Paki Sufi Arts

BREAK

2012-01-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm taking an indefinite break from blogging/ the net. You may have noticed I wasn't very active anyway. May or may not be back,

God Bless,

fi aman Allah

Young Ustad Kashif sahib's work

2011-11-30T08:50:00.000-08:00

The Rilli [patchwork quilt] of the Indus Cholistan reigons

2011-10-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

Added bonus: Allan Faqir singing Sufi poet Hazrat Shah Lateef RA in the background.

Eid e Milad mubarak!

2011-02-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

Stairway to Heaven: documentary

2010-12-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

Some of my Art

2010-12-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

Sorry the images are rather small. taken from a cellphone.
They are handmade cards, with the geometric patterns in cutwork.

Photo from workshop :)

2010-07-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

Ustad Architect Taimoor Khan Sahib is on the right, & cyclewala center in green cap :)

Superb website on Traditional Islamic Art & Architecture

2010-07-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

Kamil Khan Mumtaz Architects

Yours truly had a chance to attend a wonderful workshop on Islamic art a few months ago by the brilliant and erudite Architect Taimoor Khan Mumtaz.

Beautiful Website

2010-07-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a lovely artistic site I'm sure readers of this blog will enjoy: Gulab Mahal.

especially this section: Shrines in Pakistan

Interesting documentary on a great Artist- Ustad Sohba Shingh

2010-03-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Rest of it on youtube- well worth watching.

Rare Sufi-themed miniature

2009-10-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

Mughal Darbari style below, modern Bazari [sufi poster] style above.

Sufi themes are quite common in Darbari art, altho' not as common as in Bazari art.
This looks like a later Mughal painting because of the deep shading and the carpet in one-point [instead of isometric] perspective. Its probably a fairly faithful copy of earlier paintings, so we assume from this and Hazrat Khwaja Ghulam Farid saying most popular stereotyped images were good likenesses, that this is a fair approximation of what these saints looked like.

Also featured above is a modern Bazari version, in the 'psychedelic' Sufi poster art style so popular in Pakistan and India. This features in addition to the above buzurgs, Hazrat Sultanji Nizamuddin Auliya and Hazrat Bu Ali Shah Qalander of Panipat.

Sufi Khursheed Alam, Khursheed Raqam 1927-2004

2009-02-06T00:01:00.001-08:00

Sufi Khursheed Alam,
Khursheed Raqam

1927-2004
See more of his work here.

A great website: Wes Wilson

2009-02-05T23:56:00.001-08:00

Wes Wilson, one of psychedelic art's great pioneers has a website. check it out!

Quaid e Azam's Last Speech

2009-01-01T01:20:00.001-08:00

Quaid-i-Azam's Speech
On the occasion of the Opening Ceremony of
The State Bank of Pakistan on 1st July, 1948.

"Mr. Governor, Directors of State Bank, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The opening of the State Bank of Pakistan symbolises the sovereignty of our State in the financial sphere and I am very glad to be here today to perform the opening ceremony. It was not considered feasible to start a Bank of our own simultaneously with the coming into being of Pakistan in August last year. A good deal of preparatory work must precede the inauguration of an institution responsible for such technical and delicate work as note issue and banking. To allow for this preparation, it was provided, under the Pakistan Monetary System and Reserve Bank Order, 1947, that the Reserve Bank of India should continue to be the currency and banking authority of Pakistan till the 30th September, 1948. Later on it was felt that it would be in the best interests of our State if the Reserve Bank of India were relieved of its functions in Pakistan, as early as possible. The State of transfer of these functions to a Pakistan agency was consequently advanced by three months in agreement with the Government of India and the Reserve Bank. It was at the same time decided to establish a Central Bank of Pakistan in preference to any other agency for managing our currency and banking. This decision left very little time for the small band of trained personnel in this field in Pakistan to complete the preliminaries and they have by their untiring effort and hard work completed their task by the due date which is very creditable to them, and I wish to record a note of our appreciation of their labours.

As you have observed, Mr. Governor in undivided India banking was kept a close preserve of non-Muslims and their migration from Western Pakistan has caused a good deal of dislocation in the economic life of our young State. In order that the wheels of commerce and industry should run smoothly, it is imperative that the vacuum caused by the exodus of non-Muslims should be filled without delay. I am glad to note that schemes for training Pakistan nationals in banking are in hand. I will watch their progress with interest and I am confident that the State Bank will receive the co-operation of all concerned including the banks and Universities in pushing them forward. Banking will provide a new and wide field in which the genius of our young men can find full play. I am sure that they will come forward in large numbers to take advantage of the training facilities which are proposed to be provided. While doing so, they will not only be benefiting themselves but also contributing to the well-being of our State.

I need hardly dilate on the important role that the State Bank will have to play in regulating the economic life of our country. The monetary policy of the bank will have a direct bearing on our trade and commerce, both inside Pakistan as well as with the outside world and it is only to be desired that your policy should encourage maximum production and a free flow of trade. The monetary policy pursued during the war years contributed, in no small measure, to our present day economic problems. The abnormal rise in the cost of living has hit the poorer sections of society including those with fixed incomes very hard indeed and is responsible to a great extent for the prevailing unrest in the country. The policy of the Pakistan Government is to stabilise prices at a level that would be fair to the producer, as well as the consumer. I hope your efforts will be directed in the same direction in order to tackle this crucial problem with success.

I shall watch with keenness the work of your Research Organization in evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life. The economic system of the West has created almost insoluble problems for humanity and to many of us it appears that only a miracle can save it from disaster that is not facing the world. It has failed to do justice between man and man and to eradicate friction from the international field. On the contrary, it was largely responsible for the two world wars in the last half century. The Western world, in spite of its advantages, of mechanization and industrial efficiency is today in a worse mess than ever before in history. The adoption of Western economic theory and practice will not help us in achieving our goal of creating a happy and contended people. We must work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice. We will thereby be fulfilling our mission as Muslims and giving to humanity the message of peace which alone can save it and secure the welfare, happiness and prosperity of mankind.

May the Sate Bank of Pakistan prosper and fulfil the high ideals which have been set as its goal.

In the end I thank you, Mr. Governor, for the warm welcome given to me by you and your colleagues, and the distinguished guests who have graced this occasion as a mark of their good wishes and the honour your have done me in inviting me to perform this historic opening ceremony of the State Bank which I feel will develop into one of our greatest national institutions and play its part fully throughout the world."

Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
1st July, 1948

Ali Alam- Paki pop with a conscience

2008-12-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

My old friend, cf Ganda Banda & the 3D Cats[those days were fun!] Ali Alam, has his own website. Check it out!

Chand Tara Orchestra, IVS gig

2008-12-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

another photo.

Me playing daff

2008-12-16T12:49:00.001-08:00

With the Chand Tara Orchestra, at IVS, Karachi December 2008.

Sacred Geometry: concentric circles

2008-11-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

And surely our Creator has placed Signs in the Heavens & the Earth, for those who have understanding.

Everything is in motion, circling around a center... planets around the sun, blood around the heart, protons around the nucleus, worshipers around the Ka'aba.

How to play the Daf by David Kuckhermann

2008-11-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

poem by Habib Jalib:- sums it up!

2008-08-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

PAKISTANI Qawwali Sain Akhter & Inayat Bhatti

2008-07-11T23:21:00.000-07:00

Kalam Baba Bullay Shah Rehmatullah Aleh.

Pakistan today

2008-07-11T23:20:00.001-07:00

Cartoon by Khalid, Daily Dawn

Contemporary Miniature Artist Mudassar Manzoor

2008-03-30T02:34:00.000-07:00

"Mudassar Manzoor's contemporary miniatures are suspended between two existences, two worlds,and two states of mind. There are surfaces, and imagined places where he is at peace, and is completely free to feel, but then there are paintings where the lone figure is engulfed. It is the verdant green and gold leaf foliage as well as the seashells, which consume him. Manzoor is a distinction holding graduate from the Miniature Painting Department of the iconic National College of Arts in Lahore.This exhibition follows Manzoor's shows in France (Paris and Nice), Korea and India, besides Pakistan in 2006-07."
-courtesy Gandhara Art Gallery.

Ho Allah by Allan Faqir

2008-03-23T00:53:00.000-07:00

Aao Bacho Sair Karain tum ko Pakistan ki

2008-03-21T03:59:00.000-07:00

Beautiful painting by Rashid Shehzad

2008-03-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

acrylic on canvas

Rebuilding Afghanistan Pot by Pot: The Turquoise Mountain Foundation and the Potters of Istalif

2008-02-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

Great article
Kabul is a city teeming with construction. Returning refugees contribute to the sprawl of the city, while international companies and governmental organizations build taller and taller buildings downtown. Infrastructure struggles to keep pace; water and electricity are scarce, traffic crawls down unpaved streets and even the richest neighborhoods lack plans for sewage. Outside of Kabul the pace of life is slower. Traditional towns and villages have changed little in the past hundred years. Reconstruction and the impact of foreign aid have been minimal and much of the country struggles with poverty and hunger.

Areas such as the Shomali Plain north of Kabul were devastated by fighting with the Taliban and have been very slow to rebuild. Many of these towns have struggled to reconstruct themselves and have been forced to find their own means of economic development. For Istalif, a town an hour and a half north of Kabul, in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, this means returning to their traditional crafts to drive their own rebuilding process. Istalifi potters in particular have come back to rebuild their kilns and return to methods of potting which have been passed from father to son for generations.

Istalif has long been renowned for its gardens and traditional crafts. The Empire Babur praised the beauty of Istalif’s gardens. Before the Soviet invasion, Istalif was a popular spot for tourists and Kabulis to visit on the weekend. However, Istalif’s location also made it a target for military strikes during Afghanistan’s 25 years of war.....

Turkish pyrographic artist Husnu Zuber

2008-02-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

Hazrat Maulana Rumi RA in the Pyrographic technique. Do visit Husnu Zuber's great site!

Great cartoonist Amjad Rasmi

2008-01-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

Amjad Rasmi is with the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper [Al-Arab News, UK]
Politically astute, great artwork with a touch of the surreal.

Professor Kouichi Honda

2008-01-20T01:52:00.000-08:00

Kouichi Honda is a Japanese master calligrapher...of Islamic calligraphy!

Read about him here
and see this wonderful slideshow.

Is not God sufficient for His slave?

2008-01-03T23:55:00.001-08:00

STORM IN A TEA CUP-Pakistan's National Art Gallery.

2008-01-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

STORM IN A TEA CUP by M. Rizwanullah.

[NB- This is based on a letter I had written to Dawn. Needless to say, they didn't print it!]

Sorry to say, but the National Art Gallery has nothing to do with our culture.

It could have been a great opportunity, but the principal parties on both sides of this debate are people of borrowed vision. Their Sun rises from the banks of la Seine.

As far as the 'furor' raging over it, it is of no consequence: 2 groups of misdirected zealots- or unprincipled sycophants- fighting for Government funds & facilities...taxpayer provided?
Or perhaps some grants have come from the West? Maybe the Colas are financing our 'culture'?

Rather than represent the Pakistani nation and our true heritage, this National Art Gallery represents the culture of a minority, our westernized elite whose cultural forms (oil painting, modern drama, installation art etc.) all come from an unquestioned adoption of the West.

What the Art Mafia wishes to foist upon us as "our heritage" in the National Gallery, is that of a rootless generation aping the West. This art did not exist amongst our people before 1950. The real artists of this country are relegated to "mere" craftsmen and excluded from positions of respect and prominence.

Our modern artists are either unaware of their own traditions, or simply unschooled in them. Miniatures are hung on walls! Calligraphy is not taught as an integral part of the discipline at any art school. The design courses in Pakistani art colleges owe more to Josef Albers than to Islamic geometrical design, as developed by the muhandiseen who produced the al-Hambra and the Taj Mahal. The history of post-Renaissance Western art dominates the curricula. The philosophies of art taught, are either Modernist (Realism, Expressionism & Formalism) or Post-Modernist.

That is no surprise, for these people, the Art Mafia, i.e. 6 or 7 begmaat who run the art scene in Pakistan, are unaware of even the existence of an Islamic philosophy of Art. Even the Western philosophies of art are subconsciously imbibed, with very few of the Art Mafia really conversant with them, their context or implications.

After all, their intellectual background, whether old or new, Foucault or Herbert Read, their language (English), their concerns, their aesthetic sensibilities, are completely alien to 99% of the people living in this country. Their ideological bent is anti-Islam, or 'anti-mullah' as they would prefer to say. In other words, Islam is not to be taken from the scholars, the Ulema and the Awliya but depends on their own whimsical interpretations.

Any 'Urs of a sufi saint in Pakistan will reflect far better our true culture and our visual arts, as well as our intellectual tradition, than anything these westernized whiners can come up with.

My suggestion?
... this building be turned into a state-of-the-art Yateem Khana and Vocational and Crafts Training Institute.

M. Rizwanullah,
Lecturer, Art History, Karachi University, Dept. of Visual Studies,

Truck Art

2008-01-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

found on Flickr

Muslims don't need much furniture!

2007-12-15T22:54:00.000-08:00

A picture by Kevin Kelly, I think.

Truck Art!

2007-12-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

Check out some great photos from Pakistan by talented young photographer Umair Muhsin!

Humayon Sakhi playing the Desperado Theme!

2007-12-06T22:47:00.000-08:00

mosque niche

2007-12-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

found on Flickr

no comment

2007-11-22T18:16:00.000-08:00

Have Sohrab, will travel

2007-11-08T23:34:00.001-08:00

found on Flickr.

Interesting photos of Islam in China

2007-11-05T07:35:00.001-08:00

Do see.

another psychedelic Pakistani dervesh

2007-11-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

At the Shrine of Pir Baba Buner RA, NWFP, Pakistan. By the superb photographer 'Sir Cam' from Flickr.
Long may true Sufism prosper in Pakistan! It is opur hope that the tolerant message of love for humanity & devotion to GOD of the Sufis will prevail over militancy, terrorism, extremism as well as the fake exploitative piri-muridi 'sufism' which has been taken over by corrupt landlords and commercial-minded shrine-caretakers,

Pakistani Faqir

2007-10-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

Pakistani folk music legend Alam Lohar

2007-10-16T01:20:00.000-07:00

This great Punjabi folk singer was the father of the talented Arif Lohar. Do visit his website, and you can watch his classic rendition of "jugni" here.

Baba e Urdu Maulvi Abdul Haqq

2007-10-11T23:12:00.001-07:00

Picture of Maulvi Abdul Haqq sahib from the excellent Pakistan Philately website.
A legendary figure: Born at Hapur (District Merut, U.P. India) in 1870, Maulvi Abdul Haq, popularly known as Baba-e-Urdu (Father of Urdu) took his B.A. degree from Muslim University Aligarh (U.P. India). For thirteen years he served as a translator at the Home Department before being appointed as the provincial Inspector of Schools (Aurangabad, Deccan). The same year he was elected to the office of Secretary, Department of promotion of Urdu at Delhi All India Muslim Educational Conference.

Baba-e-Urdu was the moving spirit behind the Usmania University Hyderabad, Deccan, where all subjects were taught in Urdu. The textbooks and reference material to be used here were translated and compiled under his supervision: Later on, he served as the chairman of the Department of Urdu. After his retirement in 1930, he compiled and edited a comprehensive and authoritative English Urdu dictionary.

Under his care, the Anjumane Taraqqi-e-Urdu, emerged as a powerful service organization. In the 1930s, Gandhi Started a campaign to change the Urdu script, since it was identified with the Muslim people. Thanks to the Anjuman, the attempt was successfully thwarted. Thereafter, till the creation of Pakistan, he fought the Indian National Congress for mother tongue Urdu and Pakistan.

In 1948, Maulvi Abdul Haq migrated to Pakistan. During the partition riots, thousands valuable manuscripts, memoranda, books and articles that he possessed had been lost. The Indian government had seriously damaged the Anjuman by withdrawing all support. Maulvi Sahib reached Pakistan poor in health, meager in resources but planted the Anjuman anew, on fresh ground. Under the aegis of the organization, countless books and several important journals were brought out. Numerous old but invaluable manuscripts in old Urdu (Deccani) were published that have considerably deepened the roots of the Urdu language. Baba-e-Urdu patronized and inaugurated two public libraries and lived long enough to see a dream realized: the establishment of Urdu medium Institutions of higher learning: the Arts and Science in Urdu Colleges. He continually stressed the need for an Urdu University for which he even called a national conference in 1959. After a prolonged illness, Maulvi Abdul Haq died of cancer in 1961 (August 16, 1961).

He was a prolific writer, with almost a dozen titles to his name including the authoritative Standard English-Urdu Dictionary, Chand Ham Asar, maktoobat Baba-e-Urdu Tauqeedat, Muqadimat, etc. As a researcher, scholar, critic and lexicographer Maulvi Abdul Haq is a great name in our history. It is, however, as the foremost campaigner of Urdu and its greatest servant that Baba-e-Urdu will be remembered.

Courtesy: Anjumane Traqqi-e-Urdu Pakistan.

From De-schooling Society by Ivan Illich

2007-10-08T01:40:00.001-07:00

1. Why We Must Disestablish School

by Ivan Illich

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process.

I begin my analysis, in this first essay, by trying to convey what the deschooling of a schooled society might mean. In this context, it should be easier to understand my choice of the five specific aspects relevant to this process with which I deal in the subsequent chapters.

Not only education but social reality itself has become schooled. It costs roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any one of twenty U.S. cities lies in the same range-and sometimes is favorable to the poor. Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one's own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. For both groups the reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. The progressive underdevelopment of self- and community-reliance is even more typical in Westchester than it is in the northeast of Brazil. Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs "deschooling."

Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin andend life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.

Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.

The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves. Peasants on the high plateau of the Andes are exploited by the landlord and the merchant-once they settle in Lima they are, in addition, dependent on political bosses, and disabled by their lack of schooling. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon, and lies at the root of contemporary underdevelopment. Of course it appears under different guises in rich and in poor countries.

It is probably most intensely felt in U.S. cities. Nowhere else is poverty treated at greater cost. Nowhere else does the treatment of poverty produce so much dependence, anger, frustration, and further demands. And nowhere else should it be so evident that poverty-once it has become modernized-has become resistant to treatment with dollars alone and requires an institutional revolution.

Today in the United States the black and even the migrant can aspire to a level of professional treatment which would have been unthinkable two generations ago, and which seems grotesque to most people in the Third World. For instance, the U.S. poor can count on a truant officer to return their children to school until they reach seventeen, or on a doctor to assign them to a hospital bed which costs sixty dollars per day-the equivalent of three months' income for a majority of the people in the world. But such care only makes them dependent on more treatment, and renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities.

The poor in the United States are in a unique position to speak about the predicament which threatens all the poor in a modernizing world. They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. The poor in the U.S. inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a "schooled" society is built.

Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas observed that "the only way to establish an institution is to finance it." The corollary is also true. Only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped.

This must be kept in mind when we evaluate federal aid pro-grams. As a case in point, between 1965 and 1968 over three billion dollars were spent in U.S. schools to offset the disadvantages of about six million children. The program is known as Title One. It is the most expensive compensatory program ever attempted anywhere in education, yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these "disadvantaged" children. Compared with their classmates from middle income homes, they have fallen further behind. Moreover, in the course of this program, professionals discovered an additional ten million children laboring under economic and educational handicaps. More reasons for claiming more federal funds are now at hand.

This total failure to improve the education of the poor despite more costly treatment can be explained in three ways:

1. Three billion dollars are insufficient to improve the perform-ance of six million children by a measurable amount; or

2. The money was incompetently spent: different curricula, better administration, further concentration of the funds on the poor child, and more research are needed and would do the trick; or

3. Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school.

The first is certainly true so long as the money has been spent through the school budget. The money indeed went to the schools which contained most of the disadvantaged children, but it was not spent on the poor children themselves. These children for whom the money was intended comprised only about half of those who were attending the schools that added the federal subsidies to their budgets. Thus the money was spent for custodial care, indoctrination and the selection of social roles, as well as education, all of which functions are inextricably mingled in the physical plants, curricula, teachers, administrators, and other key components of these schools, and, therefore, in their budgets.

The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively richer children who were "disadvantaged" by having to attend school in the company of the poor. At best a small fraction of each dollar intended to remedy a poor child's disadvantages in learning could reach the child through the school budget.

It might be equally true that the money was incompetently spent. But even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged. Special curricula, separate classes, or longer hours only constitute more discrimination at a higher cost.

Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present Administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice. If such credit were limited to purchases which fit into a school curriculum, it would tend to provide greater equality of treatment, but would not thereby increase the equality of social claims.

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

All this is true in poor nations as well as in rich ones, but there it appears under a different guise. Modernized poverty in poor nations affects more people more visibly but also-for the moment-more superficially. Two-thirds of all children in Latin America leave school before finishing the fifth grade, but these "desertores" are not therefore as badly off as they would be in the United States.

Few countries today remain victims of classical poverty, which was stable and less disabling. Most countries in Latin America have reached the "take-off" point toward economic development and competitive consumption, and thereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. Their laws make six to ten years of school obligatory. Not only in Argentina but also in Mexico or Brazil the average citizen defines an adequate education by North American standards, even though the chance of getting such prolonged schooling is limited to a tiny minority. In these countries the majority is already hooked on school, that is, they are schooled in a sense of inferiority toward the better-schooled. Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many.

Paradoxically, the belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been-and will be-served by schools. Yet in Latin America different paths toward education could still be taken by the majority of parents and children. Proportionately, national savings invested in schools and teachers might be higher than in rich countries, but these investments are totally insufficient to serve the majority by making even four years of school attendance possible. Fidel Castro talks as if he wanted to go in the direction of deschooling when he promises that by 1980 Cuba will be able to dissolve its university since all of life in Cuba will be an educational experience. At the grammar-school and high-school level, however, Cuba, like all other Latin-American countries, acts as though passage through a period defined as the "school age" were an unquestionable goal for all, delayed merely by a temporary shortage of resources.

The twin deceptions of increased treatment, as actually provided in the United States and as merely promised in Latin America complement each other. The Northern poor are being disabled by the same twelve-year treatment whose lack brands the Southern poor as hopelessly backward. Neither in North America nor in Latin America do the poor get equality from obligatory schools. But in both places the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning. All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task.

School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market.

In the United States the per capita costs of schooling have risen almost as fast as the cost of medical treatment. But increased treatment by both doctors and teachers has shown steadily declining results. Medical expenses concentrated on those above forty-five have doubled several times over a period of forty years with a resulting 3 percent increase in life expectancy in men. The increase in educational expenditures has produced even stranger results; otherwise President Nixon could not have been moved this spring to promise that every child shall soon have the "Right to Read" before leaving school.

In the United States it would take eighty billion dollars per year to provide what educators regard as equal treatment for all in grammar and high school. This is well over twice the $36 billion now being spent. Independent cost projections prepared at HEW and the University of Florida indicate that by 1974 the comparable figures will be $107 billion as against the $45 billion now projected, and these figures wholly omit the enormous costs of what is called "higher education," for which demand is growing even faster. The United States, which spent nearly eighty billion dollars in 1969 for "defense" including its deployment in Vietnam, is obviously too poor to provide equal schooling. The President's committee for the study of school finance should ask not how to support or how to trim such increasing costs, but how they can be avoided.

Equal obligatory schooling must be recognized as at least economically unfeasible. In Latin America the amount of public money spent on each graduate student is between 350 and 1,500 times the amount spent on the median citizen (that is, the citizen who holds the middle ground between the poorest and the richest). In the United States the discrepancy is smaller, but the discrimination is keener. The richest parents, some 10 percent, can afford private education for their children and help them to benefit from foundation grants. But in addition they obtain ten times the per capita amount of public funds if this is compared with the per capita expenditure made on the children of the 10 percent who are poorest. The principal reasons for this are that rich children stay longer in school, that a year in a university is disproportionately more expensive than a year in high school, and that most private universities depend-at least indirectly-on tax-derived finances.

Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating which is closely related to per capita gross national product, and much more painful.

The paradox of the schools is evident: increased expenditure escalates their destructiveness at home and abroad. This paradox must be made a public issue. It is now generally accepted that the physical environment will soon be destroyed by biochemical pollution unless we reverse current trends in the production of physical goods. It should also be recognized that social and personal life is threatened equally by HEW pollution, the inevitable by-product of obligatory and competitive consumption of welfare.

The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than the GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for nonschooled learning. The United States is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing, because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.

Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it. The ideology of obligatory schooling admits of no logical limits. The White House recently provided a good example. Dr. Hutschnecker, the "psychiatrist" who treated Mr. Nixon before he was qualified as a candidate, recommended to the President that all children between six and eight be professionally examined to ferret out those who have destructive tendencies, and that obligatory treatment be provided for them. If necessary, their re-education in special institutions should be required. This memorandum from his doctor the President sent for evaluation to HEW. Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system.

Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligator;' schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.

Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The State shall make no law with respect to theestablishment of education." There shall be no ritual obligatory for all.

To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or what is equally likely has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job. Only by protecting the citizen from being disqualified by anything in his career in school can a constitutional disestablishment of school become psychologically effective.

Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.

Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitate learning. Roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of conditions which the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade. School links instruction but not learning to these roles. This is neither reasonable nor liberating. It is not reasonable because it does not link relevant qualities or competences to roles, but rather the process by which such qualities are supposed to be acquired. It is not liberating or educational because school reserves instruction to those whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social control.

Curriculum has always been used to assign social rank. At times it could be prenatal: karma ascribes you to a caste and lineage to the aristocracy. Curriculum could take the form of a ritual, of sequential sacred ordinations, or it could consist of a succession of feats in war or hunting, or further advancement could be made to depend on a series of previous princely favors. Universal schooling was meant to detach role assignment from personal life history: it was meant to give everybody an equal chance to any office. Even now many people wrongly believe that school ensures the dependence of public trust on relevant learning achievements. However, instead of equalizing chances, the school system has monopolized their distribution.

To detach competence from curriculum, inquiries into a man's learning history must be made taboo, like inquiries into his political affiliation, church attendance, lineage, sex habits, or racial background. Laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling must be enacted. Laws, of course, cannot stop prejudice against the unschooled-nor are they meant to force anyone to intermarry with an autodidact but they can discourage unjustified discrimination.

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.

But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement. The strongly motivated student who is faced with the task of acquiring a new and complex skill may benefit greatly from the discipline now associated with the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught reading, Hebrew, catechism, or multiplication by rote. School has now made this kind of drill teaching rare and disreputable, yet there are many skills which a motivated student with normal aptitude can master in a matter of a few months if taught in this traditional way. This is as true of codes as of their encipherment; of second and third languages as of reading and writing; and equally of special languages such as algebra, computer programming, chemical analysis, or of manual skills like typing, watchmaking, plumbing, wiring, TV repair; or for that matter dancing, driving, and diving.

In certain cases acceptance into a learning program aimed at a specific skill might presuppose competence in some other skill, but it should certainly not be made to depend upon the process by which such prerequisite skills were acquired. TV repair presupposes literacy and some math; diving, good swimming; and driving, very little of either.

Progress in learning skills is measurable. The optimum resources in time and materials needed by an average motivated adult can be easily estimated. The cost of teaching a second Western European language to a high level of fluency ranges between four and six hundred dollars in the United States, and for an Oriental tongue the time needed for instruction might be doubled. This would still be very little compared with the cost of twelve years of schooling in New York City (a condition for acceptance of a worker into the Sanitation Department) almost fifteen thousand dollars. No doubt not only the teacher but also the printer and the pharmacist protect their trades through the public illusion that training for them is very expensive.

At present schools pre-empt most educational funds. Drill instruction which costs less than comparable schooling is now a privilege of those rich enough to bypass the schools, and those whom either the army or big business sends through in-service training. In a program of progressive deschooling of U.S. education, at first the resources available for drill training would be limited. But ultimately there should be no obstacle for anyone at any time of his life to be able to choose instruction among hundreds of definable skills at public expense.

Right now educational credit good at any skill center could be provided in limited amounts for people of all ages, and not just to the poor. I envisage such credit in the form of an educational passport or an "edu-credit card" provided to each citizen at birth. In order to favor the poor, who probably would not use their yearly grants early in life, a provision could be made that interest accrued to later users of cumulated "entitlements." Such credits would permit most people to acquire the skills most in demand, at their convenience, better, faster, cheaper, and with fewer undesirable side effects than in school.

Potential skill teachers are never scarce for long because, on the one hand, demand for a skill grows only with its performance within a community and, on the other, a man exercising a skill could also teach it. But, at present, those using skills which are in demand and do require a human teacher are discouraged from sharing these skills with others. This is done either by teachers who monopolize the licenses or by unions which protect their trade interests. Skill centers which would be judged by customers on their results, and not on the personnel they employ or the process they use, would open unsuspected working opportunities, frequently even for those who are now considered unemployable. Indeed, there is no reason why such skill centers should not be at the work place itself, with the employer and his work force supplying instruction as well as jobs to those who choose to use their educational credits in this way.

In 1956 there arose a need to teach Spanish quickly to several hundred teachers, social workers, and ministers from the New York Archdiocese so that they could communicate with Puerto Ricans. My friend Gerry Morris announcedover a Spanish radio station that he needed native speakers from Harlem. Next day some two hundred teen-agers lined up in front of his office, and he selected four dozen of them-many of them school dropouts. He trained them in the use of the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Spanish manual, designed for use by linguists with graduate training, and within a week his teachers were on their own-each in charge of four New Yorkers who wanted to speak the language. Within six months the mission was accomplished. Cardinal Spellman could claim that he had 127 parishes in which at least three staff members could communicate in Spanish. No school program could have matched these results.

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.

Opportunities for skill-learning can be vastly multiplied if we open the "market." This depends on matching the right teacher with the right student when he is highly motivated in an intelligent program, without the constraint of curriculum.

Free and competing drill instruction is a subversive blasphemy to the orthodox educator. It dissociates the acquisition of skills from "humane" education, which schools package together, and thus it promotes unlicensed learning no less than unlicensed teaching for unpredictable purposes.

There is currently a proposal on record which seems at first to make a great deal of sense. It has been prepared by Christopher Jencks of the Center for the Study of Public Policy and is sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity. It proposes to put educational "entitlements" or tuition grants into the hands of parents and students for expenditure in the schools of their choice. Such individual entitlements could indeed be an important step in the right direction. We need a guarantee of the right of each citizen to an equal share of tax-derived educational resources, the right to verify this share, and the right to sue for it if denied. It is one form of a guarantee against regressive taxation.

The Jencks proposal, however, begins with the ominous statement that "conservatives, liberals, and radicals have all complained at one time or another that the American educational system gives professional educators too little incentive to provide high quality education to most children." The proposal condemns itself by proposing tuition grants which would have to be spent on schooling.

This is like giving a lame man a pair of crutches and stipulating that he use them only if the ends are tied together. As the proposal for tuition grants now stands, it plays into the hands not only of the professional educators but of racists, promoters of religious schools, and others whose interests are socially divisive. Above all, educational entitlements restricted to use within schools play into the hands of all those who want to continue to live in a society in which social advancement is tied not to proven knowledge but to the learning pedigree by which it is supposedly acquired. This discrimination in favor of schools which dominates Jencks's discussion on refinancing education could discredit one of the most critically needed principles for educational reform: the return of initiative and accountability for learning to the learner or his most immediate tutor.

The deschooling of society implies a recognition of the two-faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math, and class attendance to the right to use the playground.

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.

Most skills can be acquired and improved by drills, because skill implies the mastery of definable and predictable behavior. Skill instruction can rely, therefore, on the simulation of circumstances in which the skill will be used. Education in the exploratory and creative use of skills, however, cannot rely on drills. Education can be the outcome of instruction, though instruction of a kind fundamentally opposed to drill. It relies on the relationship between partners who already have some of the keys which give access to memories stored in and by the community. It relies on the critical intent of all those who use memories creatively. It relies on the surprise of the unexpected question which opens new doors for the inquirer and his partner.

The skill instructor relies on the arrangement of set circumstances which permit the learner to develop standard responses. The educational guide or master is concerned with helping matching partners to meet so that learning can take place. He matches individuals starting from their own, unresolved questions. At the most he helps the pupil to formulate his puzzlement since only a clear statement will give him the power to find his match, moved like him, at the moment, to explore the same issue in the same context.

Matching partners for educational purposes initially seems more difficult to imagine than finding skill instructors and partners for a game. One reason is the deep fear which school has implanted in us, a fear which makes us censorious. The unlicensed exchange of skills-even undesirable skills-is more predictable and therefore seems less dangerous than the unlimited opportunity for meeting among people who share an issue which for them, at the moment, is socially, intellectually, and emotionally important.

The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience. He discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that each word stays on the blackboard even after its sound has faded. The letters continue to unlock reality and to make it manageable as a problem. I have frequently witnessed how discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to take reality into their hands as they write it down.

I remember the man who complained about the weight of pencils: they were difficult to handle because they did not weigh as much as a shovel; and I remember another who on his way to work stopped with his Companions and wrote the word they were discussing with his hoe on the ground: "agua." Since 1962 my friend Freire has moved from exile to exile, mainly because he refuses to conduct his sessions around words which are preselected by approved educators, rather than those which his discussants bring to the class.

The educational matchmaking among people who have been successfully schooled is a different task. Those who do not need such assistance are a minority, even among the readers of serious journals. The majority cannot and should not be rallied for discussion around a slogan, a word, or a picture. But the idea remains the same: they should be able to meet around a problem chosen and defined by their own initiative. Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.

Let me give, as an example of what I mean, a description of how an intellectual match might work in New York City. Each man, at any given moment and at a minimum price, could identify himself to a computer with his address and telephone number, indicating the book, article, film, or recording on which he seeks a partner for discussion. Within days he could receive by mail the list of others who recently had taken the same initiative. This list would enable him by telephone to arrange for a meeting with persons who initially would be known exclusively by the fact that they requested a dialogue about the same subject.

Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple. It permits identification only on the basis of a mutual desire to discuss a statement recorded by a third person, and it leaves the initiative of arranging the meeting to the individual. Three objections are usually raised against this skeletal purity. I take them up not only to clarify the theory that I want to illustrate by my proposal for they highlight the deep-seated resistance to deschooling education, to separating learning from social control but also because they may help to suggest existing resources which are not now used for learning purposes.

The first objection is: Why cannot self-identification be based also on an idea or an issue? Certainly such subjective terms could also be used in a computer system. Political parties, churches, unions, clubs, neighborhood centers, and professional societies already organize their educational activities in this way and in effect they act as schools. They all match people in order to explore certain "themes"; and these are dealt with in courses, seminars, and curricula in which presumed "common interests" are prepackaged. Such theme-matching is by definition teacher-centered: it requires an authoritarian presence to define for the participants the starting point for their discussion.

By contrast, matching by the title of a book, film, etc., in its pure form leaves it to the author to define the special language, the terms, and the framework within which a given problem or fact is stated; and it enables those who accept this starting point to identify themselves to one another. For instance, matching people around the idea of "cultural revolution" usually leads either to confusion or to demagoguery. On the other hand, matching those interested in helping each other understand a specific article by Mao, Marcuse, Freud, or Goodman stands in the great tradition of liberal learning from Plato's Dialogues, which are built around presumed statements by Socrates, to Aquinas's commentaries on Peter the Lombard. The idea of matching by title is thus radically different from the theory on which the "Great Books" clubs, for example, were built: instead of relying on the selection by some Chicago professors, any two partners can choose any book for further analysis.

The second objection asks: Why not let the identification of match seekers include information on age, background, world view, competence, experience, or other defining characteristics? Again, there is no reason why such discriminatory restrictions could not and should not be built into some of the many universities-with or without walls-which could use title-matching as their basic organizational device. I could conceive of a system designed to encourage meetings of interested persons at which the author of the book chosen would be present or represented; or a system which guaranteed the presence of a competent adviser; or one to which only students registered in a department or school had access; or one which permitted meetings only between people who defined their special approach to the title under discussion. Advantages for achieving specific goals of learning could be found for each of these restrictions. But I fear that, more often than not, the real reason for proposing such restrictions is contempt arising from the presumption that people are ignorant: educators want to avoid the ignorant meeting the ignorant around a text which they may not understand and which they read only because they are interested in it.

The third objection: Why not provide match seekers with incidental assistance that will facilitate their meetings-with space, schedules, screening, and protection? This is now done by schools with all the inefficiency characterizing large bureaucracies. If we left the initiative for meetings to the match seekers themselves, organizations which nobody now classifies as educational would probably do the job much better. I think of restaurant owners, publishers, telephone-answering services, department store managers, and even commuter train executives who could promote their services by rendering them attractive for educational meetings.

At a first meeting in a coffee shop, say, the partners might establish their identities by placing the book under discussion next to their cups. People who took the initiative to arrange for such meetings would soon learn what items to quote to meet the people they sought. The risk that the self-chosen discussion with one or several strangers might lead to a loss of time, disappointment, or even unpleasantness is certainly smaller than the same risk taken by a college applicant. A computer arranged meeting to discuss an article in a national magazine, held in a coffee shop off Fourth Avenue, would obligate none of the participants to stay in the company of his new acquaintances for longer than it took to drink a cup of coffee, nor would he have to meet any of them ever again. The chance that it would help to pierce the opaqueness of life in a modern city and further new friendship, self-chosen work, and critical reading is high. (The fact that a record of personal readings and meetings could be obtained thus by the FBI is undeniable; that this should still worry anybody in 1970 is only amusing to a free man, who willy-nilly contributes his share in order to drown snoopers in the irrelevancies they gather.)

Both the exchange of skills and matching of partners are based on the assumption that education for all means education by all. Not the draft into a specialized institution but only the mobilization of the whole population can lead to popular culture. The equal right of each man to exercise his competence to learn and to instruct is now pre-empted by certified teachers. The teachers' competence, in turn, is restricted to what may be done in school. And, further, work and leisure are alienated from each other as a result: the spectator and the worker alike are supposed to arrive at the work place all ready to fit into a routine prepared for them. Adaptation in the form of a product's design, instruction, and publicity shapes them for their role as much as formal education by schooling. A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education.

Incidental education cannot any longer return to the forms which learning took in the village or the medieval town. Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and work and religion and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into the others. Even specialized apprenticeship was a by-product of specialized activities, such as shoemaking or the singing of psalms. If an apprentice never became a master or a scholar, he still contributed to making shoes or to making church services solemn. Education did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned.

Contemporary society is the result of conscious designs, and educational opportunities must be designed into them. Our reliance on specialized, full-time instruction through school will now decrease, and we must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational quality of all institutions must increase again. But this is a very ambiguous forecast. It could mean that men in the modern city will be increasingly the victims of an effective process of total instruction and manipulation once they are deprived of even the tenuous pretense of critical independence which liberal schools now provide for at least some of their pupils.

It could also mean that men will shield themselves less behind certificates acquired in school and thus gain in courage to "talk back" and thereby control and instruct the institutions in which they participate. To ensure the latter we must learn to estimate the social value of work and leisure by the educational give-and. take for which they offer opportunity. Effective participation in the politics of a street, a work place, the library, a news program, or a hospital is therefore the best measuring stick to evaluate their level as educational institutions.

I recently spoke to a group of junior-high-school students in the process of organizing a resistance movement to their obligatory draft into the next class. Their slogan was "participation not simulation." They were disappointed that this was understood as a demand for less rather than for more education, and reminded me of the resistance which Karl Marx put up against a passage in the Gotha program which-one hundred years ago wanted to outlaw child labor. He opposed the proposal in the interest of the education of the young, which could happen only at work. If the greatest fruit of man's labor should be the education he receives from it and the opportunity which work gives him to initiate the education of others, then the alienation of modern society in a pedagogical sense is even worse than its economic alienation.

The major obstacle on the way to a society that truly educates was well defined by a black friend of mine in Chicago, who told me that our imagination was "all schooled up." We permit the state to ascertain the universal educational deficiencies of its citizens and establish one specialized agency to treat them.

Corridor of Shah Jehani Mosque, Thatta

2007-10-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

Painting by Ayesha Shariff

2007-10-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

This talented young Pakistani artist is currently abroad.

Keep on Truckin' !

2007-10-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

The Saints and Shrines of Multan by Roshan Malik

2007-10-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

The Saints and Shrines of Multan
by Roshan Malik

[from All Things Pakistan-see link in sidebar]

Multan is one of the ancient towns in Pakistan. Beside its historical importance in the geopolitics of Subcontinent, the city has been the hub of great sufis and saints who were the harbingers of Islamic teachings.

Just as Bahawalpur’s architecture is defined by its political heritage, Multan’s architecture is defined by its religious heritage. Multan is commonly described as the city of saints and shrines. Within the radius of twenty five miles, one finds hundreds of Mausoleums of those saints who propagated Islam in subcontinent with a message of love, peace, fraternity and tolerance and religious harmony.

Sometime back ATP carried a post on the Gateways of Multan. Today, I want to share this pictorial about the Multan’s saints and shrines.

Sheikh Bahauddin Zakariya commonly known as Bahawal Haq was born in 1170 in Layyah. He went to Iran and received religious education from Sheikh Shahab-ud-Din Suhrawardy in Baghdad. After performing Hajj, and visited Jerusalem, Syria, Baghdad. On his return to subcontinent he settled in Multan in 1222 AD and preached his teachings.

His Mausoleum is visited by thousands of people and has great number of followers in Southern Punjab and Sind. Many of his followers when arrive Multan, they put off their shoes as a gesture of respect to this sacred land (Multan Sharif).Shah Rukn-e-Alam was grandson of Bahawal Haq and continued the message of grandfather to the public at large. Thousands of people accepted Islam due to his inspirational teachings. He died at the age of 88 and was buried in the lofty dome built by Ghias-u-Din Tughlaq for himself.

Beside religious importance of the Mausoleum (pictures above), its archeological value cannot be undermined. It is one of the iconic building in Multan with loft dome that stands 100 feet high from the ground. The use of red bricks with wooden beams is ornamented with blue and white ceramic tiles (Multani tiles) brings a majestic beauty in the building.

The descendents of this family have always been influential in government and politics. Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi is currently the custodian of this Mausoleum.

Shah Shams Sabzwari, also known as Shah Shams Tebrez, [NB: Not the Shems Tabriz of Maulana Rumi-- this Shamsuddin Sabzwari Tabrezi is an Ismaili missionary from the same city Rizwan.]came to Multan in thirteenth century and preached his teaching among the inhabitants of the area. He died in 1276.

Many miracles are associated with his personality. Lot of people comes to this shrine (picture on the left) to pay homage.

Musa Pak Shaheed, was originally from Uch Sharif and descendant of Hazrat Abdul Qadir Jillani. He died in eleventh century and is buried inside the wall city called Pak Gate. The famous Gillani family is the descendant of Hazrat Musa Pak Shaheed.

Yousaf Shah Gardezi came to Multan in 1060 and preached his teachings to his disciples. He died in 1088 AD and was buried inside Bohar Gate. He has rectangular Mausoleum with white and blue tiles. His descendant family is still very influential in the area.

Following are some of the famous shrines in Multan.

* Shrine-Bibi Pak Daman
* Shrine-Hameed-ud-Din Hakim
* Shrine-Qutab-al-qutaab “Moj Dariya”
* Shrine-Syed Pir Sakhi Shah Hassan Parwana
* Shrine-Qazi Qutab-ud-Din Kashani
* Shrine-Syed Hasan Khanjzee
* Shrine-Hazrat Shah Dana Shaheed
* Shrine-Abu Hassan Hafiz Jamal-ud-din “Musa Pak Shaheed”
* Shrine-Hazrat Shah Kamal Qadari
* Shrine-Hafiz Muhammad Jamal Chisti Nazami
* Shrine-Pir Chup Wardi Waly
* Shrine-Mollana Hamid Ali Khan Naqshbandi
* Shrine-Allama Syed Ahmad Saeed Kazmi
* Shrine-Hazrat Khawaja Awais Khagga
* Shrine-Pir Syed Wali Muhammad Shah(Chadar Wali Sarkar)
* Shrine-Hazrat Gul Shah

Roshan Malik is a development practitioner; his earlier posts at ATP include one on the architecture of Bahawalpur.

The Gateways of Multan by S.A.J. Shirazi

2007-10-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Gateways of Multan

by S.A.J. Shirazi
taken from All Things Pakistan.

One of the oldest living cities in the world, Multan is a significant example of old Islamic urbanization. While many historic Islamic cities have lost much of their original character during the twentieth century, Multan has survived remarkably intact, retaining the classic form of the medieval city encircled by its rampart and gateways. It is the entire urban fabric of the place that is historic.

Inside the walled portion — archetypal form of old town — one can still see beautiful bay windows with intricately moulded ‘jharokas’ in narrow streets or delicate brick work with geometric patterns and tile friezes on the facades of havelis. Meanwhile, modern Multan has expanded in all directions covering over 28 square kilometres of area. And with modernism have come related difficulties. “Problems like overflowing sewerage and a broken down water supply system, encroachments and pollution are taken as hazards of urbanization or attributed to lack of funds,” says a resident of Gulgasht colony.

Archaeologist Nazir Ahmed complains,” the intelligentsia is inactive and people have no time for pursuits like preservation of historic and cultural heritage.” The original defensive wall — 40-50 feet high — dating from the seventeenth century was demolished in 1854 after the British captured Multan but its lower sections survived. The present remains of the wall preserves the semi circular form of bastions at intervals.

The wall was reduced to 10-12 feet during the British period. It contained seven gates, of which Lahore, Delhi, Daulat and Khizeri gates have disappeared. Dilapidated Khuni Burj (Bloody Tower) named after the bloody battle fought here when British force stormend Multan in January 1848 still survives.

A circular road (alang) runs around the walled city connecting the surviving gates, Khuni Burj and Hussaim Agahi entrance. Three of the six gateways — Bohar, Haram and Delhi — were rebuilt in the latter half of the nineteenth century with pointed arches and castigated towers. All of them badly need renovation.

Once an imposing gateway, Lahori Gate existed even in the nineteenth century when Alexander Cunningham visited and wrote about Multan. It was damaged when the British annexed Multan and totally demolished in 1854. The new gate built on this site is a combination of two double story towers with a flat band above and is without much decoration. Haram gate comprises of two pylons on each flank, with a large four cantered pointed arch in the middle. The castigated towers on flanks are double storied. Delhi Gate, one of Multan’s oldest landmarks, existed even before arrival of the British. The present gate was rebuilt during the British rule. Its construction is similar to Haram Gate except that its arch has a wider span. The gateways have been white washed and painted several times with water based earth colours and none of the original work has survived. The wooden doors have also disappeared. The gateways are surrounded and engulfed by encroachments, cubby-hole shops, hundreds of advertisements and hoardings.

As for the wall itself, its present condition is ruinous and at no place does it maintain its original shape. At most places, it is totally missing. Most salient portion exists between Daulat Gate and Pak Gate. Rows of houses and shops have been erected on the strip of land between the outer face of the circular road and the inner face of the wall, in the process concealing several notable historic features.

The photo on the left is where Daulat Gate once used to be. This crossing is however, still called Daulat Gate.

However ruined it maybe, the wall still defines the edge of the old city far more clearly than the circular road and is an immediate reminder of Mutlan’s historic character. The circular road is in fairly good condition through its width and right of way has been considerably reduced due to unchecked encroachment.

Multani monuments face unsympathetic development, unsuitable repairs or general neglect. All the surviving gates should be cleaned, repaired and renovated to their original shape as far as possible, says Nazir Ahmed. They should be freed from all sorts of neon sign that hide more than they highlight.

The Antiquities Act 1975 and the Punjab Special Premises (Preservation) Ordinance 1985 are not sufficient to protect historic cities. A new concept for area conservation is required to be developed through government polices and public education. Towards this end, the departments of archaeology, Auqaf and civic bodies all need to work together to save what remains of a once glorious medieval Islamic culture.

Article on Multani ceramics by S. Shirazi

2007-10-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice article on Multan's famous blue pottery.

TRUE BLUE OF MULTAN: by SAJ Shirazi

In the past we have covered the Gateways of Multan and the Saints and Shrines of Multan. Today we have brought another topic for you and that is the famous blue tile work (kashi gari) of Multan.

The history of Multani arts and crafts also goes back to medieval period. Kashi work, glazing and hand painting of ceramic products is an important art for which Multan is famous the would over. The use of foliage branches and leaves of trees and superb richness of colours (mainly blue) in Kashi work is an evidence of Persian influence. As Persian arts themselves have been under Chinese (Mongol) influence, therefore some historians are of the view that Kashi work had originally come from Kashghar, China. Over a period of centuries Multani Kashi work has matured and developed a unique and distinctive style of its own.

The art has survived for centuries through generations as its trade secrets like composition of colours were zealously guarded by a handful of artist and their families. Artists like Ustad Allah Wasaya and others have left lasting work in the field and their work ahs lent an immortality to the art.

In 1853, during a limited excavation on Qillah Kohna Qasim Bagh, Alexander Cunningham found glazed tiles made in Multan in about 900 AD. These tiles had been used in the mosque built by Muhammad Bin Qasim on his arrival in Multan. The highest quality Multani tiles have been used in shrines, mosques and other important buildings including house ever since. The shrines of Shah Yousaf Gardezi (1153), Shah Rukne Alam, Ali Akbar, mosque Nawaban, Shrines of Uchh Sharif in Cholistan and Talpur tombs in Sindh are classic examples of tile work. Kashi work on the walls of shrine of Hazrat Haqani, Sawi Mosque, Shrines of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Eidgah Multan and Lahore museum is very distinctive and of a fine quality. Lately Akhtar Abbas Bharwana (ex minister Punjab) has used the tiles from Multan at his house in Jhang. A contemporary artist Ustad Muhammad Alam has executed Kashi work in the house of late actor Sultan Rahi in Lahore.

Blue pottery of Multan is at display in prestigious president’s house, prime ministers secretariat, culture missions of Pakistan in different countries and British Museum London. Foreign tourists and private collectors love to buy vases vessels planters, cookie jars and table lamps with hand painted in designs like China Kashi, Special Kashi and Bamboo Shoot. World Bank team has also visited the Institute and shown keen interest in the conservation and development of the art.

The process of making blue pottery and tiles has undergone many changes with the development in technology. Gas furnaces with controllable and uniform temperature are being used for biscuit firings and glazing instead of wood and dung cake fire. Clay is being procured from Manshera (NWFP), Tharparker (Sindh) and Gujrat (Punjab) instead of local red clay.

“Baking of raw material as per the formula, grinding, kneading, filtration, moulding, biscuit firing at the temperature of 800-850 degree centigrade, Kashi work and glazing at the temperature of 1200 centigrade are all necessary steps in the process,”

explained one young artist Muhammad Irfan wile showing everything being done at his concern by 20 ceramists and 15 Kashi artist and their students.

“The special blue colour prepared from cobalt oxide and copper oxide is a special technique and distinctive feature of the Kashi work,”

he says. The art has evolved into a far more sophisticated process today.

Among the various arts that are practiced in Pakistan, Multani Kashi work has attained a higher state of refinement. There is always a room to bring into the art new innovations, endow it with fresh spirit and set the science as its guide. Assistance can be sought from international agencies like UNESCO and the World Bank. The range of possibilities in the field of ceramics is very vast. The whole world can be the market for Blue Pottery from Multan.

A suggested course outline for Western Art, 1400-1900

2007-10-05T07:08:00.001-07:00

THE MODERN WORLD a course outline By M. Rizwanullah
Topics covered:
1. 14th century beginnings of the Renaissance.
2. 15th century Early Renaissance/ Age of Discovery
3. 16th century High & Late Renaissance / Age of Conquest
4. 17th century Baroque/ Age of Reason
5. 18th century Neo-classical & Rococco/ Age of Revolution & Enlightenment
6. 19th century Romanticism & Realism/ Industrial Revolution

Required Reading:
Gombrich, Ernst, The Story of Art, Phaidon, London, 1999
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Ideas that Changed the World. Doring Kindersleigh, Surrey, 2003
Recommended reading:
Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World, Suhail Academy, Lahore, 2000. OR Martin Lings, Ancient Beliefs & Modern Superstitions. Suhail Academy, Lahore, 1999 This is a basic list, you may be assigned further reading/ film viewing. It is advisable to browse other books & encyclopedias related to the topics. Surfing the net is also useful.
TOPICS DETAIL/ STUDY GUIDE
1. What is Modernity? 3 Ages of Western History…Ancient Pagan World ‘Classical Antiquity’; The Midieval Christain world: Age of faith or Dark Age?; the Modern World. How the modern world arose. Characteristics. Modernity vs. Tradition. The New Philosophy (J. Donne) & Old Beliefs. Knowledge & Superstition? Age of Discovery. New World & Copernican revolution. Guttenberg’s printing press. Protestant Reformation. Luther & Calvin. Counter-Reformation: Art as propaganda. The Inquisition. Greco-Roman influence. What is Humanism?
2. 14th century Italy; The city states; expansion of trade & commerce; Black Death. Development of vernacular literature; Humanism (reviving classical values); birth of new artistic culture. Proto Renaissance: Giotto & Duccio. Early Renaissance. Influence of classical art; Ghiberti, Botticelli; Fra Angelico, Fra Fillipo Lippi. Ghirlandio. Development of 1-point perspective: Brunulleschi, Mantegna & Uccello; Alberti. Types of perspective: orthogonal, geometric. David by Donatello; David by Verrochio. Signorelli’s Damned. Chiaroscuro: Massaccio. Fresco & Egg Tempera on panel. Emergence of Capitalism & Banking. 15th century Europe. The Money lenders. Real & Fiat money. Promissory notes. Adam Smith (17th cent.) & Economic Man. Marx’s critique. Today: Keynes & Friedman.
3. Early Renaissance in the North. Campin, Van Eyck, Bouts, Van der Weyden; Van der Goes; Use of oil paints; Diptych & triptych. Limbourg brothers (manuscript illumination). Martin Schongauer. 1400-1500
4. High Renaissance: The Great masters: Leonardo da Vinci; Michelangelo; Raphael; Titan & Durer. The Mastery of anatomy, perspective, composition & humanism. Renaissance Man. Venetian Renaissance: Bellini, Giorgione, Titan. Main characteristics: Idyllic Landscape, rich color, & soft, golden light. 1500-1600
5. Mannerism: Paramigiano, Il Bronzino, El-Greco; Tintoretto, Giambologna; Pontormo. Allegory, exaggeration & symbolism. Use of diagonals, shallow space & 2-point perspective. Also Bruegel, Grunewald, Holbein, Veronese. 1590-1690
6. Baroque: Bernini; Caravaggio(the dark Manner/tenebrism & Realism ); Rubens (the Grand Manner); Poussin (Linearity vs. Painterliness); Rembrandt; Velasquez. Little masters: (Dutch still life) Kalf. Vermeer (study of light & interior scenes). 1690-1760. Rise of the middle classes. Drawing rooms.
7. Rococco & the Neo-Classical Reaction. Louis 14th the Sun King & Versailles: magnificent palaces, endless gardens, high heels. Madame du Pompadour& ‘les salons’. Courtesan culture; haute couture. Watteau; Boucher; Fragonard. English Rococo: Reynolds & Gainsborough. Hogarth’s parodies. Neo-Classical. J.L. David & Benjamin West. 1760-1800
8. The French & American revolutions. Let them eat cake. Discuss; Democracy & Secularism (life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness). The Enlightenment: Philosophy & society. Science & Logic. Age of Reason & Enlightenment Thinkers: Locke, Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Diderot. 1776 (USA) 1789 (France). Reign of Terror & return of Monarchy, 1798.
9. Romanticism & the cult of Personality. (Napoleon & Byron). The revolt of imagination against reason. Wilfred Thesiger’s definition of a romantic: someone who ‘loves the past, hates the present & dreads the future.’ Romantic artists & poets: William Blake (‘The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom’) & the English Romantics. The quintessential Romantic movement: PRB. Romantic landscape artists: Turner, the Hudson River School (Cole, Church, Moran), German Romantics(Phillip Otto Runge, Caspar Friedrich, Bocklin). Orientalists & Orientalism; Ingres, Delacroix, Gerome. French Symbolist artists & poets. Dore, Moreau, Redon, Chavannes, von Stuck, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine. Goya and his times The Industrial Revolution. Fuseli Géricault and the Napoleonic Period
10. Romanticism in music & literature. Walpole, Bram Stoker, Arabian Nights etc. Keats, Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The rise of Pulp Fiction. Gothic revival. Trends in World Literature during 19th century. Realism. Russian & Gerrman writers. Zola & Manto. The detective story (Conan Doyle) & science fiction.
11. The Rise & Rise of Photography. Daguerre & Talbot. Early history. George Eastman’s Kodak Brownie & the rise of snapshot & popular photography (1850-1890). National Geographic & Life: documentary photography. Aesthetic vs. Straight debate. Jacob Riis.
12. Realism. The American Realists: Eakins, Tanner. Realism in France: Corot, Courbet, Millet, Manet. Realism in England: Constable. The Barbizon school (E. Boudin). Elitism in art. The French Salon. The role of the Academies. A class-based society. Degas & Manet. Daumier: lithography, journalism.
13. The French Impressionists. Hausmann’s Paris, 1848-1870. The contribution of Impressionsts to Realism & to Abstraction. The contribution of Impressionism to Bohemianism: Montmarte culture. What is Bohemianism? Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley. Influence of Japanese prints. Whistler’s Peacock Room. Light & Color.
14. The Post-Impressionists: Toulouse -Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat & Cezanne. Les Nabis. Post Impressionism outside France: John, Munch, JD Innes etc. O’Keefe. Expressionism & Formalism.
15. Fin de Siecle & Art Nouveau. Decadent Art: Beardsley. Viennese Secession: Klimt. La Belle époque. Art for Art’s sake: Oscar Wilde & the Aesthetic Movement. Dandyism. William Morris’ Arts & Crafts Movement: reaction against Industrialization. Socialism. McIntosh & Tiffany.

Mobile paan wala, Jodia bazaar, Karachi, by Sohail Zuberi

2007-10-05T07:05:00.001-07:00

Hala Tiles by Sohail Zuberi

2007-10-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

Sohail Zuberi is a multi-talented man: designer, furniture-maker, paper craftsman, photographer, organic gardener! He lives and works out of Karachi.

Istighraq

2007-09-25T05:15:00.001-07:00

Flickr Pakistan zindabad!

Women at the Urs of Hazrat Salim Chishti RA, by Weeks

2007-09-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

M. Rizwanullah adds:
Edwin Weeks was an American Orientalist painter of the 19th century. Orientalism in art refers to the Romantic art movement specializing in scenes of the "exotic East" i.e. the Orient. The most famous artists were French, known for their love of the exotic, such as Gerome, but Americans and Englishmen such as Bridgman were not far behind. How could they be, when the Thousand and one Nights was the best selling book of the [19th] century?

There were some really good artists with a passion for the East, who actually loved and respected their subjects [indeed quite a few painters eventually "went native" and adopted the local dress, mannerisms and even the "Moslem religion," e.g. E. Dinet] But it cannot be denied that for a lot of Orientalist artists all the visits to the East and the carefully-observed sketchbooks were merely for satisfying the "Harem" and "Turkish Bath" fantasies of not only repressed, but also libertine Europeans.(1)

As for this painting, showing various "types" attending the Urs of Hazrat Salim Chishti rehmatullah aleh:

Hazrat Salim Chishti, may God sanctify his secret, was a legendary Pir of Fatehpur to whom Akber Badshah famously walked bare-foot, to get him to pray for a son. The saint prayed to God for Akber, and then foretold that Akber would insha Allah have three sons. Akber not only named his first son Salim [later Jahangir] after the saint, but also eventually shifted his court to Fatehpur, where he had constructed a huge palace and also a tomb for the now-deceased saint.

However, in Fatehpur Akber set about instituting his "Deen e Ilahi," a synthetic religion with the Emperor as the manifestation of the Divine in its center. For some reason, probably the anti-Islam stance of most non-Muslim historians, [and also perhaps Akber's pro-Hindu policies], Deen e Ilahi has been seen as a kind-hearted, liberal attempt to bridge India's religious divide(s), rather than the self serving cult of Emperor-worship it was.

Whatever the case, the Deen e Ilahi did not go down well with the deceased Hazrat Salim Chishti. The saint made one more prayer from beyond the grave, and within a few years Fatehpur had run bone dry. Hence its full name Fatehpur Sikri: Fatehpur the Dry.

A disgruntled Akber was forced to abandon his dream palace and return to his old digs at Agra. Leaving Hazrat Salim Chishti RA in peace in Fatehpur.

*******************************************

You can see a lot of Orientalist art here.
This excellent site has a lot of paintings by EL Weeks.
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Footnote (1) [This last point is important because it is assumed that only repressed people have an unhealthy interest in sex & pornography. Rather, it is liberals who are the biggest consumers of such porn-masquerading-as-art books, as Phaidon's and Taschen's recent sales of glossy coffee-table titles no doubt testify]

Pots from Morocco

2007-09-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

Found on Flickr. The little teapots are for serving the refreshing mint tea!

Weeks: orientalist painting of Wazir Khan Mosque

2007-09-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Masjid Wazir Khan, Lahore.

Women at Mazar e Sharif, Afghanistan

2007-09-09T02:27:00.000-07:00

Photo by Kevin Kelly

The Rajput Naqqash family of Multan

2007-09-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Rajput Naqqash family of Multan
The late, great Ustad Malik Aashiq Muhammad of Multan

By M. Rizwanullah, 2007

Ustad Abdullah’s family deserves special mention. Although there are many great Naqqash in Multan, this family is the most prominent. They are the illustrious offspring of a Rajput family who embraced Islam in the 13th century at the hands of the Saint of Multan, the great Sufi Hazrat Ghous Bahauddin Zakaria [RA], a saint of the Suharwardy Sufi order from Baghdad, who was sent to make Multan his home and bring people to the light of Islam. This artist family was among the many millions who converted to Islam due to this great saint’s influence. Under his guidance they left the Hindu figurative arts and brought their considerable skills to Islamic art. Members of this Naqqash family even worked on the Taj Mahal in Agra, as well as many mosques and tombs in Multan and Taunsa—Taunsa being the seat of the Chishti Sufis just as Multan is the seat of the Suharwardy Sufis of Pakistan.

The Sufi saints, are in truth responsible not just for spreading Islam, but also nurturing Islamic culture and Arts. Shah Hamdani [RA]’s patronage of the shawl makers of Kashmir, Shah e Naqshband [RA]’s patronage of the carpet weavers of Bukhara are just 2 well known examples. Languages, arts crafts, what aspect of our culture that is beautiful does not owe its development to them?

Traditionally, the Muslim craftsmen were organized into guilds [biradri] in Urdu, and the Biradris or guilds were usually headed by a craftsman who was also a Shaykh i.e. a Master in Sufism. Even in case of the gharanas, or the hereditary crafts families, the family usually owed its allegiance to some Sufi Shaykh or order and each generation of craftsmen would renew their allegiance with the current head of that Sufi order [silsila].

It was customary for the young craftsman to be initiated into the Sufi order of that guild in a formal initiation ceremony, where he was also explained the symbolism of his craft. Occasionally he was also given a precious book to copy out, usually in the form of verse, so if unlettered he could memorize it with ease, as in the case of the Persian Kuza Nameh, (the book of the Potters), and its Pashto equivalent, which outlined the symbolism of his craft, and also prayer formulas and incantations (wazaif & azkar) for each step of the process.

In this manner, the Muslim craftsman knew he did meaningful work, and in fact, approached it like worship. He connected his humble tools and craft with creation, with the larger universe. In the words of artist & educationist Durriya Kazi, the practice of Islamic art is a kind of Zikr, or act of remembrance of God.
The Naqqash of this Rajput family too, developed “their art of Naqqashi according to Islamic mood and mysticism. This very mysticism, Islamic style of writing and mixture of colours are the sources of …. their strength and richness, and it is, continuously, being transferred safely from one generation to the next.” (Naqqash website)

Ustad Abdullah pioneered the camel-skin lamps. For this the British Government honoured him with a medal in 1936-37. In 1933, he was given the Nawab of Bahawalpur Award.

This writer too, was very fortunate to have met and made the acquaintance of the Late Ustad Muhammad Aashiq, the son of Ustad Abdullah when he was exhibiting in Karachi. This great artist, but simple humble and saintly man was quietly sitting at the site of his exhibition in the Alliance Francaise, but despite being well over seventy, was using the time to practice his Naqqashi brushwork!

Later I had the privilege of visiting him in Multan and interviewing Ustad Aashiq, sitting in his little workshop for a short film made by artist/educationist Durriya Kazi and filmmaker Maheen Zia of the Karachi University’s department of Visual Studies. It’s a precious document of a great artist of Pakistan and the Islamic world.

Ustad sahib took us to a jewel-like mosque in Kamangran Street, simple on the outside, but when we entered it took our breath away! It was decorated top to bottom in exquisite Naqqashi, including the ceiling, which was the Naqqashi equivalent of the Sistine Chapel.

Ustad Aashiq Naqqash not only kept alive his noble ancestral art, but also managed to introduce this fine art internationally. His work can be seen on famous buildings all over the country, including Iqbal Hall and the Sarena Hotel of Faisalabad with Naqqashi. This hall was named ‘Naqqash Hall.’ Most importantly, Ustad Aashiq wrote an introductory textbook to Naqqashi, putting into writing perhaps for the first time, the rudiments the technique and the methods of Naqqashi. This art had been passed down sina ba sina, “chest to chest” as they say, and many Ustads were jealous in guarding their secrets. But Ustad Aashiq was incredibly generous with his vast knowledge. Free of cost, he had tutored hundreds of little girls in the art of Naqqashi, and many of them, apart from finding an artistic outlet, had subsequently gone on to find employment in Pakistan’s significant textile industry as textile designers. Truly the Naqqashi designs have many applications.

For his lifelong services to naqqashi, Ustad Aashiq was awarded with the Pride of Performance by the Government of Pakistan, the highest civil award for an artist’s contribution to his country.

Much of Ustad sahib’s work was on camel skin objects, especially the lamps that are so popular.

The process is described by his son, Ustad Malik Abdur Rehman, an intelligent young man & a ustad in his own right, with a real vision for the future of Naqqashi, as follows:

The articles prepared with camel skin are passed to the Naqqash after various steps of final touches. First of all, the potter prepares the moulds according the required pattern. In the next stage, presser (Dabger) cleans the fresh camel skin by clearing the hairs and flesh from its surface, hither to it becomes transparent. After this, the pieces of moist hide are enveloped on the above mentioned moulds, in this manner that the connecting links on the hide become naturally normal and on drying after 36 to 48 hours, these cannot be seen or felt.
After this process, the moulds are broken down with a special blow. The dried specimens are then, ready according to the desired design.
Now (the) Naqqash demonstrates his art of Naqqashi on the special articles of camel skin. This is a very skilled and hard work. For this purpose of Naqqashi, water colours and oil colours are used and to save them for longer period, varnish is spread on them with brush.
All above mentioned process comes …. only by the working of the hands of the artists. The freshness and beauty of these prepared products, remain strong at least for hundred years.

Today, Ustad Abdur Rehman the highly skilled son of Ustad Muhammad Aashiq Naqqash carries on his family’s 900 year contribution to the arts. There are many such “gharanas” who have nurtured the arts in this region, however, few are such selfless servants of their art, and few devote so much energy to its promotion. Most gharanas alas are concerned more with self-promotion, but thankfully Ustad Abdur Rehman is highly committed to furthering the cause of his art and that of his fellow artists and craftsmen. Ustad Abdur Rehman has introduced Multani handicrafts in exhibitions at international level. He has received many awards, including the SARAC Award in 1992, the D8 Award, 1995, Asian Conference Award in 1997. He has exhibited and demonstrated his craft in many countries, including India and the UK.

The young Ustad Abdur Rehman is also a gracious host and a good businessman. He has been instrumental at setting up the Multan Crafts Bazaar, a place for Multani artists to showcase their talent, located below the shrine of Hazrat Shah Rukn e Alam Suharwady [RA] near the Ghanta ghar in Multan. [see picture above, plus the link to Multan Craft Bazaar in the sidebar]

Absolutely incredible work!

2007-09-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart, the Scottish adventurer, is doing some absolutely amazing work trying to preserve the Traditional & Islamic arts of Afghanistan!

He has a center called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is working to restore traditional Afghan architecture & preserve the beautiful arts & crafts at the same time, by training young people in them through the old Ustads and thus providing economic support for the ustads and opportunities to the next generation!

Some of their activities in their own words:

Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture
Afghanistan’s unique arts and architectural heritage are of the utmost cultural and economic value. They provide employment to the most vulnerable communities, particularly women and the rural poor. They attract enthusiastic customers all over the world. But they have been threatened by years of conflict. The craft skills are rapidly dying out and the lack of infrastructure has not allowed for workspace or time to regenerate them.

The Foundation aims to make cultural heritage sustainable and beneficial to livelihoods. It embeds crafts and conservation within a programme of education and business opportunity. The Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture, which will be located in Murad Khane, is at the core of this philosophy.

The Centre provides an opportunity to:

* Preserve existing Afghan traditions by training the next generation of artisans

* Improve the range and quality of Afghan craft products through access to new technologies and designs

* Increase the incomes of craftsmen through business training and access to new markets

* Rebuild the cultural pride and national identity of Afghanistan

Subhan Allah. May God give them every success.

--Rizwan.

Rabab player from Kashmir

2007-09-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

Sufi music was once an integral part of Kashmir. this photo is by Kevin Kelly, the 'internet guru' who happens to be a very fine photographer. Do check out his amazing Asia Grace series.

Kafir Kalash bead & shell-work

2007-09-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

woman's head-dress, back view

Mughal gardens -baghat wa bagh-bani

2007-09-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

Jahangir ka Maqbara, Lahore, Pakistan.

This is a very nice resource on Mughal Gardens. Do visit! Be sure to click on the tiny photos at the top.

A Suggested course outline

2007-09-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

Suggested course outline for a basic HISTORY OF ART course at Pakistani Art institutes (eg., KU, NCA, CIAC, TIP, KSA, PAF-KIET etc.) developed by M. Rizwanullah. But everyone feel free to use this.

NOTE this does not include Islamic Art. I feel that Islamic Art warrants its own course, ideally in the second year or semester. InshaAllah I shall be posting my proposal for an Islamic art course here soon.

M. Rizwanullah, 2007

Course Description
This course attempts a broad-based introduction to the varied forms of activity that have been called ‘Art,’ through different times and climes. The emphasis is on developing ‘visual literacy’ and awareness of basic concepts, and paradigms of interpretation.
Wherever necessary the lectures will be augmented by slide presentations, reading assignment in English & Urdu, and documentary film showings etc.

Topics outline plus study guide

1. Basic questions: What is ‘Art’ anyway? Why do people make Art? Who is it made for & why? (The uses of Images: Art as record, creation, narrative, truth, propaganda, icon, expression, catharsis, beauty) Concepts of Beauty: Kantian vs. Platonic (i.e. ideal vs. subjective). Khwaja Ghulam Farid on Layla & Majnun. Beauty & Truth. Abstraction; Islamic Art. SLIDESHOW WORLD ART

2. The Elements of Art. 2D & 3D art. Length Breadth & Depth + Time = Time Space (zaman wa makan) Elements of Art & Principles of Design; Are these elements objectively ‘real’? Are the principles ‘true’? Elements of Western art: line, color, shape, texture, mass & volume. Elements of Islamic art: dot, square & circle. Principles of Design: harmony, variety, balance. Theory of Balanced Opposites.

3. What age are we living in? Concepts of History: cyclical, straight line. Evolutionary (isolationist) & Diffusionist theories of history. Islamic concept of History. Main eras of history, East & West. ‘New,’ ‘Old’ & ‘Third’ Worlds. Stone, Bronze & Iron Ages. Hunting/Agriculture/city life. Kamal/zawal v.s. irtiqa. Ibn Khuldun & Fukayama. Do great men shape history or do impersonal historical forces? [Thomas Carlyle & Heroism]

4. Photography. Overview of history of Photography. Lord Herschel, Daguerre & Talbot. Glass & paper negatives. Studio portraits, travel photography. The Kodak Brownie & snapshot camera. Aesthetic vs. ‘Straight’ Photography.

5. Music. Elements of Music. East & West. Melody (sur), Harmony, Rhythm (taal). Major instruments & categories. Octave (saptak). Scales & chords. Music in the Islamic world. Concepts about music. Sufi music (Sema). Hazrat Amir Khusro. Maulana Rumi’s theory of Aesthetics & Music. Main instruments in the Muslim World: woodwind, stringed, & percussion.

6. Ancient Iraq. Sumer; Akkad; Babylon; Assyria, Neo-Babylon; Achaemenid Persia. Geography of Iraq & Iran. Mesopotamia, the land between 2 rivers: Tigris & Euphrates. Hieratic Perspective. Man-beasts. Ground-line or register. Depth cues. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stele of Hammurabi. Ashurbanipal & Ashurnasirpal lion-hunting reliefs. Lion Gate of Ishtar. Cyrus, Darius & Persepolis. 3000 BC – 612 BC (Persian conquest) 634 AD Islamic conquest.

7. Land of the Pharaohs. Egyptian civilization, a ‘gift of the Nile’; Old kingdom; Middle kingdom; New kingdom. Late period; Alexander’s conquest; Hellenistic period to Islamic. Geography of Egypt. Upper & Lower Egypt. Great Pyramids, Jiza/Giza: Khufu, Khafre, Menkure. Origin of pyramids: mastabas, Zoser & Imphotep. Stepped pyramid at Saqqara. Fresco paintings & low-relief. Egyptian canon of formal representation: Cubit system. Amarna Revolution: Akhenaten & Nefertiti. Rameses II. Egyptian Pantheon: Horus, Amon/Ra/Aten, Hathor, Annubis, Thoth, Isis & Osiris, Seth. WOMEN, Make-up & Jewelry in ancient Egypt: Bust of Nefertiti. 3000 BC- 500 BC (Persian conquest) & 327BC (Greek conquest) 31BC Roman conquest & 641 AD Islamic conquest.

8. Bronze age Europe & the arrival of the Greeks. Cycladic, Minoan & Mycenaean art. Greek civilization; Greek Humanism; Geometric, Orientalizing & Archaic periods. Archaic period. Homer & Mythology (Hellenistic pantheon). The 12 Olympian ‘gods’, their Greek & Roman names;(Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Ares/Mars, Aphrodite/Venus, etc.) Prometheus, Hercules, Jason, Achilles, other Greek heroes. Homer’s Trojan War & Odessey: plot & main characters. Black Figure & Red Figure pottery. Exekias, Euphronius, Brygos painter. 1500 BC – 600 BC.

9. Classical Greece. Polytheism, Philosophy. The Greek philosophers. Pythagorian mysticism, Euclid’s axioms, Plato’s idealism, Aristotle’s realism. Hippocrates (medicine), Diogenes (skepticism). Persian Wars& Classical period (golden age of Perikles); Hellenistic period. Battle of Marathon. Athens & Sparta’s rivalry. Role of Gymnasia in Greek life. Discuss: what makes a ‘Hero’? The impact of Alexander the Great. The great sculptors: Myron, Praxitles, Phidias, Polykleitos, Lysippos, Scopas. 600 BC- 300 BC. Building: Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens. Iknatios & Kallikrates, 448-432BC.

10. Significance of Greek civilization for Muslim world. Western debt to Classical Antiquity. Discus: consequent implications for non-Western world. Pagan echoes in modern life: physical culture: Gymnasia, the body beautiful, homosexuality, Olympics, hero-worship, & concept of ‘Promethean Man.’ Symposia. Concepts about God in the Greeks.

11. Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire. Etruscans & the formation of the Roman republic. Punic wars w. Carthage. Augustus to Constantine. Western & Eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Pax Romana & Pax Americana. Roman pluralism in religion: state gods, Greco-Roman pantheon, cults. Roman Law. All roads lead to Rome. Roman engineering; canals, roads, running water & fountains. Cosmopolitan nature of Roman City Life. Virgil’s Aeneid & Roman Character. Roman architectural achievements: Arch, cross-vault, tunnel, dome. Roman ‘verrism’ in painting (Pompeii/Egypt) & Sculpture. Muslim debt to Rome. 500 BC-31BC Republic. 31 BC- 455 AD Western Roman empire sacked by Huns. 1453 AD Mehmet al faith conquers Constantinople (fall of Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire). Buildings/Monuments: Pantheon, Rome; Trajan’s column; Victory Arches of Titus, Diocletian’s Fort; Hadrian’s Wall; Carcalla’s baths; Marcus Aurelius Equestrian Statue; Pompeii & Herculaneum 79AD. Hazrat ‘Isa a.s. & the Romans. Herod & Yahya a.s.

12. China: The Middle Kingdom. Geography & culture. Neighboring countries: Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, Turkestan. Yellow & Yang-tze Rivers. 3 philosophies of China: Taoism (Lao-Tze), Confucianism (Kung Fu Tze) & Buddhism(Siddhartha & Bodhidharma). Shang (1700-1111BC) & Zhou (1111-221BC) Dynasty Bronzes. Warring states (481-221BC). Qin Dynasty (221-206BC). The First Emperor Shi Huang Di & the Great Wall. Film: The Emperor & the Assassin. Taoist concepts of P’u (un-carved wood) & Wu Wei (to give way). Nature mysticism. Chi /Ki. Yin/Yang.

13. Later Chinese Dynasties. The Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) & the emergence of the Chinese civil system. Tang Dynasty (618-906AD) Art & poetry (Li Bai). Northern & Southern Song Dynasty (960-1279AD) contribution to painting & calligraphy, standing walking & running scripts. Monk Painters. Changez Khan (Temujin). The Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1260-1368AD). Kublai Khan & Marco Polo. West’s fascination with China. Chinese Porcelain--Ming dynasty (1368-1644AD). Islamic Influence on Chinese pottery (blue glaze). Chi’ing (Manchu) dynasty (1644-1911AD). The last Emperor P’u Yi. Nationalists (Chang Kai Shek) & Communists (Chairman Mao). (1912-1950).

14. The Land of the Rising Sun. Japan. Zen (Chan) Buddhism. Shinto & Bushido. Meiji Restoration. Samurai culture. Japanese Tea ceremony, Zen Gardens, Haikus & Koans. ‘Of the 10,000 Buddha natures, which is the True Buddha nature?’ Difference & similarities between Japanese & Chinese Martial Arts. Ukiyo-e Wood blocks: Houkasai, Hiroshige, Utamaro.

15. The Indo-Pakistan sub-continent: Geography; Indus valley civilization: Moenjodaro & Harrappa; town planning, seals & script. Aryan invasions (1500BC); the Vedas (1000BC), the Upanishads (800BC), the Puranas (600BC) & the Epics (Mahabharata & Ramayan of Valmiki). 4 paths of Hinduism: Gyana, Bhakti, Yoga, Dharma. The Bhagavad Gita: Arjuna & Krishna. Key Hindu concepts outlined in Gita: All paths lead to God, Ultimate reality is One, & concepts of Dharma, Karma (Awagawan/reincarnation) & Varna (caste).

16. The rise of Buddhism, Jainism & Hinduism; Story of Siddhartha. Buddhist concepts. Main sects: Theravada/Hinayana, Mahayana, Tibetan (Tantra), Chan (Zen). Buddhist symbolism & iconography: types of images in Buddhist art: Images symbolizing Buddha e.g. Dharma Chakra, garlanded feet, Lion’s roar etc.; Buddha images (after Kanishka coin). In 2 asanas & 4 mudras. Gandhara, Amaravati, Mathura & Gupta styles; Stories from Buddha’s life; Boddhisatva images; Jataka stories; Mandala (Yantra) paintings; Thankas of Lamas etc.

17. Indian Art. Mauryan art & architecture; Gandharan art, Hinduism & Hindu Iconography; Mythology; Classical Hindu art & architecture: Gupta period. Ajanta & Ellora caves. Al-Beruni in India. (kitab al-hind). Medieval dynasties: Rashtrakuta, Pallava, Chola. Sculpture: terracotta, carving & cast bronze.

18. Muslim influence on Indian Art. Rajput & Pahadi styles of painting. Main Rajput centres: Kishangarh (Nain Sukh), Jaipur, Udaipur, Kotah. Main Pahadi centres: Basholi, Kangra, Chambi. Stylistic differences between Muslim & Hindu miniature styles (profile view, linearity, color palette, simplicity/abstraction, vegetation). 1500AD-1900 AD

19. Modern art in India & Pakistan. Company School. The Bengal Renaissance. The Proghressive movement. Some major artists: Raja Ravi Varma, Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Ustad Abdul Rahman Chughtai, Ustad Haji Shareef; Ustad Allah Bux; Ustad Sohba Singh; MF Hussain, FN Souza & The Bombay Progressives. Amrita Sher Gill, Zubeida Agha, Ahmed Pervez, Shakir Ali. 1890 AD-1980 AD.

ART APPRECIATION-
ADDITIONAL/OPTIONAL TOPICS—As time permits

1. The ‘Big’ [or Cosmic] Questions for every civilization: Man & Cosmos: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How different civilizations have answered these questions, & the role of art subsequently. How Religion, Philosophy & Science have answered these 3 questions. Physics & Metaphysics. Scholasticism. Science. Western Science, metaphysical assumptions: Occam’s razor.

2. The Psychological Perspectives on Mankind, Modern & Traditional. (Modern: Humanism, Freudian & Jungian Psycho-Analysis, Behavioursim, Cognitivism, Gestalt) Stream of Consciousness; Conscious & sub-conscious, Id, Ego, Super Ego, defense mechanisms; Conscious & Universal Sub-conscious, Archetype; AI; Ghost in the Machine; Hierarchy of Needs, Self-actualization; Holistic) & Traditional e.g. Islamic Psychology (as outlined by Hzt. Faridi: Ruh, Qalb, Nafs, and by Imam Ghazali: Nafs Ammara, Nafs Lawwama, Nafs mutma’inna).

3. Global Village…Amusing ourselves to death? Brand new life: impact of modern media. Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Original, Internal & External Context. McLuhan’s concepts of ‘global village’ & ‘the medium is the message.’ Berger’s theory of ‘the male gaze’ & Kristeva’s theory of inter-subjectivity. Critics: Schumacher, Nasr, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman.

4. The relationship of Art & Economics. Emergence of Capitalism & Banking. 15th century Europe. The Money lenders. Real & Fiat money. Promissory notes. Adam Smith (17th cent.) & Economic Man. Marx’s critique based on Classes. Today: Keynes & Friedman. Origin of paper money & banking. Real money & Fiat money. Free Market & controlled economies. (Capitalism vs. Communism). The rise of the middle classes and their role in shaping Art. Modern consumer-culture. The Green movement in the West: simple living. Our own Green Turbans. Alternative medicine, alternative transport.

5. Pakistan ka Matlab kiya? Origins of Pakistani culture. Is there such a thing as Pakistani culture? Mubarak Ali & the Secularists vs. Sir Syed & the 2-nation theory. Identity: Regional or Religious? Brief history of the freedom movement: Progressives, Reformists, Revivalists. Shahabnama. Quaid e Azam kya chahte the?
SLIDESHOW PAKISTANI/REGIONAL CULTURE

the superb photography of Luke Powell

2007-09-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

Haunting faces & places, vanishing cultures. To this day, probably the best photography I've seen.
His website is here and worth many visits.

Blue Pottery- the Art of Kashi

2007-09-01T23:50:00.000-07:00

Blue Pottery- the Art of Kashi
by M. Rizwanullah, 2007.

The Art of Blue glaze pottery is perhaps synonymous with Islam. Iznik in Turkey, Kashan (hence the local name Kashi) in Iran Herat in Afghanistan and Multan and Hala in Pakistan are the famous centres of Blue Glaze pottery in the Muslim world.
Pottery is really an alchemical art. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Earth, symbolizing Man (“We created you out of clay”) is transformed to the “Gold” of the different glazes, especially the blue of heaven, which is appropriately used most often on domes. This hints at the connection between Earth & Heaven (“We are nearer unto man than his jugular vein”), and links the dome of the mosque to the floor, for spiritually the Dome represents Heaven (Arsh), and the floor, the Farsh where the believer prostrates, represents his origin, i.e. clay. This is all symbolic of the spiritual path in Islam, for when a person connects with his reality, he recognizes his Creator, (and his dependence upon Him) for as the Prophet said, PBUH man arafa nafsohu, arafa rabbahu (he who knows himself, knows his Lord). Also, as the Prophet PBUH said, truly the believer is closest to Heaven (the Arsh) when his head is touching the floor (the Farsh) in prostration. This prostration or sajdah, is the central site of worship, so much so that the word for a mosque itself is “masjid” or place of prostration.
Blue gaze pottery often adorns the domes of the Persian speaking part of the Islamic world, including Persia, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and Turkey. However it is sometimes used all over a building, especially since Timur’s time, two famous examples being Mazar e Sharif in Afghanistan and Hazrat Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s tomb in Pakistan.
Blue glaze pottery was known to the ancient Babylonians, as the magnificent Ishtar Gate, now in the Berlin Museum, testifies. However, the Muslims in 8th century Iraq, in the glorious Abbasid period, added new developments, and in trying to imitate the Chinese porcelain white, came up with a near approximation by adding tin oxide to lead glazes, and also developed lusterware in the process, by adding vinegar to copper or silver oxide in a second firing, using more smoke. This produced Japanese raku-like effects.
Muslims developed a rich palette of glazes, and there were many regional variations of the haft-rang (seven color) technique…the mystical number seven representing the 7 heavens, the 7 seas, 7 days, the seven musical notes, the 7 Ptolmaic planets, etc. This haft-rang can be seen in all its glory at the Maqam of Imam Ali Reza a.s. in Meshad, Iran, and also in Mazar e Sharif in Afghanistan, both Timuri buildings. Timur’s reign, had at least this one positive, that the haft rang technique was spread far and wide. Also around the same time, the Sufi poet Hazrat Nizami’s Haft Payker, or story of the Seven Princesses under the Seven Domes, explained the symbolism behind the 7 colors, tying it to the seven stages of the spiritual journey in some Sufi understandings of the path to God, such as the 7 valleys the birds cross to meet their master in the Conference of the Birds by Hazrat Fariduddin Attar(Mantaq al Tair).
Despite the popularity of the haft rang, it was the various shades of blue, from turquoise to lapis, which became the most popular all over the Muslim world. Except for the Maghrib, (North Africa) and the Far East Malaya/Indonesia, the Blue Glaze became representative of Islam. Later on, this distinctive blue & white combination would influence Chinese pottery, especially in the Ming Dynasty.
Like Uch, Multan in Pakistan also abounds in beautiful blue-glazed buildings, and Multan has the further distinction of being perhaps the biggest centre for pottery production east of Iznik. The best known ustad of Kashi, or ceramic art in Multan is Ustad Muhammad Wajid.

In Multan, the clay is taken from the riverbeds. The blue glazes are made from copper and cobalt, and usually fired in a wood oven. Ustad Wajid used to have a gas fired kiln, but after a while, it was no longer possible for humble craftsmen like him to continue paying exorbitant gas bills to the Sui Southern Gas company, and he switched to wood. The higher level of smoke in wood fired ovens can be useful for luster effects. Of course, it is a burden on Pakistan’s already depleted forest resources, but at least wood unlike natural gas, is potentially a renewable resource.
Ustad Muhammad Wajid comes from a long line of ceramic artists; potters, tile-makers and kashi gars (glaze painters). Muhammad Wajid’s father, Allah Divaya, was honored with the Agha Khan award. Like his forefathers, Ustad Muhammad Wajid, lives and breathes ceramics. He has represented Pakistani blue pottery in many exhibitions and workshops.

A quiet, pleasant man devoted to his craft, and generous with his knowledge, Ustad Wajid, like the late Ustad Muhammad Aashiq, to this writer represents the best of Multan: hard working, creative, humble, God-fearing and talented people, people with a quiet dignity, who stick to the traditions they love and respect in an age of ever growing materialism that does not respect them, and is losing patience with its heritage for a more modern, glamorous alternative.

These are the people who are the identity of Pakistan, it is they who make our rich cultural identity which we proudly show the world. Do we do enough for them in return?

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Excellent artist website

2007-09-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

Quetta born Islamic artist Sana Naveed.

Photograph of the great Sufi singer, Sain Zahoor by Aaron Huey

2007-09-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

Watch Sain Zahoor perform Allah Hu here!

Many thanks to my friend Babar Shaikh!

beautiful photos of [some aspects of] Sufism in Pakistan

2007-09-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

The wonderful American photographer Aaron Huey has some more beautiful pictures here! Do see.

Rizwan's note: superb use of the 6 pointed star to make up most of the patterns here. Beautiful mirror-work, I wonder why people go see the sheesh-mahal when most mosques & mazars have far finer mirror-work!

Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Islamic Art, Ecology & modernity

2007-09-01T18:36:00.001-07:00

Islam, Muslims, and modern technology
Seyyed Hossein Nasr

In this interview, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr highlights the impact of modern technologies on human habitats and ecosystems. The destruction of environment by modern technology is seen as one of the most serious threats faced by humanity. Modern technologies have also replaced traditional methods of making objects of daily use. This replacement has serious consequences for the spiritual health of humanity. In discussing the impact of modern technology on the Muslim world, suggestions are made to preserve various aspects of Islamic civilization.

Keywords: Modern technology and its impact; Muslim world and modern technology; aspects of Islamic civilization; role of machine-made objects in the destruction of natural balances; traditional crafts and their spiritual significance; Islamic urban design; modern technology and Islamic civilization.

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In this article, modern technology refers to technologies which have been developed during and after the Industrial Revolution mostly in the West and which have now spread all over the world. There are two very different dimensions to this discussion: one pertains to the actual situation that exists in the world, that is, what is going on now; the other pertains to the question of what we believe should go on as far as the Muslim world is concerned. Let me give an example. There is no government in the Muslim world today which does not support any form of technology that brings with it either power or wealth. No one resists any form of technology that is believed to bring certain conveniences, like the cell phone which has spread like wildfire all over the world, and which has many detrimental effects upon the brain, as many studies are showing, though most people usually do not care too much about such negative factors--at least for now.

So, at that level, discussing the relationship between Muslims and modern technology is not efficacious in the sense that whatever form of technology comes on the market--and it is usually from the West, and occasionally from the Japanese and a few other peoples who invent new things--if these new technologies are perceived to bring wealth, power, or conveniences, they spread very rapidly among Muslims as elsewhere and it is no use talking to them about the danger of their spread with the hope of having any positive influence.

But there are other questions which can be discussed, for instance, the destruction of the environment which modern technology is causing. Then there is the dimension of this issue concerning what should take place. What should be the Muslims' attitude toward modern technology whose negative effects are obvious? It is about this dimension that I wish to say something and this is where the deepest issues lie. Otherwise, if we go on debating whether this particular country, or that particular country, has or is going to have or should have knowledge of nuclear engineering or certain types of lasers or this or that, this I think is a wasteful effort at the present moment, because we, who are supposed to be the intellectual figures of the Islamic world, who are supposed to clarify these issues, cannot do much at the level of action by Muslim governments and companies in relation to technology. There is, however, something very important that we can do and that is to create an understanding for the future as far as these issues are concerned. We are responsible for creating an awareness of what is really involved for Muslims when it comes to the adoption of modern technology. And in this domain, in fact, a number of people in the West have a much greater awareness of the dangers of technology than do people in Asia or Africa, who are on the receiving end of modern technology, and this itself is one of the major issues that should be discussed.

In light of this, I think we should turn to the issue of what the problems are which modern technology poses for Muslims, not only as ordinary human beings, but more specifically as people who belong to the Islamic religion and are rooted in the Islamic worldview; then to try and analyze these problems, and in light of that, to discuss what can be done, if anything, and what Muslims should do.

First of all, it is important to define terms. The word technology comes, of course, from the Greek word techne which means "to make" and is related to the word for art, which comes from the Latin word ars, also meaning to make, and both are related to the word san'at in Persian, or the word sina'ah in Arabic which we still use in these languages for both technology and art. Quite interestingly, the division has not yet come about for us, as it has in the West, where art is one thing and technology another, despite the fact that there are some modern sculptors who go to junkyards and put various parts of cars together and call it art. That is a minor matter.

What we have in the modern world is a situation in which technology in the modern sense is the source of most of the objects that surround human life, whereas, before the Industrial Revolution, when things were made by hand, the products of arts and crafts surrounded man's life. This is very important to understand. There is a qualitative difference, although the root of the word "technology" goes back to a Greek word with a very different meaning.

A very important event took place in the Industrial Revolution that completely changed the nature of technology. Machines were made as means to create objects for human beings in Western Europe and gradually elsewhere and they soon replaced human beings in many realms. Now what was the significance of this change that occurred? Let us take a concrete example. There were water wheels in ancient times and complicated clocks created by al-Jazar and many other Muslims, but ordinary objects of human life were still made by human agents. Moreover, there is a very big difference in the techniques used to make ordinary objects by hand and the ways of modern technology. Of course, there always was some technology like the water clock in Muslim lands, but it always remained secondary and peripheral. What surrounded life was the product of art and had a spiritual significance. It is very interesting to note that the very complicated machines made by Muslim scientists were considered mostly for play and amusement. They were not seen as a means of increasing production and serving economic purposes. This is very significant.

So there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative change that took place when the Industrial Revolution occurred. A number of eminent Western writers, going back to William Morris and John Ruskin in the nineteenth century and Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul in the twentieth, wrote about certain negative aspects of modern technology that Muslims should know. Illich wrote a remarkable book, Tools for Conviviality, and the French author Jacques Ellul wrote The Technological Society. Ellul has recently turned against Islam because he does not understand it, but he has produced some important and profound critiques of modern technology in its relation to the human soul, the human spirit, and human society.

In the 1970's, I invited Ivan Illich to Iran and on purpose I organized a session that involved some of the higher authorities of the land who were in charge of various activities which required technology from the department (ministry) of national economy, the department of industry, and so on. Ivan Illich gave a talk to them on the significance of traditional technologies in contrast to modern technologies. He gave a simple example of a water closet. He said that if all the people of Asia and Africa were to have the same water closets as do the people of the industrialized societies in the West, that fact in itself would destroy the water system of the whole world. Everyone was shocked. These were all highly educated Iranian administrators, some on the ministerial level with advanced degrees from the best Western universities, and precisely because of that they did not have the least notion of what Illich was talking about. We have the same situation in Pakistan, in the Arab world, and in many other Muslim countries.

Now what we have to do first of all is to understand the difference between traditional technologies, which were an extension of our hands, senses, and other parts of our body and which, like the body, were subservient to the soul, and the modern machine which dominates over the human being; an example may explain this: if you were to go to a part of the Muslim world where we still have traditional craftsmen, let us say Isfahan, Fez, Damascus, or somewhere like that, you will see a person sitting with a simple hammer and a simple chisel and producing remarkable geometric patterns in stucco, stone, or wood. Traditionally, the know-how and the art resided within the being of the craftsman and the tool was very simple. But if you go to a Detroit factory where they are producing cars, the worker there has very little know-how--he just presses a few buttons. All of the know-how is in the machine. In a sense it is a transfer of human knowledge and art to the machine. And now we have the second step of the same process in the form of the computer, where knowledge in the mind has been transferred to the machine. I have many students who can no longer spell because they rely on a computer to spell for them. They cannot do any math because the computer computes for them, and gradually the computer empties the mind as the machine emptied the dexterity of the hand, the eye, and other parts of the body of the artisan and craftsman.

Now, that is what modern technology does. Modern technology is not simply the continuation of the Persian waterwheel or some medieval contraption. It changes the relationship between the human being and the means of creating things. Therefore, it takes away from the human being's creativity--it takes away the creativity and the spiritual content of work. The only creative part of modern technology is done by those engineers who design the machine. For someone who is designing an airplane or a ship or something like that, yes, there is still creativity in that work. But for those who make things, especially in mass production, objects that are made no longer involve creativity, which is why work in a modern factory and most other places has become so boring. That is why you have to have long vacations. In traditional societies, you did not go on vacation. Have you ever thought of that? Vacation was integrated into life. Weekends were not necessary like today. Nowadays, many people say 'I hate Monday', 'thank God it is Friday'--this sort of thing. This attitude exists because work has come to be emptied of spiritual content, thanks to the machine.

All of these negative effects on human beings are consequences of modern technology. The first thing we have to understand is that this technology is not neutral, that is, claiming that if you are good, you make good use of it, if you are bad you make bad use of it. That is not at all the case. Of course, if you are good and make good use of it, you do not drop a bomb on somebody's head--that part I accept--but even if you go for a drive down the road peacefully, so-called peacefully, this gadget, this automobile, is a major source of aggression against nature. Now of course we realize, or I hope we realize, that global warming is destroying many ecosystems and so many other things and that much destruction comes from the so-called peaceful use of the automobile. Therefore, it is not simply a question of good use and bad use of technology. There is something more involved. Technology itself brings with it a certain technological culture which is against the soul of the human being as an immortal being, and is against the fabric of all traditional societies which are based on the spiritual relationship between the human being and the objects he or she creates, that are based on an art that is creative and reflects God's creativity, as the Supreme Artisan. God is called Al-Sani in the Qur'an; He is the Creator, the Artist, the Supreme Artisan, and He has given us the power of creativity which we share because we are His khulafa, vicegerents on earth.

In Islamic civilization there was no line of distinction between art and technology, between the high arts and the low arts, between the so-called fine arts--this terminology is total nonsense from the Islamic point of view--and industrial arts. What is fine arts? All such terms were created in the West including "beautiful arts" (the French beaux arts) because art as the means of creating objects for use in everyday life was taken away from human beings in the Industrial Revolution and replaced by, for the most part, ugly products of the machine. In traditional civilizations there was a continuous spectrum of creation which was always related to God, from the making of a simple comb to the composition of f poetry and everything in between; everything was related to God and reflected His quality as the Supreme Artisan on the human plane. Now modern technology destroys that relationship. Whether or not the person driving a car is a pious person, who uses the car to go to the masjid to pray, or go to a night club, the destruction of the environment is there and the making and driving of the car--which is a machine--are cut off from the divine prototype of creativity.

Many of us think that the sacred character of life can be preserved simply by saying our daily prayers. I wish it could. But those are simply the pillars; the rest of life also needs to be made sacred. In Islam every activity has a symbolic and sacred aspect. In agriculture, for instance, when one cultivated the land, the whole process of sowing seeds and cultivation has a spiritual and religious significance, whereas now with mechanized agribusiness this spiritual dimension of agriculture is all gone. The use of animals in transportation necessitated a relationship between the human being and the animal. There is the hadith about treating animals well. That attitude is mostly gone and of course the fact that animals are used less for transportation does not mean that they are better treated. Let us remember how many species disappear and become extinct everyday as a result of the use of modern technology or through painful experiments performed upon them.

The structure of our traditional cities was one of the greatest artistic creations in human history. I mean the Islamic urban design, of which we can still see remnants (al-hamdu li'Llah they have not completely disappeared in cities such as Fez in Morocco, Yazd in Iran, in parts of Isfahan, in parts of Damascus around the Umayyad Mosque, in the old quarters of Cairo, etc.). These urban designs were meant to create a human ambiance in which religion, commerce, education, and daily living were all combined and integrated into a whole in which unity dominated over multiplicity. And what we today call amusement, or having fun or entertainment, which is such a big part of modern society, that also was integrated into life. The reason that amusement (including sports) has become such an important part of today's world and treated as an independent reality is that work is so unentertaining and so depleted of the sense of the sacred, thanks to the modern machine. It is so boring for most people that entertainment has to become a major independent event to make life bearable. It has practically replaced religion for many people.

I have said all of these things in order to prepare the ground for Muslims to understand the nature of this technology and not to be naive and think that it is simply neutral. It is true that sometimes we have no choice. God has placed me at this time and place in history where I cannot get on a donkey and go to a madrassah as my ancestors did in Kashan. There are no donkeys here and the roads are long. I have to use a car. God knows in what condition we are in this world. Yet, this does not mean that we should be blind to the consequences of the technologies that are involved and adopt every form of technology that comes along just because it is out there.

Besides the loss of subtle spiritual elements, some of which I have mentioned and some of which I have not, modern technology is literally leading us to our death. It is as simple as that. We are witnessing the destruction of the natural environment on a vast scale and no amount of putting our head in the snow and trying to forget what is going on is going to solve the problem. If the Muslim world, China, and India really take off industrially and become as industrialized as, let us say the United States, and have the same rate of consumption as does America, then the whole ecosystem in the world will probably collapse or be radically modified. Everybody knows that. Already without having reached that point, numerous places are at the verge of catastrophic destruction--from the coral reefs of Australia to the Amazon forest. Every intelligent person knows these facts, but few want to pay attention to them. I think that it is the duty of the Islamic intelligentsia to draw attention to this situation. This issue is, from the point of view of our earthly life, much more important than any other single issue in this world. I am not talking about the spiritual matters which, from the Islamic point of view, are the most important, of course, in human life, but of issues such as poverty, economic crises, political oppression, dictatorships, revolutions, all of these things: none of these poses as great a danger as this problem of the destruction of the natural environment, because those things may gradually be solved, whereas if we do not turn immediately to the issue of environmental degradation caused by modern technology, we are not going to be around to solve anything else unless God intervenes in nature in ways that we cannot think of--that is in His Will--but from the human point of view, the way we are going, we have just a few years left to completely change the way we live, or we shall perish.

Most people in the West will say, "Ah! The solution to this crisis is new technologies to replace old technologies." It is here I believe that they are completely wrong. What has to be done is to revive the sacred view of nature which is totally opposed to how modern technology views nature. What Muslims have to do, in fact, is not to employ every new foreign technology that comes along, but only use technologies which have less negative impact on the environment. Yes, I agree, there are relative benefits in, for example, having factories which do not create as much smoke as before, but that is minor compared to something much more profound and that is the general negative impact of modern technology upon the environment and upon the souls of modern human beings. Modern technology creates a negative impact, and this impact increases not only tenfold, but up to hundredfold with many new technologies, so that the more technology we have normally, the more negative of an impact we make upon the environment, and also upon minds and psyches.

We have to change our whole way of living. We--and I mean everybody on this planet--have to change in a basic way and think of technology in another manner. This is where the Muslim world can play a positive role. Let me say a few things specifically about Islam. Educated people in the Muslim world want to be technologically like the West, including, unfortunately, even those who are pious and do not like the West, and even those who are so-called 'fundamentalists'. When it comes to technology, they are as Western as the most modernized Muslims. You take the most secularized Turk in Istanbul or from some other city, and the most fundamentalist Muslim preaching in some mosque in Saudi Arabia; their attitude toward technology is probably the same, which is a remarkable comment to make when you consider their very different interpretations of the Islamic worldview.

Now, that has to change. Muslims have to realize what we cannot and should not do in this realm. There is no choice for a Muslim community in having or not having telephone or electricity. Let us, therefore, not talk about things which cannot be done and technologies that cannot be avoided, even if we realize their negative aspects. Let us talk about things which can be done.

The Muslim world can still preserve many things. First of all, in the field of agriculture, for instance, genetic engineering is a dangerous practice to be avoided if possible. In countries like Pakistan and Iran, which have major agriculture sectors, we must strive to preserve as much as possible, and it is possible to preserve the traditional modes of agriculture production by keeping small farms, rather than changing the whole method by adopting large agro-businesses, using genetically engineered seed, taking over the traditional farms; these agro-businesses are hardly the hope for providing food for the whole globe as is usually advertised.

Secondly, it is possible to preserve to a large extent the traditional urban design of Islamic cities and the technologies which affect human relationships, modes of transportation, the use of energy, and many other forms of technology. The preservation of traditional Islamic architecture and urban design can play a major role in preserving something of traditional technologies and a saner way of life.

We must not be like a sleepwalker who accepts whatever comes along without even thinking about its consequences. It is paradoxical, just to take the case of cell phones that have spread like wildfire over the earth in the last twenty years. We even have people circumambulating the Ka'bah while their cell phones are ringing--this is a blasphemy of the worst kind that you can imagine. These cell phones have so many negative medical effects, but many Muslims are just blindly following the trends that originate in the West. But the irony is that in the West, at least a small number of people have their eyes open, whereas the Muslim world is blindly copying whatever comes from Western technology. Even those who are against the West have a deep trust in Western technology. They think that whatever technology comes from the West must be good. We need to have a greater sense of discernment in this matter.

That does not mean that tomorrow morning we can stop having anything to do with modern technology. Some people in England have recently created small villages which are completely pre-industrial, with natural agriculture, natural water, and so on. Alas, I do not think that many in the Muslim world would envisage such a thing at this time.

There are, however, many wise choices which we can still make and are not making, for example in the use of traditional technologies in making objects such as carpets and utensils, traditional irrigation systems, traditional use of energy in relation to architecture, and so on and so forth. More generally I believe that we must do everything possible in the Muslim world not to allow our tradition of making of things in an artistic way to be totally destroyed. The weakening of this tradition was one of the major results of the impact of colonialism in the nineteenth century, parallel to the destruction of our scientific tradition and of much of our educational system. The arts have not been completely destroyed but they have suffered a great deal.

Let me give you an example: the Persian carpet is a very important element in many homes. It is true that for the most part its dyes have become chemical, imported originally from Germany, since the 1920's and 30's, but still carpet making remains a traditional artform. It is woven by artisans and has a spiritual significance. The carpet plays a very important role in traditional Islamic society because we sit on the floor, pray on the floor, eat on the floor, sleep on the floor. A carpeted space becomes the living room, the dining room, the prayer room, and the family room where everyone sits together in the small traditional home, which is the case for the majority of Muslims. In many places, say in a village in Afghanistan, many have one room, where they do everything. The same is true in Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, everywhere. Now, we must not allow the traditional carpet to become the industrialized carpeting that we have in the United States, though such an industry makes money. Unfortunately, some carpet factories have even come to Iran, which is the most important country for the making of carpets. We have to prevent such destruction of the traditional crafts to the extent possible and this is an instance where the preservation of traditional technologies is possible if there is the will. We have to try to preserve the making of hand-woven cloth. A lot of the things that Gandhi said that everyone scoffs about today, even in India, where he is the father of the nation and yet nobody wants to listen to what he said, were completely true. Once you destroy over 100,000 Indian villages whose economy is based on recycling, what is left of India? The same holds true for us.

The wonderful hand-woven cloth still made in Morocco or Algeria is there, but many other arts, crafts, and traditional technologies have been destroyed in the central lands of Islam; much has been lost. But in certain parts of the Muslim world, traditional methods of production continue and these should be strengthened rather than lost. The governments should try to help in this task of preservation. There are projects like this in Amman, in Morocco, in Iran, and other places. They should try to expand the production of traditionally produced objects not as luxury items, so that you can buy a vase and put it in your living room not as a so-called piece of art, but as part of daily living. Your grandmother and my grandmother took a cloth to go to the public bathhouse once a week, as almost all men and women did in those days--those pieces of cloth were all woven by hand, and many of them are in textile museums today.

It is remarkable how the quality of life has gone down, and not up, with modern technology. The clothing, the bowls from which people ate food, the quality of the food itself, its fragrance and everything else has gone down as far as quality is concerned. So, we should try and preserve these islands, those sectors of human life in which the traditional technologies still survive. Such technologies are combined with art, with a meaning in the making of things, with the satisfaction of the person who makes them, the satisfaction of the person who consumes them, because there is something directly human and at the same time spiritual in the production of handiworks, even if it be a simple comb made by hand.

Titus Burckhardt has a wonderful story in his book on Islamic art that a simple comb maker narrated in Fez, Morocco. He told of how this art was first taught by God to Seth, the son of Adam, and has a spiritual significance. The simple comb, if you go to the bazaar and buy one made by hand, you feel the difference between it and the one produced by the machine. Even an American tourist feels it. In Western society with its high technology something made by hand is considered to be valuable and not inferior. People pay a lot more money if something is made by hand, whereas in much of the Muslim world things have been going in the reverse direction for the last hundred years. Machine-made objects are considered by many to be better than hand-made ones. We can, however, reverse these trends. This can be done. This reversal has to go hand in hand with the intellectual critique of modern technology along the lines of first dealing with its cosmological/ spiritual aspect and second its impact upon the environment, both natural and human.

In response to this point of view, it is often said that it is impossible to go back to those technologies which cannot produce massive quantities because our needs have increased manifold, because the number of people on this planet has increased tremendously from the pre-Industrial Revolution era. This is true to some extent in certain fields, but not all. For example, let us take the big cities of India where women still wear saris made by hand. Today there are about 500 million of them. Two hundred years ago there were probably 100 million of them; a 1000 years ago 50 million of them. It is true that the consumers have increased from perhaps 50 million in the Middle Ages to 500 million now, since there are now a billion Indians, out of which approximately 500 million are women. But the number who can produce the cloth have also increased. If one has a somewhat simpler life there will be also more people who can produce things which are made by hand, as their consumption is also increased in proportion. This is one of the fallacious arguments (supposedly on firm economic basis) that is given to create a consumer society.

A consumer society consumes a lot more than it needs. It feeds upon the creation of false needs, which is driving the world to its annihilation and always, the argument is given, that "oh, yes, more people need more things." That is not necessarily true, because when you have more people, you also have more people who can produce simpler things and do not always need machines. In fact the sudden explosion of the world population is itself a product of modern technology, for medical technology is a part of that technology; there is no doubt about it. Modern medicine is a double-edged sword. It saves many lives but it is also indirectly destroying the world through making possible over-population and the greater impact of human beings on the natural environment. They all go together. Right now, if there were a billion of us on the surface of the earth rather than six billion and a half, this catastrophe--that several species have already disappeared from the surface of the earth just during the forty-five minutes that I have been speaking--would not have occurred. It is a catastrophic situation.

So, it is true that we have now a much larger world population, but we also have a much larger population to produce simple things, as I gave the example of hand-woven saris in India. This could work for many other objects. For example, Iran now has a population of over 70 million people. Just a generation ago we had 35 million people, doubled in a period of 30 years. That means that the usage of Persian carpets has more or less also doubled. That could be the pretext, and it was something that many in the government said both before and after the Iranian Revolution, that we have to bring in machine-made carpets because the population and its needs have increased. But also, the people who make the carpets have increased. In fact, in the villages in Iran today, you can see that there are lot more people making carpets than there were thirty years ago. Appropriate government policies can help a great deal in such situations. I am not saying that it should be done in every case, but in many cases, efforts should be made to preserve the qualitative relationship to production and to consider happiness in life not as having more and more, but in valuing what one has while providing for basic necessities.

This is a very challenging matter because many people will criticize me and say, "Oh! You are against wealth. You are against this, you are against that." No, I am not. There have always been poor people and rich people. But the human collectivity--six billion people--cannot together have the so-called standard of living (which is a dangerous statement but it is made all the time) of the highly industrial nations of the world. The earth cannot support that. And despite all of this modern technology, far from destroying poverty, the modern world has made poverty much worse in cutting man away from nature. Look at the difference between the rich and the poor--there are few places on earth where the difference is as great as in the United States, where the head of a company makes nine million dollars and the janitor makes 10 thousand dollars a year. This is very common here. It is in many ways worse than the difference between the maharajas of India and their subjects during the rule of the Raj. This is one of those very fallacious arguments that are given by economists of communism and socialism on the one hand as well as capitalism on the other. All claim that they will make people richer and destroy poverty. Now this is possible to some extent but not completely. You see what has happened in practice. Those countries which have the modern technologies, the North, look how different their life is from those who do not. And the idea of chasing after this technology in the so-called underdeveloped world is of course based on the fact that you are always receiving the breadcrumbs of someone else who has eaten at the table, and this so-called chase is not going to improve matters.

We need to think of poverty and wealth in other terms. Let us take a village that lives close to nature, has natural water, has good clean air coming from the mountains, deserts, or forests. It does not have to have all of the wealth of the city of New York in order for people to be happy. That is not the case. We need to rethink our whole attitude towards happiness, towards poverty. Of course, no government can refuse food or clothing or water to its citizens, I am not saying that. Modern technology could of course help these things, but the fact is that most modern technology is associated with greed; it is associated with modern economics, which is based on greed, and you have seen the consequences of it. We do not have to go into that matter here but we should not blindly accept such arguments that modern technology is the only means to a happy life. The Muslim world can, perhaps, do a better job if it can control greed, if it can control the negative elements, and have a better distribution of wealth, as the Qur'an teaches us. That it can do if it remains faithful to Islam. But that does not mean that it has to forego the intimate relationship between human beings and the means of production, while trying to have economic justice. That is the whole issue.

Coming back to the main point, "what should be the attitude of Muslims toward modern technology", let us first analyze this matter. This is a very complicated question. The Muslim world encountered the modern West in a situation of a power struggle, that is, the West invaded the Muslim world and Muslims tried to understand how it was that they were being dominated. They thought it was modern Western technology, science, and managerial organization which had allowed the West to colonize them. And power brings with it a sense of respect, unfortunately. There is a beautiful Arabic saying, "al-insanu 'abid al-ihsan", "man is the servant of virtue". But unfortunately, there is also the axiom: "al-insanu 'abid al-qudrah", that is, "man is the servant of power". This is human nature. And the Muslim world, seeing the power of the West, just as did the Chinese and the Japanese worlds, began to have a sense of servitude, obedience, and awe, combined with an inferiority complex, from the nineteenth century onwards: attitudes which are still very much with us.

Although during the past fifty years many voices have spoken very strongly against this inferiority complex (and insha'a 'Llah it will gradually diminish) it is still present to a large extent. This inferiority complex does not only involve technology; it is a subset of something larger, that is, the attitude towards the whole of Western culture's organizational strength, its political and economic power and so forth, although not, strictly speaking, religious thought. Even among the most Westernized Muslims would few would say, "Christianity is superior to Islam because that is the religion of the West." But in other domains the inferiority complex remains.

There is, however, one very important mistake that has complicated this discussion. Muslim society has tried to reassert itself during the last half century, or a bit earlier, but certainly since the Second World War, and has tried to redefine its own identity. Many people have said, "We are no longer mesmerized by the West, its philosophies, its this or that, but what the West has that is positive is its technology. We are against modern Western culture, but technology is neutral, and we want to adopt it." The supreme case of this way of looking at things can be found in what happened in Saudi Arabia between the 1960s and early 90s. The Saudis became very docile in the acceptance of Western technology, as if it were totally neutral. This attitude, although it is a subset of a larger problem, is in fact a new problem that is even more dangerous because it is based on an illusion of the worst kind, and that is that modern technology is culturally and ethically neutral. It is not. It is culturally bound. And it cannot be separated from a worldview which affects man's understanding of himself, of the world around him, not to speak of God and the spiritual world.

But there is some hope. Let me turn to the subject of Islamic architecture and design which are so deeply related to traditional technologies. In the early 1970s I organized the first conference ever held on traditional Islamic architecture in modern times in the city of Ifahn. I brought Hasan Fathy, the famous Egyptian architect, from Cairo to Iran. We helped publish his book Building for the Poor and Fathy's style has now changed the whole area around Lake Fayyum in Egypt. It really began to take off from the Isfahan conference. And it became a turning point of sorts. From about the early 1970s, a number of Muslim architects and city planners began to realize the significance of what in Persia we call "baft", that is, the texture of the Islamic City, meaning not only individual buildings, but the urban design itself. My own former students Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar wrote a book The Sense of Unity which analyzed the urban design of Isfahan and other places on the basis of the idea of "divine unity", the integration of various functions of a city and the cosmological and theological significance of urban design.

Since that time, some thirty years have passed. One of the things I did was plant, along with others, the idea in the mind of the Aga Khan to give an award for architecture which now has become very famous, though the Aga Khan award, I believe, does not only deal with buildings that are Islamic architecture, but it gradually grew out of the ideals of Islamic architecture and then came to also include other buildings. Its concerns have remained in any case mostly Islamic. This program has helped to gradually draw attention to the importance of Islamic architecture and of the urban design of Islamic cities, which are a very important part of Islamic civilization and culture and include traditional technologies.

Now, what can be done? The first thing that can be done is to preserve what has not been destroyed. All those areas of cities such as Tehran, Lahore, and Cairo--where people infatuated with Western models have demolished beautiful traditional quarters to make big boulevards which are extremely hot during the summer and have destroyed the whole environmental context of the city and all of these things--cannot be resuscitated anymore; nothing can be done to undo this destruction, at least in the short term. But there are quarters of some of these cities which are still partly traditional, like the area around the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore or the Grand Bazaar of Tehran or of course the old Mamluk and Fatamid Cairo. The first thing to do is to prevent these areas from being further destroyed by having big streets run though them, or building tall structures which would destroy the texture of the area. And some of this has been done, thank God. This is one area where things are better now than before. Can you imagine that in the 1970s the mayor of Fez wanted to cut a big boulevard across the middle of the city? Fez is the largest urban area in the world which has no cars in it. And Titus Burckhardt saved the city by going to UNESCO and getting a commission to save Fez and finally speaking with the King of Morocco so that they stopped the plan. Nobody today would think of doing such a thing in Morocco. Things have improved a great deal in this respect. So the first thing to do is to preserve those areas which we still have in many of our countries, especially the smaller cities--for example, Aleppo, Kashan, and Yazd--those magnificent cities in Syria, the central and southern parts of Iran, and also in Morocco, the whole of Yemen, perhaps Hyderabad in Sindh, some of the Indian cities, and so forth. This is the first thing to do.

The second step, and this has also been taken to some extent, is to try to be inspired by this traditional Islamic urban design in the designing of new towns and villages, rather than simply using Western designs. I was very happy to see that a few of these traditional designs have been implemented in even Saudi Arabia which destroyed so much of its old architecture so rapidly, as well as in Iran, Egypt, Morocco, and elsewhere; of course they are still a minority voice (the architects that are doing this) but this trend continues. Now, I accept that it is not possible in the big capitals of the Muslim world; you cannot undo what has been done to Istanbul or to Cairo. But for the smaller cities, I think, it can be done: many great cities of the Muslim World still have areas which have traditional Islamic architecture or urban design: Damascus, Istanbul, Isfahan, Mashad, Lahore, even Delhi--much of which is really an Islamic city because it was ruled by Muslims for so long--Cairo, and of course the cities of North Africa, which are exceptional in the preservation of their medinahs. All of these can still be preserved.

A new generation of architects has to be trained to carry out this task. Right now there is only one school of traditional architecture in the Muslim World that gives a degree in traditional Islamic architecture. That is in Jordon. Until a few years ago, there was just the Prince of Wales Institute in London. There is still no other university in the Muslim World which grants a degree in Islamic architecture and design. When they have a "school of architecture", it is Western architecture. So, we have to start changing by having more schools of Islamic architecture. The same is true for medicine; we have to teach Islamic medicine and pharmacology in medical and pharmacy schools, to teach their philosophy as we should teach the philosophy of Islamic architecture and design. What is important is to understand the principles of Islamic urban design, not only its external form.

For example, in the planning of the city of Lahore--which was one of the most beautiful cities in the world when I first saw it in 1959, and when I saw it thirty years later, I was flabbergasted by the sprawl, it was one of the big shocks of my life--Islamic architecture took into consideration local natural and social conditions, traditional technologies, as well as metaphysical and cosmological principles. They knew that the climate of Lahore is not the same as the climate of Yazd, nor that of Tangiers, so they took everything into consideration: climatic conditions, the social fabric, social dynamics, etc. But above all, these cities had something common in their design: they were all based on certain metaphysical principles related to the nature of reality, cosmology, and the relationship between the human being and God from an Islamic point of view. These principles are now gradually being studied by younger Muslim architects. This type of study has in fact made a lot of progress in the last few decades. For this, we owe a great deal to the writings of Titus Burckhardt and a few others, and perhaps some of my own humble writings which I wrote to try to explain the cosmology and the philosophy behind Islamic art and architecture along with their related technologies. But we also owe a great deal, of course, to the few architects, such as Hasan Fathy, and then the younger generation of architects--people such as Abdul- Wahid al-Wakil and Umar Faruq in Egypt and Sami al-Anghawi in Saudi Arabia, who have tried to apply some of these principles. In this domain, I am more hopeful than I was thirty years ago when I organized the conference in Isfahan. Let us hope that, insha'Llah, this will continue and that in-depth critique of modern technology will enable Muslims to preserve at least something of their traditional ambiance, which was always permeated with the presence of God and was also in harmony with the natural ambiance. Let us also hope that Muslims will gain a deeper awareness of what modern technology entails and develop a more discerning attitude toward it.

This is the transcription of an interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr by Islam & Science. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is the University Professor of Islamic studies at The George Washington University, Washington DC and President of the Foundation for Traditional Studies; Gelman Library 709R, 2130 H Street, NW, Washington DC 20052, USA.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Center for Islam & Science

On Hazrat Rahman Baba by GreenSufi

2007-09-01T18:30:00.001-07:00

You can read about this great poet here. Hazrat Rahman Baba was probably an Ovesi Sufi, who played the Rubab, both of which make Green Sufi particularly interested in him!

Here's a translation of one of his poems from the same site:

My Lord

Look! My Lord is such a great doer of things,
That my Lord commands full authority.

Of great and virtuous people that one can name,
My Lord is beyond them all.

He is not dependent upon others for his needs.
My Lord owes nothing to anyone.

He created life from nothingness.
My Lord is this kind of creator.

He has fashioned all created things.
My Lord hears all speech.

Of which there is no similarity of likeness,
My Lord is the maker of such scents.

Of every structures in this world or the one to come,
My Lord is mason of them all.

He is the reader of unwritten scriptures,
My Lord is the knower of all secrets.

The overt, the covert and the part-known,
My Lord knows them all.

What is created, what is concealed, what is between,
My Lord is aware of them all.

He does not have any associate in his kingdom,
My Lord is a king without a partner.

His oneness is not due to weakness,
For my Lord is infinite in one body.

He needs friendship from no one,
Whose friend is my Lord?

I don’t need to look elsewhere,
For my Lord is with me in my home.

He is not transformed or changed O Rahman!
My Lord is always constant.

The Art of the Naqqash

2007-09-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

Ustad Abdullah Naqqash of Multan

The Art of the Naqqash-floral painting
by M. Rizwanullah, 2007.

The art of Naqqashi has flourished in the Indo-Persian and Central Asian region, especially since the conversion of this region to Islam, which was a gradual process from the mid-eight century to the 13th. Interestingly, this area roughly corresponds to the ancient Persian speaking region, which was usually dominated by Turkish rulers, who however generally adopted the Persian language as a court and artistic language. After the 4th century Hijri, Persian arguably also became the most important language for religious texts, books on Tasawwuf (Sufism) such as Hazrat Ali Hujweri’s Kashf al Mahjub being the first, but later it was the standard in this region the at the majority of religious texts, be they tafsir, usul uddin Fiqh etc, were written mostly in Persian, with Arabic being a second and the vernacular being the third choice (although often the first choice for the Poetry of the Sufis).
Although practised for centuries, perhaps even in the Sassanian period, Naqqashi was transformed by Islam, through the influence of geometric design, Calligraphy etc. it took on a symmetrical character, and certainly it developed far more in Islam than it had in Sassanian Iran or even later China, no doubt as a direct consequence of the iconoclasm of Islam, the well known prohibition of representation of people and animals.
This art reaches its peak perhaps, in the contemporary Mughal and Safvid periods, and no doubt the close artistic and cultural ties since which were deepened since the time of the Iranophile Queen Noor Jehan, resulted in a high standard of excellence and an awareness of the local variations and tastes, in short a sophisticated art. The Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore’s old bazaar, the Wali Muhammad Mosque in Multan’s (even more picturesque!) old bazaar, are masterpieces and testaments to the skill, and aesthetic sense of the artists, as well as their remarkable lack of egoism: all individuality is subliminated to the design and the overall aesthetic, to the harmony and the message, which surely is a feature of Eastern art and has been missing from the West since the Gothic was overthrown by the Renaissance.

Ustad Omar on the rubab

2007-09-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

2007-09-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

a beautiful example of Naqqashi[ornamental floral painting] by the late great Ustad Malik Muhammad Ashiq of Multan.

The Nature of Islamic art

2007-09-01T10:13:00.001-07:00

The Nature of Islamic art
by M. Rizwanullah 2007.

*******
A famous hadith of the Prophet of God, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him is this:
“God is Beautiful and He loves beauty.”
In the words of Sidi Ibrahim Titus Burckhardt, the famous scholar of Islamic art
"In Islam the Divine Art is in the first place the manifestation of the Divine Unity in the beauty, and regularity of the Cosmos. Unity is reflected in the harmony of the multiple, in order and in equilibrium- beauty has all these aspects within itself'. To start from the beauty of the world and arrive at Unity- that is wisdom."
The most fundamental Islamic arts are Calligraphy & the Art of Pattern. This latter can be further divided into two, i.e. Geometric pattern and Floral pattern. Taken together, these give us the three basic Islamic arts, which may be thought of as the foundation of all Islamic art across the world: Calligraphy, Geometry and Islimi (the art of the Arabesque, known in the Persian speaking world as Naqqashi).

As such, although the Islamic world has a myriad arts and crafts and craftsmen working in all sorts of media, are basically familiar in varying degrees with all 3 arts, i.e. Calligraphy, Geometry and Naqqashi(floral pattern), it must be conceded that the 3 “high” artists are the specialists, i.e. the Khuttat, the Muhandis and the Naqqash.

The Khuttat is also called a Kaatib or Khushnawis. Muhandiseen (plural of Muhandis) are rare today save in Morocco, so today this word meaning strictly Geometrician, is used for Engineer. The Naqqash may be called a Mussawwir in other parts of the Muslim world, and Naqqashi is referred to as Islimi in the Arabic world. These are not the only arts, for example there is also the Turco-Persian Ebru or Abri, the art of marbling which is very highly developed given the central importance of the text amongst the People of the Book, however, these three aforementioned are definitely the major arts over most of the Muslim world.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the well known contemporary Islamic philosopher, has said, Islamic art “is not considered a luxury, but an integral part of life itself... everything has its special art [fann] by virtue of which it can be made or done correctly.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF ISLAMIC ARTS ---AN INTRODUCTION.

2007-09-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

THE IMPORTANCE OF ISLAMIC ARTS ---AN INTRODUCTION.
----- M. Rizwanullah, June 2007

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

A tree cannot grow without roots; so, too, no culture can flourish that is not nurtured by its traditions and its past. This paper is about the superlative tradition of Islamic art with particular reference to Pakistan, especially the Naqqashi (floral painting) and Kashi (blue glaze tile) work of Multan.

Since 1400 years, Islamic Art has fascinated and charmed the world, despite the fear of Islam that has been nurtured in the West. What better proof can there be of this than the fact that of the many who convert to Islam, do so due to the beauty of traditional Islamic civilization, its profound mysticism, and its dazzling range of arts, from tiles to architecture, calligraphy, carpets, pottery, jewellery, & the ‘arts of the book’ ?

But unfortunately we see today that Muslims themselves neglect the traditional arts of Islam, perhaps in the pursuit of some other ideal of ‘progress,’ at great loss to themselves.

For one thing, it is well known that the arts have a humanizing effect. Part of the reason for the growth of extremism and intolerance amongst Muslim youth is surely the alienation they experience from their own culture. Especially urban youth are torn between either literalism of the Fundamentalist approach, or the promiscuity & liberalism of alien celluloid cultures be they Hollywood or Bollywood. Finding no alternative between these two false extremes, they are pushed into one and then the other, and ultimately driven to violence and extremism themselves because of their own deprivation and frustration.

An attempt should be made to re-integrate Islamic Arts into the modern arts curriculum, and balance traditional methods and philosophy with new needs and techniques.

Islamic Arts is greatly relevant at this juncture, when Muslims all over a shrinking world grapple with issues of culture and identity, and not to mention a serious image crisis since 9/11, which has had an impact even within the Muslim world, while striving for progress and economic viability.

The traditional arts and crafts are crucial to Muslims regaining a sense of wholeness, a harmony between inner ideals and outward forms that is necessary for the spiritual health of the Ummah.

Based on surviving practices throughout the Islamic World, Islamic arts should be introduced in Muslim centres of learning. The underlying philosophy should be to provide students with a firm grounding in the foundations of Islamic arts, calligraphy, geometry and the distinctive use of floral patterns (Naqqashi), so students can apply the concepts and principles to all manner of arts and crafts including modern design situations.

Masters of these Traditional Arts & Crafts still exist, practicing the main modes of expression such as architecture, calligraphy, textiles, carpet weaving, ceramics, metalwork and jewelry, and the ‘arts of the book’ including binding, illumination, gilding and miniature painting.

It is hoped that reviving our own Tradition will help us find our path, regain a sense of wholeness peace, and our true identity, as well as promoting the true image of Islam.

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

2007-09-01T09:55:00.000-07:00