Download PDF | José Miguel Puerta Vílchez - Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus-Brill (2017).
955 Pages
Preface to the English Translation
The translation of a book twenty years after its original composition presents its author with an obvious dilemma. He may rework it to the point of rewriting it altogether – an impossible task in the present case – or he may preserve the original text and make the changes that the lapse of time requires, while bringing the references up to date. The latter is the path that I have chosen in both authorizing this translation of Historia del pensamiento estético árabe. Al-Andalus y la estética árabe clásica (Madrid: Akal, 1997) and preparing the forthcoming second edition of the Spanish text. Since I completed the original manuscript in 1995, unfortunately, little has been added to the history of aesthetics in Arabic thought. The continual crises and wars that have afflicted the Middle East have had their impact on the academic and intellectual life of several Arab countries.
I had hoped to awaken further interest in the history of art and aesthetics, fields that are relatively new to Arabic studies, but publications in those areas remain limited. Nonetheless there have been some, in Arabic and particularly in English, that show how much Arab-Islamic civilization has to offer in this regard. I take note of these recent studies in the second edition and this English translation, incorporating some later publications of my own on various topics related to Arab and Andalusi aesthetics and humanism.
I have also concluded Chapter 3 with a section on the aesthetic vocabulary of the poems inscribed in the Alhambra, in a modest homage to Oleg Grabar and his magnificent monograph on that great palace. It was he who, long ago, first encouraged me to make my Historia del pensamiento estético árabe available to an Englishspeaking readership, a project that has only now been realized. I am working on an extension of the current study into a second volume, to be titled Aesthetics in Arabic thought from The thousand and one nights to the present day. There I shall explore how new discourses on aesthetics in Arabic have been shaped by the impact of modernity. J.M.P.V. Granada, 2016
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Renata Holod, Barry Flood, Cynthia Robinson, Fairchild Ruggles, Valérie Gonzalez, and Olga Bush – all specialists in Islamic art – for their interest in having this work translated from Spanish to make it available to the English-speaking academic world. Kamal Boullata and Harvey Sholdmann also encouraged the project, and Maribel Fierro was instrumental in persuading Brill to publish the translation. I express all my gratitude to them, to the editors at Brill, and to the Dirección General del Libro at Spain’s Ministry of Culture, which provided financial support. And needless to say I offer my sincere admiration and thanks to Consuelo López-Morillas, who not only undertook the long and arduous task of translation but contributed much additional research, bringing the sources up to date and adapting bibliographical references, concepts, and terms (both Spanish and Arabic) to the new language. She has been a model of generosity and dedication. It is as if the book had been originally composed in English, and I dare say it has even been improved by this great scholar of Arab-Islamic culture from Indiana University
Introduction
Until recently scholars doubted whether a Western aesthetics existed at all in the Middle Ages, or else considered it a distant precursor of the true, coherent aesthetics founded by Baumgarten.1 But they questioned even more the existence of an aesthetics written in Arabic during the same period, which corresponds to the Classical era in the Islamic world. To define the scope and purpose of the present study we must explore the reasons for this questioning of, or lack of interest in, aesthetic concepts generated by Arab-Islamic culture. First we must realize that the discipline of Aesthetics as a method and form of knowledge arose from eighteenth-century European Classicism: it is based not only on a specific concept of beauty and the arts but also on a view of the world and humankind that ignores the artistic practices of “primitive,” medieval, or Oriental art. It holds these to be opposed to Classicism, or to be mere attempts, more or less unsuccessful, to reach the “true” order of knowledge represented by European rationalism and humanism.
Therefore there are both aesthetic and philosophical reasons why the Aesthetics born in the West did not traditionally include an “aesthetics in the Arabic language.” On the one hand Islamic art was often seen as second-rate, mere artisanship meant to serve dominant religious principles or to produce decorative or exotic objects. On the other hand European consciousness generally relegated Islamic thought – with its many variants manifested in social unrest, and with the internal development peculiar to Islamic peoples – to an inferior level: it was viewed as no more than an adulterated reiteration of Greek philosophy, or a conglomerate of half-baked ideas that lacked the “rationality” typical of Western thought, which had been developing since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.2 Islamic art and thinking lay, irremediably, outside the conditions that had given birth to Aesthetic science in Europe. It was an art apparently authorless, uncreative, artisanal, medieval, lacking humanistic ideals, theological, and therefore incompatible with the secularism that was then developing in Europe.
Later defenses of Arab-Islamic culture, like that of Delacroix, were based on a supposed survival of the spirit of Greco-Roman Antiquity on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, rather than on any intrinsic or historic value of its aesthetics.3 This attitude toward Arab-Islamic art and aesthetics crystallized into a particularly clear and influential theory in the Hegelian vision of art, born of the encounter between the German Idealist aesthetic and the dialectical theory of History.4 Kantian aesthetics was concerned with human cognitive faculties; Hegel redirected it toward art as an expression of the Spirit of a people, and of the Absolute throughout History. In Hegel’s view, Islamic art becomes one of those that make up what he calls the “symbolism of the sublime” as a moment which may be superior in Eastern art, but which is inferior to both Classical and Romantic art.5
For Hegel, Islamic art is limited because the formal richness with which it expresses its idea of the Absolute is abstract, and lacks the artistic consciousness of a personal creative subject. It is a pre-art. It establishes a relationship between form and content that does not rise to the level of consciousness, unlike Classical and above all Romantic art, which is a conscious expression of the Spirit of a people and an era. The symbolism of the sublime depends upon religion, in which the Absolute One is ungraspable by means of natural forms, resulting in an artistic expression that cannot blend content with form.
This art does not succeed in representing the idea and is therefore dead or irrational, whereas Christian art does manage to represent God in a conscious and positive way. Hegel believes that because for these peoples the Spirit contrasts with the human being and Truth cannot be represented figuratively, plastic arts in the true meaning of the term cannot exist among them. Hegel accepts Kant’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful in art, and Kant’s suggestion that sublime art does not allow physical representation, but he believes that sublime art is inspired by the pure idea that it seeks to represent. Therefore in the symbolism of the sublime the mere attempt to express content – that is, the inexpressible Absolute – leads to the impossibility and annihilation of expression.
The greatest achievement of this aesthetics is what Hegel decides to call the “pantheism of art,” which is born in Hindu poetry, continues in Jewish poetry, and culminates in Islam, specifically in the person of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī; it lived on, but in attenuated form, in Christian mysticism. This “pantheist” poetry is able to express, in conscious fashion, the simultaneous unity and diversity of all things in the One, transforming the fear of God normally found in those cultures into the idea of love, and opening the way for the conscious expression of harmony and serene pleasure that the poet feels on contemplating the presence of God in all things. Even then, Hegel continues to think of Islamic art as preartistic because it supposedly lacks the dramatic, which requires a unity in which the Absolute and the particular can recognize each other as separate entities.
Moreover, Islam’s supposed ban on figurative representation reduces its arts to those of the word – poetry above all – and architecture. The latter, in spite of its impact in Hegel’s times and on the philosopher himself, he considers incomplete, because it does not achieve full representation and abstracts the natural and the human in a less-than-conscious manner. He acknowledges a certain consciousness and creative freedom in Islamic architecture insofar as – necessarily in this art – it exists in opposition to nature. But he understands that it focuses exclusively on the “arabesque,” that is, on a brilliant, varied, and imaginative rationalization of natural motifs, especially vegetal ones, which does not manage to blend its forms with its purposes: “when architecture freely fulfills its purpose it degrades arabesques to a decoration and ornament.”6 In Hegel, therefore, we find a summation of all the great clichés that have prevailed in Western discourse on the arts and aesthetics of Arab-Islamic culture: exclusive dominance of the religious, incapacity to express the artist’s individual self, lack of dramatic art, canonical prohibition of representation, and, as a result, reduction of art to the word and the arabesque.
The latter two are seen, further, as mere rhetorical variations or gratuitous playing with forms which tend, with more or less success, toward representating a single, simple idea of the Absolute. The limitations of this position are obvious. It is based on a preconception of Arab-Islamic art and culture that is both stereotyped and reductive, assumes that they obey a single theological principle, and ignores their historical development, internal contradictions, and ideological and conceptual richness. The discourses of Hegel and others consider only a few specific works, while excluding such important Islamic arts as calligraphy, music, painting and representation in general, architecture with its spatial and ideological values, sculpture, and Arabic poetry and prose in all their immense complexity, not to mention many known historical facts about individual works and artists across Islam’s extensive history and geography. The texts cited are few and scattered, quoted in the versions that Orientalism was slowly uncovering during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 If we add to all this the lack of concern, not only by Hegel but by art criticism and European thought in general, for the concepts and history of Arab-Islamic culture itself, we will understand how necessary and appropriate
it is to study aesthetics as expressed in the Arabic language. Therefore the present study will attempt to assess in depth the aesthetic ideas that were produced within Arab-Islamic culture itself. My point of reference will be al-Andalus in its specific philosophical and historical context, intending both to enrich our view of Islamic art and to outline the characteristics of a true Arab-Islamic aesthetics, but without any debt to specific artistic practices of the Islamic peoples. I will offer, that is, a study of epistemological texts, one that eschews any supposed “Islamic spirituality” on the subject of beauty and the arts; that concept is nothing but a catchall that has gradually filled up with ideas and clichés arising from an external and even ethnocentric point of view on classical Arab-Islamic culture.
I will not follow any preconceived notion about relationships between texts and works of art in Islam, nor about their value. What interests me above all is to establish, as far as possible, the place of aesthetics in the order of knowledge of classical Arabic culture. Any conclusions about the aesthetics of particular artistic practices should be left for monographic studies on specific works of art. I shall begin by reviewing in greater detail what the history of aesthetics, in both the West and the Arab world, has to offer on the subject of this study; I shall then suggest some basic methodological principles, and go on to discuss the Arabic philosophical vocabulary involved in the broad and complex realm of aesthetics.
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