Culture as Contestation

the good word and the good tree

All human societies produce and enjoy distinct cultures. If we think of a culture as a tree, it is identifiable by its outermost manifestations—its customs, mores, aesthetics, and products. These are the habits, traditions, values, beauty standards, and sciences and arts of every type, including agriculture, animal husbandry, economy, politics, education, family life, cuisine, dress, music, dance, theatre, literature, poetry, etc. For Plato, artwork being mimetic, or imitative, of real-life objects, occupied a lower metaphysical stratum of life. The objects imitated are themselves lower than the ultimate realities, or forms, they depict. Forms can only be grasped through contemplation, and artworks pertaining to the lower soul, ought to be subjected to moral realities. Art, for Plato, was not the default realm of beauty.

‍Just like a tree, the outermost artistic extensions of a culture represent its firmness and health—in this case, its values. What are a society’s highest-ranking values? They will be reflected in the culture that is produced. And these cultural products and values are further rooted in and guided by the philosophy of that civilization (the tree’s roots). A society’s philosophy answers the most basic and universal human questions, including: What is life? What is the human being’s purpose? What ought we to aim at? What are the most important values that will help us achieve that aim? In this paper, I focus on factors and values to consider for American Muslim artistic cultural production within the broader American cultural arts.

Because a tree from root to fruit is a single organism, examining and tasting the culture reveals a great deal about the nature and foundations of that philosophical ground, and guides us to understand what nourishment—or harm, as the case may be—that culture is providing.

While “culture” is a modern behavioral concept, classical Islamic jurists spoke about ‘urf and ‘aada: custom and usage. Dr. ‘Umar Faruq ‘Abd-Allah in “Islam and the Cultural Imperative” argues that Islamic civilization—a civilization that spanned from China to the Indian subcontinent, Somalia, Senegambia, Italy, Spain, and as historical evidence suggests, reached the Americas centuries prior to Columbus

—traditionally related to its sprawling variety of cultures in a distinctly healthy and productive way.

‘Abd-Allah states: “In history, Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly and, in that regard, has been likened to a crystal clear river. Its waters (Islam) are pure, sweet, and life-giving but—having no color of their own—reflect the bedrock (indigenous culture) over which they flow. In China, Islam looked Chinese; in Mali, it looked African.” Culture for Muslims has always been understood as second nature. As such, Islamic law has always been known to implicitly endorse local cultures in their positive aspects. ‘Urf as a legal category indicates that cultural forms have the weight of law: if it is sound culture that is neither prohibited nor explicitly harmful, then it enjoys the weight of law. The jurists were careful not to abuse or criminalize the sound aspects of local culture, for “to reject sound custom and usage was not only counterproductive, it brought…difficulty and…harm to people.”

And this is because what people generally consider proper “tends to be compatible with their nature and environment, serving essential needs and valid aspirations.”

Indeed it is from the sunnah of our Prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, to acknowledge the emotional needs, tastes, and cultural inclinations of all who embrace his teachings. Islam as a civilization, historically, was the perfect balancing point between the universal sacred law (the crystal clear river) and the indigenous cultural forms of a people (the distinctive and colorful bedrock over which that river flows).

Culture is so powerful it not only represents the underlying foundations of a people, but it can also change those underlying foundations over time. Culture “governs everything about us and even molds our instinctive actions and natural inclinations.” The roots determine the outer manifestation, but the environment outside can also affect the deeper values. Our instincts, inclinations, desires, and values can be molded and influenced over time by actions and opinions that are culturally normative and prevalent.

Perhaps most importantly for developing responsible practice vis-à-vis culture today, we must understand the ways in which culture is rooted in expression, language, and symbol.

To read further click here