The Ecumenical Review
Volume 71, Issue 5 pp. 674-692
In Honesty and in Hope: Rethinking Interreligious Engagement for Our Times
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Aesthetics as Shared Interfaith Space between Christianity and Islam

Vasile-Octavian Mihoc, 

Vasile-Octavian Mihoc

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First published: 15 December 2019
https://doi.org/10.1111/erev.12472

Abstract

Due to its immediate message, religious aesthetics is prone to various kinds of instrumentations in the contemporary world. In this context the aesthetic fundamentals shared by different religious traditions or scriptures must be rediscovered. This article argues for theological aesthetics as an effective category of analyzing religious identity and alterity. It looks at the aesthetics of revelation and scripture, and their reflexes in the embodied faith – architecture, ritual, and faith narratives – to articulate a comparative aesthetic theology of Christianity and Islam. The focus of this article lies in the interreligious potentialities of religious aesthetics, in the case of (Eastern) Christianity and Islam, conceived as a resonance chamber for similar sensibilities in the two religions.

We live in a world where images are easy to mass produce and diffuse, are often used as concise evidence, and colour the collective cultural memory. At the same time, it is a world where a worldwide urbanization movement has led to a squeezed public space such that images compete for attention. In this context, a refocus on the theological meaning of religious aesthetic forms is crucial to mutual understanding. Aesthetics in general – as perceived in things like arts, architecture, and rituals – points to perceptions and beliefs, and is therefore as diverse as human beings, cultures, religions, communities, languages, and societies are. Religious aesthetics, in particular, points to religious perceptions and beliefs about God, about the world, and about the self.

In this paper, religious aesthetic forms of Christianity and Islam are considered. At even the most cursory glance, it is obvious that these two religions have very different visual cultures. As it can be argued, this goes back to different ways in which, and levels to which, revelation and religious belief are embodied in specific cultural and political contexts and reflect different profiles of religious community formation, as well as different ways of codifying the religious practice. The Christian understanding of God becoming human engages various forms of visibility both in the representation of God and in religious practice. In contrast, Islam is marked from its very beginnings by an inflexible aniconism in sacral space, a reliance on word and geometry. In spite of these, in both religions, imagery has an exceptional place in affirming and confirming specific religious truths. In this article, I look at the aesthetics of revelation and scripture, and their reflexes in the embodied faith – architecture, ritual, and faith narratives – to articulate a comparative aesthetic theology of Christianity and Islam. I argue for theological aesthetics as an effective category of analyzing religious identity and alterity.

Revelation and Scripture, Religious Art, and Worship

Visibleness of the invisible – aesthetics of the appearances of God

The question of the possibility of perceiving God has engaged religious traditions from their very beginning. The prophetic revelation was not only a matter of message but also an aesthetic knowledge that was conceived through the senses: a visual and an auricular experience. Both the Bible and the Qur’an contain anthropomorphic images of God. These images show God sitting on the throne, or simply the throne of God symbolized through the heavens (Bible: Is. 66:1, Ez. 1:26; Qur’an: 2:225). In both religions, a literary interpretation of these passages was carefully avoided. In Islam, these anthropomorphic images of God were interpreted metaphorically as an expression of the greatness of God. This interpretation was part of the broader key concept of Allāhū akbar, that is, “God is greater,” which precedes any Qur’anic recitation. In addition to this, the Asharite Muslims developed the concept of not-asking-how (bi-lā kayfa wa-lā tashbīh). In Christianity, these anthropomorphic images of God were used by Arab Christians in their dialogues with the Muslims as an opportunity to explain their Christological teachings. In particular, Arab Christians developed an interscriptural hermeneutical method according to which knowledge of God necessarily happened in two stages, the first of which was knowing God with the help of anthropomorphic statements, and the second of which was knowing God in the person of Christ. The outcome was an emphasis on the revelation as the “showing” of God.

But aside from giving us an opportunity to study different individual reflexes to the same phenomenon in Islam and Christianity, these shared anthropomorphic images of God also give us an opportunity to study complex processes of mutual religious negotiation. We discuss an example from each side below.

As shown by modern scholarship, beyond just scriptural correspondences, this imagery in the Qur’an is a result of the negotiation of former religious traditions. In one of the most important verses of the Qur’an, the Throne Verse (āyat al-kursī), Q 2:225, Angelika Neuwirth sees biblical resonances:

Qur’an 2:255: Allah – there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of [all] existence. Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. Who is it that can intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows what is [presently] before them and what will be after them, and they encompass not a thing of His knowledge except for what He wills. His Kursi extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation tires Him not. And He is the Most High, the Most Great. Daniel 6:26: For he is the living God, enduring forever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end.
Psalm 121:4: He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
Isaiah 66:1: Thus says the Lord: Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool.

More than this scriptural intertextuality, A. Neuwirth observes in the Qur’anic centrality of God’s vigilance a possible substrate of a vigil hymn and especially of a prayer of St Basil the Great from the midnight service in the Eastern Christian tradition: “Grant us to live the whole night of present existence with a watchful heart.” “You, who give sleep to rest of our weakness,” “awaken our sense from the deep sleep of sloth.” The Qur’anic text nevertheless reverses the centrality of the characters, so that it effectively functions as an “anti-text” to the Christian vigil: instead of the human vigilance achieved through ascetic practice, as expressed in the prayer of St Basil, the Qur’anic verse depicts the vigilance of God, and instead of human beings waiting for the last judgement under the intercession of the mother of God, the Qur’an presents only the image of an inaccessible God.

Just as the Qur’anic imagery is often the result of complex hermeneutical strategies around given scriptural narratives, in arabophone Eastern Christianity as well, skilful scriptural exegesis became crucial for reinforcing and reimagining religious identity. In his Treatise on the Veneration of the Icons, the Melkite Bishop of Harran Theodore Abū Qurrah (d. ca. 830) – considered to be the first Christian to write theological treatises in the Arabic language and arguably also the first comparative theologian between Christianity and Islam – uses the fact that the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Bible were also present in the Qur’an as a way to interpret the Qur’an in the light of the Bible. As we hinted earlier, in the early Muslim era in which he lived, the anthropomorphic description of God in the Qur’an as having hands and sitting on a throne caused passionate intra-Islamic as well as interreligious controversies.

In response to this, Theodore Abū Qurrah proposes that these images from the Qur’an be understood in the context of their counterpart images in the Old Testament, namely, on the one hand as prototypical and on the other hand as confirmatory images for the incarnation of God. Even if this reading of the Qur’an is far from any Islamic interpretation, it represents an important step toward a rich history of scriptural cross-reading of the two religious traditions. For Theodore, living as a leader of the Christian minority in an Islamic context, the scriptural interconnectedness was the most credible way of doing theology of a sort that could be communicated beyond the boundaries of his own religion. Even if not all Old Testament passages find a Qur’anic correspondence in his Old Testament testimonia list, Theodore Abū Qurrah creates an influential model of a compound or corresponding imagery in the scriptures of the two religions (interscriptural exegesis). This dialogical model is intended to expand and supplement the traditional interpretation one is accustomed to, as part of a definite exegetical tradition, offering the religious text of the other religion (for example, the Qur’an) a constituent role in the argumentation. In this way, the referenced text (in the case of Theodore Abū Qurrah, the Old Testament) is enriched by novel, universal meanings, beyond its immediate historical confines and relevance (meta-scriptural meaning).

Both the Muslim and the Christian example show a mutual renegotiation of shared aesthetics. The second example, however, shows an even more ambitious project – the attempt to articulate a cross-cultural aesthetics to give a theological answer to the question of God communicating himself to the world: How can the infinite word of God be expressed through the mediation of finite and contingent words, without losing its meaning? Is the human language an apt carrier of God’s direct message to the world? In formulating an answer to this question, Bishop Theodore proposes viewing anthropomorphism as an important stage in the process of revelation, urging the theologian to talk audaciously about God and not to quickly withdraw behind the discourse of apophatism, which would out of reverence negate any positive statement about God. He underlines that the sensitive concreteness of the theological language can function as a cure against the temptations of imagination in speaking about God, and pays respect to the reality and diversity of the divine message itself, understood as God’s multiplied faces when talking to the prophets. It is thus this concreteness of God’s expression toward humanity that saves God’s message from one-sided ideological monism and secures its mystery and everlasting meaning. For Bishop Theodore, the theological answer to the scriptural anthropomorphism and to the dilemma concerning the possibility and/or impossibility to conceptualize God can be found in the drama of the incarnation of God: the “humanization” of the transcendence has its consequences for the religious life of the believers, thus instituting the very possibility of a religious aesthetics. This central aspect is noticed by the Muslim scholar of the 9th century Al-Jahiz (d. 868/869) when he notes that Christians are more eager in their devotion to God because they picture God in human form, and further points out that “those of us (Muslims), who imagine God in human form are more zealous in their worship (a’bad) than those who denied this similarity.” Thus picturing God along an anthropomorphite model has a direct bearing on devotion and concrete religious life: divine aestheticization influences and is reflected by religious worship and devotion.

To sum up, scriptural anthropomorphic images of God create a paradigmatic space that can accommodate interreligious encounter, where ways of knowing God such as via causalitatis or via eminetiae could be further explored. In this space, as in the case of Theodore, experiencing otherness is as important as communicating oneself. Of major importance for him remains the fact that the inconceivability of God finds its representation in a “privileged” anthropomorphism, which was chosen by God himself in his self-communicating revelatory act. Even if in the Muslim understanding sacredness is understood as being signified symbolically and in Christianity it is understood as being signified iconically, the image of God, about which the scriptures relate, remains a common starting point. We could see in the Qur’anic verses a transformed reception of earlier tradition, that is, a transformation of the theological semiotics in its own system of understanding. Thus, even when understood and interpreted differently, the scriptures still show with their interresonances and interaesthetic imagery a remarkable semiotic hospitality.

Narrated revelations – literary aesthetics

The imagery of succession from vision to visuality concretizes in Islam in conceptualizing the word of the Qur’an. The 9th century marks the development of the Islamic teaching of the inimitable nature (i'jaz) of the Qur’an, that is, the literally miraculous character of the Qur’anic revelation. Thus, revelation becomes entangled with linguistic expressions such as vivid descriptions, analogies, similes, metaphors, parables, comparisons, maxims, aphorisms, allegories, symbolic imagery, and pictorial narratives. The Qur’an states: “We relate to you the best of the stories [l-qaṣaṣi] in what We have revealed to you of this Qur’an although you were, before it, among the unaware” (Q 12:3)

One of the most widely known verses is the light verse (āyat al-nūr):

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example [mathalu] of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star lit from [the oil of] a blessed olive tree, neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Light upon light. God guides to His light whom He wills. And God presents examples [l-amthāla] for the people, and Allah is Knowing of all things. (Q 24:35)

This verse, which describes the divine wisdom and its communication through “guidance” and “examples,” is essentially a parable, an extended metaphor for the divine light, which describes it as “a refracted and bent light that creates a state of illusion.” The light imagery in the Qur’an points not only to the “metaphysical light of the divine faith, monotheism, and so on, it is also a reference to the human mind, human intellect, and reasoning powers.” D. B. MacDonald assumes here an allusion to candles lit in churches and monasteries, or even more concretely – to an image of an altar with its candles. In addition to it, expressions like “light of the world” and “light from light” would remind of the gospels and of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

The use of such parables is pervasive in the Qur’an. Q 29:43 even directly asserts that God speaks to humankind in parables: “And these examples/parables [l-amthālu] we present to people, but none will understand them except those of knowledge.” This new homiletic use of examples and parables, which also served didactic and paraenetic purposes, appeared fully developed in the late Meccan period of the Islamic community. In the Medinan phase, the parable already represented “a striking characteristic of Qur’anic speech.” The term mathal (pl. amthāl) “seems to have become a technical term at a certain point, a term that named an exegetical programmatic, and perhaps also a reference to the parable speeches of the older religions.” There are about 30 parables in the Qur’an that enrich its didactic and aesthetic dimension. The unfolding of the parables was “an important station of Qur’anic rhetorical development” and became a typical feature of the prophetic speech.

Some of these parables show similarities with the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. Martin Bauschke identifies in the Qur’an four “anonymous” parables of Jesus, that is, passages that echo motives from the parables of Jesus in a “rudimentary, altered or new accentuated form”: (1) parable of the two ways (Q 90:10-20 → Matt. 7:13 f.); (2) parable of the supercilious or fatuous vineyard owner (Q 18:32-44 → Luke 12:16-21); (3) parable of the good and bad tree (Q 14:24-27 → Matt. 7:17–20); and (4) double parable of sowing, growing, harvesting as well as of the torrential rain (Q 2:261-265 → Mark 4:3-8); parable of the lacking light at the last judgement (Q 57:12-15; Q 66:8 → Matt. 25:1-13). In the following, I will focus on the parable of the two ways, listed on the right below:

Matthew 7:13 f.; 25:31-46 Qur’an 90:10-20
7 13Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14 For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it. 10And have shown him the two ways?
25 31When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” 37Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” 40And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” 41Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” 44Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” 45Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. 11But he has not broken through the difficult pass.
12And what can make you know what is [breaking through] the difficult pass?
13It is the freeing of a slave
14Or feeding on a day of severe hunger
15An orphan of near relationship
16Or a needy person in misery
17And then being among those who believed and advised one another to patience and advised one another to compassion.
18Those are the companions of the right.
19But they who disbelieved in Our signs – those are the companions of the left.
20Over them will be fire closed in.

Both texts speak about the “two ways” that mark the spiritual biography of human beings and about altruistic virtues. Whoever doesn’t follow the “narrow” or “difficult” path exercising selflessness will be sent into the eternal fire. One notes a crucial common element of the parable style: the rhetorical power of the parables could ensure a more interreligious receptive effectiveness. Their complex semiotic structure could function as the appropriate model for theological reflection. With their linguistic effectuality in the reception process, parables are considered to be “genuine artworks, real aesthetic objects.” As such, and because of their content dealing with existential questions, they go beyond specific religious borders. They are action-oriented and show what relations between people, and between people and God, should look like. They are not mere norms to follow but rather compact imagined pictures of what can be, which assures their universal and concrete meaning.

This kind of interscriptural aesthetic message enables parallels and contrasts between Christianity and Islam to become clearer. In particular, another metaphorical description of how God reveals himself to humankind gives us the key difference in this regard between Christianity and Islam: “Do you not see how God draws a likeness . . . God gives strength to the faithful with speech unchanging in the present life and the hereafter” (Q 14:24, 27). In essence, in contrast to the biblical “showing himself” of God, the Qur’an insists on the “telling himself” of God. This narrative depiction – seen in the Qur’anic scholarship as a “myth corrective” – creates “a particular medium for authorization of the message.” Arguing in favour of the Christian images and trying to bring Christianity and Islam in a mutual correspondence, Theodore Abū Qurrah, in an implied reference to the Aristotelian “most influential text in the history of semantics,” shows the equivalence between images and writing. His reflections on the referential character of both writing and image can help to further develop ways of connectiveness between Christianity and Islam on the semiotic level today.

Iconicized revelations – religious art aesthetics

The perception of the religious otherness does not happen only on the scriptural or doctrinal level. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract belief systems but also as embodied practices of belief, their aesthetic dimension comes to the fore. For example, it cannot be deemed a mere coincidence that the first representative sacral buildings of Islam coincided with the final editing of the Qur’an. They laid the foundation for a new programme in which architectural and textual “narrations” announced the message of the Qur’an in mutual reinforcement. Islam claimed “a kind of ‘restorative bridge’” to the Abrahamic monotheism. In accord with the religious self-definition in the footsteps of Moses and Abraham, images are associated with outright idolatry and apostasy. Abraham, “the friend of God” (Q 4:125), thus becomes a “warner” of the futility of idolatry. However, apart from the warning against idolatry, in the Qur’an, there is no explicit prohibition of images, such as in Exodus 20:4. Nevertheless, the Ḥadīṯ contains clear and consistent statements against the images: any kind of picture distracts the praying faithful during the prayer; the painters of figurative representations will await in the hereafter cruel and often impossible punishments, as being asked to give those very living beings they have painted spirit (rūḥ), which bring them eternal torments.

The Islamic prohibition of images is a consequence of the uniqueness of God, the Creator. All creation is under the effect of the creative power of the one God, and there must be no sign or image which could be inhabited by another force. The theological problem of images became, therefore, a question on the meaning and origin of life itself: only the creator God is responsible for imparting life in the world. The ultimate meaning of the Arabic key term rūḥ in Islam was thus “never first the soul or the life-breath of man, but the spirit of God, which at most, as in the conception of Mary, can be breathed into a man.” It is thus the Spirit of God, God’s very breath, that sustains life; any anthropomorphic representation of the transcendental God or of humans is considered an attack of the innermost and purest core of the religion as well as a “treachery of living beings.” It is this failed mimesis of life inherent in figurative art that is targeted by Ḥadīṯic prohibition of images.

More appropriately formulated, Islam knows a phenomenon of iconophobia rather than a phenomenon of iconoclasm. While the walls of the churches are adorned with pictures, the mosques present the Muslim faithful with phrases from the Qur’an, as once Mohammed did, thus instrumentalizing the iconic dimension as the bearer of the divine message. As a result of the anchoring of the earthly counterpart of the Qur’an in the heavenly archetype, “the mother of the script” (umm al-kitab, Q 43:4), this imagery was clear: the written word becomes an opening toward the transcendent, a non-figural icon of the divine.

In the original text on the transcendent “preserved tablet,” al-lawḥ al-maḥf (Q 85:22), the creation was “already recorded” and “coded ‘scripturally’” before the act of creation itself took place. We can find here a parallel to the Pauline Christology: in Colossians 1:15-17, the apostle Paul said about Jesus Christ that “he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” While in the Christian icon theology God is conceived as the original “image-maker,” in Islam God is the “eternal calligrapher,” who not only wrote the eternal word of the Qur’an but also laid signs (āyāt) in the creation. To the eternal personified word of God, the Qur’an opposes the eternal writing. As a religious form of art, calligraphy was an expression of reverence for the Qur'an, which was revealed in the Arabic language and was considered to contain in this particular expression the eternal beauty. The genius of Islamic calligraphy lies not only in its endless creativity and versatility, but also in the tension between the calligraphically transmitted text and its concentrated meaning through the aesthetic code.

The “handling of the Holy Book as an aesthetic phenomenon” represented one of “the essential components of Islamic faith practice.” The beauty of revelation was already mentioned in the Qur'an. Sura 39:23 expresses the idea of the perception of the Qur'an as an aesthetic experience that initiates a “cathartic process” for the remembrance of God: “The skins shiver therefrom of those who fear their Lord; then their skins and their hearts relax at the remembrance of Allah.” The idea of ​​the Qur’an's religious aesthetic experience can be compared with the Christian icons. To the memory of seeing contained in the icons, the Qur’an opposed the textual memoria. Like the beauty of the Qur’anic text and its calligraphic depiction, the beauty of the icons goes beyond the art of painting. According to Theodor Abū Qurrah, the icon illustrates the restored original beauty of the saint, and the contemplation of the image of Christ leads to the right knowledge and the desire to set one's own soul in that image, so that one looks at him like in a mirror of one’s own self. Islamic calligraphy practically takes on the role of religious images in the churches.

Islamic art, which reached its “classic phase” in the 9th and 10th centuries, took up the aesthetic-symbolic plan of the late Byzantine Christian buildings. Focal points of the artistic word-programme, which was applied to the walls of the mosques, show similarities with the image-programme of the Byzantine churches. In the Dome of the Rock, the Qur'anic throne verse appears as a central religious-aesthetic motif and as a counterpart to the enthroned Christ from the cupola of the churches. Muḥammad is mentioned or implied eight times in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock, which can be understood as a contrast to the figure of Christ in the churches. However, in its iconicity, the Qur'an expresses a different relation to its archetype, as compared to the Christian images. Belting emphasizes this difference. It was not the concrete incarnated logos of God in the Christian sense but the abstract word that became the supporting pillar of the religious representation of Islam.

Liturgized revelations – participatory aesthetics

Qur’anic recitation and the saying of the Jesus Prayer

In both Christianity and Islam, humans are called to judge their existence according to God’s revealed will, in order to sanctify it. However, this holiness has different accents in the two religions. Although in both Christianity and Islam (especially in mysticism) the person of Jesus stands as a paradigm for the sanctification of life (in Islam by his example of being God-given), the two religions qualify this point from divergent perspectives. In Eastern Christianity, the Christ-centred existence of man will shift to the perpetual inward uttering of the name of Jesus (prayer of the heart). So, if in Christianity the body and the soul are the space for the union of the believer with Christ, in Islam they are the space of resonance for the Qur’anic recitation, its continual reverberation. The crystallization of this idea took place in the context of “preceding Jewish speculations over the relationship between word/book and body, even if the acoustically realized word remains of prime importance for the Islamic conception of divine self-communication.” To the Christian concept of the incarnation of the logos in the body and the Jewish idea of ​​the book as “textualization of the body,” Islam opposed not the embodiment of the divine word in the book (inlibration), but the recitation of the Qur’an, which has its place “in an organic ‘resonant cavity’”: “This ‘resonant cavity’ is not to be sought in transcendence, but rather, since spiritual and aesthetic experience are innate in the creation of man, in human nature itself.” Thus, the human body, through the recitation of the divine word, becomes the place where the imagery of creation is perceived internally, in a mystical experience.

The recitation of the Qur’an represents the form of Islamic prayer (salah) per se. It is not only the medium through which the depth of the word of God can be experienced, but an act of the “mimesis” of the “primordial scene of Islam.” This imitation is not to be understood in the sense of remembering a historical event, but in the sense of “re-staging the mythical event of revelation, insofar as it reproduces mimetically the act of the physical-acoustic recording of the word by Mohammed.” The German Arabist Angelika Neuwirth sees in Islamic prayer practice parallels to Christian liturgy. The power of the liturgical proclamation Allāhū akbar, which relocates the worshipper “out of the profane place-time-frame . . . into a sacral state” in which he creates an “imaginary simultaneity to all fellow worshipers and spatial proximity to the central shrine” and embodies “a mimesis of the central experience of the prophet,” is compared by Neuwirth with the “mimesis of the symbolic legacy of Jesus himself.” The Islamic ritual thus builds “on the verbal reconfiguration of a sacrificial rite.”

Both the practice of the prayer of the heart and the recitation of the Qur’an engage a mystical and at the same time aesthetic knowledge, which differs from a rational knowledge of the content of the prayer. Achieving such mystical knowledge is aided by formal aspects such as the arrangement of words, specific breathing techniques, and so on. Thus, the meaning of what is said inwardly is revealed in sensoriality, so that meaning and sensoriality form a living unity. Both ways of prayer confirm the faithful in the presence of the divine and their bodies become loci for the sublime.

Prayer carpet and image – aesthetics of worship

Both the Muslim prayer carpet and the Eastern Christian icon create a space for encountering between the praying faithful and the divine. These religious practices – which represent a condensed expression of religious identity – are aestheticized through embodied experiences of sight and touch, and of individual and collective memory. The performance of prayer is in both Christian and Muslim practice connected to spatiality and mental imagery. In the Christian practice, especially in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the direction of prayer to Jerusalem or generally to the East was relativized through icons. In his Treatise on the Veneration of the Icons, where he considers the three Islamic prescripts – prosternation (sujūd), intention (niyya), and direction (qibla) – for the valid performance of the prayer, Theodore Abū Qurrah holds onto certain localities, like Jerusalem. But he does this only in order to transcend them, thus securing the spiritual content, which is not bound to a concrete outward location but is solely defined in relation to Christ. The people of the Old Covenant – just like Theodore argues – turned to God through signs that symbolized God’s presence. Christians address Christ and the saints through the images that represent their presence. Both the images and the cross became the Christian compass for the direction of prayer (qibla). Because of this Christological direction, all other spatial orientations in prayer are provisional and secondary.

Concerning the comparison between the Muslim prayer carpet and the icons, it can be said – together with Theodore – that the prostration toward images is reflected on the Islamic side in the “instrumentalization of the carpet (sajjāda) as a medium of worship.” Where the Muslim rolls out his prayer rug, the place becomes a place of prostration. The prayer rug itself is called sajjāda, which means “place of many prostrations.” The icon is not only a bearer of religious content, but, just like the prayer rug of the Muslim, a medium. A basic principle in Islamic ethics is that all actions, and especially the act of worship (ibadah), must be preceded by a (verbal or mental) declaration of intention (niyyah), stating that the following action is performed for the sake of God. The niyyah forms a unity with the act of prayer in Islamic understanding. Without the intention in one’s heart, the (ritual) act is meaningless. This precursor act before any good deed or prayer preserves one from “empty ritualism.”

In Theodore’s understanding, the icons of saints are images or windows to the restored image of God in man. According to him, Muslims and Christians perform the same act of worship, namely the adoring worship of God. The veneration of icons is rooted in and stays in the continuity of the acts of prostration performed by the prophets in the Old Testament toward venerable persons and cultic objects. Just as in the Muslim act of prostration the touching of the carpet with the forehead does not mean the veneration of the material, similarly the veneration of icons corresponds to the prostration of the Israelites in the direction of the pillar of cloud, from which God spoke to Moses, even though they knew that God was not confined to that pillar. Among Jews and Muslims, the act of prostration was thus a “common religious gesture with no small liturgical significance.”

Theodore understood that it was a crucial issue for Christians, who were accused of idolatry because of the usage and veneration of icons, to legitimate their religious functionality, but at the same time to show the common scriptural roots and the similarities in this religious act.

Religious Aesthetics as Faith Narratives

For both Christianity and Islam, stories of faith, sometimes at the border of hagiographical legend, are of crucial importance in the construction of religious identity. They represent therapeutic and sanctifying models, but at the same time they narratively construct the image of the religious other, contrasting the perceived negative traits of the other with the positive aspect of the community of faith that narrates them. But narration is also a space where the imagined or real encounter with the religious other can take other forms, such as genuine interest, respect, reverence, admiration, and so on. It is a space where religious sensitivity can be challenged or enriched beyond the rigidity of the narrator’s religious or cultural belonging. One such example of renegotiation of religious sensitivities is the monumental novel Gate of the Sun / Bab al-Shams, in which Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist, imagines and creates a space in which the other is found in one’s self and thus symbolically integrated. It is in the context of Palestinian refugee crises in 1948 that the reader gets in touch with a world of injuries, displacement, exile, memory, love, and fragile hope. The novel opens with the passing of Umm Hassan, the midwife and matriarch of the Shatila refugee camp outside Beirut, and with a makeshift hospital room in which the temporary doctor Khalil tries to keep alive his patient and spiritual father Yunes from Galilee, a member of the early Palestinian resistance, who lies in a coma, by telling him stories. After referring to the passing of Umm Hassan, Khalil begins with a family story of the injured patient that branches into many others throughout the novel:

[I said to you:] “But Yunes, you don’t go to fight. You go because of your wife.”

You gave me a long lecture about the meaning of war and then said something about the picture of the Virgin Mary in your house, and that was when I asked you if your mother was Christian and how the sheikh of the village of Ain al-Zaitoun could have a Christian woman. You explained that she wasn’t a Christian but loved the Virgin and used to put her picture under her pillow. She’d made you love the Virgin, too, because she was the mistress of all the world’s women and because her picture was beautiful – a woman bending her head over her son, born swaddled in his shroud.

“And what did the sheikh think?” I asked you.

It was then that you explained to me that your father, the sheikh, was blind, and that he never saw the picture at all.

When did Nahilah tell you of your mother’s death?

Why don’t you tell me? Is it because your wife said your mother has asked to be buried with the picture and this caused a problem in the village?

Why do you sleep like that and not answer?

This kind of storytelling is a fight against forgetfulness and death. Narratives are a special way of communicating belief systems. The mother of Yunes is not an example of multiple religious identities, but a woman of faith who finds in an Orthodox icon the representation of the birth of Jesus, of which a detailed description is present in the Qur’an (19:17-34), even if in a very different way than in the gospels. This icon helps the storyteller visualize the mother of his patient, who already passed away and now is watching her son dying from the hereafter. But, as in the case of the divine child from the icon, swaddled in his (burial) shroud, the death is projected in the future. For now, the hope and the love to his friend, as well as of the dead mother, is to be restated. These moments of religious otherness – or maybe already through the education of the mother in the love for the Virgin, of religious ownness – find themselves expressed in the icon of the birth of Jesus. This icon becomes an identity marker for the dying Muslim. It is especially in his dying that it receives its existential meaning. The icon of the birth of Jesus becomes his own icon. It is the “incarnation” of the icon in his own reality that should give him strength and hope.

Religious Aesthetics and Public Politics: Two Contemporary Examples

To secularized societies, religious communities oppose a culture of faith and could shape collective identities that are culturally influential. Especially in societies where Christians and Muslims strive with issues like adaptation, integration, and affirming identity, and are living in intercultural contexts while dealing with racism and xenophobia, the practice of their cultural and religious aesthetic forms is an affirmation of their otherness. The public visibility of various religions should not remain a static religious difference carved in various monumental materialities, as architecture or the like.

The disputes around the construction in European cities of mosques or of Christian churches from minority denominations reveal the difficult transition from the invisible migrant worker to visible and settled citizens. Locality becomes glocal, and shared local collective imaginaries and self-perceptions are challenged. The minaret ban in Switzerland (2009) and local protests against the building of mosques (the case of Cologne in Germany) or churches are only some examples of the fight against religious otherness when it comes to the question of their public visibility. Interconfessional shared church buildings due to migration movements and new sacral buildings are not only places of worship but also open spaces of encounter, of sharing religious and cultural life. They don’t exclusively belong to a specific religious community; but as religious public spaces, they contribute to the cultural life of a city. Their visibility goes beyond religious instrumentalization and influences to a certain degree the status of the secular public space. They become the interface between different modes of religious practice, religious pluralism, and urban environment. With their visibility, processes of negotiation, regulation, acceptance, and mutual learning on different levels – aesthetically, religiously, and culturally – and between different actors are set into motion.

Shahid Alam, a Pakistani Muslim who displayed his calligraphies from the Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an in churches in Germany, understands calligraphy as an aesthetic bridge between religions. He named one of his exhibitions, which was displayed in the Protestant church of St Thomas in Berlin, “Seeing One Another.” By using specifically Islamic artistic expressions (calligraphy) to express biblical thoughts and exhibiting his works of religious art in a church, interreligious encounter, sharing, and mutual learning become forms of transforming the aesthetics itself. The aesthetics of different religions become intertwined and facilitate a compact image of creative coexistence. In this context, specific religious expressions become malleable. Calligraphy becomes iconicized. The complex aesthetic interresonance creates a new space for experiencing interconnectedness. Religious art, expressed in church architecture with its whole instrumentarium and with Islamic calligraphy, becomes the negotiating instance of commonality and difference, as well as of their legitimate coexistence.

In his book Ungläubiges Staunen über das Christentum, a collection of meditative texts about Christian art, the Iranian-German Muslim writer and orientalist Navid Kermani talks about the new window in the southern transept of the cathedral in Cologne, Germany. It is the abstract and colourful window in 72 different shades created by the artist Gerhard Richter. After his inauguration in 2007, incumbent Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who had expected to see in the window a representation of Catholic martyrs of the 20th century, was surprised by the abstract style, remarking that it would fit “more in a mosque or other prayer house” than in a Gothic cathedral. At that time, however, he could not have imagined what impact this window would have on a Muslim thinker. Kermani agrees with the Cardinal that this window brings the “abstractness, the mathematical arrangement and even some of the colour principles of Islamic architecture.” But he also points out that it fits well with the cathedral that it was built for – through it, the interior of the cathedral is highlighted and the cathedral appears brighter, and, even more importantly, the “fundamental form of the cathedral as body of the Crucified” gains a new, complementary focus: “And now in the cathedral, of all places in the cathedral, the strict focus on only one place, I do not want to say: abolished, but yet extended to a different perspective and another principle: to the view into heaven, in which God also is and the principle of imagelessness, which is also biblical.”

To the centring on the concreteness of the altar – and, respectively, on the incarnation – the Richter window adds not only a colourful lighting of the altar but also a new outlook from outside: the perspective of the withdrawn God. It imposes a different seeing, an enhanced meaningfulness of the space. One can say that it adds to the cataphatic concreteness an apophatic dimension. Kermani’s meditation on the simultaneity of concreteness and transparency shows how different cultural and historical levels can complement each other without exclusion. The cathedral in Cologne is seen not as an immutable emblem, but rather as an organic and ever-evolving synthesis, which surpasses time and space in its combination of convergent aesthetic elements.

Concluding Remarks

Given the increasing proximity of religions to each other in the contemporary world and the rapid change of urban life, which affect the sensorial quality of the surrounding world, a closer reading and understanding of religious otherness has become crucial. Due to its immediate message, religious aesthetics is prone to various kinds of instrumentations in the contemporary world. In this context, the aesthetic fundamentals shared by different religious traditions or scriptures must be rediscovered. The focus of this article was the interreligious potentialities of religious aesthetics, in the case of (Eastern) Christianity and Islam, conceived as a resonance chamber for similar sensibilities in the two religions. This chamber, resonating by the call of God to devotion and love of the fellow human, is meant to function as a decompressing room as well, liberating us from the burden of matter and at the same time raising materiality to indicate always beyond it. The symbols and images of Christianity and Islam, their aesthetic component, not only share a common historical origin but are also sacred because they were received through divine revelation and afterwards deposited in scriptures. Because of this mutual sacredness, both religions give rise to a polyphonic theology; otherwise something essential from each of their messages is ineluctably lost.

This is precisely the lesson taught by Theodore Abū Qurrah, among others, who understood that doing theology is foremost a communal enterprise. Knowing very well the religious sources and liturgical practices of Islam, he developed a theology of Christian religious identity in correspondence, a self-clarification in the mirror of the other. His attention to religious otherness, and the multiple integrative resonances resulting from his interscriptural readings, can function as a model of interreligious encounter. He shows that intercultural empathy is not durable without mutual hermeneutical understanding. It can be said that he understands interreligious relatedness as a beauty construct. Religious aesthetics expressed in architecture, ritual, and faith narratives can function as an interreligious corrective to dismantle prejudices and nurture cultural renewal.

  • 1 A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 86.
  • 2 A. Neuwirth, “Spätantike Bilddiskurse in arabischem Gewand: Das koranische Bild der Welt zwischen Gottesthron und Schöpfungsschrift,” in Religion als Bild. Bild als Religion, ed. C. Dohmen and C. Wagner (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012), 31–43, at 41.
  • 3 Ibid., 42.
  • 4 I. Arendzen, Theodori Abu Kurra de Cultu Imaginum Libellus e Codice Arabico Nunc Primum Editus Latine Versus Illustratus (with Latin translation) (Bonn: Drobnig, 1897); I. Dick, Traité du culte des icônes / Maymar fi ikram al-ayqunat li-Thawudhurus Abi Qurra, édition, présentation et indexation (Jounieh et al., 1986). Translations: G. Graf, Die arabischen Schriften des Theodor Abû Qurra, Bischof von Harran (ca. 740–820) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1910), 278–333; S. H. Griffith, A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons (Louvain: Peeters, 1997); P. S. Bigham, Les images chrétiennes (Montréal: 2010); P. Pizzo, Theodoro Abu Qurrah. Difesa delle icone. Trattato sulla venerazione delle immagini (Milan: Jaca book, 1995).
  • 5 I. Dick, “Un continuateur arabe de saint Jean Damascène: Théodore Abuqurra, évêque melkite de Harran. La per­sonne et son milieu,” Proche Orient Chrétien 12 (1962), 209–23, 319–32; 13 (1963), 114–29; Graf, Die arabi­schen Schriften des Theodor Abû Qurra, 1–20; J. Nasrallah, Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’Eglise melchite du Ve au XXe siècle, 6 vols, Louvain u.a.: 1979–1996, here vol. 2:2 (Louvain: Peeters, 1988), 104f; S. H. Griffith, “Reflections on the Biography of The­odore Abū Qurrah,” Parole de l’Orient 18 (1993), 143–70; S. H. Griffith, Theodore Abū Qurrah: The Intellectual Profile of an Arab Christian Writer of the First Abbasid Century (Tel Aviv: The Irene Halmos Chair of Arabic Literature, Tel Aviv University, 1992); C. Lamoreaux, “The Biography of Theodore Abū Qurrah Revisited,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), 25–40.
  • 6 See V.-O. Mihoc, Christliche Bilderverehrung im Kontext islamischer Bilderlosigkeit. Der Traktat über die Bilderverehrung von Theodor Abū Qurrah (ca. 755 bis ca. 830) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 143–58.
  • 7 Ibid., 230.
  • 8 Ibid., 152f.
  • 9 Ḥucac an-nubūwa, Mubarrad’s Kāmil, K. 1324, 2/51–52, quoted by H. Ritter, Das Meer der Seele: Mensch, Welt und Gott in den Geschichten des Farīduddīn ʿAṭṭār (Leiden: Brill, 1955), 441.
  • 10 See A. Neuwirth, “Das islamische Dogma der ‘Unnachahmlichkeit des Korans’ in literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht,” Der Islam 60 (1983), 166–83; M. Larkin, “The Inimitability of the Qur’an: Two Perspectives,” Religion and Literature 20:1 (1988), 31–47; Y. Rahman, “The Miraculous Nature of Muslim Scripture: A Study of Abd Al-Jabbr's ‘I’jaz Al-Qur’an,’” Islamic Studies 35:4 (1996), 409–24.
  • 11 S. R. bin Tyeer, The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World (London: Palgrave, 2016), 90.
  • 12 Ibid.
  • 13 “Allah,” in E. J. Brill’s First Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, 318.
  • 14 A. Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, trans. Samuel Wilder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 306.
  • 15 See A. H. M. Zahniser, “Parable,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 9, 9–12.
  • 16 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 306. Because the Qur’an was considered “absolutely the best book in linguistic, rhetorical and literary terms” (Neuwirth, 1983), 170, it certainly influenced the (inter)religious discourse. In Arab Christian apologetic texts the Qur’anic style was adopted as a means to better convey the argument. The message of the scripture and the message of their theological identity is reformulated in a way to match the literary structure of the new scriptural data (the Qur’an).
  • 17 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 306.
  • 18 M. Bauschke, Der Sohn Marias, Jesus im Koran (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 61.
  • 19 The Noble Qur’an, https://quran.com.
  • 20 D. O. Via, Die Gleichnisse Jesu. Ihre literarische und existentielle Dimension (München: C. Kaiser, 1970), 9.
  • 21 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 306.
  • 22 Ibid., 87.
  • 23 N. Kretzmann, “Aristotle on Spoken Sound Significant by Convention,” in Ancient Logic and Its Modern Interpretations, ed. J. Corcoran (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), 3–21, at 3.
  • 24 A. Grünschloss, Der eigene und der fremde Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 125.
  • 25 Auszüge aus dem Ṣaḥīḥ al-Buḫāryy, 5957, translated from Arabic and commented by Abū-r-Riḍāʾ Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rassoul (Düsseldorf: Islamische Bibliothek, 2010), 581.
  • 26 I. Goldziher, “Zum islamischen Bilderverbot,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 74 (1920), 288.
  • 27 H. Belting, Florenz und Bagdad. Eine wetöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (München: C.H. Beck, 2008), 75. The aniconism in Islam sees Belting as a “Theory of the Living” (76).
  • 28 The Arab geographer Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Muqaddasī (d. 991) reports that the Dome of the Rock and the mosque in Damascus served as a counterbalance to the abundantly decorated churches. Kitab Ahsan al-taqasim fi maʿrifat al-aqalinm, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 159.
  • 29 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 103.
  • 30 Ibid., 180.
  • 31 John of Damascus, “Apologetic Discourses against the Attackers of the Holy Images,” in Patrologia Graeca 94 1231-1420, III 26; I,31; Theodore Abū Qurrah, Arendzen, De Cultu Imaginum, 24; Graf, Die arabischen Schriften, 304.
  • 32 A. Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 1.
  • 33 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 84f, 265.
  • 34 A. Schimmel, “Schriftsymbolik im Islam,” in Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst. Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel zum 75. Geburtstag am 26. 10. 1957, ed. R. Ettinghausen (Berlin: Mann, 1959), 244–54, here at 244f; See also E. C. Dodd, “The Image of the Word,” Berytus 18 (1969), 35–69; E. C. Dodd and S. Khairallah, The Image of the Word: A Study of Quranic Verses in Islamic Literature (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981).
  • 35 Ibid. See also W. A. Graham and N. Kermani, “Recitation and Asthetic Reception,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'ān, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115–41.
  • 36 See ibid., 124f.
  • 37 Ibid., 118.
  • 38 Arendzen, De cultu imaginum, 50; Graf, Die arabischen Schriften, 333; Dick, Traité du culte des icônes, 219.
  • 39 See G. Necipoǧlu, “The Dome of the Rock as Palimpsest: ʿAbd al-Malik’s Grand Narrative and Sultan Süley­man’s Glosses,’” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 17–105, at 46.
  • 40 See Belting, Florenz und Bagdad, 84.
  • 41 Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity, 103.
  • 42 Ibid.
  • 43 A. Neuwirth, “Koranische und nachkoranische Reflexionen zu Blut und Tinte, Opfer und Schrift,” in Ausstellung Taswir. Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne, ed. A. Sh. B. Çoruh and H. Budde (Berlin: Nicolai, 2009), 58–63, at 60.
  • 44 Ibid.
  • 45 Ibid.
  • 46 Mihoc, Christliche Bilderverehrung, 221.
  • 47 Ibid.
  • 48 B. Jokisch, “Konversion und Konfession. Die Reproduktion konfesioneller Gegensätze im frühen Bagdad,” in Fremde, Feinde und Kurioses, ed. B. Jokisch, U. Rebstock, and L. I. Conrad (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 301–21, at 312.
  • 49 S. Murata and C. W. Chittick, The Vision of Islam (Saint Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 1996), 14.
  • 50 See A. J. Wensinck, “Niyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (1995), 66–67.
  • 51 P. R. Powers, “Interiors, Intentions, and the ‘Spirituality’ of Islamic Ritual Practice,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 72:2 (2004), 425–59, at 427.
  • 52 Mihoc, Christliche Bilderverehrung, 205–17.
  • 53 S. H. Griffith, “Christians, Muslims and the Image of the One God: Iconophilia and Iconophobia in the World of Islam in Umayyad and Early Abbasid Times,” in Die Welt der Götterbilder, ed. B. Groneberg and H. Spieckermann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 347–80, at 359.
  • 54 E. Khoury, Gate of the Sun, trans. H. Davies (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007), 9.
  • 55 See E. Draxel, “Neue Heimat für die Gläubigen. Grundsteinlegung im Herzen des Kirchenzentrums der rumänisch-orthodoxen Metropolie an der Kastelburgstraße”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22 April 2018, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/aubing-neue-heimat-fuer-die-glaeubigen-1.3955259.
  • 56 See the exhibit website: https://einandersehen.de/english.
  • 57 N. Kermani, Ungläubiges Staunen über das Christentum (München: C.H. Beck, 2015), 270.
  • 58 “With the longship as trunk and legs, the transept for his outstretched arms and the apse as his head. Quintessential for the overall construction of the church is that the dome is oriented towards the place where God becomes present on earth; it depicts the movement of man to God, on his long journey from the outer world through the ship to the altar, where the light falls steeply downwards: when the church as a whole replicates the body of the Crucified, here is his heart” (Ibid. [my translation]).
  • 59 Ibid. (my translation), 270f.

Biography

  • Dr Vasile-Octavian Mihoc works as programme executive for Ecumenical Relations and Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches and is a professor at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey.

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