A Counter Culture in God's Name

The past decade or so has seen a growth of interest in the Muslim ‘cultural imperative.’ What will American Muslim culture look like? And what determines its validity? In this post, I don’t want to talk about specifics; I want to go to the roots. What makes a culture what it is?

Everything I needed to know about culture I learned in 2.5 seconds in Religion, Art, & Science class with Seyyed Hossein Nasr: "Culture is a direct reflection of cosmology, how people view the universe." Everything else is a footnote to that quote. What Professor Nasr said, essentially, was that the unifying factor beneath culture, is aqida, what the fashioners of that culture believe.

He gave examples: if you look at past works of art, be it in China, India, Christendom, or Dar al-Islam, they were all either balanced or symmetrical in some way or other. They certainly were not decentralized, chaotic, or meaningless. That's because behind every work of art is a human being. And the human beings of the past believed that they were part of something bigger than themselves. Christians and Muslims of the past, for example, believed that their existence revolved around God, and so their art reflected that too. Take for example when Muslims in the past made simple things like water fountains. They made an eight sided star filled with water-in emulation of the throne of God and inspired by the Qur’anic verses "carrying it are eight" and "His throne was on water.” Take zillij as another example. It all starts with one dot in the middle. And from it, emanates a massive but organized and systematic web of perfect shapes, formed by individual angular lines. It's an allusion to the creation and our inter-connectedness, all emanating from one source. And the lines are the like the various divine wills shaping a perfect destiny.

The symmetry and order of zillij

Now fast-forward to the work of Jackson Pollack, which stands in stark contrast to zillij. Belief in God is out of the picture and so the worldview is drastically different too. There's nothing central in the imagination and so the same applies to the imagery. There's a lack of order, balance, and meaning. In fact, chaos is ever-present.

Modern Art, Jackson Pollack

A great culture, Dr. Nasr continued, must “pass the test of time” (one of his favorite phrases). The more its fashioners are rooted in something absolute, the longer their ‘creations’ will endure, because naturally, they will be appreciated by the next generation, which also shares the same essential beliefs. A second feature that lends to the greatness of a culture has to do with the expanse of that belief system. The more holistic it is, the more facets of culture can be touched by it. A great culture is capable of manifesting its essential narrative at spiritual, legal, artistic, and even mundane levels. Contrast this with a culture in which the economic system, legal code, understanding on the origin & purpose of life, and morality & ethics, all have nothing to do with one another, having no unifying factor.

The farther a cultural expression is from a meaningful, absolute, and holistic vision, the faster it will collapse into meaninglessness, a soon-to-be-forgotten fad. Such cultures lack generational continuity; the trend-setters of today will be ‘retro’, if not forgotten, by 2030.

Modernity does not submit to any one narrative greater than itself. Rather, it splinters reality into millions of personalized individual realities that are valid just because they exist. This is all an echo of the work of Wittgenstein and the European philosophers of his order who rejected absolute grand narratives. In this world-view, the measuring tool that validates something is nothing other than your own self. Never before in history was the human being explicitly his own validator. (Pagans used to make their own gods then author narratives about them, then submit to them, so even they were submitting to something outside themselves, albeit of their own making.) The impact this has on culture is profound. It took about 100 or more years for all of this to trickle down, but it finally has in the form of a split-second ME culture. From “I think, therefore I am” to "I experienced it, therefore it is valid."

What Muslims can represent in modern America, is an alternative. A true counter culture. Not merely a different brand of ME culture, in which we validate ourselves. Nor a copy and paste from the centuries past, blessed as they were (e.g Andalus and the Ottomans). But a genuine NOT-me, worship-oriented culture fashioned for and by the awakened hearts of our time and place. It is a culture in which we revolve obsessively around the Divine in full submission to and in emulation of His order. The fulcrum on which such a culture would pivot is the reflection in every expression of Allah and His Final Messenger, Muhammadﷺ, be it through His commands or by deriving allusions from His creation. It is one in which tradition is as honored as innovation.

When the fireworks of love, worship, and guidance are set off in a believer’s heart, everything he or she produces-sacred or mundane-will be authentically ‘Muslim’ and emit the scent of tawhid, whether they intended it so or not. This is because we as humans can only produce externally what is within us internally. We are also creatures that crave analogy and symbolism. And if it is Divine knowledge that is within us, then that is what will be reproduced, knowingly or not.

In sum, the heart and starting point of a genuine and successful ‘Muslim culture’ be it in America or elsewhere, lies in the depth of our personal relationship with Allah and His Messengerﷺ. Everything else is just detail.