The Aesthete and The Truth-Seeker

In Islam, and particularly in Sufism, Allah has 99 names. They are called the “Asma al Husna”(the beautiful names).Amongst them are ”al Haqq”(the Reality, the Truth);Al Adil(the Just) and Al Rahman(The Compassionate). Al Jemal (The beautiful) is not officially one of the ninety-nine names although it is implicitly because of a hadith of our Prophet sal saying ”Allah is Beautiful and He loves beauty” .The beauty is also in the Asma al Husna(The Beautiful names) although the Arabic hassan at the origin of husna is another name for Beauty which can be used instead of Jemal. The Sufis often talk about the two contrary names of Allah-The “Jellal(“Severity or Majesty)of Allah and the Jemal(Beauty and Softness) as complementary qualities. So beauty is very present in the Islamic lexicon.

This classification of names of Allah has helped me to clarify issues that were formerly obscure. I will try, here, to share that insight with the reader. Please note that some of these names come up more frequently than others.”Jemal” is not one of them. In fact Al Jemal (The Beautiful) is not one of the classical 99 names! It is by no means given the same prominence as Ar-Rahman and Ar-Rahim(The Compassionate and the Merciful) or Al Haqq (The Reality, The Truth) There is no reference that I can find in the Quran itself to the Beauty of Allah although it is implied throughout. All of this should give us pause.

In the same vein, another very important Islamic term, to help our overall understanding, is “shirk” -literally “partnership with God” but used in the sense of idolatry or worshipping of other than God. So we may, for example, have people that are in love who care more for their partners than the Creator. That is “shirk”. Or we may have people whose profession, like medicine, becomes a God in that all their energy and all their attention is taken up by this activity. That also is “shirk” A more common “shirk” in the modern world and probably since the beginning of time is money or nowadays physical prowess like in athletes or sex( the sensualists) or fine food (the gourmet God that we see so much on television like”
The Master Chef”.) Whenever the activity in question becomes more important in the heart of humans than their relationship with the Creator, it becomes ‘shirk”.

A personal anecdote. For about 12 years, while I was following Sheikh Nazim, I would go to London every year during Ramadan. One of my in-laws there was intrigued with all the energy I was devoting to this path and began questioning me and my wife of the time about it. At the end of the conversation, he concluded in the following way. ”I see” he said. ”So you do Sufism and I do narrow-boats (his passion).So fundamentally we’re the same!” I wanted to say: ”No, it’s not at all the same. Your preoccupation with boats cannot be compared to being preoccupied with our relationship to the Creator” but in one of my rare moments of discretion lol I abstained.

So “What does this have to do with the “aesthete?” you may legitimately ask at this point. Well, there is a more subtle form of shirk than loving narrow boats or soccer or Hollywood actresses. It is loving one of the names of Allah to the exclusion of others or prioritizing it in an imbalanced way. This is the nature of the “aesthete”. The Webster’s Dictionary defines aesthete as: ”A person who makes a cult of art and beauty” For him or her, the most valuable commodity, beyond all others, is beauty. You will rarely hear this kind of critical discourse in modern society. For the modern world, cults are fanatical religious groups where leaders exploit and manipulate their followers. No-one talks about the “cult of beauty”. That is because it is a socially approved and even encouraged kind of cult, but cult it is.

This beauty may take the form of a beautiful piece of music or a beautiful work of art or a wonderful play .Whether this is accompanied by corruption or exploitation or injustice of any sort, becomes relatively unimportant .All that really counts is the beauty of the product.

One of the groups of people most trapped in this illusion are the artists themselves. From what I can see, most of them are not in a very good state. Look at their pictures if you don’t believe me. Look at Picasso and Salvador Dali and Ludwig Van Beethoven, Edgar Degas and even Bob Dylan (horror of horrors- my hero at one point in my life-story) and see if you can see what I mean. They do not look like happy campers. In fact there is darkness all around them-despite the beauty of their productions. Many of the lovers of art, or nowadays we would call them consumers, are caught in the same trap-except, in their case, it is more passive. Problematic, nevertheless.

Now ‘Beauty” is not the only trap amongst the names of God. For example, take “Justice”-the way of the revolutionaries and the political activists of all stripes .I was struck in my clinical work, by several patients who were dating people involved in some of the most reputable NGO’s on the planet-Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, amongst others. What struck me was what poor partners these people were-lacking in some of the most basic human skills of empathy and compassion. At first I was dumbfounded by the apparent contradiction. Until I realized that most of them were ideologues. Since they were lacking in real sympathy for others, they sought out strong sensations and even stronger moral principles to replace their lack of human feeling. None of these relationships ever worked out! That is saying a lot.

In my own journey, at one point I, myself, was a political activist. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then lol. And you certainly wouldn’t have been well-served by being in a relationship with me. One day I was at a meeting of all the top political activists in my community. I looked at the head table and it became apparent to me, intuitively, that if these people were in power, it would be a lot worse than our current government. It was the time of Robert Bourassa in Quebec and Pierre-Elliot Trudeau- no saints in their own right. But ultimately more responsible and trustworthy than that motley crew before me- with all their supposed principles of social justice. We saw where that led with Lenin and Stalin and Mao!  That was the beginning of the end of my political career. A trip to China during the Cultural Revolution finished it off once and for all.

So much for Justice. There are many other examples of this “imbalance of virtues” for lack of a better term. There are those who appear very “generous”. A recent story in Toronto is of billionaire couple who were known for their generosity were found murdered in their home. We don’t know the final results of the investigation yet but it would not surprise me to find out that they had made numerous enemies on the way to accumulate their fortune and one or several of those enemies could no longer contain their bitterness.

Then there are those who are so Patient (Patience or Sabr in Arabic is another name of God) that they regularly fail to act when it is called for. Or those who are so Compassionate that they miss out on occasions when they need to defend themselves or their families.

So what is the message here? The message is one of balance and completeness. Unfortunately, social forces are such that one or another of the fundamental values gets overemphasized and other, sometimes more important ones, get minimalized. For example, in our current social context, health and physical fitness are emphasized and modesty and piety are under-rated. Ultimately, what is most important is knowing our Creator and getting our relationship with Him right. But that involves humility, obedience and submission, none of which are really valued elements in contemporary society. It also involves faith-a quality which has been much belittled in our “objective, scientific” world-view. Beauty, yes: Success, yes; physical prowess as in athletes yes, Rationality and Analysis, yes. But piety and humility-much less so.

And who is the Truth-Seeker that is mentioned in the title- The Insan al Kamil, the Complete Man. He is the one who seeks balance and perspective .He seeks to understand this life and the hereafter. He seeks the meaning in everything. And therefore he goes to the Essence of all matters- as opposed to staying at the surface. Ultimately he is not obsessed by any of the names of Allah. He is obsessed by the Source of all the names-Allah the origin of all Being and all Truth. Everything else is contingent reality and thus less important .Salaams, Ibrahim