom that must be rediscovered through "knowledge of self." In any case, rebellious rap with Muslim elements cannot be understood without the influence of this movement. A prominent example is the Wu-Tang Clan.

Trap from Granada's Albaicín: Khaled

A successful example of Spanish trap that foregrounds Arab roots can be found in an artist of Moroccan background who grew up in the Albaicín: Khaled. He produces neighborhood music in which themes of drugs, money, and prostitution are recurrent—especially in his early period, when he shared a project with Yung Beef in Los Santos. He defends the legitimacy of a mixed Arab-and-Spanish culture, though his songs are not, strictly speaking, ideological. While he does not say whether he is a practicing believer, he states in an interview: "I consider myself Muslim, in my own way. I've got the best from here and the best from there: I'm a Spanish Muslim. I have no homeland." Another highly successful artist in a similar orbit—this time from the Barcelona area—is Morad, who often combines trap with reggaetón. In his song "Normal," he offers a harsh critique of the police against a backdrop of crime in his neighborhood.

This kind of trap, focused on the street-level realities of marginalized neighborhoods, can be found across Europe. Although it is performed by Muslims, it often articulates a cultural rather than a religious claim.

Zoufriya

By contrast, Zoufriya, of Moroccan origin, explicitly foregrounds Islam. She is one of the most provocative examples in France of this broad musical register (she is often classified as dark trap). Her real name is Lamisse, and she is a practicing Muslim. Her persona is strikingly dark. On Instagram she uses the slogan:

"Don't change for the rules, change the rules."

along with the hashtag in dialectal Arabic "#FREEKOULCHI" (Free everything).

With her provocative and oppositional aesthetic, she embraces—so she says in an interview—what she considers one of France's "demons": the veiled woman. She does not wear a simple hijab but a jilbab—and at times even the niqab or full-face veil—because she believes this aesthetic is "disturbing in France." In this way, she denounces the stigmatization of Muslim women, who are treated as accomplices of Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Through this unsettling look, she seeks to express the violence of the gazes of French society that she experiences and that, in her view, no one acknowledges. In the music video for one of her songs, she appears dressed in different forms of burqa or the Afghan full-body veil. She sings:

My madness (x7) overwhelms me.
I become homeless.
I have lost my body, but not my mind at all.
I run super fast, I leap super high,
My life is fantastic.
I am free, I fly high—no umbrella needed
(when) the downpour engulfs me.

Taqwacore

At the intersection of (1) immigration and the racialization of people from Muslim-majority countries, (2) Western underground culture, and (3) the rebellious music of punk rock, the phenomenon of taqwacore, or Muslim punk, emerged. "Taqwa" is an Arabic word designating religious piety, while "core" refers to hardcore punk.

The first to use the term was an American writer and convert to Islam, Michael Muhammad Knight. In 2004 he published a novel titled The Taqwacores, recounting the experience of a young, pious, shy American Muslim who moves into a punk squat where he encounters other Muslims who lead him to rethink his faith. The house is the center of a novel that attempts to portray conflicts among diverse Islamic currents. Each character represents one: a mystical, queer, charismatic leader; a strict Salafi; a nihilistic drug addict; and a radical feminist who breaks expectations by wearing a niqab—along with other characters who appear over time, including a Shiʿi skinhead.

The novel was adapted to film in a work of the same title directed by Eyad Zahra. The house becomes the setting for discussions that reach a certain degree of violence, as well as self-destructive behavior through drug use. Normative frameworks in Islamic sexual ethics are also disrupted through the introduction of gay themes and the radical feminism of the woman who always wears a niqab. All of this unfolds in a space where, at certain moments, a punk band plays, and at others the small room is transformed into a mosque. One especially striking scene is the Friday prayer and the words, in the manner of a khutba, delivered by the house's charismatic leader:

"Islam is total surrender—damn it!
That's it.
Knowing you're not in control.
Keeping it in mind in everything you do.
Take your hands off the wheel
and see how it feels.
Islam isn't about verses or hadiths,
not about niches and lamps.
It's about us. All of us.
God is too vast and too open
for my Islam to be small and closed.
I'm so Muslim… I'm so Muslim
that I can say: to hell with Islam!
You know, Imam Husayn said:
'Whoever has no religion should at least
be free in this present life.'
Let us pray."

In the book, the full text appears, interpreting Islam as total surrender to God—who is responsible for everything—and as an absolute liberation from the narrowness of norms:

The earth does not turn because you command it.
Your intestines do not digest at your order.
You are made of a billion cells
that do not ask your permission before doing their work.
And we think that "submission" (islam)
means imposing strict discipline on our worship.
We think that submission is not eating pork.
For me, it is not something so small.

I cannot put my dīn in a little box,
because for me everything comes from God.
Birds sing the name of God.
To say that God is in this book and not that one,
or that He likes this and not that…
you know who you are talking about?

God is too vast and too open
for my faith to be small and closed.

Does that make me a kāfir?
I say Allāhu Akbar.
If that is not enough, then to hell with Islam—
you can keep it.

We see a highly provocative aesthetic and discourse. In this passage, the leader foregrounds what he takes to be Islam's fundamental element: total surrender to God. He also draws a key conclusion from the principle that God is "always greater": God cannot be confined by the smallness of human understanding; consequently, Islam "is not about rules drawn from the Qur'an or hadiths." A Sufi background is discernible not only here but also in his final blasphemous provocation, which recalls the early malāmatī tradition—figures who sought people's reproach and contempt by voluntarily concealing good works and even living as if they were unbelievers. They saw themselves as wholly surrendered to God and rejected all worldly acclaim. Their will to scandalize reappears in the aesthetic of taqwacore.

Within the house there is no organization or hierarchy, constituting a radical critique of authority. It intentionally seeks an atmosphere of "chaos," experienced in the energetic, unstructured dancing of punk-rock concerts, which finds an echo in the extreme Sufi dances of the Rifāʿī order. It must be acknowledged that, more than explicitly grounding a political anarchism, this phenomenon draws on cultural and egalitarian anarchism. It flees stereotypes of a monolithic Islam while simultaneously rejecting the convenience of a unified Islam.

Michael Muhammad Knight, the novelist who coined the term and imagined a Muslim punk-rock scene, recounts his personal trajectory in a documentary titled The Birth of Punk Islam: Taqwacore. The son of an American Catholic mother who was abused and abandoned by her husband when Knight was young, he had a difficult childhood that led him to convert to Islam and travel to Pakistan for Islamic training in a massive mosque affiliated with the Tablighi movement, financed with Saudi money. The rigidity of the education he received turned his initial naivety into disillusionment and led him to explore themes of rejecting authority in his works. Yet he has remained a practicing Muslim.

One of the main bands to adopt the taqwacore label, emerging around 2005, is The Kominas, formed by two Americans of Pakistani origin. They have even tried to establish themselves in Pakistan in the hope that taqwacore might take root there. Their work is less an Islamic self-assertion than a leftist political activism that reads Islam as liberating. Some songs have religious content, while others focus on political issues. They are especially provocative in their aesthetics, breaking gender boundaries and even performing in drag on some occasions. Their album covers often extend this critique of rigid gender characterization. In the song "Pigs Are Haram" (pigs are forbidden), they denounce abusive police power:

I'll show you where to plant the drugs
I'll show you my badge and my ass crack
I'll book him up front and shoot him in the back
You'll tell me he's wanted (by the police) when he's just Black
I'll show you how to run this country
I'll show you how to plant palm trees
I'll show you how to run this country
I'll show you how to ruin the country

Not today
Not today
The pigs won't get away with it
Not today

Dropping the bomb
So keep calm
Read the Qur'an
PIGS ARE HARAM

Another particularly active group is The Thawra. Their name already signals their oppositional character: it is an Arabic word meaning "revolution." Their creator and driving force, Marwan Kamel, is the son of a Syrian father and a Catholic mother, but he acknowledges himself as strongly influenced by Sufism. Since their emergence in Chicago, they have blended punk and metal with Arabic maqām.

Other active groups in the United States include Sarmust; Vote Hezbollah (San Antonio); Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate (Oregon); and the queer, all-female group Secret Trial Five (Toronto).

Although taqwacore remains a very minor phenomenon, it has found resonance in other Muslim contexts, especially in Indonesia—for example, with the band Trotoar Chaos.

Conclusion

We have seen that trap made by Muslims often asserts Arab cultural origins in a Western context of marginalization more than it asserts belonging to Islam. Although this "street music" can enable greater commercial success, such songs cannot be straightforwardly placed on the political left. They often express the hedonism of drugs and sex, along with the objectification of women's bodies.

Within trap there are exceptions in which religious self-assertion is central, as in Zoufriya; yet this tends to confine the artist to far more marginal spaces. Given this religious emphasis, Zoufriya—while making dark trap rather than hardcore—has felt an affinity with the concept of taqwacore.

Strictly speaking, despite appearances, taqwacore is not primarily a religious self-assertion but a form of political activism centered on critiquing a bourgeois, capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and white world. It defends the rights of foreigners and denounces formalism and homogenization. In fact, not all members of groups that claim the taqwacore label are Muslims, though they tend to introduce religious references more frequently. Without ever offering a structured religious presentation, taqwacore nonetheless seems to articulate a more reflective kind of rebellion.

Islam is conceived in its most liberating and egalitarian dimension. It embraces, in all its radicality, the principle that "God is (always) greater" (Allāhu Akbar). Religious norms (even those purportedly grounded in the Qur'an and the Sunna) are treated as "busybodies" that constrain the person—and God Himself. In this way, a symbiosis takes shape between the far left and Islam.

Do we find the same symbiosis between Christianity and the far left within a context of rebel music? In principle, it could have emerged from liberation theology. In the trap of the young Kaydy Cain (also part of the Los Santos project), we find Christian references in the song "Blessed" from the album Fallen Angel: the singer greets the evangelical community and appears confessing in a Catholic church in a song steeped in a macho hedonism. The same could be said of a song by Yung Beef titled "Trappin en el Vaticano," recorded in a cemetery. In such cases, however, religious elements function aesthetically and are not, in any sense, claims of faith.

By contrast, there does exist a self-assertive Christian hardcore that could be considered equivalent to taqwacore. One example is the song "Jesus Is Not Dead" by the band Living Fire, among others. The Protestant pastor Brad Rocks emphasizes the subversive character of Jesus in his time, assimilating it to the punk spirit.

Nevertheless—whether because most Western countries are of Christian tradition, or because of the clerical character of the Catholic confession (which punk principles must reject along with all authority)—the truth is that Islam has been the tradition to monopolize the banner of rebel, anarchist, revolutionary far-left music, even when it is carried by groups that are not Muslim.

As early as 1988, the provocative Italian group with a communist name, CCCP Fedeli alla Linea, sang "Punk Islam" on the public television channel RAIDUE, going so far as to exclaim: "ALLAH E' GRANDE E GHADDAFI E' IL SUO PROFETA!!!" (God is great and Gaddafi is His prophet).

Islam is used as a symbol of rejection, alterity, and rupture with the Western world, reductively conceived as Catholic and bourgeois.

It is true that Gulf countries have made accommodations with capitalism and established profoundly unequal societies. It is true that Salafism—which controls the smallest details of an individual's public and private life—stands at the opposite extreme from punk. Yet many Muslim-majority countries (Algeria, Nasser's Egypt, Syria, Iran, etc.) aligned with the Eastern bloc after decolonization and found in Islam a religious foundation for socialism's egalitarian aspiration. Likewise, Sunni Islam's non-clerical character and its claimed direct relationship with God, without intermediaries, resonated with anarchism. For this reason, anarchist leftist currents have been one avenue of access to Islam in the West.

Ethics and Aesthetics in Islamic Heritage
Dance(s) and Spirituality: Issues and Challenges in Developing Interreligious Dialogue Practices in Contemporary Africa

Introduction

Dance is seldom immediately associated with religious practice, and when it becomes part of a liturgical celebration it often gives rise to controversy, since the tendency toward a body-soul dichotomy-or a Cartesian dualism-has been widespread since the modern era. Dance may be defined as "a movement of the body performed by one or more persons, in rhythm, with measured steps, ordinarily to the sound of instruments and sometimes to the voice." Over time, dance has come to be framed primarily as play, making it difficult-if not impossible-to associate it with sacred music. Yet in certain cultures, especially in Africa, dance still forms part of liturgical celebrations. In many African societies, music accompanies life events and, alongside language and religion, constitutes one of the most important foundations of traditional communities. In most African languages, "music" and "song" are interchangeable terms. Song and music serve as media of communication that are both material (physical, acoustic) and immaterial (mystical, initiatory, esoteric, spiritual). Music is generally used in religious rites-particularly within African traditions-as an accompaniment or as a mediator capable of creating a connection between interiority and exteriority, up to the highest spiritual spheres. Music performed by initiates can alter states of mind and heighten human capacities or sensibilities.

During fieldwork in a Protestant parish in the Paris region of France, the pastor we interviewed expressed surprise at the fact that congregants danced enthusiastically during the Sunday worship liturgy. In his view, this euphoria during the time of adoration and praise was incompatible with the devotion inherent in worship; above all, he wondered whether preaching still had its proper place within such a festive and joyful liturgy. In other words, his concern related to the link between music, dance, and the meditation on Scripture. The parish community was largely made up of people of African origin. The pastor was a native Frenchman. This cultural mismatch made it difficult to understand the place of dance in liturgical activities. In a Reformed church in Togo, the faithful strongly called for the introduction of dance into liturgical celebrations, as is the case in charismatic or Pentecostal services that draw large crowds.

In Senegal, the Mourides organize the thiant, a night of prayer made up of liturgical chants and praises. The recitation of poems by the founder of the brotherhood, Amadou Bamba-known as khassaides-is accompanied by dance steps. This liturgical activity concentrates most of the movement's most radical criticism. The Gnawa of Morocco include, within their liturgical rites, a circular dance that belongs to their tradition and can lead to ecstasy. This practice is strongly criticized by the guardians or proponents of Muslim orthodoxy. Yet dance continues to be associated with various liturgies of religious traditions present in Africa, and elsewhere (Sufi brotherhoods, charismatic renewal, etc.).

Why this interest in, and attraction to, liturgical dance despite the contrasting positions of different religious lawmakers?

In the pages that follow, we seek to show that if the place of music and the dance that accompanies it in various religious liturgies is controversial today, this is largely because of different ways of conceiving spirituality. A conception of spirituality as a "reality" makes the human body the privileged locus of spiritual manifestation. Since this conception is shared by various religious traditions, music and the dance that accompanies it can provide a framework for organizing interreligious encounters. To do so, we will examine the relationship between dance and spirituality throughout history, as well as the place of dance in Islam and Christianity in Africa, and its contribution to interreligious dialogue.

Dance and Spirituality through History

Dance can refer to a wide range of activities: from improvisation to a choreographed performance before an audience accompanied by an orchestra; from a personal escape to a social activity for couples or friends in a nightclub; from a ritual circle dance to a meditative movement of a body inspired by profound communion with the environment. Etienne Pouliot identifies three epistemological perspectives on the relationship between spirituality and dance. The first is characterized by an opposition between materiality and spirituality, implying a conception of dance shaped by a certain body/mind opposition, with the body becoming the instrument of dance. A second perspective understands spirituality as a dimension of the real and thus as one aspect of human life; through movement or dance, it becomes possible to express one's spirituality. Finally, a third perspective views spirituality as part of reality itself, and the body as enabling the human being to enter into communion with the environment; dance thus serves as a means of attuning oneself to the reality of the surrounding world.

Drawing on Platonic philosophy, Monteil-Laeng argues that dance makes it possible to produce, within the human soul, harmony and balance that reflect the divine order. It is therefore a means by which human beings can control what naturally eludes their control-namely emotions and feelings-since, through dance, the body-soul dichotomy is dissolved. This may explain why dance has often been integrated into religious rituals of a communal scope, privileging a quest for spiritual elevation.

The relationship between dance and spirituality has evolved in several ways over the course of history. First, conceptions of the body have changed: one moves from a body regarded as an "obstacle" to the harmony of the soul with the surrounding universe, to a body conceived as the "ideal place" for the manifestation of the divine presence as felt and lived by human beings. The sensory body makes it possible to become aware of the surrounding world and influences the experiences and reflections attached to it. Second, the practice of religious, ritual, or spiritual dance has shifted from a largely communal scale to an individual practice. According to Jean-Sebastien Viard, dance would have been used in antiquity as a means of integrating society. Third, there has been a change in how ecstasy-or the state in which the body is animated by the breath of the spirit-is described. The divine presence in a human body can lead it to display joyful, sometimes disorderly movements associated with a feeling of floating. It is a fact that human beings are not exclusively matter: within them there exists an immaterial entity that is sensitive to the immaterial dimension of the surrounding environment. Through music and the dance it elicits, the human soul becomes more sensitive to the reality of the spiritual world that surrounds it. How has this reality been taken into account by different religious traditions?

The Status of Music and Dance in Islam

From one region of the globe to another, music is an indispensable mode of expression for Islamic spirituality, even though there is no unanimity regarding the status granted to it by religious law. In general, proponents of dogma (reluctant to use music) and proponents of mysticism (who make it a privileged means of access to the divine) hold opposing views. Some thinkers have attempted to reconcile these approaches by indicating criteria for the permissibility of music, as did al-Ghazali. According to Luis Velasco-Pufleau, Salafi and Wahhabi leaders consider music haram because, in their view, it prevents listening to and meditating on the Qur'an. Yet, to disseminate their ideology, they make use of musical practices-particularly through anasheed, recited or sung poems that serve to amplify a religious ideology. Some theologians opposed to music appeal to verse 6 of surat 31 (Qur'an 31:6), which primarily concerns poetry and, by extension, art, construed as a deviant practice because it is playful and liable to produce feelings and behaviors that would distance the human being from the worship of God. For Eric Geoffroy, when one consults works dealing with the "Circumstances of Revelation," the dominant view is that this verse was revealed concerning a man who sought to compete with the Prophet by offering information about ancient peoples, or, somewhat later, concerning a man who had acquired a slave-girl who sang day and night. The term used is lahw, which denotes futile entertainment that distracts human beings from God and from their religious duties. This is why a distinction is drawn between sama', spiritual audition practiced by Sufis, and ghina, profane music with a pejorative connotation. Certain hadiths that interpret this verse as a prohibition of music and of the instruments used to produce it are also contested. Another verse that includes references to musical practice-whistling and handclapping (Qur'an 8:35)-is interpreted by Eric Geoffroy as referring to pre-Islamic pagan rites associated with "idolatrous practices and their bacchic manifestations."

Several theologians and scholars of Muslim culture argue that Islam has always been associated with a musical culture and a repertoire of sacred music. Many of them cite the call to prayer as evidence of the presence of music in Muslim practices. The call to prayer consists of a melody and words intended to gather believers in a given place for communal prayer. In choosing the muezzin, practical considerations (a far-carrying voice) combine with aesthetic and artistic considerations (a voice that is pleasant to hear). Music is also found in the Qur'an's psalmody, which may serve a practical purpose by enabling the verses of the Qur'anic text to be memorized more easily. The use of musical instruments belongs to Sufi practices, and those who promote it argue that the Qur'an never prohibited them. Moreover, such instruments are praised in the Bible, notably in the Book of Psalms (Psalm 150). The Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and praises that the Qur'an repeatedly recognizes as a gift from God to David (Qur'an 5:163; Qur'an 17:55). Since Islam presents itself as a universal religion, it has developed in different countries according to local culture, including musical genres and practices. The gamelan, a percussion ensemble used before the arrival of Islam in Indonesia, was introduced into Muslim liturgies, notably during the call to prayer on Ramadan evenings or in traditional mosques. The term sama', meaning spiritual audition, refers to religious songs of praise addressed to God or to the Prophet, sometimes with instruments and dancers. In Turkey, these dancers-members of the Mevlevi Sufi brotherhood (a Muslim order founded in Konya in the thirteenth century by Jalal al-Din Rumi)-are called the "whirling dervishes," in reference to their clothing and their dance movements, which resemble those of a spinning top. In Algerian diwane, a Sufi music with Guinean influences, the guimbri (a plucked string instrument) and karkabous (iron castanets) of the Afro-Maghrebi Gnawa are used. Dhikr is a sung practice, rhythmically shaped by breathing and the swaying of the body within Sufi brotherhoods; it consists in repeating the divine attributes in order to enter into communion with God. The permissibility of music is assessed according to the criterion of the author's intention, which shapes the use and the effects of music, capable either of elevating or of defiling.

Dance is the object of even more intense debates than music. Its detractors locate its origins in the time of the golden calf fashioned by the Hebrews while Moses was on Mount Sinai, and they believe that dance facilitates promiscuity and incites sexual libertinism. Aline Tauzin argues that music and dance were rejected in Islam because of their sensual character, which is associated with femininity. Advocates of dance appeal to the hadith recounting that Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin, began to dance for joy when the Prophet told him that he resembled him; this expression of joy was not condemned by the Prophet. The theologian al-Baqillani and the "sultan of the 'ulama'," Ibn 'Abd al-Salam (d. 1261), danced during sessions of sama' in which they participated. Indeed, from the ninth century onward, sessions of sama' were organized in mosques, in a zawiya, or in private homes in Muslim cities, bringing together scholars and muftis to listen to or sing poems of praise to God or to the Prophet-sometimes with musical instruments, clapping of hands or feet, dance, or ecstasy. One of the instruments most used by Maghrebi Sufis is the bendir, which is associated with religious rituals because it can reconcile musical intervention with submission to the worship of God. It is linked to Sufi rituals that highlight sacred dance and create harmony among musicians, reciters, singers, and dancers.

Music and dance are thus associated with various liturgical celebrations as means of elevation toward God, despite the contrasting positions of Muslim leaders. This practice is reinforced in Africa and on other continents.

The Place of Music and Dance in African Christianity

The historical evolution of musical practice in the Church helps us understand how, over time, doctrinal concerns gradually gave way to taking local musical culture into account, as well as the needs of the people, with increased participation by the assembly. The Church Fathers, concerned with the doctrinal transmission of the Christian faith, drew attention to the dangers of musical pleasures. During the Middle Ages, music composed from popular melodies had primarily a liturgical and ritual purpose. Dance and popular music were opposed because they entertained the people and drew them away from worship. Sixteenth-century Reformers emphasized the content of the message-especially its conformity with the Gospel-as well as the use of language accessible to the community of the faithful. Some analysts have spoken of the "logic of music's threefold office," or of a Trinitarian reinterpretation of music in Luther's theology. In relation to the Father as Creator, music plays the role of preserving the order of things. In relation to the Son as Redeemer, music serves the proclamation of the Gospel. In relation to the Holy Spirit, music-understood as prayer-makes it possible to take human existence into account. Other Reformers such as Bucer, Calvin, and Cranmer worked so that praise would be offered in the people's language in order to edify the assembly. John Calvin insisted that music should be only the means of conveying the message of Scripture. Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had an ambivalent relationship with a written liturgy, emphasizing praise directly inspired by the Psalms. Later, popular songs were composed from the Bible or in light of human experience. Maurice Mondengo Lyoga observes that Protestant hymnology created and preserved Protestant choral song as early as 1517 through Martin Luther and his collaborators: a choral repertoire characterized by four-part harmonization within a strophic structure, developing the use of the Psalms through the adaptation and harmonization of melodies. In the Congo, as throughout Africa, Protestant hymnology was born with the work of Christian missions from the West beginning in the eighteenth century; it then developed within various local churches and institutions, even if it now seems to be neglected. One finds hymnals from the revival period in Europe translated into vernacular languages, written around the Psalms, arranged from popular melodies, and presented according to various theological and doctrinal themes (the Trinity, evangelization, Christian life, trials and consolation, etc.). In general, these are translations of hymns already existing in Europe. However, in the Congo-as elsewhere in Africa-one observes a need to adapt, to take contemporary musical practices into account, and sometimes to draw closer to Pentecostal musical practices, whose rhythms are closer to local, contemporary, or popular music. Based on a study in the Presbyterian Church of Togo during the first half of 2000, Maditoma was able to identify the need among members of Reformed churches for a sung and danced liturgy that goes beyond the traditional hymnal inherited from the missionary period and comes closer to the joyful liturgies observed in Pentecostal churches in Togo-liturgies that echo the traditions of African traditional religions, even as these churches seek to break with them. Drawing on interviews, she shows the attraction of charismatic spirituality for members of the Presbyterian Church of Togo, emphasizing the struggle against the forces of evil, a rigorist Christian ethic, and a joyful celebration of worship services. This attraction to a spirituality close to Pentecostal movements, found in several other countries, could be explained by the cultural background of church members. Celestin Kiki notes that elements of traditional worship in Africa shape the expectations of church members when they participate in various liturgical celebrations-especially prayer (requests presented by initiates to the spiritual world), offerings (elements of nature offered to foster communion with the spiritual world), and sacrifice (the shedding of an animal's blood to repair a harm)-as means of calling upon spiritual forces. Recourse to these elements draws on various notions that undergird ritual practice in African traditional religions: the notion of time (determined by events), the rite (accompanying all moments of life and intended to gather and to reconcile spiritual forces), songs and dances (circumstantial means of communication among the living and with the invisible world), and the spoken word (a means of action capable of directing the power acquired through the rite). In these elements of traditional rites in Africa there are similarities with liturgical celebrations-prayer, music, dance, offerings, and blessings. It is therefore possible that Africans, in the liturgical celebrations of the Christian faith, feel the need to contextualize Christianity within their own reality when they do not simply desire syncretism. Ambroise Kua-Nzambi Toko notes that, although scientific debate about the religious character of music is intense (see Gilbert Rouget's theses on "the relationship between music and trance" and Erwan Dianteill's on "music and trance in Afro-American religions"), field observations show that there is indeed ritual or sacred music in African traditional religions. Song and dance may be associated with prayer and provoke trance. However, the rejection of traditional worship elements by Western Christian missionaries caused these elements to disappear for a time from liturgical celebrations in Africa. They later regained interest thanks to new religious movements, African-initiated churches, Pentecostal movements, and the dynamic of reappropriating the Gospel by African theologians observed since the 1950s through the development of so-called theologies of incarnation, which integrate such elements into their religious celebrations for various reasons. Churches emerging from Pentecostal movements emphasize the struggle against the forces of evil through an operational mode that resembles that of African traditional religions. Pastors, prophets, and evangelists organize prayer sessions in which one finds suggestive songs of personal self-development accompanied by dance, supplicatory prayers, declarations of victory over evil spirits, proclamations of healing, and revelations about the causes of suffering. Maditoma notes that, even if Pentecostal discourse excludes any compromise with African traditional religions, its mode of action takes into account the worldview of African peoples. These are attempts to reinvent a form of Christianity that takes African spiritual categories seriously.

All these elements that enter the liturgy of worship among sub-Saharan African peoples influence those who have become Christians or were born into Christian families when they come to worship to adore God our heavenly Father. These elements suggest that worship as lived within the cultures of sub-Saharan African peoples tends to be more pragmatic than speculative in orientation.

In addition to these cultural elements, we should note the non-negligible influence of a socio-political context marked by precariousness and poor governance, which increases the need to rely on a transcendent force to transform daily life. How can the reading of the Bible help manage these contemporary expectations in the practice of liturgical music?

In the Bible, music is present in liturgical celebrations. First, in the Old Testament, music is the means by which believers express gratitude to God for his benefits, notably deliverance from a threat or a danger (Exodus 15). The Book of Psalms is a collection of praises in which the experiences of life, as realized by believers in their walk with God, are expressed in poetic form for liturgical singing. Among the Levites consecrated and dedicated to the service of God, there is a class of singers (1 Chronicles 25) charged with praise in cultic celebrations. These singers are placed on the same level as other members of the clergy. Music, which plays an important role in the life of the people of Israel, is associated with prophecy, presented by some commentators as celebration and praise addressed to God. In Psalm 150, there is an invitation to praise God with precise indications concerning places (where his power bursts forth, the sanctuary or the firmament: 150:1), motivations or reasons (his mighty deeds, the immensity of his greatness; see verses 2-3), instruments (lute, harp, tambourine, cymbals, etc.), and the corporeality that accompanies them (dances; see 150:4), and finally the actors concerned (everything that breathes; see 150:6). Through this psalm, we understand that praise expressed through words, instruments, and dances is the expression of believers' worship and praise before the greatness and goodness of the Creator and the Savior. The transformative effects of music played by a person consecrated by God upon the human being are illustrated by this text. Music is presented here as a means of exorcism. David is depicted as a valiant hero, a good musician, and someone who visibly bears God's favor. The conjunction of well-executed instrumental music and David's anointing contributed to Saul's deliverance (1 Samuel 6:13). Music is a means of entering into communion with God and of manifesting his presence.

In the New Testament, music is marked by the concern to make the Word of God known, hence its use in church gatherings or meetings of Christians. From a few New Testament texts (1 Corinthians 14:26; Ephesians 5:19; and Colossians 3:16), we get an idea of the kinds of songs used in the gatherings of the first Christians: psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

Perspectives for Interreligious Dialogue

According to Benjamin Simon, while the tendency observed in recent years has been to privilege a comparative approach in interreligious dialogue, this should be done on the basis of what he calls interreligious conviviality-that is, making religious multiplicity a source of mutual enrichment rather than of divisions, tensions, or conflicts. Music, with its capacity to transform people's state of mind, could be mobilized to develop practices of interreligious dialogue marked by conviviality. Music occupies an important place in religious practices in Africa because it fulfils several functions:

• Educational: proverbs, riddles, and the like.
• Liturgical: chants dedicated to the divine, to ancestors, and to tutelary spirits.
• Playful: family or community celebrations such as weddings.
• Functional: accompanying each ritual gesture of life.
• Cathartic: channeling the mystical powers of the otherworld, acting as an intercessor.

Music belongs to the sphere of religious power insofar as it participates in the domestication and staging of the cosmic order. Instruments, songs, and dances carry a spiritual value, since they are consecrated to a form of worship.

Since interreligious dialogue is a dialogical undertaking, the interactive construction of a moment of encounter around a shared event is in itself a sufficient reason to facilitate the meeting of distinct religious communities. It is a co-construction, not a clash of abstract ideas. "Being together to pray" is a concept previously invoked by John Paul II at the Assisi meeting in 1986 to express the willingness to pray for peace without dissolving the specificity of each religious tradition. This also gives rise to the concepts of multi-religious or interreligious prayer. Depending on the context and on the willingness of stakeholders, religious leaders may indeed come together to pray, or arrange to pray together when possible. Common preparation is necessary for such times of shared prayer. The essential point is to avoid relativism and syncretism, which are threats hanging over interreligious dialogue. To achieve this, Risto Jukko suggests introducing into the program of multi- or interreligious prayer the fundamental elements of the liturgy of the religious traditions concerned, such as the Psalms, the Pater Noster, surat al-Fatiha, the names of God, and so forth. These liturgical elements are most often sung in order to praise or worship God, and this could give rise to the organization of a common prayer in music, potentially accompanied by specific dances. Prayer reminds us of our status on earth: we are weak, limited beings dependent on the divine will. Through prayer, we place our needs and intentions in God's hands so that his will may be done. Prayer thus invites us to the humility of the creature before the Creator.

Nostra Aetate is an important declaration of the Second Vatican Council, promulgated on 28 October 1965 by Pope Paul VI. It is one of the most significant documents of the twentieth century for the Catholic Church regarding openness and dialogue with the world. It is a remarkable text that invites Catholic Christians to forge ties with believers of other religions across the world. Although it was published by the Catholic Church, its structure, content, and numerous references to Scripture make it a text that can inspire Christians of other confessional traditions-notably Protestants-and believers more generally. Its many references to Scripture make it a particular text that should serve as a source of inspiration for faith practices. Whether it is Matthew 5:45, which recommends expressing love for our neighbor so as to resemble God our heavenly Father who makes it rain on the good and the wicked alike; Acts 17:26, which reminds us that we are God's creatures whom he causes to dwell together on the earth; Romans 12:18, which calls us to live in peace with all human beings as far as it depends on us; Galatians 3:7, which invites us to show consideration for the children of Abraham; or 2 Corinthians 5:18, which reminds us of the ministry of reconciliation given by Christ to his disciples-these scriptural references invite us to universal fraternity, mutual respect, and love of neighbor, especially those who show respect for revealed writings. Jesus particularly insisted in his teaching on love of neighbor as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. For example, in his teaching through the parable of the Good Samaritan, he shows that respect for the human person should matter more than our religious affiliation. After him, the apostle Paul presented love of neighbor as the only condition for exercising a ministry within the church in order to serve God (1 Corinthians 13). He wrote that without love of neighbor, miracles, sacrifices, and charisms are nothing. The apostle John clearly showed that love of neighbor is a capacity given to the human being by God the Creator (1 John 4).

Conclusion

We set out to explore the place of dance in different religious traditions in Africa, given the attraction it exerts in practice despite the controversy over whether it is licit. We have observed that, throughout history, conceptions of spirituality and its relationship to the human body have evolved. From Cartesian dualism to an understanding of spirituality as a reality of life, the human body has shifted from being considered an obstacle to spirituality to being viewed as the ideal place for spiritual manifestation. Through dance, Platonic philosophy suggests that human beings can master what escapes rationality-namely emotions and feelings. Dance reunifies body and soul through movements that accompany musical sounds. This recognition of the spiritual value of music justifies its use in spiritual and religious practices that privilege elevation toward the divine or communion with the spiritual world. This is the case in Sufi brotherhoods within Islam and, within Christianity, in forms of worship marked by the quest for the manifestation of the Holy Spirit across confessional tendencies. The declaration Nostra Aetate invites Christians to dialogue with members of other religions. Pope John Paul II elaborated the concept of "being together to pray" at the Assisi meeting in 1986. On the basis of this concept, it is possible to co-construct times of prayer between Christian and Muslim communities-to pray, praise, and worship God-by drawing on liturgical elements that resonate with both religious traditions and are regularly sung. Liturgical dance for the praise of God can enable interreligious encounters marked by conviviality...

"Whoever speaks about Sufism is not a Sufi;
Whoever bears witness to Sufism is not a Sufi.
To live Sufism is to be absent from it."
— Éric Geoffroy, Le soufisme

To begin with these words is to accept, from the outset, an essential difficulty: that of speaking about an experience which, by its very nature, eludes any attempt to grasp it. Sufism allows neither definition nor possession; it is lived as a self-effacement, as a presence that cannot be named. Any discourse about it is therefore necessarily modest—aware of its limits and attentive to what exceeds it.

Some experiences surpass language, and yet exist only through it. The mystical moment in the Sufi tradition is one of these: a point of ignition where being, saturated with itself, sheds its contours in order to yield to the invisible. The Sufi does not seek God as an object of knowledge; he desires Him, tastes Him, loses Him. Now, this grammar of loss, vertigo, and crossing is strangely familiar. It is also that of eroticism. Eroticism—in the deep, philosophical sense rather than the moral one, as Bataille reminds us—is a limit-experience: one in which the body ceases to be a boundary and becomes a passage. It engages the whole being in a movement of self-transcendence through the other, in an intensity that is not merely pleasure but a transformation of presence.

Everything seems to set mysticism and eroticism in opposition: elevation and flesh, the divine and the sensible. Yet Sufi thought invites us to shift our gaze. It leads us to ask: what if eroticism were one of the paths to the sacred? What if spirituality, far from negating the body, were its most subtle fulfillment? From this trace, we would like to examine what we shall call a spiritual eroticism and an erotic spirituality in Sufi mystical thought—not as provocation, but as fidelity to a tradition in which desire, love, and the body are never excluded from the experience of the divine, but are often its most intense loci. For if Sufism exceeds language, it does not refuse it: it inhabits it otherwise. It makes of it a place of passage, a breath, a trace. This reflection will unfold in three movements. We will first approach desire as the primary language of the Sufi experience, through poetry and amorous intoxication. We will then attend to the ways in which God is spoken of in the feminine, in the voices of male and female mystics. Finally, we will linger over the body as a place of passage, where surrender becomes a way of knowing.

1. Sufi Mysticism as an Erotics of Desire

1.1. The Aesthetics of Desire Tested by Absence

Eroticism inscribes the body within a dispossession of the self that later leads to continuity—first physical, through an "eroticism of bodies," and then to emotional unity through an "eroticism of hearts." We develop the same hypothesis from a comparative perspective with mysticism. Mysticism, like eroticism, calls for self-giving—in other words, the loss of everything that in principle constitutes being: one's body. Mysticism is a movement of stripping down, of voluntary abandonment. It presents itself as a path of knowledge and communication with the divine; that is, as whatever can make accessible a communal experience, far from religious representations that may tend toward dogmatism. This knowledge is not theoretical but experiential. Éric Geoffroy states it with sober clarity: "There is no Sufism without experience. Sufism is not a knowledge about God, but a knowledge through God." Every mystical experience is thus intrinsically governed by sensitivity and intuition. In Sufi mysticism in particular, it is a matter of correspondences between the veiled and the unveiled, the apparent and the hidden, presence and absence. Mysticism makes the body the place where desire is felt for what is sought yet remains unattainable: God. There is always a gap, even if only physical. There is enjoyment, but it remains impossible to grasp fully.

In searching for God's presence, the mystical being encounters a presence-in-absence: a presence that is also a non-presence, one that does not quench thirst. Hence an enduring quest in which God proves to be the name of an impossible satisfaction. Mysticism is a movement of self-dispossession, but it takes place only in order to give another meaning to loss and stripping away. What is lost is replaced by what is absent, and cannot be absorbed. When what one believed oneself to be, or to possess, disappears, another relation to lack and desire opens up. It is not only a matter of letting the trappings of the ego fall away; it is also a matter of rebuilding from what is missing—making lack itself what creates a being. Mysticism thus creates a particular aesthetics of pleasure: it turns unsatisfied desire into a desire for dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction becomes the sought-after object through every practice.

Michel de Certeau writes in this sense: "Mystical is the man or the woman who cannot stop walking and who, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of each place and of each object that it is not that; that one cannot dwell here nor be content with this. Desire creates an excess." This is why we can say that mysticism is an erotics. And this is what allows us to connect spirituality and eroticism.

1.2. Words of Intoxication: In Praise of the Elusive

Sufi mysticism does not seek to name God head-on; it approaches Him through desire, intoxication, and amorous address. That is why Sufi poetry unhesitatingly borrows the lexicon of the body, wine, the gaze, and self-loss. In The Great Tāʾiyya, Ibn al-Fāriḍ addresses at length a "She." The poem presents itself as an unbroken declaration of love, without explicit indication of its addressee. A profane reader could read it as a poem of human love, so carnal, unsettling, and incarnate is its language. Nothing dispels the ambiguity; on the contrary, the poem deepens it.

سقتني حُميَّا الحبِّ راحةَ مقلتي،
وكأسي محيَّا مَن عنِ الحُسنِ جلتِ
فأوهمتُ صحبي أنَّ شربَ شرابهم،
بهِ سرَّ سرِّي في انتشائي بنظرةِ

She gave me to drink the burning wine of love,
and my eyes found rest in it, as if in calm.
My cup was her face,
a radiance of beauty freed from every limit.

I let my companions believe
that I was drinking their drink,
while the secret of my intoxication
lay in a single vision.

The poet feigns here a visible intoxication, shared and almost social, while the true source of his ecstasy remains secret, inward, bound to an intimate vision. Mystical intoxication hides beneath the appearances of profane intoxication. The boundary between the two becomes indistinguishable. Nothing allows one to affirm with certainty whether the beloved is human or divine. This confusion is not the poem's weakness; it is its strength. Carnal desire and spiritual desire speak the same language. This language of desire is ubiquitous in Sufi poetry. It is articulated through terms that do not belong to abstract symbolism but to lived experience: ʿishq, passionate love that consumes; shawq, burning longing; wajd, ecstasy—literally what is "found" by losing oneself. This vocabulary is not decorative. It builds an aesthetics of continuity, in which human love and divine love mirror one another without hierarchy.

Further on, Ibn al-Fāriḍ suggests an intimacy even more troubling, where proximity becomes almost unbearable:

ولمّا انقضى صحوي، تقاضيتُ وصلها،
ولم يغشني، في بسطها، قبضُ خشيتي

When my return to myself came to an end, I asked for union with her,
and in the opening of her arms,
no fear came to seize me.

The union requested here—waṣl—is a term one might expect in a profane love poem. It signifies the joining of bodies as well as that of souls. The absence of fear, the relaxation, the total surrender reinforce the impression of a carnal scene, where desire at last finds a resting place, without naming its source.

This indeterminacy of the beloved runs through much mystical poetry, especially Persian, where the language of love deliberately lingers on a threshold.

In Ḥāfeẓ of Shiraz, the beloved takes on the features of a named, situated, almost tangible woman—yet remains elusive:

اگر آن ترکِ شیرازی به دست آرد دلِ ما را
به خالِ هندویش بخشم سمرقند و بخارا را

If that Turk of Shiraz takes my heart in her hand,
for the beauty spot on her face
I would give Samarkand and Bukhara.

Nothing in these lines fixes the beloved's status. The scene is eminently carnal: a heart taken in the hand, a face, a beauty spot. And yet the gesture of offering is absolute: to give away kingdoms for a sign on a face. The economy of love becomes excess, disproportion, the loss of any reasonable measure. Here desire refuses assignment; it circulates between body and the invisible, between the beloved woman and the absolute Beloved. The poem does not seek to resolve the ambiguity; it cultivates it. For it is precisely in this undecidable space that desire becomes mystical.

This logic of displacement becomes still more radical when the very place of prayer is diverted. Ḥāfeẓ writes:

نماز در میخانه‌ام افتاد و سجده بر لب دوست

My prayer led me into the tavern,
and my prostration came to rest upon the beloved's lips.

The gesture is audacious, yet revealing. The sacred is not denied; it is displaced. The tavern becomes a place of disclosure; the beloved's lips become the place of prostration. Desire no longer finds a stable space in which to settle. It slides, slips away, becomes de-localized. Thus, in these poetics of desire, love is never grasped. It promises union without delivering it fully; it offers visions without stabilizing them. Desire is felt as tension, as movement without a terminus. It does not aim at satisfaction, but at its own renewal. It is in this very impossibility—in this flight of the loved object—that desire becomes mystical.

This confusion is not unique to Ibn al-Fāriḍ or Ḥāfeẓ. It runs through the whole of Sufi poetry, including in women's voices whose speech embraces a direct sensuality. Some mystical poets assumed a language so close to the erotic that it was sometimes perceived as blasphemous. Yet that blasphemy—if it is one—is never a rupture: it is an excess of love.

2. Living God in the Feminine

2.1. Words of Sufi Women: A Mysticism Lived in the Flesh

This excess of love finds a particularly intense expression in the words of Sufi women, whose mysticism is not spoken from a distance but lived in the flesh. Annemarie Schimmel captures this aptly: "Sufi women have often expressed their relationship with God in a direct, bodily, affective language, because their spiritual experience was inseparable from their sensuous life." This sentence states what matters: mystical experience is lived before it is thought. It passes through the body; it marks itself in breathing, in exhaustion, in impetus, and sometimes in overflowing joy. The divine does not remain at a distance; it allows itself to be approached in intimacy, in what trembles and gives itself. The words of Fāṭima al-Juzajānīyya bear witness to this:

المحبّةُ نارٌ تَقَعُ في القلوب،
ثمّ تسري إلى الجوارح فتحرقها،
فلا يبقى في العبد موضعٌ لغير الله

Love is a fire that falls into hearts,
then runs through the limbs and burns them,
so that no place remains in the servant for anything other than God.

Love here is neither a purely interior sentiment nor a simple disposition of the soul. It is a force that moves, invades, consumes. The body becomes the very site of spiritual transformation: not an obstacle to divine presence, but its space of expansion.

This carnal geography of the spirit reaches its apex in the poetry of Mahsatī Ganjavī. With her, belonging to the Divine is no longer a matter of dogma, but an anatomical inscription. She writes:

ا در تـن مـا جـان و رگ و پـی بـود قـربـان و فـدای رخ زیـبـا بـودیم [...] ما را به دم پیر پـیـمانـه کـشـیـد در آتش عشق تو تـنـم زبـانـه کـشـیـد

So long as there remained in our body a soul, veins, and tendons, we were the sacrifice and the offering to that Face of beauty […] He drew us toward the breath of the old master and the cup; in the fire of Your love, my flesh became a flame.

Here the body is not merely consumed; it is offered in its most intimate structure—its tissues, its bloodstream—as irrefutable proof of love. These words echo those of the great Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, whose very "breath" could not turn toward any other than the Beloved, making the act of breathing the unceasing rhythm of an incarnate divine presence. With these women, Sufism is not thought at a distance; it is lived—passing through breath, fatigue, waiting, and the heart's surge.

In this sense, the feminine becomes, in Sufi thought, a key for reading mystical experience. Ibn ʿArabī formulates this intuition with remarkable density when he states that a place devoid of femininity is not trustworthy. He is not speaking of women in a biological sense, but of a spiritual quality: the capacity to receive, to bear, to let what comes come, without seeking to possess. The feminine denotes an availability to presence, an openness that makes divine manifestation possible.

2.2. The Feminine as Threshold of Presence

If the feminine becomes, in Sufi thought, a key for reading mystical experience, it is because it designates a locus of manifestation rather than a fixed identity. It does not refer only to woman as a historical or social subject, but to a spiritual quality: that which allows presence to give itself, to draw near, to be felt. Ibn ʿArabī expresses this strikingly when he writes, in the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya:

أكملُ الشهودِ شهودُ الحقّ في المرأة

The contemplation of God in woman is the most perfect contemplation.

This sentence—often quoted but rarely pondered in all its force—is neither provocation nor easy allegory. It affirms that woman, as a figure of the feminine, constitutes the place where divine presence becomes closest, most sensible, most visible. Not because she would possess God, but because she welcomes. The feminine is thought here as a surface of revelation, as a space where the divine consents to become visible without congealing. Ibn ʿArabī adds elsewhere:

المرأةُ مَحَلُّ القَبول، وفي قَبولِها يَظهَرُ السِّرُّ الإلهي

Woman is the locus of receptivity, and it is in her reception that the divine secret manifests itself.

To receive is not to undergo. In Sufi language, to receive means to let what comes come without capture, to allow presence to pass without enclosing it. The feminine thus becomes a threshold: neither outside nor inside, neither pure transcendence nor closed immanence, but a point of opening where the invisible consents to become sensible.

This intuition runs through other Sufi voices. Rūzbihān Baqlī, for whom beauty is central, explicitly associates divine manifestation with the beloved form:

جمالِ الهی را دیدم که در صورت‌های دل‌انگیز پدیدار می‌شد،
و دلِ من دیگر میانِ محبوبِ انسانی و محبوبِ حقیقی تمایزی نمی‌دید.

I saw divine Beauty appear beneath lovable forms,
and my heart could no longer distinguish the beloved from the Beloved.

With him, the beloved woman is not a screen between man and God; she is the very place where beauty is unveiled. The confusion is not an error; it is a mode of knowledge. Where the gaze accepts not to separate, presence becomes perceptible. Annemarie Schimmel illuminates this logic: "In Islamic mysticism, the feminine symbolizes the soul's capacity to receive divine manifestation. It is the place where transcendence becomes relationship." The feminine, then, is not opposed to transcendence; it is its sensible condition. It allows mystical experience not to remain abstract, disincarnate, remote. That is why so many Sufi poets speak of God through a face, a voice, a woman's presence, without ever feeling the need to resolve the ambiguity. Éric Geoffroy puts it plainly: "Sufism does not seek to move away from the sensible world, but to recognize there the signs of Presence." In this perspective, woman is not merely one symbol among others: she embodies this possible proximity. She is the place where the divine becomes relationship, address, trembling. To speak of God in the feminine is not to reduce Him; it is to accept that His presence may manifest where being consents to receive.

Thus the feminine as threshold of presence points neither to an identity claim nor to an abstract idealization. It designates a spiritual posture: one that does not seize, does not dominate, does not close. Wherever this posture exists—in women as in men—presence can come to be. From this threshold the body becomes fully involved. For receiving presence is never a purely inward act: it is an experience that passes through breath, emotion, exhaustion, and joy. The feminine opens; the body receives. And it is in this passage that the most radical mystical experience unfolds.

3. The Body as Passage

3.1. Fanāʾ: The Experience of the Transfigured Body

In the Sufi path, mystical experience is never lived outside the sensible. It does not proceed from withdrawing from the body, but from crossing through it. Far from being an obstacle to spiritual knowledge, the body becomes one of its most exposed, tested, and transformed sites. The quest for the divine engages the whole being—not as an ascetic discipline aimed at extinction, but as a making-available of the flesh. The Sufi body is not a body to deny, nor even to dominate: it is a porous body, open to intensities, traversed by breath, fatigue, impetus, sometimes exhaustion and overflowing joy. It is within this crossing that the experience of fanāʾ takes shape—often translated as "annihilation," but better understood otherwise: not as destruction, but as the effacement of the ego's centrality.

This effacement cannot be decreed; it is undergone. It manifests in precise bodily states: loss of bearings, intoxication, trembling, surrender, the momentary dissolution of boundaries between inside and outside. Fanāʾ is an experience lived before it is thought, a way of inhabiting the body otherwise, until the subject ceases to be the center of his own world. This is why Sufi poetry so often turns to the images of intoxication, wine, night, and flesh. In Abū Nuwās—long marginalized as a poet—these figures are not mere moral provocation. Wine becomes the metaphor of consenting to self-loss; the tavern, a symbolic space where identities loosen, where the ego abdicates. Far from diverting from the sacred, this intoxication becomes one of its paradoxical paths.

This logic reaches its incandescent point with al-Ḥallāj. When he declares:

أنا من أهوى ومن أهوى أنا

I am the one I love, and the one I love is me.

he is formulating neither a thesis nor a metaphor. He gives voice to an experience of fusion, where any distinction between lover and Beloved becomes untenable. This utterance carries an undeniable erotic charge—not because it explicitly describes the body, but because it names the moment when the subject can no longer stand at a distance from what touches him. The body becomes pure intensity, pure presence, without mediation. Here Henry Corbin's thought sheds deep light on the Sufi experience: "Mystical experience does not abolish the body; it transfigures it. It makes appear a body of light, intermediate between the sensible and the spiritual." Fanāʾ therefore does not destroy the flesh; it displaces it. It brings forth another relation to the body, no longer as possession or identity, but as a place of passage. The transfigured body becomes the space where the sensible and the invisible cease to oppose one another, where presence gives itself without fixing itself.

This experience entails a true ethics of risk. To love God, in the Sufi tradition, is not to protect oneself; it is to accept being lost—not in order to vanish, but to consent to be traversed by what exceeds every stable form of the self. The body is no longer what must be surpassed to reach the divine: it is what makes the experience possible. Thus understood, fanāʾ paradoxically fulfills the sensible rather than abolishing it. It opens a space where the body, far from being rejected, becomes the very place of effacement, presence, and transformation. It is in this crossing—and not in flight—that Sufism asserts its most radical vision: one does not encounter God by cutting oneself off from the world, but by accepting to be fully exposed within it.

3.2. The Gentle Blasphemy: Loving Until One Is Lost

When mystical love reaches its point of incandescence, it can no longer be spoken in a cautious language. Desire no longer merely evokes; it exposes. It commits being up to its extreme limits, where speech becomes risky, sometimes fatal. It is in this space that what has been called, from the outside, Sufi "blasphemy" comes into being—not as negation of the sacred, but as overflow of love. In the Sufi tradition, this overflow is inseparable from the erotic. The language of fusion, embrace, and self-loss is not a poetic ornament: it is the only language capable of speaking an experience in which the distance between lover and Beloved has dissolved. As the Persian mystic Shams of Tabriz writes:

عشق اَلَه‌ بیر اودور کی، آلوولاندیغدا
عاشیغی یاندیرار،
اوندان یالنیز بیر آد قالانا قَدَر

Love is that fire which, when it ignites,
burns the lover until nothing remains of him but a name.

Here love acts as a force of radical de-identification. Fire does not merely illuminate: it destroys contours. The self, exposed to such intensity, ceases to be a refuge. Mystical desire does not aim at a stable enjoyment, but at an irreversible loss.

This logic is also present in Ibn al-Fāriḍ, when he writes elsewhere in his poetry:

كان فنائي بقائي، وكان غيابي حضوري

My annihilation was my subsistence,
and my disappearance, my dwelling.

Mystical eroticism reaches here a tragic depth: fusion does not merely suspend the self; it replaces it. The lover no longer possesses himself; he becomes the very locus of love. This radical substitution helps explain why certain Sufi utterances were perceived as intolerable: they speak an intimacy with the divine that religious order cannot contain. Michel Chodkiewicz clarifies the point: "The scandal of ecstatic utterances lies in the fact that they abolish the protective distance between man and God." To abolish distance is also to abolish safety. Mystical eroticism is an eroticism without guarantees: to love God as one loves a body, without mediation, exposes one to social, symbolic, sometimes physical disappearance. Blasphemy then becomes the name given to speech that can no longer contain itself, because the lived experience has exceeded all measure.

The Sufi Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī, long before al-Ḥallāj, already expressed this self-loss in a language of extreme audacity:

تجرّدتُ من نفسي كما تنسلخُ الحيّةُ من جلدِها

I stripped myself of myself
as a snake sheds its skin.

The image is profoundly carnal. It speaks of a molt, a painful separation, an irreversible transformation. The body itself is implicated in this dispossession: it does not remain intact; it is affected, displaced, traversed. Denis Gril notes: "Mystical ecstasy involves a total staking of one's being, where love leads to a form of consented disappearance." This disappearance is not a death drive. It is the paradoxical completion of a desire that refused to contain itself. Where human eroticism accepts the return of the self after pleasure, mystical eroticism pushes the experience to a point of no return. This is why some Sufis accepted the ultimate loss—not out of fascination with death, but out of fidelity to a lived love. Sacrifice is not a sought end; it is the risk inherent in too-great proximity to the divine. To love in this way is to consent not to protect oneself. As Alexander Knysh writes: "Sufi ecstatic speech is dangerous because it is born of an experience in which the self does not survive intact."

Sufi blasphemy is therefore "gentle" because it does not destroy in defiance, but in excess of love. It is the speech of a body too close, of a desire too engaged to remain compatible with institutional distance. Where the Law requires restraint, mystical love requires fusion. Thus, in Sufism, spirituality and eroticism never separate at the decisive moment. Eroticism is its burning language; disappearance is sometimes its tragic horizon. To love God until one is lost is to accept that desire does not return unscathed—and that the truth of experience may cost a life.

What Sufi mystical thought reveals, then, is not a confusion of the erotic and the spiritual, but a radical fidelity to the very trouble of desire. To love God there never consists in tearing oneself away from the body, but in consenting to be traversed by it—accepting that the sensible is the very site of ordeal, and sometimes of revelation. Desire does not settle into a final resolution: it remains opening, living tension, movement without end. It does not possess; it exposes. It does not fix; it sets one on the way.

In Sufi poetry and experience, intoxication, the feminine, flesh, and effacement are not profane deviations, but languages of approach. They each say, in their own way, what cannot be named without being immediately lost. The body becomes a threshold—not as a limit to cross, but as a place of welcome. Lack ceases to be a deficiency: it becomes a path. Love, finally, is no longer a consolation but an assumed risk—the risk of letting oneself be displaced, dispossessed, transformed. Perhaps this is, in the end, Sufism's most discreet and most audacious lesson: the sacred is not preserved through mastery or distance. It entrusts itself to vertigo. It gives itself where being accepts not to know, not to hold on, not to protect itself. And it is perhaps in this lucid surrender—in this fidelity to a desire that does not close upon itself—that another way of thinking spirituality takes shape: not as an ascent out of the world, but as the art of inhabiting presence with intensity, until one is traversed by it… and where speech ends, presence begins.

Salma Rouyett

Bibliography

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Ethics and Aesthetics in Islamic Heritage

5th Congress – PLURIEL

10–14 February, Córdoba, Spain

Aesthetics of Living Together: Visualizing an Islamic Ethics of the Other in al-Andalus

Raja Sakrani

Introduction

The theme of ethics raises a number of pitfalls.

To seek the ethics of a religion or a society is to perform an operation of extraction from an abundant given. It is a quest that undeniably leaves room for selection and for personal sensibilities—favoring one moral line over another. One must also confront the difficulty of divergence, even antagonism, among values within a single ethical system, especially when that system is as vast as Islam.

How should Islamic ethics be understood when situated at different levels of apprehension? How can it be grasped in its variety—in the historical and legal thickness that has shaped it over the centuries? And finally, how should it be approached in its relationship to aesthetics (which is precisely the theme of this congress)?

Given the time allotted to me, I shall begin by briefly sketching a picture of the values that emanate from the last monotheistic religion and of their development at the time of the conquest of al-Andalus at the beginning of the eighth century. I shall then examine the aesthetic creativity of living together by interrogating the ethics of alterity developed in Muslim Spain.

The Specificity of Islamic Ethics

At the outset, an etymological clarification is necessary: the term ethics is close to the notion of a system of values, a global vision of moral life, but it can also express a normative approach. This is what I shall emphasize in studying the case of al-Andalus.

Sacred Texts

We can distinguish two levels of values that constitute Islamic ethics: the Qurʾān and prophetic narration, or ḥadīth. The first level comprises a relatively limited but imperative set of moral rules required of the homo islamicus. The Qurʾān thus obliges the believer to affirm divine transcendence, to pray, to fast, to give alms, to accept the superiority of the sacred over the profane, and of the world to come over this world. At the same time, it also organizes human relations through an intense moralization based—essentially—on belief in God and in the afterlife. One may therefore say that the metaphysical precedes ethics, yet it posits ethics as its complement, insofar as the Qurʾān constantly associates the profession of faith with good works (al-ṣāliḥāt), thereby intertwining the metaphysical demand and the ethical demand.

The second level is typically Islamic. It is one of the most gigantic compendia of values, norms, and visions ever produced by the human mind. These norms are extremely numerous—covering most human behavior—and they propose a vision of life. Qurʾānic discourse mingles pity and anger, mercy and violence, whereas the discourse of the Sunna tends to construct a sensibility, an inner instance, an ethical intuition—an extremely diverse palette of values unfolding on the margins of Qurʾānic ethics with unmatched richness. One ḥadīth can even be set against another. Yet the two levels converge to forge the typical personality of the homo islamicus and to constitute the core of its superego.

Islamic Law and Thought

Islamic law presents itself as the development of the principles and values set out in the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth. It is a kind of codification that details and explains both worship and social relations. The pragmatism of the approach and the attention to precision are far more prominent than theoretical effort. It is therefore unsurprising that, in classical works of fiqh, it is rare to find a chapter devoted to ethics as such. At bottom, this legislative effort—characterized by concrete applications of Islamic values that remain in the background—has largely helped to shape the ethics of an Islamic way of life and the identity of the civilization that claims it. The rare exception is al-Ghazālī and the third volume of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, entirely devoted to deepening Islam's values. We are in the eleventh century. Yet, thousands of kilometers away, the Islamic ethics of the Iberian Peninsula had experienced a unique flowering, marked by a distinctively Andalusi imprint—exceptional in Islamic history.

Living Together in al-Andalus: Toward an Outline of an Islamic Ethics of Alterity

The study of this ethics requires an understanding of the historical context of the conquest of the Islamic West and of its normative framework.

Context of the Conquest of al-Andalus

Although the current state of our knowledge suffers from gaps and insufficiencies, this does not prevent us from sketching a sufficiently rigorous outline beginning with Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād's conquest in 711 and the settlement of Arabs on Iberian soil. In the absence of a frankly colonial policy—as evidenced by the military contingent, which was not intended for such an end—the essential point lay in exploiting the internal Visigothic crisis in order to impose the signing of a peace pact (muʿāhadāt ṣulḥ), in accordance with Qurʾānic expression. The system of peace pacts in Islam is linked to the implementation of a protected status (dhimma) applicable only to the People of the Book. It should be recalled that Jews, cruelly oppressed under Visigothic rule, welcomed the Arabs as liberators. Muslims strengthened this treaty "through campaigns of mixed unions and the granting of territorial autonomies, which allowed the emergence of the Mozarab phenomenon." The Mozarabs were Christians who spoke and wrote Arabic. I shall return to this point.

Normative Framework

It is important to note that the medieval mental structure of living together, on the one hand, and the gradual path toward the principle of tolerance, on the other, began to take shape and develop thanks to a Semitic vein—precisely an Islamic one.

This era knew nothing of religious or cultural liberalism in the modern sense. The aim was not to respect religious freedom, nor to withdraw religion into a strictly individual sphere while sharing public space with other communities in a Habermasian sense, nor even to practice a modern tolerance based on equality—an idea that would appear later, from the eighteenth century onward. Lessing's play bears witness to this. That great modern treatise on tolerance shimmers through its protagonist, Nathan the Wise, and the tale of the three rings—mirroring the Andalusi episode of las tres culturas.

The Aesthetics of Living Together: A Bridge Between Self and Other

Andalusi interaction touched socio-political, agrarian, artisanal, and intellectual domains, not to mention food habits and dress; neighborly relations; attendance at feasts and weddings; funerary rites; medicine; love affairs, and much more. The features of this aesthetics can be explained by the following elements.

First, one must not forget the living, pragmatic, and conjunctural character of this living together—a kind of modus vivendi, to use Francisco Márquez Villanueva's apt expression, to which the three communities agreed to adhere. Second, this process was neither always complete and stable nor homogeneous across time and space. The very history of medieval Spain proves as much. What has been called Convivencia was not the same in Córdoba, the first Muslim Andalusi capital from the eighth century to the beginning of the eleventh, as it was in Toledo, when, on 6 October 1085, Alfonso VI retook the city from the Muslims without expelling them—indeed working to attract Jews. The reign of Alfonso X was another episode of Convivencia, as were Seville and Granada, the last Muslim capitals before the fall of Granada in 1492, the Reconquista, and the tragic expulsion of all Semites—Muslims and Jews.

Third, the interferences and intertwinings between these normative universes are attested by several works, such as Averroes's writings on the legal wisdom of Arab Spain; Kitāb al-Qāḍī on the history of judges in Córdoba; Rafael Castejón Calderón's Los juristas hispano-musulmanes (1948); or, earlier, Julián Ribera's edition of Historia de los jueces de Córdoba by al-Khushanī (1914). Alfonso X's Código de las Siete Partidas, whose sections devoted to legal rules applicable to Jews and Muslims bear witness to the intertwining of cultures and norms, is another example.

But the question is this: how did Andalusi Islamic civilization constitute the traits of its existence through an ethics of its own—magnifying and sublimating them aesthetically?

The Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios, born in Zaragoza in 1871, proposed—on the basis of rigorous scholarship and with reference to Arabic texts and their translations—pertinent hypotheses concerning complex intertwinings, extending over many centuries, between Islam and Christianity in their mystical, literary, linguistic, philosophical, sociological, and even botanical dimensions.

In the address he delivered on entering the Real Academia Española, La escatología musulmana en la "Divina Comedia", he opened an entire field of inquiry by arguing that Dante had used a text by Ibn ʿArabī to construct his journey to the afterlife, presupposing the existence of a translation accessible to Dante—a point later confirmed.

Between Dante and Ibn ʿArabī of Murcia, as well as the rich literature on al-Isrāʾ wa-l-Miʿrāj and the names that surface in Asín Palacios's book—such as Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī and many others—there emerged new knowledge about the logic of "discipline and punish" in Islam and about an Islamic purgatorio.

We reach here a crucial moment in this short lecture: if the hard core of Islamic ethics proceeds from the Qurʾānic given, other lines of value stem from other sources and were elaborated or fixed at various moments. It is possible that the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries marked the completion of this gestation. It is precisely the moment when living together among the three monotheistic religions reached its apex. In al-Andalus, the ethnic and social fabric differed markedly from that of Baghdad or Cairo, Córdoba's two rivals at the time. A strong Berber presence and mixed unions created dynamics of acculturation and religious conversions in all directions, including the conversion of Muslims to Christianity (what scholars would much later call the phenomenon of the "Muslims of Christ"). In other words, even if the religious element predominated, the ethical ensemble remained vast—too vast, often contradictory at its margins, leaving room for individual choice. This is precisely what I shall demonstrate through a few fatāwā and decisions by Andalusi judges.

Broadly speaking, secular values other than strictly Islamic ones survived within this complex or were grafted onto it. They are not of religious inspiration, but belong to Islam-as-history or Islam-as-culture. This is without counting the immense diversity of ethical overlaps lived in micro-environments, insofar as Islam presided over an increasingly unified and complex world.

Adab literature (prior to the normative usage made of the term by Imam al-Shāfiʿī, who used it as a near-synonym of akhlāq) appears as an integrative pedagogy of secular ethics against a background of ethno-cultural diversity, with a predominance of the Arab note. This is why Persian and Indian wisdom—embodied by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, in Kalīla wa-Dimna as well as in his adab writings—could be integrated. It also explains why Ibn Ḥazm, al-Rāzī, or al-Ghazālī drew heavily on Miskawayh. In the values of the Tahdhīb, they recognized a common ground that one might call a synthesized Islamo-Arab ethical culture.

It is well known today that troubadours are indebted to Arabic courtly poetry transmitted through Spain. The invention of new literary or poetic genres; the interlacing of languages; Arabic, Latin, and Jewish calligraphies; architecture; music; the blending of iconographies and culinary arts; the refinement of living together and the celebration of joie de vivre; laying down one's own language to borrow that of the other; translating and letting oneself be translated—all of this was made possible by an ethics of hospitality and muruwwa, of openness and inclusion ("Quien tiene un moro tiene un oro"—whoever has a Moor has a treasure).

And who could deny the precious role of the School of Translators of Toledo (Escuela de Traductores de Toledo)? How many Arabic manuscripts and books were translated into Latin, thus transferring the essentials of Greek and Roman antiquity—without forgetting, along the way, what the Islamic world was able to contribute, add, adapt, and enrich. The intertwining not only of bodies of knowledge and cultures but also of languages is fascinating. Castilian could be transcribed in Arabic characters and vice versa, or Arabic in rabbinic Hebrew characters…

As for mysticism, religions interlace when the self opens to the other in its infinite quest for the Divine—from Ramón Llull, the "Christian Sufi," who introduced the tale of the Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) and was a close disciple of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī of Murcia, to Saint John of the Cross (Noche oscura), via Teresa of Ávila.

Normative Aesthetics of Living Together

The Definitionsmacht—the "power to define"—of living together belonged largely to Muslim judges. It thus allowed the normative elasticity commonly found in Islamic law. There is often a plurality of legal solutions or, more broadly, a normative flexibility in the way everyday interactions with Christians were regulated. This plurality is difficult to apprehend because it is tied to practice and daily cohabitation, and not only to fatāwā and legal writings.

Let us recall the scale of validity in Islam: it is, in itself, pluralistic in nature.

One of the main properties specific to a Geltungskultur (a "culture of validity") is the logic of validity itself. What is legally valid or invalid in Islam is not subjected to a binary code as in Western legal logic (legal/illegal; valid/null, etc.). Islamic validity logic is richer because it is more gradual. This explains the existence of an entire palette of legal classifications: an act may be regarded as obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), legally neutral or indifferent (mubāḥ), reprehensible (makrūh), or, finally, forbidden (maḥḍūr). The legal sanction attached to an act likewise varies according to its classification.

Beyond strictly legal operational rules, there exists a whole series of non-binding prescriptions concerning manners, the subtleties of mutual respect, how to behave toward the other, and the calibration of social distance—that is, not living too close to one another, yet participating in overlapping communities: a community of neighbors; a transreligious community in the form of mixed marriage (connubium); a community of meals or fasting (commensality); a community of physicians, artisans, and so on.

The normative network of situations of living together is therefore far more complex and must be analyzed in terms of social proximity and social distance.

If living together functioned, it is because there were multiple ways of being Christian, multiple ways of being Muslim or Jewish, and multiple ways of being a minority or a majority. In this climate of diversity, the principal normative order became that of "live and let live," according to a supple social hierarchy capable of absorbing and tempering strictly religious norms. Diversity and pluralism thus had the paradoxical effect of forging a community beyond communal identities: an Andalusi identity that transcended the three monotheistic religions ("ʿindanā fī l-Andalus" — Jil Anidjar).

To explain unity in the diversity of Andalusi society, one might recall Émile Durkheim's notion in The Division of Labour in Society: integration through difference. In reality, this paradoxical-looking model rested on a hidden assumption—a normative consensus on the legitimacy of diversity; in other words, an underlying normative ethics of tolerance and mutual respect. Examples abound.

Al-Bakrī, in his Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, details Christians' religious practices on Saturday, their sexual ethics, their marriage rules, the prohibition of divorce and adultery, etc., and notes something intriguing about fasting: "They [the Christians] eat two days a week during the fast: Saturday and Sunday (…) Those among them who live among the Muslims observe the fast for reasons of propriety. But in lands under their sovereignty, they fast only half a day."

On the Mozarabs

Let us return to the Mozarabs. Building on the work of María Jesús Rubiera—an approach also accepted by other scholars—we can classify the Mozarabs into three groups:

1. Mozarabs of Visigothic origin, that is, Christians who were in the peninsula at the time of the Muslim conquest.
2. Neo-Mozarabs, that is, Christians originating from outside al-Andalus, from the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds.
3. Mozárabes nuevos, that is, Christians of Muslim origin.

Al-Miʿyār as a Window onto Andalusi Practice

Al-Miʿyār is the most important collection of Mālikī fatāwā in the entire Muslim West. It gathers the work of qāḍīs and ʿulamāʾ, among others, from Córdoba, Granada, Seville, and Ceuta. The fatāwā, very disparate and sometimes even contradictory, imply a plurality—and contradiction—in practice.

This compendium is original and rare in its kind given its socio-cultural value. It is full of unique information on living traditions of an Islamic ethics of living together in al-Andalus.

Commensality

In the second volume of al-Miʿyār, a long chapter is devoted to "matters of hunting, slaughtering, and animal sacrifice." The question posed to the Andalusi judge Ibn ʿArabī concerned a Christian who slaughters a chicken and then cooks it: "Is it permissible to eat the chicken with him, or to accept it if he offers it to take away?" (apparently, dishes to take away were exchanged at the time…). He replied: "Yes, it is permissible to eat it, because this chicken is his food." He then added: "what they (Christians) find ḥalāl in their religion is also ḥalāl for us, except what God has forbidden." The response evidently prompted a major debate between the judge and his disciples. The theological argument continues: Ibn ʿArabī recalls verse 5 of Sūrat al-Māʾida ("The Table Spread"), according to which: "The food of the People of the Book is lawful to you, and your food is lawful to them." He adds: God has permitted to us their food, which is ḥalāl in their own religion according to their own rituals, and it is not necessary that their rituals conform to ours concerning the slaughter of the animal. The only exception is what God has not specifically permitted, such as pork. This permission is a facilitation (taysīr), a flexibility for us, and we are not obliged to "search" (nabhatha) in their sharīʿa in order to judge it. In other words, their normative validity can be transmitted to us.

This Andalusi argument entails respect for the normativity of the Other as a phenomenon of recognition and respect for the Other's own religious authority, whether Christian or Jewish. This becomes even more fascinating when the Other's normative limitations or prohibitions play the same conflict-regulating role within a different culture of validity. By way of example, another fatwā stipulates that animals slaughtered by Jews but later found, because of illness or other reasons, to be non-ḥalāl for them must be prohibited in the markets.

In a fatwā concerning hunting by the People of the Book, Ibn ʿUqāb notes the existence of a controversy among qāḍīs. The majority tended to prohibit eating an animal hunted by a Christian or a Jew, whereas many "shaykhs such as al-Lakhmī, al-Bājī [of Tunis], Ibn Rushd, and Ibn ʿArabī [of al-Andalus]" chose the position of Ibn Wahb and Ashhab, qualifying hunting by a kitābī as mubāḥ (permissible).

Communitas

In the eleventh volume of al-Miʿyār, a new phenomenon is reported, which became a new tradition among Muslims: celebrating the Christian New Year as though it were a Muslim feast. "They exchange among themselves many prepared dishes for the occasion, gifts, and mementos to strengthen their bonds. Men and women stop work the next day as a sign of glorifying and venerating that day."

Several fatāwā spread across different volumes of al-Miʿyār address the question of feasts and Christian influence on Muslims. Thus, a very rare fatwā is addressed specifically to women. The text begins with the threatening Arabic formula "Wa-iyyākunna"—"Beware of glorifying Sunday and Saturday, and of stopping work on those two days and during Christian festivals. You must work every day, including Friday, until the call to prayer (…)". Women's role in the dynamics of living together is often neglected. Yet in neighborly relations, feasts, and culinary traditions, they are the principal actors. The ḥammām, for example, is not a confessional place in Islam. Women from the three monotheistic religions often met there with their young children.

Ibn Rushd does not consider candles a bidʿa (blameworthy innovation) on the grounds that they are inspired by Christian feasts. In madrasas, celebrating the Prophet's birthday by lighting candles and singing is not ḥarām.

Commercium

The first volume is devoted to purity (ṭahāra), a central theme in Islam. It deals with the use of paper made by Christians, sometimes containing a cross inlaid in the paper. The fatwā on this question is among the longest—so long that it could constitute a book in itself. Ibn Rushd's argumentation, in particular, is remarkable. By reasoning through analogy, the clothing of Christians—and Jews as well—is ḥalāl. More than that, clothing worn by a Christian is not impure, since a Muslim can wear it and even pray in it. The remaining water used by a Christian is not impure and is ḥalāl for performing ablutions before prayer. Christians' cheese is also ḥalāl, even if elements of pork are used in its manufacture. By contrast, it is clearly forbidden to eat cheese made by Zoroastrians (al-majūs), who are not monotheists.

Conclusion

In 2016, Donostia—the beautiful Basque seaside city—was named European Capital of Culture, presented as "un legado de convivencia," with a message "por la tolerancia y el respeto al otro."

The ethics of living together—of "las tres culturas y las tres religiones"—attests to the importance of the ethical question and to its role in celebrating alterity and difference.

Confronted with the memory of an Andalus—still a narcissistic wound—in the Arab collective memory, Islamic ethics has shown that religious assimilation was never a sine qua non for obtaining social and legal recognition. This is why it is not enough to say that Andalusi Islam was Mālikī. It served social dynamics and religious, cultural, and artistic intertwinings. It was a specifically Andalusi school.

Historical and archaeological research shows this increasingly: the presence of Muslims across yesterday's Europe differs from that of today. Yet this presence is more constant and more diverse than was expected. Despite dominations on both sides, slavery on both sides, and—especially in the Iberian case—violent and massive expulsion, Muslims have for centuries been close foreigners on European soil, familiar foreigners—the title Lucette Valensi chose for her book published in 2012.

What Milan Kundera calls "the sudden beauty of the impossible" lasted only a few centuries, ending in the cruelty of the Reconquista and the brutal expulsion of Jews and Muslims—even those converted to Christianity (los Cristianos nuevos).

Max Weber speaks of Islam and other religions as ethical religions, that is, as "a complex of commandments and prohibitions whose transgression constitutes sin," and he attributes this to prophecy, which "produces a centralization of ethics." Weber's observation is correct, but incomplete, because it overlooks—especially in Islam—the historical thickness of a synthesized, open Islamo-Arab ethical culture that leaves room for individual choices and transgressions. But can one really reproach Weber for his observation? Did not the seeds of puritanism appear with al-Ghazālī, one of the rare figures to devote an entire chapter to ethics? Did not this monastic aspiration of a legalistic type—an asceticism that becomes codified and rationalized while succumbing to the temptation of a morality of perfection for the homo islamicus—come to be confined to puritan movements that would, from Ibn Ḥanbal's call to apply the ḥudūd Allāh to Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, passing through Ibn Taymiyya, position themselves as "higher" than ordinary religion? This aspiration to a very harsh, external sharīʿa hardens into belief in the force of the legal, as in that of symbolism. And it clashes with modern ethical inspiration, which is not founded on an absolute embodied in a text.

In al-Andalus, a metamorphosis in Islamic ethics was finding its way. Ibn Rushd was opening a new breach—so much so that one of today's leading moral philosophers, the Moroccan Ṭāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, sees in Averroes a Western philosopher writing in Arabic who carried out the secularization (or laïcization) of knowledge. And yet the sequel is well known: his tragic fate of exile and intellectual marginalization. If Christian ethics has, since the Andalusi episode, managed to preserve the values of charity and compassion without their religious justification—secularizing them while simultaneously opening a new horizon toward the exaltation of freedom and a reflective humanism—Islamic ethics has not yet succeeded in rebuilding bridges with an ethical quest that has transcended the religious in order to reach a free and creative humanism. More than ever, it runs up against an existential crisis that makes Muslims' lives deeply miserable on both ethical and spiritual planes. Perhaps amnesia persists—forgetting that the Arabic word akhlāq is derived from the act of creating, khalq.

Kaaba and Holy Sepulchre in Images: Pilgrimage Souvenirs

Marie-Laure Davigo

Introduction

While preparing a scholarly catalogue of previously unpublished eighteenth- and nineteenth-century icons in Coptic Orthodox churches of a diocese in Upper Egypt, I had the opportunity to study the proskynetaria of these periods (fig. 1), and especially those from the end of the Ottoman era. Produced in workshops in Jerusalem, these large painted canvases met the needs of Eastern Christian pilgrims who visited the Holy City in great numbers. They offer a representation of Jerusalem in the form of a symbolic and spiritual topographic map. Surrounding the Holy Sepulchre, at the center of the composition, scenes from the life of Christ, saints, or episodes from the Old Testament are set in perspective with the life of Christ (fig. 2).

The theme of this conference—"Aesthetics and Ethics in Islamic Heritage"—brought to mind eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pilgrimage scrolls belonging to the Muslim tradition (fig. 3). They develop a symbolic vision of the Grand Sacred Mosque of Mecca (al-Harām), with the Ka'aba at its center. Qur'anic inscriptions often accompany these representations (figs. 4–5). Painted on paper, these scrolls are intended for pilgrims performing the Hajj and may also be used for proxy pilgrimages.

Today's presentation allows me to place these two kinds of pilgrimage images in dialogue and to question them (fig. 6). Both rely on a codified visual language tied to the sacred worlds of Christians and Muslims. What do these images truly represent? What is their function? How does the believer receive them and use them? Finally, what future awaits pilgrimage scrolls and proskynetaria? Should they be described as objects of devotion, as relic-amulets, or as works of art?

Scriptural and Historical Grounding of Pilgrimage Sites

Islamic pilgrimage scrolls and proskynetaria each authenticate and materialize, in their own way, Qur'anic verses and biblical words associated with supremely holy places: Mecca and Jerusalem.

Pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca is inscribed from the outset in the Qur'an as one of Islam's five pillars. In accordance with Qur'an 3:97: "In it are clear signs, including the place where Abraham stood. Whoever enters it is safe. Pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to God by those who are able to find a way to it. And whoever disbelieves… God is independent of the worlds." Pilgrims—exclusively Muslim—come in great numbers (fig. 7), from every country, to venerate the Ka'aba (a "consecrated sanctuary"). This cube, considered sacred, houses the Black Stone, said to have descended from Paradise and to have been received, according to different traditions, either by Adam at the creation of the world or by Abraham and Ishmael. The Muslim pilgrimage is thus a symbolic act involving a sequence of ceremonies, whether the rites performed within Mecca itself or those carried out in the surrounding sites (fig. 8). Qur'an 22:25–27 also states: "But those who disbelieve and bar others from the way of God and from the Sacred Mosque which We have made for all people, alike for those resident therein and those from outside… whoever seeks to commit sacrilege therein unjustly, We shall make him taste a painful punishment. And when We indicated to Abraham the site of the House [the Ka'aba], [saying], 'Associate nothing with Me; and purify My House for those who circumambulate, those who stand, and those who bow and prostrate. And proclaim the Hajj to the people: they will come to you on foot and on every lean mount, coming from every distant pass.'"

As in the Qur'an, several passages of the Torah mention the obligation for Jews to make pilgrimage, at specific moments, to a particular and highly symbolic place: the Temple of Jerusalem. In the Gospels, there is no explicit obligation for Christians to undertake pilgrimage to a specific site. Yet in the fourth century—late relative to the writing of the canonical Gospels—Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. He had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre erected (fig. 9) on the presumed site of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection, thereby giving historical and spiritual legitimacy to these founding events of Christian faith. From the fourth century onward, believers were strongly encouraged to pray at the holy places of Palestine, especially at the Holy Sepulchre. Liturgical celebrations were held there to commemorate the principal events of the Passion–Resurrection cycle.

Bibliographic References and State of Research

For this paper, I draw primarily on studies conducted under the direction of Mat Immerzeel on proskynetaria. For pilgrimage scrolls representing Mecca and the Ka'aba, Finbarr Barry Flood's work on technologies of devotion in the arts of Islam has been especially valuable, given my limited familiarity with the field of Islamic art.

Description of the Pilgrimage Scroll

Within the Islamic tradition, Muslim artists began very early to reproduce holy places in the form of manuscript illuminations, on ceramic tiles, on metal bowls, and across many other media, including pilgrimage scrolls (figs. 10–11). The Futūḥ al-Ḥaramayn ("Revelation of the Two Sanctuaries"), illustrated by the Indian or Persian author Muḥyī al-Dīn Lārī (d. 933 AH / 1526–1527 CE), plays a particular role (figs. 12–13). It is often regarded as the first guide intended for pilgrims performing the Hajj. It lists and illustrates—schematically and in vivid colors—the stages of the pilgrimage and the rituals to be observed, as well as customary prayers and offerings. In the sixteenth century it was widely copied in Ottoman Turkey, both in Istanbul for the sultan's library and in the provinces. Pilgrimage scrolls often accompanied copies of this guide.

These scrolls range from 20 to 50 cm in width and can reach 210 cm in length. They are images painted on paper in ink and often brightly colored with watercolor; the drawing is highly schematic, and the background is sometimes colored with wax. Their visual beauty lies in purified lines that highlight this "source-place" reserved for the pilgrim. They were produced in large numbers using woodblock printing techniques and most often made locally. They reproduce the sacred topography of holy places, including the sanctuary of Mecca.

At the center of the Sacred Mosque (al-Harām), the Ka'aba (literally "the cube"), about 14 meters high, is considered the "sacred house built for humankind." On the scrolls it is represented as a black rectangle. The interior of the building remains hidden and is entirely covered by a thick black cloth (the Kiswah). The Black Stone, set into the southeastern corner of the Ka'aba, is integrated into the representation of the "cube." During the Ottoman period, Egypt was tasked each year with replacing the cloth until 1962, when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia resumed this tradition and continues it to this day.

Function of the Pilgrimage Scroll

The Muslim believer undertakes pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam's most sacred city (fig. 14), in obedience to religious duty. The gesture is ethical in intention, both personal and rooted in a sense of belonging to the universal Muslim community (umma islāmiyya). The transformative and purifying aspects of travel and of staying in this place confer particular significance on the pilgrim, binding him to Muslims throughout the world and granting him a distinctive social status: that of ḥājj. Rituals, fixed by the universal scope of Islamic teaching, accompany the pilgrim's journey.

The production of pilgrimage scrolls often served as a complement to a "pilgrimage certificate" for Muslims who were able to perform the Hajj (fig. 15). Having been purified by observing all rites associated with the visited sites, they have symbolically walked "in the footsteps" of Muhammad in Mecca. (I will only mention in passing the importance, in connection with Mecca, of relics such as those associated with the Prophet's sandal.)

The artist who creates the scroll allows the pilgrim, once home, to retain a visual souvenir of the pilgrimage; in this sense the scroll functions as a contact-relic image. It enables both contemplation of the visited sacred place and—through the act of rolling and unrolling it vertically by hand—the reactivation of the mystical experience lived during the Hajj, of the baraka received on site, and of the testimony of purification and fidelity to God. The scroll's function is to synthesize, in a symbolic image, the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of pilgrimage. Once acquired, this image becomes an object of personal devotion that also carries a communal dimension.

The graces received on site are transmitted and conveyed through the pilgrimage scroll, hence the importance of reproducing it in large numbers. Such scrolls carry an apotropaic dimension: they integrate and redistribute the aura and baraka of the places. A purely profane material support could not preserve the memory of the sacred and transmit it, especially when it is mass-produced. For jurists, the challenge is to preserve these scrolls from any profanation foreign to the Muslim faith, or from contact with anyone in a state of ritual impurity. Even if jurists do not encourage kissing or touching the scrolls, popular devotion often expresses itself through tactile gestures—making the holy places "still sacred" at home. These scrolls correspond to popular practices in which an ultimate desire for fusion between image and viewer finds expression.

On certain scrolls depicting Mecca (fig. 16), pronounced wear in the painted area corresponding to the Ka'aba—especially on the sanctuary façade—has been caused by repeated hand contact, in a circular movement that imitates the rituals around the Ka'aba on the paper itself. Touching the Ka'aba representation to the point of sometimes erasing part of the drawing and paint reveals the scroll's prophylactic role, assimilating it to a contact relic. Pilgrims performing the ṭawāf (the seven circumambulations around the Ka'aba) begin and end each circuit by greeting or touching the Black Stone, a gesture invested with spiritual meaning. In Islamic tradition, it is not the stone itself that is worshipped; rather, touching or saluting it symbolizes obedience and love toward God. The pilgrimage scroll can also enable believers who cannot physically perform the Hajj to undertake it spiritually by proxy and likewise benefit from baraka.

Description of the Proskynetarion

Proskynetaria (fig. 17), often of large format (approximately 90 × 100 cm), are painted on canvas. In the eighteenth century, the most common technique is tempera using the three primary colors (yellow, blue, red) and sometimes gold. The style appears popular and naïve, with often thick outlines and figures sketched quickly. In the nineteenth century (fig. 18), artists sometimes used oil paint; colors became more subtle and refined, glazes lent greater transparency and nuance to figures, and chrysography was often used for garments.

The architectural cutaway representation of the Holy Sepulchre encompasses the different episodes of Christ's Passion–Resurrection cycle. Each event in this narrative cycle is located in the chapel dedicated to it within the building. Among these scenes, Greek Orthodox clergy appear anachronistically, officiating with a lit candle in hand, celebrating liturgies in the chapels of the Holy Sepulchre. Very likely, this also recalls the Greek Orthodox celebration on Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, of the miracle of the "Holy Fire" (fig. 19)—in Greek Ἅγιον Φῶς ("Sacred Light")—celebrated since the fourth century around the edicule of Christ's tomb.

The painted surface of a proskynetarion is entirely covered with scenes; there is no empty space. Only the cartouche—most often at the center of the lower register along the bottom edge—remains blank. Once the work is finished and ready for sale, the owner's name, the date of execution, and sometimes a prayer intention are inscribed there. The inscription is written in Greek, Slavonic, or Arabic depending on the commissioner's origin; the most frequent script is Arabic, the local language. The Arabic-speaking pilgrim often has his name preceded by the word hajj ("pilgrim"), a term also applied to Christians who make pilgrimage to the Holy City. Additional inscriptions in Greek or Arabic, distributed across the painting, identify the figures and scenes. The selection of scenes surrounding the Holy Sepulchre varies somewhat from one workshop to another and, very likely, according to the preferences of different periods. These scenes, covering the entire canvas, are organized within rectangular or circular geometric frames.

Proskynetaria were produced in series in Greek Orthodox (Melkite) Arabic-speaking workshops in Jerusalem. As custodians of the Holy Sepulchre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Greek Orthodox clergy are the only clerics represented by these artists (themselves Greek Orthodox).

Function of the Proskynetarion

Proskynetaria (fig. 20) emphasize the architectural function of the Holy Sepulchre as an enclosure in which the incarnate divine and the Christian soteriological message (the theology of Salvation) unfold. The vignettes around the Holy Sepulchre illustrate multiple manifestations of grace and the fruits of God's incarnation in human space. The Christian pilgrim faces an accumulation of figures that saturate the pictorial field. The scenes surrounding the Holy Sepulchre serve as a visual catechesis and usher the viewer into an eschatological hope tied to the "Jerusalem above," with which the Holy Sepulchre is organically associated. The artist brings together, in a single place, historical events from the past and their contemporary commemoration; notions of time and space merge at the Holy Sepulchre, as if to announce the eschatological vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.

The faithful pilgrim's reception of a proskynetarion may function as a souvenir marking a significant moment in Jerusalem. The pilgrim brings it home rolled in a tube and displays it as proof of travel to the Holy Land. At times, a parish community that has made pilgrimage offers a proskynetarion to its church to adorn a wall. The object's functions then resemble a memorandum, a notebook, or a visual attestation that officially records one's stay in the holy place. More profoundly, it can represent a visual and spiritual reappropriation of the pilgrim's mystical experience in the Holy City.

On proskynetaria, the depiction of clergy holding lit candles, and the hanging lamps burning in each chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, are so many clues enabling the pilgrim, once home, to renew spiritually the experience of passing through the Holy Sepulchre.

The pilgrim may also consider the object a contact relic made in the Holy City where Christ lived. Yet it is difficult to know whether the relationship to this canvas mirrors the relationship to an icon. Will the pilgrim kiss it, touch it, venerate it? These questions remain open. To my knowledge, the prophylactic role of proskynetaria has not yet been studied. The ethical dimension lies in respect for the transcription of scenes, which are richly invested with sanctified human presences and evangelical episodes. The fresh, vivid coloring contributes to an aesthetic marked by popular simplicity.

Aesthetics and Ethics

The architectural dimension present in Islamic pilgrimage scrolls and in proskynetaria corresponds to two different conceptions of religious community. The Holy Sepulchre is, first, the church as a geographic gathering place for Christians—the "assembly of the faithful." It also symbolizes the Church as the body of Christ Jesus, the Son of God, of which all the baptized are members. Mecca, with the Ka'aba—ordinarily saturated with crowds—is paradoxically represented on pilgrimage scrolls as an empty place, where an immutable architecture stands, as if "eternally" stable. Only color, and sometimes the presence of inscriptions, bears the trace of a "living" mobility. The aim of these scrolls is to highlight the sacred nature of the Ka'aba and Mecca, along with a collective Muslim awareness of the symbolic charge of these sites, frequented not only by Muhammad but also by Abraham and—even according to some—by Adam.

The relationship between "artistic transcription" and "spiritual experience" in a sacred place must be taken into account when considering the mass development of Muslim pilgrimage scrolls and proskynetaria. The question arises of how the sacred is materialized. Indeed, the "capacity of a material support to absorb and transmit immaterial benefits"—a question raised by Flood—takes different forms depending on whether one considers an Islamic pilgrimage scroll or a proskynetarion.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, the production of proskynetaria (fig. 21) disappeared with the rise of photography and the mass circulation of printed tourist guides. Photography better matched the commissioner's desire for a more specific representation of the object; the image was then framed as a visual "reality" determined by the viewer. Tourist guides, for their part, provide pragmatic information on the history of events linked to particular sites. The object, removed from its context and from its personal commemorative dimension, entered the sphere of modern rationality and lost its prophylactic power.

In recent years, proskynetaria have attracted aesthetic interest among private collectors and have appeared in international auction rooms and online at significant prices. Several private and public museums also hold them. More recently, archaeologists and art historians have taken an interest in proskynetaria as objects of scholarly investigation. Their work continues to bring to light ever more examples worldwide, demonstrating their substantial production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the enthusiasm of pilgrims at that time for these canvases.

Unlike the fate of proskynetaria, the tradition of reproducing Muslim holy places did not die out with the advent of photography. The prophylactic attribution associated with mass-produced representations of Muslim holy sites over the centuries persists to this day. Yet in more recent photographic reproductions, instead of depicting a timeless place without human presence, believers are now foregrounded, gathered in massive crowds around the Ka'aba. The emphasis is increasingly placed on the visibility of the human event (fig. 22)—political and spiritual—that brings together the umma islāmiyya.

Conclusion

Although I am not a specialist in Islamic art, my recent encounter with Islamic pilgrimage scrolls opens new research perspectives for me, complementing and enriching my field of specialization, which is more oriented toward Eastern Christian art. The pilgrimage scroll and the proskynetarion translate and accompany—each in its own aesthetic manner—the truth of the pilgrim's purifying journey to holy places in order to contemplate, on site, a materialization of the sacred. In this paper, I have only sketched the question of the materialization of the sacred through aesthetic and ethical avenues. The issue opens a vast field of research. I hope to have shared a taste for it.

Thank you for your attention.

Honoring Icons and Its Religious and Moral Meanings: Theodore Abu Qurra and al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl as Models

Dr Nadine ʿAbbās

Ecclesiastical painting emerged in the first centuries of Christianity, and people split over it between supporters and opponents. Clement of Alexandria (d. 216) and Origen (d. 254) rejected it, whereas Saint Basil (d. 379) accepted it and urged Christian painters to glorify the martyrs in their works, affirming that "the honor paid to the image returns to the person it represents." Debate over honoring icons continued, and the crisis erupted in the eighth century when the caliph Yazīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ordered, in 723, that all images in churches and homes be smashed. Jewish and Muslim objections led many Christians of the Arabic-speaking East to question the legitimacy of honoring icons. Arab Christian theologians then defended the honoring of icons and prostration before the cross: Saint John of Damascus (d. 750) wrote three discourses in defense of icons; Patriarch Timothy I (d. 823), in his dialogue with the caliph al-Mahdī, answered the question of why Christians prostrate before the cross; Theodore Abu Qurra (d. c. 825) composed his Mīmar on honoring icons; and Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974) wrote a treatise explaining why Christians honor the holy cross.

The intellectual openness displayed by certain Muslim caliphs in the Middle Ages contributed, on the one hand, to strengthening dialogue between Muslims and Christians on religious and doctrinal questions, and, on the other, to encouraging Christians to write on various sensitive topics, including icons.

In this paper, I examine the question of honoring icons from the perspective of Arab Christians. I take as my two models Theodore Abu Qurra and al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl (d. after 1260), situating them within the Islamic milieu under whose protection they lived. I seek to address the following problem: how does the moral dimension manifest itself in honoring images, especially the image of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints?

From this problem follow these questions: how can prostration before images be prostration "as an honor" rather than as worship? How does honoring images of the saints become a path to their intercession, as mediators between God and the human person? And how does honoring the image of Christ lead to reward?

I will treat my topic in two parts:

• First: icons in Abu Qurra.
• Second: images in churches in Ibn al-ʿAssāl.

I. Icons in Abu Qurra

1. A brief note on Theodore Abu Qurra

Abu Qurra is an Arab Christian theologian belonging to the Melkite Church. He was born around 750 in al-Ruhā (Edessa) and died in 825. He was a contemporary of Hārūn al-Rashīd and al-Maʾmūn. He traveled to Egypt and Armenia in defense of Chalcedonian doctrine, seeking to restore Christian unity around the definition of the Council of Chalcedon. He wrote several works in which he explained the mystery of the Incarnation and the union of the two natures, divine and human, in the hypostasis of Christ. He was in contact with the Muʿtazilites of his time; the Baghdadi Muʿtazilite Abū Mūsā ʿĪsā ibn Ṣubayḥ (d. c. 840) composed a book titled Refutation of Abu Qurra the Christian, now lost. Abu Qurra wrote in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. Among his works is the Mīmar on honoring icons, on which I rely here.

The term "icons" means "images." An icon is "a Greek word meaning image. It is a technical term used in the Eastern Christian tradition to designate images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints that the believing people venerate. Its art follows precise rules and goes back to the paintings of Hellenistic Egypt" (Dictionary of Christian Faith, p. 86). In the Middle Ages, however, the term "icon" is seldom used among Arab Christians: they more often use ṣūra ("image"), an Arabic term corresponding to the Greek eikōn. In his Mīmar, Abu Qurra does not use the word "icon" but "image," even though the title of the work mentions icons.

Abu Qurra wrote his Mīmar on honoring icons in order to establish the legitimacy of honoring images of Christ and the saints and prostrating before them, and to affirm that believers are obliged to do so. His argument rests mainly on Scripture and the Fathers, as well as on reason. He also draws on historical facts to show the honor due to images, offers symbolic interpretations of Old Testament prescriptions, and cites Fathers such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius the Great, and Gregory the Theologian.

Abu Qurra opens his Mīmar by stating that Christianity surpasses the understanding of non-believers. If a Christian allowed himself to be swayed by what "outsiders" (that is, non-Christians) say and accepted their objections against honoring images, he would then have to reject the greatest mysteries of Christianity—mysteries that those outsiders reject even more vigorously than they reject the honoring of sacred images: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the crucifixion, the Eucharist, and baptism.

Moreover, non-Christian religions, including Judaism and Islam, themselves contain statements and narratives that reason does not readily accept.

In the Old Testament, it is said that God created things from nothing, "and that if he wishes to make something, he only says to it: 'Be!' and it is" (a formula also found in several Qurʾānic verses). It also recounts the creation of Adam from Eve's rib, the speaking serpent, and Balaam's donkey speaking. It recounts miracles such as Sarah's conception despite her barrenness and old age; the sea's parting by Moses' staff; rivers bursting forth from rock; the healing of Naaman the Syrian; the sun standing still and then returning; and many other reports that reason would contest.

Likewise, Jews and Muslims—who deny what the Gospel says about Christ—describe God in their books with attributes that reason cannot accept in a straightforward sense. The Old Testament says that God walked in Paradise and smelled the odor of sacrifices; that he regretted creating Adam; that he descended on Sinai and said that no one can live and see him; that he spoke with Moses as a man speaks with his companion; and many other narratives. The Qurʾān, for its part, mentions that God is seated upon the Throne, and that he has a hand, a face, and other bodily attributes. Abu Qurra then asks: how do Jews and Muslims understand these attributes, which imply anthropomorphism? If they reply that these are said of God in a fitting sense, one may answer them: how can you fault Christians for the predicates they apply to God in the Gospel, when you yourselves say similar things about him—indeed, things even more startling?

This raises a question: does Abu Qurra criticize the Old Testament to the point of rejecting it? Certainly not. He affirms that Christians believe in the Old and the New Testament, but that they understand "each thing according to its proper register," meaning that they know how to interpret sacred texts. The disagreement with Jews thus concerns the understanding of verses, not their acceptance.

Another question arises: why must the Christian honor images and prostrate before them? Abu Qurra answers that the believing Christian must accept what the Gospel proclaims and be convinced of it, even if opponents find it offensive. He must also trust everything the Church teaches and accept honoring images as he has believed in miracles and embraced the mysteries of Christianity. Scripture is not the only source of Christian foundations; Tradition is also a source. Christians have received by tradition and transmission many practices not mentioned in the Gospel, such as the eucharistic offering, baptism, the anointing with chrism, prostration before the cross, and others.

In this context, Abu Qurra reports narratives attributed to the Fathers and the saints, including a text attributed to Athanasius, responding to a question posed by Antiochus: why do we prostrate before images and the cross like idols, when God commanded that we not prostrate before what hands make? Athanasius answers that our prostration to God is not the same as our prostration before images; the honor we show images does not return to wood, but to what the image represents, out of love and attachment to it (that is, to the one represented). Abu Qurra adds that honoring images also exists among Jews: they honored the two tablets of the Law and the two cast-gold cherubim—not as gold and stone, but in honor of the Lord who commanded that they be made (Exodus 25:18–22).

2. Five points for discussion

If Scripture and Tradition are the two fundamental sources of Christianity, a series of questions follows: if God forbade, in the Old Testament, prostration before anyone other than himself, how does Abu Qurra interpret this prohibition? How does he explain its apparent tension with Christian Tradition? Why were images proscribed in the Old Testament? Why do Christians prostrate before images? Is it merely a tradition? What is the purpose of such prostration?

1. The meaning of prostration in the Bible and the Qurʾān

   Jews and Muslims base their opposition to honoring images and prostrating before them on scriptural passages that forbid prostration to anyone other than God. The Torah states: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above, or on earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them" (Exodus 20:2–5). Abu Qurra responds that, if by "do not bow down" God had intended to forbid absolutely any prostration to anyone other than himself, then the holy Fathers and the prophets would have to be considered wrong. The Old Testament offers many examples, before and after the Mosaic Law, of people prostrating before other human beings as a sign of honor: Abraham before the sons of Heth, Jacob before his brother Esau, and Joseph's brothers before Joseph. The Qurʾān, for its part, reports that God commanded the angels to prostrate before Adam; they did so, except Iblīs, who became one of the unbelievers. It also mentions that Jacob and his sons prostrated before Joseph. God therefore forbade prostration before idols, but prostration offered to prophets is admissible: it is honor, not worship.

2. The prohibition of prostration before images in the Old Testament

   Why did God prohibit prostration before images in the Old Testament (as in Exodus 20:2–5)? Abu Qurra provides several reasons, the most important of which are the following.

   • The prohibition is not absolute. God commanded Moses to make the Tent of Meeting according to the pattern shown him on the mountain (Exodus 25:8–9). Abu Qurra concludes that God's word to Israel—"do not make any likeness of what is in heaven, on earth, and in the water"—does not mean that believers must never produce images or figures; rather, it targets the things they were making in order to worship them, thereby being diverted from the knowledge and worship of God.

   • God prohibited prostration before images in the Old Testament because of Israel's weak discernment and its inability to honor images rightly. The prohibition of images is therefore a temporary dispensation. Abu Qurra compares this logic to other temporary arrangements in the Old Testament, notably the fact that the mystery of the Trinity, the divinity of the Son, and the divinity of the Holy Spirit were not disclosed explicitly there, lest the children of Israel fall into polytheism.

3. Justifying prostration before images

   Abu Qurra distinguishes two kinds of prostration: prostration as worship and prostration as honor. He maintains that Christians' prostration before the image of Christ and his saints is honor, not worship. The honor is not directed to boards and colors but to what these images represent. He argues, in substance: if someone objects that Christians do not merely prostrate before images but also touch them in their prostration, let him recall Jacob prostrating on the end of Joseph's staff and touching it, and interpret this act as the honor he wished to render to Joseph. Let him also recall that anyone who prostrates before God necessarily touches the ground or a carpet with his knees; we interpret his prostration according to the intention he forms with respect to God. Likewise, the fact that Christians touch images in prostration must be interpreted according to their intention: to honor Christ their God, as well as his saints, the prophets, the righteous, the martyrs, and others.

4. The benefits of prostration before images

   Abu Qurra maintains that whoever prostrates before the image of a saint moves the saint to pray for him. The saints are mediators between God and human beings, appeasing God on behalf of humanity in their lifetime and after their death. Many miracles, he says, have occurred through the relics of the saints and their images. God has established the saints as intermediaries between himself and his servants, both to honor the saints and to encourage others to attain a comparable share with God. The saints' capacity for intercession is rooted in the goodness of God, who wished to associate them with his generosity and gifts. The intercession of the saints does not diminish God's power or liberality; on the contrary, it manifests that power and liberality. The Old Testament offers many testimonies of prophetic intercession: Moses interceding for the children of Israel after the golden calf and turning away divine wrath; Abraham pleading with God that the inhabitants of Sodom be spared; and many other examples.

5. The dignity of images

   Abu Qurra argues that an image painted on a material gives that material a particular value; the insult or honor done to that image reaches, in sorrow or in joy, the one whose image it is. The Torah and the Gospel are written on parchment; before bearing the divine word, such parchment has no special dignity. But once the sacred word is inscribed, it is venerated and honored in the highest degree; whoever profanes it exposes himself to death. Abu Qurra also refers to a revered image of Christ "in our blessed city of al-Ruhā (Edessa)." To one who claims that the honor or offense done to Christ's image does not reach Christ, he replies by comparison: if the image of the father of an opponent of images were hung on the door of a church dedicated to Christ, and everyone leaving the church spat in the face of that image, would he not be consumed with anger? In the same way, the honor rendered to the image of Christ reaches Christ, who will reward whoever prostrates before it in proportion to the good done—just as the evil of spitting in the face of one's own father's image would be measured, and more besides.

   Those who depict Christ and honor his images deserve the highest reward, especially if they depict him crucified: in doing so, they manifest their attachment to their Savior, who will reward them, according to his generosity, with a recompense comparable to that of the martyrs.

   Furthermore, the dignity of an image depends on what it symbolizes. Abu Qurra explains that the two tablets of the Law and the Ark of the Covenant also belong to the register of "image." The two tablets placed in the Ark symbolize the Incarnation of the Word, and the Ark symbolizes the Virgin Mary. To venerate them is therefore to honor the image of Christ and the image of the Virgin. As for the ten words placed in the Ark, spoken by God to the children of Israel, they symbolize the incarnate Word of God; the "finger of God" by which these words were written is the Holy Spirit; and the Ark of the Lord is Mary, in whom the incarnate Word of God dwelt. Thus, in the tablets and the Ark there is an image of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

II. Images in churches in Ibn al-ʿAssāl

1. A brief note on al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl

Al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl is one of the four sons of al-ʿAssāl (along with al-Asʿad Abū al-Faraj Hibat Allāh, al-Ṣafī Abū al-Faḍāʾil, and al-Amjad Abū al-Majd Faḍl Allāh). They are among the leading Coptic scholars and notables of the thirteenth century. Al-Muʾtaman authored works in theology, biblical studies, liturgy, and linguistics (including a Coptic–Arabic dictionary).

I examine his treatment of images on the basis of his work Majmūʿ Uṣūl al-Dīn wa Masmūʿ Maḥṣūl al-Yaqīn ("Compendium of the Foundations of Religion and Collected Reports that Secure Certainty"). It is a substantial book of seventy chapters in which he gathers texts from the Fathers and Arab Christian authors on various theological issues: the Trinity, union, crucifixion, repentance, decree and predestination, honoring the cross, and others.

He devotes chapter 48 to images. Its title is: "On painting in churches examples of those in whose name they are depicted, for their remembrance and for seeking, through them, intercession with God (Most High)." His defense of images can be presented in two points.

2. Why do Christians depict images in churches?

Al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl appeals to the Old Testament and the writings of the Fathers to set out the reasons Christians place images in churches. He states that they do so "by imitation, not by innovation": they were not the first to do so but follow precedents. He then cites Old Testament narratives—three of which already appear in Abu Qurra:

• First narrative: God's word to Moses: "make two cherubim of gold…" (Exodus 25:18–22).

• Second narrative: the story of Solomon, son of David, as reported in 1 Kings 7.

• Third narrative: transmitted from a book attributed to Eusebius, the story of the woman whom the Gospel testifies Christ healed of a flow of blood (Mark 5:22–34). She placed an image of Christ on her door and placed her own image beneath Christ's feet in a posture of prostration. A plant grew beneath the feet of the image, and whoever sought healing through that plant was healed.

After these accounts, al-Muʾtaman concludes that, if it were not permissible to depict images in churches for the remembrance of those represented—and not for worship—then the Lord Christ would not have allowed the hemorrhaging woman to depict his image and her own; he would not have manifested the sign of healing through the plant that grew beneath the feet of the image; and the apostles would not have ordered that a church be built at the site of the two images—a church that remained until the city was destroyed.

One may therefore conclude that images in churches are associated with a power of healing. Other benefits also emerge, which I develop below.

3. What are the benefits of images?

The benefits of images can be summarized in three points:

• First benefit: a religious benefit tied to faith in Christ and his lordship. When believers contemplate the image of the Lord Christ, his remembrance is renewed within them: they praise him, sanctify him, exalt him, glorify him, and confess his lordship. They should kiss the image and prostrate before it "in honor of the one in whose name it has been depicted," not in honor of the image itself painted by human hands on walls with pigments.

• Second benefit: it concerns the image of the Lady Virgin. Seeing it strengthens faith. When ordinary people see her image and ask who she is, they are told that she is the Virgin foretold by the prophets, such as Isaiah and Ezekiel; that she found favor with God; that the Holy Spirit came upon her and that she gave birth to a son named Jesus. Hearing such accounts and others like them strengthens faith, and illnesses are healed through her intercession.

• Third benefit: it concerns images of the apostles, martyrs, prophets, the righteous, saints, and holy women. Whoever sees them and learns what torments they endured (crucifixion, beatings, killing, burning, drowning, and so forth) finds his fidelity strengthened and judges it fitting to kiss their images "out of veneration for them," not for pigments, walls, wood, or stone. They become ethical exemplars: people imitate them in conduct, for instance by refraining from abandoning fasting despite its demands, from changing religion under coercion, or from indulging greed and making divorce too easy.

Finally, al-Muʾtaman adds that images are not, for Christians alone, a means of intercession: communities that share their belief and others that differ from it have likewise sought deliverance from God by means of these bodily images, and God has relieved them and healed their illnesses through them.

Conclusion

It thus becomes clear that, among Arab Christians (Theodore Abu Qurra and al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl), honoring icons and prostration before images are not acts of worship but acts of honor. They carry religious meanings—above all the strengthening of faith—and moral meanings related to conduct. The icon is not a mere picture: it plays an essential role in the manifestation of revelation and in the work of sanctification. It is the sensible medium through which the believer ascends to the invisible; it is mediation and a path by which the believer draws near to God. This is logically possible within Christianity: just as the body of Christ was the visible material through which God bound himself to the human being in the Incarnation, so icons and images are a sensible material through which the human being enters into relation with God.

Introduction

In this presentation, I will speak about Dževad Karahasan, a Bosnian writer and professor of dramaturgy.

I chose to address this author at our conference on «Ethics and aesthetics in the Islamic heritage» because his work is particularly well suited to illustrating the relevance, for theology and for interreligious dialogue concerned with eschatology, of aesthetic discourses drawn from contemporary literature.

As a Christian theologian interested in dialogue with Islam, I am often confronted with difficulties connected with eschatology. It must be acknowledged that this theme is far less present than others and far less readily perceived as a field for fruitful exchange, dialogue, or even consensus between Islam and Christianity.

This difficulty in matters of eschatology can be explained in part by the fact that Christian theology—and especially Protestant theology—subjected the portion of its dogmatics devoted to reflections on the Last Judgment, the immortality of the soul, and the afterlife to a rigorous reassessment throughout the twentieth century, leading either to a "demythologization" (Bultmann) or to a radical reinterpretation (Barth) of these themes. Although a modern Muslim thinker such as Muhammad Iqbal also maintains that Islam would benefit from understanding the ultimate realities more as "psychological realities" than as metaphysical data, this is not the dominant position across Islamic theology as a whole. Christian interlocutors often find it difficult to understand why notions such as Judgment, hell, or barzakh, etc., do not seem to lose their significance among Muslims in the way they appear to do for many Christians. Added to this is the fact that eschatological questions exceed the purely dogmatic level and belong rather to a deeply rooted spirituality. But how can one establish dialogue—or at least mutual respect—when the topic is as sensitive as the other's view of the hereafter?

If I introduce the voice of the writer Dževad Karahasan into this already complex discourse, which risks turning into a dialogue of the deaf, I do so for two reasons. First, explicitly eschatological motifs run throughout Karahasan's work, so that it can serve as a valuable resource of experience and insight for (Christian) readers less familiar with this kind of reflection. Second, in addition to his fiction, Karahasan has written about his own poetics and about the aesthetics of his works, thereby offering a suggestive lead for the general theme of our conference. In his writings on aesthetics, Karahasan argues that although his books are literary texts, they are not devoid of the ambition to grasp reality. He even defends the idea that, as a rule, literary texts are better able to do justice to lived reality than other discourses grounded in a purely rational register. Being composed according to aesthetic principles does not therefore diminish a text's ability to describe reality. On the contrary: because the literary text develops a dialogical and dramatic discourse—even on a single topic—it does not reduce reality to the status of a mere object.

My justification for drawing on literary texts in matters of eschatology follows the same logic. Read and interpreted through a literary work, these discourses make it possible to analyze eschatology in Islam as part of a living heritage that continues to generate meaning.

I borrow this sentence from one of Karahasan's texts on poetics in order to sharpen this reflection:

"I enjoy recalling his astonishment (Heinrich Heine's) at people who pin a dead butterfly to a sheet of paper in order to study it—as if something could still be a butterfly once it has been deprived of its ability to fly."

Historical context

The world depicted in Karahasan's writings is that of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Our author spent a large part of his life in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, which for centuries had features somewhat comparable to those of al-Andalus before the Reconquista. The region's population always included members of the three major monotheistic religions (including Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—Sunni Muslims, and Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews). The civil war of the 1990s nevertheless brought a brutal end to the peaceful coexistence of these different communities, and the genocide of Bosniak Muslims became tragically notorious, particularly through the Srebrenica massacre. The terrors and traumas of those years are constantly present in our author's writings and led him to interpret the war through an eschatological prism. In what follows, I will show you several examples, notably his use of the concepts of barzakh, hell, and paradise.

The barzakh

The first story by Karahasan that will serve as my example is titled Noćno vijeće ("The Night Council"), and it takes place a few months before the outbreak of the war in a town called Foča, inhabited by Serbs and Bosniaks. The population is confronted with acts of hostility and terror that foreshadow the imminent war. A series of murders shakes the Bosniak community, and a violent group of young Serbs interrupts the funeral ceremony and prevents the imam from finishing his prayer. Those who desire war in every way spur one another on with apocalyptic visions.

The text strongly advances the idea that the cause of the hostilities lies in repressed conflicts from the past that resurface. The protagonist of the book—a Serb who is only briefly home on vacation—encounters in his house the apparition of his friend Enver, who was in fact murdered a few days earlier. The friend leads the protagonist down to the basement of the house. Once there, he meets the souls of several former inhabitants of the town, also violently killed, who relive the sufferings of their deaths.

"Whenever a catastrophe is about to be unleashed on Earth, they gather at the place where they were murdered and relive the sufferings of their death, until the massacres are over and the fresh blood has dried on the ground. Or until someone kills them, as they were killed back then. Then they return to the barzakh and rest with the ordinary souls until new massacres are announced."

As you can see from this passage, Dževad Karahasan draws here on the notion of barzakh, the place where, according to Muslim tradition, the souls of the deceased dwell between death and the Last Judgment. Strikingly, the protagonist is asked to kill them a second time—in other words, to consign them, together with their dark fates, to oblivion.

"If you kill them, you will forget everything—absolutely everything: them, your time here, their sufferings, and the very fact that they ever lived. You will spend your life in happy ignorance, do you understand? Like the blessed, like the elect. (…) You would be doing them an immense favor—not only to yourself, but also to them. (…) They would be infinitely grateful to you. (…)"

"No!"

The protagonist refuses to take part in the collective practice of repressing the pains of the past until they return in the form of an ongoing cycle of violence. Instead of killing them, he decides to spend the rest of his existence with them and thus to bear witness to their sufferings. This radical metaphorical solution bears autobiographical traits and shows the extent to which Karahasan understands his literary and theatrical project. Following the German director Heiner Müller, Karahasan thus defines the "conjuring of the dead" (Totenbeschwörung) as a fundamental task of his work.

The theological concept of barzakh becomes newly legible in the light of this original literary transposition. Karahasan identifies the barzakh with a society's collective memory. He draws on the idea of barzakh as a place of suspension rather than a place of peace or redemption. In other words, it is not only individuals, but collective memory—with its interconnected painful experiences—that needs to be set free.

Hell

In the light of these reflections, it is not surprising that Karahasan sees war as the very embodiment of hell. By insisting on this identification between war and hell, he puts an end to any attempt to glorify war. In his most recent novel, Uvod u lebdenje ("An Introduction to Suspension"), he stages this interpretive conflict through a dialogue between two men who meet in Sarajevo while the city is besieged by Serbian troops. The first, a British writer, regards his stay in the war-ravaged city as a personal experience and an opportunity for inner development.

"Here I can come to know my true self; I can discover authenticity; I can discover and understand who I am and what I am really like. (…) I often think that Hades and Jahannam, hell and Jannah, are only metaphors for that encounter with oneself, for the descent into the only truly real hell—one's own self. But without that experience you have not truly lived; you have never met your authentic self; you have simply spent some time in the world as a statistical datum."

In his book, Karahasan shows that this is a dreadful mistake. In the end, the protagonist will have lost his mind and all ethical orientation. By contrast, the other man's attitude proves more truthful. When he greets him upon his arrival in Sarajevo, he throws these words at him: "Welcome to hell!"

The effect of war on the human mind is destructive. Karahasan never tires of showing this in his texts. Contrary to what some believe, war does not bring a deeper truth to the surface; it blurs and destroys every certainty to the point that human beings lose all their bearings:

"Unreality is the most striking characteristic—if not the only one—of hell (…). Western public opinion—that is, the media, the statements of political authorities, and public debates—spoke almost exclusively of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims/Bosniaks. In the public discourse on Bosnia, there were no longer any individuals—no citizens and no names, no bodies and no individual destinies; and yet, in Bosnia, as everywhere that people die, only individuals met death. (…) I was disappearing more and more from public perception, which turned me and my world into an image that only total simplification could make possible. (…) The simplification imposed on us moved in a completely wrong direction: it generalized instead of making things concrete; it distanced the observer and the reporter from individuals and their destinies rather than bringing them closer."

Hell is therefore not a necessary psychological process, as the novel's protagonist believed. Hell names the trauma of a total loss of identity, lived as the imposition of an external perspective that rapidly gains ground without gaining plausibility. For the inhabitants of Sarajevo, the peaceful coexistence of people of different religions gave way to a logic of national and religious belonging. It is because they were dispossessed of the interpretation of their own lived experience that Karahasan retains the central theological term "hell."

Paradise

In his work The Book of Gardens, published in 2002, the author walks through the streets of Sarajevo, devastated by bombardment. He finds comfort in the fact that these ruins remain legible as witnesses to life and as traces of humanity. Contrary to what the reflection on hell might suggest, the loss of humanity is therefore not total.

"A ruin's ability to remind us of the past kept me from total despair during the war."

As he contemplates what remains of the public gardens of his city, the idea of paradise—and of justice—imposes itself as a horizon of thought, in spite of everything.

"Are the gardens of this world the shadow of the paradisal garden, the memories our soul retains of the world in which it lived before birth, or are they nothing more than a promise by which the Earth assures us that paradise is possible, in order to persuade us to return to it?"

Karahasan recalls that every garden has a center, an ultimate vanishing point—the sovereign's palace:

"Everything that comes from the garden or the market and sets out on its way inevitably arrives at the palace, where it is judged irrevocably and justly—just as this world and this life, with all their complications and their dark calculations, move inexorably toward the Day of Last Judgment."

From the concepts of paradise and the Last Judgment, Karahasan retains above all the idea of justice—invoked here precisely through its absence.

Conclusion

In view of the scale of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the central involvement of Muslim and Christian communities, the eschatological interpretation proposed by Dževad Karahasan does not leave me indifferent as a theologian of interreligious dialogue. I see in it the potential for a dialogue in which we, as Christian theologians, may rediscover the relevance of eschatology within our own tradition.

I look forward to exchanging impressions with you. Thank you for your attention.

Published in 1959, Les Fils de la Médina occupies a singular place within Naguib Mahfouz's oeuvre. Long censored, the novel weaves together allegory, social critique, and religious reflection. Through the figures of Gabalawi and his descendants, Mahfouz fashions a symbolic Medina—an arena of memory, power, and struggle for justice.

The novel interrogates the respective roles of the divine, the political, and the human in history: how can religious communities coexist while resisting tyranny?

We propose the hypothesis that the novel tightly interweaves aesthetics, ethics, and historical memory in order to conceive interreligious dialogue as a condition of social justice, with allegory operating as a critical device that denounces abuses of power and reactivates an ethical memory.

Our analysis proceeds in three stages:

• Allegory as a space of symbolic hospitality.
• A critique of politico-religious domination.
• The articulation of ethics and aesthetics in the construction of collective memory.

We begin by examining how allegory becomes a space of symbolic hospitality for the monotheisms.

I. Allegory as a Space of Symbolic Hospitality for the Monotheisms

1. Gabalawi: a paternal figure and transcendent principle

At the center of the allegory stands Gabalawi, a metaphor for the God of the monotheistic traditions, yet not identified with any single religious confession. Despite his withdrawal into the great house he founded—which symbolizes paradise and an ethical order—Gabalawi remains present within the inhabitants' collective imagination.

Gabalawi embodies the shared origin of the traditions: he is the point of departure that makes coexistence conceivable, insofar as he has engendered a line of descendants that recalls the major founding figures of the monotheisms. Yet his retreat also generates violence and domination: in the father's absence, his legacies are instrumentalized by human actors to legitimate their power and tyrannical rule.

The Medina thus becomes a microcosm: it represents a space of misery and oppression in which the sacred, the social, and the political are entangled. Gabalawi's house—unreachable and emblematic of a lost paradise—sustains both hope and contestation, reminding the reader that justice and ethics are never simply given, but must be reconstructed.

After the figure of Gabalawi, the allegory develops prophetic figures that function as symbols of religious coexistence.

2. Prophetic figures and religious coexistence

Gabalawi's descendants—Gabal, Rifaa, and Qassim—embody a reworking of the figures of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.

• Gabal acts through law and force to restore justice.
• Rifaa proposes compassion, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.
• Qassim combines social action and ethical commitment to build a durable community.

Each figure articulates a mode of resistance proper to its tradition, yet all converge on the same ideal: to establish justice, protect the weak, and recall moral responsibility. In this sense, Mahfouz stages a cumulative rather than competitive religious history, in which each tradition enriches the previous one without canceling it. The novel thus becomes an original space in which foundational narratives can be reread, compared, and questioned—indeed, interpreted. These narratives are, as it were, "liberated" from their strictly theological scope so as to move toward an ethical and political register.

Mahfouz thereby creates a narrative site of interreligious dialogue oriented toward ethics: traditions coexist, confront one another, and complement one another, without erasing their differences. A form of narrative hospitality is thus produced, grounded in a shared ethical denominator.

3. Narrative hospitality and a shared ethical denominator

Beyond merely bringing prophetic figures and their respective legacies into relation, Les Fils de la Médina constructs a genuine apparatus of narrative hospitality, founded on the recognition of a shared ethical denominator across the three monotheisms. The allegory does not simply allow these traditions to coexist within a single fictional space; it also identifies the common values that make dialogue possible, crystallizing around justice, compassion, and the refusal of oppression.

Justice: each monotheistic tradition aims to restore a justice betrayed by the stewards who have stolen from the inhabitants of the Medina the waqf (pious endowment) that Gabalawi had rightfully assigned to them, and to confront the arbitrary violence of the futuwwas.

Compassion: in the novel, compassion becomes a principle of recognizing the other, through which Mahfouz suggests that the authenticity of ethics is measured above all by the response offered to human suffering produced by injustice.

Refusal of oppression: this is the nodal point toward which the three monotheistic traditions converge, in opposition to unjust structures of power.

Precisely because it operates on the terrain of aesthetics through allegory, literature can become a neutral space for interreligious dialogue. The novel does not seek to impose a doctrinal truth; rather, it offers a narrative framework in which different traditions can be represented without being subjected to a dogmatic hierarchy. In doing so, literature contests exclusive claims to truth and opens a site of encounter grounded in ethical reflection. This aesthetic neutrality enables each reader, whatever their religious affiliation, to enter the narrative and recognize themselves within it.

In sum, allegory transforms religious narrative into a laboratory of hospitality and ethical inquiry.

Having shown how Les Fils de la Médina elaborates a narrative hospitality grounded in a shared ethical foundation, we now turn to how this aesthetic extends into a political critique of oppression and injustice—and how it shapes an ethico-political mode of action.

II. A Critical Aesthetic of Politico-Religious Domination and the Shaping of Ethical Agency

1. Tyrannical power as represented by two figures: the steward and the futuwwas

The two figures that embody tyranny emerge after Gabalawi's withdrawal, as early as the second chapter of the novel:

• The steward symbolizes an oppressive political leader. He perverts justice by dispossessing the inhabitants of the Medina of the waqf to which they are entitled by right through Gabalawi. To maintain his control over the endowments and over the Medina, he relies on the futuwwas.
• The futuwwas are figures marked by physical strength and violence; they are charged with maintaining order through brute force and protecting individuals in exchange for a compulsory contribution.

These figures also control memory and narrative, manipulating history in order to legitimate their domination—most notably through storytellers placed at their service, who justify their authority by reshaping the Medina's tales. Mahfouz thus reveals how the confiscation of memory functions as an instrument of power, and how injustice takes root in the manipulation of the sacred.

If this aesthetic criticizes political domination, it also calls for an ethico-political agency, embodied in the novel by the revolts led by the prophetic figures.

2. Prophetic revolt as an ethico-political act

In the face of oppression, the prophets embody moral resistance, becoming agents of liberation both politically and ethically:

• Gabal confronts the oppressors directly.
• Rifaa acts through compassion and speech, yet his disciples oppose the forces of oppression with vigor.
• Qassim, in turn, resists tyranny and organizes society to restore justice.

Revolt is not anarchic: it is structured, ethical, and oriented toward protecting the vulnerable. Mahfouz distinguishes oppressive violence from legitimate action, transforming prophetic history into a moral lesson.

This revolt is not conducted solely by the prophetic figures, but also by literature itself. Mahfouz thus aligns himself with the tradition of engaged writers, such as Zola, who denounce injustice and combat violence.

3. Literary transgression as a political gesture

Allegory does not merely constitute an aesthetic form; it becomes a political gesture. Its use enables Mahfouz to circumvent censorship—especially in a 1959 Egypt marked by close surveillance of critical expression. Literature becomes a means of transgression. In this respect, the rewriting of the prophets shocks, yet it also awakens the reader's conscience.

Literature also produces a critical memory in the face of forgetting. The sentence that closes chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the novel—"The scourge of our alley is forgetfulness."—is emblematic of this state of oblivion, or amnesia, which yields a repetitive history and facilitates the return of tyranny. In this way, aesthetics, ethics, and memory work together toward the advent of a more just society.

III. Aesthetics, Ethics, and Memory: Toward a More Just Society

1. The novel as a critical rewriting of history

Mahfouz uses the novel to rewrite history in a critical key. This approach appears from the prologue onward, through the narrator-writer, who questions Gabalawi, the prophetic figures, and the causes of tyranny and injustice in the Medina. This inquiry leads him to break with the storytellers beholden to power and to set down in writing the history of the Medina and the prophetic figures—historicizing them and thereby constituting a collective memory. Literature thus allies itself with history in an ethical and political perspective.

Through this act of writing—and, above all, of turning narrative into history—Mahfouz deconstructs the fixed accounts surrounding the prophetic figures and brings to light the obstacles they confronted in order to defeat tyranny. He reveals the critical potential of these religious traditions when they are reread from within human experience. Each reader is thus invited to reappropriate these texts in a simultaneously memorial and ethical perspective.

The novel also encourages identification with the oppressed by giving voice to the most vulnerable, thereby opening the way to reflection on the conditions of a more just social coexistence.

2. Protecting the most vulnerable and the ideal of social justice

The inhabitants of the Medina indeed embody diverse forms of vulnerability in the face of the steward's tyranny and the violence of the futuwwas. The transformation of experience into narrative and history brings their suffering to light, but also their capacity for resistance through prophetic action, embodied in the revolts of Gabal, Rifaa, and Qassim. These revolts, it bears repeating, aim above all to protect those without a voice and to promote a concrete justice.

The social justice that emerges from these memorial narratives thus appears as the foundation of life together in the Medina. It presupposes not only the absence of violence, but also the recognition of rights—especially those of the most fragile—and the questioning of structures of domination. By articulating justice and memory, Mahfouz shows that a critical understanding of the past is indispensable to the construction of a more equitable society. Aesthetics, through literature, thus becomes an instrument of memory as well as an instrument of moral and civic consciousness: it exposes injustice and nourishes an ethical reflection that only literature can fully sustain.

3. Aesthetics and ethics as a contemporary necessity

The ethical demand carried by aesthetics has a simultaneously contemporary and universal scope. The issues raised by Les Fils de la Médina—religious coexistence, moral responsibility, critique of abuses of power, and protection of the vulnerable—remain central in contemporary societies. Mahfouz shows that literature can serve as a laboratory for critical thought, enabling us to interrogate the political and religious uses of the sacred and to preserve a collective ethical horizon.

Finally, the novel affirms the social responsibility of literature. As we have suggested above, literature is not merely an aesthetic exercise; it engages the reader in reflection on action, memory, and justice. By making fiction a mirror and a lever of transformation, Mahfouz shows that writing participates in the formation of a collective moral consciousness capable of resisting injustice.

Conclusion

Les Fils de la Médina by Naguib Mahfouz offers a profound reflection on the ways in which aesthetics, ethics, and memory interlock in order to think power, justice, and religious coexistence. Our analysis has highlighted three major axes: symbolic hospitality and interreligious dialogue; the critique of politico-religious domination; and the construction of a critical, living memory. Through the allegory of prophetic figures and the narrative structure of the Medina, literature becomes a space of dialogue in which religious differences are not grounds for exclusion, but resources for thinking ethics and justice.

Mahfouz denounces abuses of political and religious power by staging the steward, the futuwwas, and prophetic revolts as ethical acts aimed at restoring justice. Allegory and literary transgression thus make it possible to contest structures of domination while preserving the moral force of the religious message. In parallel, the novel proposes a memory centered on the oppressed—a memory conceived as a tool of resistance against forgetting and against the instrumentalization of the sacred.

Beyond its historical or religious dimension, Les Fils de la Médina constitutes a major contribution to interreligious dialogue. Mahfouz shows that literature can establish common ground between different traditions, grounded in universal ethical principles such as justice, compassion, and the refusal of oppression. The work's resonance remains current: the questions of religious coexistence, collective responsibility, and critique of tyranny that it raises continue to speak to contemporary concerns. In this sense, the novel stands as a fertile point of departure for reflecting on the writer's moral and creative responsibility in relation to the sacred and to power in the contemporary world.

Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi was one of the most prominent literary and religious figures in Ottoman Syria. His works include collections of poetry, fatwas, treatises on oneiromancy, metaphysics, prophetology and theology, as well as four travel books. He is well known as a commentator and defender of the Andalusian master Ibn Arabi. These rihlas recount his experiences during his travels through Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz, as well as the reflections prompted by an anecdote, a visit or a vision. The author displays a particular approach to the sacred buildings and places that mark his journey.

I will first address the presence of non-Islamic shrines in Nabulusi's travel literature, especially his Rihla al-Kubra, the journey he made between 1693 and 1694 AD, leaving Damascus and crossing Syria to the Lebanese coast, Palestine, Egypt and the Ḥijāz, where it ended with a pilgrimage to Mecca. For Nabulusi and his travelling companions, the tombs of Christian saints, biblical patriarchs, and even Christian monasteries were places of veneration and contemplation. In general terms, as illustrated by the fragments of this riḥla on Jaffa and Bethlehem, Nabulusi and his companions were well received by Christians. It is also worth mentioning the significant example of Sepphoris, in Galilee, where they were welcomed with honours by the Christian population.

It should be noted that Nābulusī pays homage and recites prayers of supplication at the tombs of the Jewish prophets Levi, Reuben, and Rachel, mother of Joseph, who are barely present in Islamic tradition and do not appear in the Qur'an. From an urban and architectural point of view, these tombs, despite supposedly housing important figures, were located in rural areas and were relatively discreet constructions, as can be deduced from the absence of any description of them in this work: They usually highlight the dome in the distance and in all of them they recite the fatiha and make a supplication, that is, they are treated by them as places of devotion.

Syria and the caves around Damascus, which had become a place of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages, also feature prominently in this riḥla. As James Grehan states: 'In several stretches along the Mediterranean coast, generations of mystics had carved cells into the cliffs, where they lived and meditated. Later, pilgrims preserved them as sacred shrines." Of particular interest is the maqām of Abraham in the city of Barza (near Damascus), considered the place where, according to the Qur'an, the patriarch saw a star—presumably Venus—to which he went, thinking it was a deity. This enclave already had an ancient connection with Jewish tradition: "The Talmud mentions more than ten villages around Damascus where Jews resided, including Jawba, Ḥova, Kokheva, Kefar Avraham, Kefar Karinos, Rom, Beit Anas, Aratris, Ifarkoris, Sakhuta, etc. Of these, there is information in Jewish and Islamic sources about the sacred sites of Kefar Avraham (in Arabic, Maqām Ibrahim) and Jawbar. The former, known to Muslims and Jews as Barza in the Islamic period, is located east of the Ṣāliḥīya neighbourhood, on Mount Qāṣiyūn, and housed the shrine of the prophet Abraham.

Nabulusi recounts the custom of offering prayers of supplication at the place where Abraham addressed that astral deity: "I met some sheikhs who had gone there and were standing offering a supererogatory prayer to God, considered beneficial for a hardened and sinful heart. One of these sheikhs came from Mecca and prayed at the place above the crack in the mountain, the place from where Abraham was said to have seen the star (other authors record that it is the place where he hid from King Nimrod), apparently in a dream."

What is remarkable here is the spiritual continuity given to a place by different religions, as well as the updating of rituals, even pagan ones: I am referring to the curious custom of replicating Abraham's action by addressing an astral deity, which Muslim visitors carried out but, logically, addressing God.

This open attitude towards other religions that Nābulusī displayed, typical of his Akbari Sufism, which fostered an atmosphere of brotherhood wherever he went, was not the general trend in other almost contemporary Sufi riḥlas (such as that written by the Moroccan al-ʽAyyāshī, 1628-1679 AD), in which the author shows his refusal, for example, to enter the tomb of Jonah because it is a Christian shrine, a place that, Nābulusī nevertheless visited and admired.

The tombs of Jonah and his father, which Nābulusī locates in Hebron, and the popular customs associated with them, are also the subject of attention here. The cult of Jonah was widespread in various parts of Palestine, and there were pilgrimage shrines associated with him in Galilee, Judea, and Edom. Nābulusī points out the duplication and confusion regarding the places attributed to the same prophet—Jonah, in this case—but always accepts the popular consensus on the sacredness of a place. The tomb of Amitai was so respected by the locals and even people from other villages that, according to Nabulusi, when they want to make a solemn oath to someone, they take that person to his tomb and do not break the oath even if it costs them their lives.

As for the places attributed to Jesus and Mary, Nābulusī had already visited the oratory identified as the birthplace of Jesus (mahd ʽIsà) two years earlier, located in a cave in Ḥaram al-Sharīf, in Jerusalem. According to his account in Al-Ḥaḍra al-unsiyya, he prayed there with his companions. Other authors place in Jerusalem not only the cradle of Jesus and the oratory (miḥrab) to which Mary retired according to Islamic tradition, but also the palm tree under which she gave birth. They later visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, considered by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus. It was in this Christian temple, and not in the one that Islamic tradition identifies as the cradle of Jesus in Jerusalem, that Nabulusi went in search of the baraka (sic) of Jesus.

Nabulusi is well aware of the duplication of sacred sites and contradictory historical narratives and data, but rather than confronting them, he accepts the local consensus regarding the sacredness of a place. He focuses on what he experiences in a place or the lessons he learns from his time there.

In Nazareth, another predominantly Christian enclave, al-Nābulusī seems to confuse the name of its inhabitants with that of the followers of the early Christian sect of the Nazarenes/Nazoreans. This passage alludes to the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, which focuses on the figure of Mary, and seems to refer to this Judeo-Christian group.

Visits and stays in Christian monasteries are also noteworthy in this regard. For example, the Coptic Orthodox community of Saint Thecla (Saint Thecla was a saint converted to Christianity by Saint Paul) in Maalula (Syria). The Armenian monastery in Jaffa where they were welcomed, or the Franciscan order in Bethlehem, which proved to be an inspiring experience for Nabulusi:

In Bethlehem, they visited the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Day and were welcomed by the monks of the Franciscan monastery. Nabulusi listened, impressed, to an organ, which he described as 'as if nightingales, hoopoes and blackbirds were singing'. He quoted some verses by Afif al-Din Tilimsani (d. 1291) in which he describes an ecstatic vigil in which compares the song of a nightingale to the sound of an organ.

There are other places -such as the monastery of Zion, where David's tomb is located and where they are welcomed by the Palestinian Muslim family entrusted by the Ottomans with protecting the site- [On these issues, I refer you to the recently published book Abd al Gani al-Nabulusi: a bilingual reader.]

The second feature -apart from the interreligious one- of Nabulusi's rihlas that I wanted to address here and that distinguishes Nabulusi's work is his description of the landscape and architecture. For this author, the location of some buildings and the arrangement of their elements can be interpreted from a symbolic point of view: See the pamphlet dedicated to the tomb of Ibn Arabi (Al-Sirr al-mukhtabī fī ḍarīḥ ibn al-ʿArabī), studied by Samer Akkach, in which he interprets the allegorical meaning of the mosque, crypt and garden that make up this complex. Or the analogies he establishes between distant sacred places, as in Al-hadrat al-unsiyya (in which he equates Jerusalem/Mecca, Jenin/Medina, Hebron/Mount Arafat, etc.) or the relationship between the landscape and buildings with certain Sufi conceptualisations (see Al-hadrat al-unsiyya on the al-Sahira cemetery in Jerusalem: according to his description, it was located at the top of the hill of the same name, at the foot of which there was a zawiya of the Adhamiyya brotherhood built in a cave called Al-Kattān.

The cave was located directly beneath the cemetery and was the same size as it, which, according to al-Nābulusī, exemplified the saying 'the living are beneath the dead'. Furthermore, these three spaces symbolise the three realms of existence: the mundane in the monastery, the barzakh in the cemetery, and the afterlife that will manifest itself in that place at the end of time – according to the hadith al-Sahira, it will be the scene of the resurrection and the Judgment.

Conclusions advanced in the summary of this paper: His vision of landscape and architecture goes beyond the principles of aesthetics and historical logic; it can be said that, for him, each element of the landscape or the city contains a lesson that must be decoded and that can be expressed, as is customary in Sufi language, in an apparently irrational, even paradoxical way. He superimposes a spiritual landscape onto the real landscape.