The ongoing FIFA World Cup in Qatar is definitely about more than just sports alone.
A new kind of controversy within some Muslim circles is geared around the symbolism which was presented during the opening ceremony of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. This was where famous African-American actor, Morgan Freeman—who played “God” in the 2003-comedy Bruce Almighty—extended his hand towards Ghanim Al-Muftah, a disabled Qatari entrepreneur and YouTube personality.
This image reminded many of a fresco painting, The Creation of Adam (circa 1512), by the Italian painter Michelangelo. This painting depicts “God” trying to reach Adam, and its traditional interpretation is of “God” giving the “existential divine spark” to “Adam.”
There’s a lot to analyze in this painting.
For instance, you have what is such an obvious anthropomorphic depiction of “God,” who is presented as an old man. Of course, as Muslims, we know that Allah is not a human with a body. He does not resemble any of His creation in any way:
He is the [Sole] Originator of the heavens and the earth [with no precedent]. It is He [alone] who has made for you from among yourselves mates, [males and females]. And out of [all kinds of] cattle, He made [such] mates, [as well]. Thereby, He multiplies you. There is nothing [whatsoever] that is anything [whatsoever] like Him. For He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing. (Qur’an, 42:11)
And then there’s the portrayal of this “God” in the painting doing all the hard work while “Adam” is just sitting there, quite passively waiting for the so-called “existential divine spark” to just arrive, like some sort of little king expecting his servant’s obedience.
Doesn’t all of this indicate to us how Christians, centuries prior to liberal-modernity, were mocking their religion? And that this was for the simple reason that Christianity itself is entirely based on a mockery of God through its fundamental dogmas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation?
Looking at things more generally though, what does painting or art tell us about Western civilization as a whole?
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Art: A Product of the City and the Bourgeois Mind
Many bash Islam for its lack of love towards what are referred to as the “arts,” and painting is often brought up within such diatribes.Of course, they become completely oblivious to all the abstract art that we can see in mosques or calligraphy, which fits within the Islamic paradigm. The very idea of Tawhid imposes a sort of simplicity, even minimalism, respectful of the Creator. This is the reason why there is no sense of pure realism, or any attempt to make an exact replica of reality, since ultimately, Allah alone is Al-Musawwir (which can be translated as The Giver of Forms or The Fashioner).
Such a link between Islamic art and Islamic epistemology has been explored and discussed by many, with perhaps the best scholar on the subject being the late Titus Burckhardt (Ibrahim ‘Izz al-Din).
In the West, on the other hand, far from reaffirming the absolute inferiority of the creation in relation to the Creator, art has been a form of Fir’awnism, amplifying the human ego.
And this seems to trace back to Ancient Greece, as Didier Maleuvre tries to demonstrate in his book, The Art of Civilization.
Within this book, Maleuvre says that art is linked to a certain city-dwelling “bourgeois” approach to life, one that is characterized by expressive individualism; a rationalist epistemology; and a never-ending quest for material wealth, while being aware that this may seem anachronistic when applied to the Ancient Greeks (which is what we would usually think more of modern Westerners). He expounds on this, on p.17:
Ancient Greeks were an adventuring, pirating people, to be sure, but also a trading and productive one—indeed, as the classicist Edith Hall argues, an uncommonly pragmatic, money-minded, go-getting, and competitive people too. They valued precision and technical expertise (‘it’s skill, not brawn’, an Iliad charioteer tells his pupil); they celebrated material wealth and, like the Abyssinians, enjoyed keeping lists and taking stock; they were inquisitive, argumentative, individualistic, and business-minded. ‘No work is a disgrace, and idleness a greater disgrace still’: these are the words of, not a Victorian scold, but the poet Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer. Though the Iliad glories in the warrior–plunderer ethos, its language is precise, forensic, business-like. When Odysseus is done with the warring and buccaneering, he yearns to go back to Ithaca to till his acres and increase his property. If we must apply a Victorian type to the ancient Greek, that of the East India Company man (since the Greeks were essentially merchant settlers) will do better than the lily-clutching aesthete. Theirs was the civilization that in its heyday produced Pericles’s famous eulogy to the rule of law and meritocracy, the fifth-century rationalism that begot ‘ironic’ Socrates and his conceptual jousts, wry Aristophanes, deadpan Thucydides, Euripides’s defense of political free speech, Xenophanes’s astringent remark that men make gods in their own image, and Protagoras’s agnosticism: we, he said, ‘know nothing about the gods, either that they are or that they are not. Many things make sure knowledge impossible: the obscurity of the theme and the shortness of human life’
Art in the specific case of the Ancient Greeks refers more to sculpture than painting. It is thus a product of urbanization and the proto-bourgeoisie, by which we understand individualism and rationalism, and when it comes to religion this translates into a form of agnosticism.
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