Essay
Written alongside They Who Saw Nothing but Beauty
What exactly is abstraction? Arabic has no exact equivalent for the word. The closest we have are al-tajrīd (التجريد), to strip away in search of the essence, and al-rūḥāniyya (الروحانية), to feel through the soul. Rūḥāniyya comes from the root ر-و-ح, which also gives us rūḥ, spirit or soul, rīḥ, wind or breath, and istirwāḥ, the seeking of relief or comfort. Abstraction here is not just a visual method but a means of reaching the divine, a kind of immaterial resonance. It is a felt presence rooted in the heart (qalb), which many Sufi thinkers, Ibn Arabi among them, saw as the interface between the body and the divine: the place where spirit, self and intellect meet.
What does it mean to work within this way of sensing? It is all-encompassing and less fixed on a single sense, the gaze. You are seeing something and not seeing it at the same time, “an image that asks us to move beyond visuality,” as Christiane Gruber puts it. I started to look at my work with the heart, through the soul.
I keep returning to a phrase spoken by Saida Zaynab (A.S.). In the aftermath of the battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of her family, her oppressors ridiculed her and asked how she had experienced the death of her family. She replied: I saw nothing but beauty.
By then she had experienced cruelty, perhaps imaginable to us now that we have witnessed a genocide broadcast live. Her brother Hussein ibn Ali was murdered and decapitated, his lifeless body mutilated. Her brother Abbas ibn Ali had his limbs cut off in a valiant effort to bring back water for the children. Her infant nephew was killed with an arrow to the neck. The bloodshed, the pain, the broken hearts, the thirst. And yet she saw nothing but beauty.
She saw beyond the physical realm and its events. For her, Karbala reflected unwavering faith in the face of overwhelming agony and injustice, a testimony to the prevalence of ultimate justice and truth. We have never forgotten. We will never forget. Truth prevails.
Beauty and abstraction in Islamic art assume this meaning. In carpets, calligraphy and pottery, beauty directs the tranquillity of contemplation in search of something.
Laura Marks writes about how viewers experience carpets physically and emotionally. Saturated with symbols and patterns, packed so densely that their sheer intensity dissolves into abstraction, they engage the body in a subtle yet profound way, invoking empathy, rhythm and a physical response that goes beyond rational or symbolic interpretation. They bypass our habitual cognitive expectations and directly engage the nervous system. I am interested in this viscerality. More is more.
I see the same thing in southern Iraqi tapestries. The Madaan who weave them are proudly Shia and also claim their Sumerian ancestry, never seeing the two as opposed. Wendy Shaw writes that Islamic art has been confined within Western art-historical frameworks that make it seem rootless or derivative, when in reality it follows its own temporal rhythms and perceptual traditions. In these tapestries different times sit together without difficulty.
The overload and tension of the carpet also create room for the speculative and the fantastical. Abstract motifs and fantastical figures engage me in a similar way, despite their supposed contrast. In al-Qazwini's The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation, otherworldly beings sit seamlessly within the natural world. The battle of Karbala has always been depicted like this too, with a plethora of divine interventions: the blood of the martyred infant rising to the sky, angels flying above and watching over the battlefield, the skies turning dark at the moment of Imam Hussein's death, like an eclipse or some cosmic mourning. Alongside these, I allowed myself to speculate on moments that feel charged with a magical essence. When Saida Zaynab spoke, those around her saw, for an instant, her mother Fatima reflected in her. From this I made a figure with two faces.
Through seven woven tapestries I depict events from the battle of Karbala. At their centre is the martyr, a figure of sacrifice, resistance and spiritual transcendence. The tapestries carry symbols from the battle while searching for parallels with the landscapes of Karbala and Najaf, where traces of Mesopotamian history still remain. Many Iraqi and Arab artists have been inspired by the stories left to us by the family of the Prophet and have drawn parallels with what has happened in Palestine and Iraq: Abbas Al-Musavi's The Battle of Karbala, Dia Al-Azzawi's Folkloric Mythology, Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades. These works push for a dignified presentation and understanding of such events.
Ibn Arabi, far from systematic in the philosophical sense, scatters interrelated concepts throughout a work and repeats them through different examples, so that they trigger unplanned mnemonic responses and spontaneous flashes of insight. For me the fantastical elements can do something similar. They loosen fixed readings and ask the spectator to look with modesty and patience. Perhaps even humility.
Written alongside They Who Saw Nothing but Beauty
What exactly is abstraction? Arabic has no exact equivalent for the word. The closest we have are al-tajrīd (التجريد), to strip away in search of the essence, and al-rūḥāniyya (الروحانية), to feel through the soul. Rūḥāniyya comes from the root ر-و-ح, which also gives us rūḥ, spirit or soul, rīḥ, wind or breath, and istirwāḥ, the seeking of relief or comfort. Abstraction here is not just a visual method but a means of reaching the divine, a kind of immaterial resonance. It is a felt presence rooted in the heart (qalb), which many Sufi thinkers, Ibn Arabi among them, saw as the interface between the body and the divine: the place where spirit, self and intellect meet.
What does it mean to work within this way of sensing? It is all-encompassing and less fixed on a single sense, the gaze. You are seeing something and not seeing it at the same time, “an image that asks us to move beyond visuality,” as Christiane Gruber puts it. I started to look at my work with the heart, through the soul.
I keep returning to a phrase spoken by Saida Zaynab (A.S.). In the aftermath of the battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of her family, her oppressors ridiculed her and asked how she had experienced the death of her family. She replied: I saw nothing but beauty.
By then she had experienced cruelty, perhaps imaginable to us now that we have witnessed a genocide broadcast live. Her brother Hussein ibn Ali was murdered and decapitated, his lifeless body mutilated. Her brother Abbas ibn Ali had his limbs cut off in a valiant effort to bring back water for the children. Her infant nephew was killed with an arrow to the neck. The bloodshed, the pain, the broken hearts, the thirst. And yet she saw nothing but beauty.
She saw beyond the physical realm and its events. For her, Karbala reflected unwavering faith in the face of overwhelming agony and injustice, a testimony to the prevalence of ultimate justice and truth. We have never forgotten. We will never forget. Truth prevails.
Beauty and abstraction in Islamic art assume this meaning. In carpets, calligraphy and pottery, beauty directs the tranquillity of contemplation in search of something.
Laura Marks writes about how viewers experience carpets physically and emotionally. Saturated with symbols and patterns, packed so densely that their sheer intensity dissolves into abstraction, they engage the body in a subtle yet profound way, invoking empathy, rhythm and a physical response that goes beyond rational or symbolic interpretation. They bypass our habitual cognitive expectations and directly engage the nervous system. I am interested in this viscerality. More is more.
I see the same thing in southern Iraqi tapestries. The Madaan who weave them are proudly Shia and also claim their Sumerian ancestry, never seeing the two as opposed. Wendy Shaw writes that Islamic art has been confined within Western art-historical frameworks that make it seem rootless or derivative, when in reality it follows its own temporal rhythms and perceptual traditions. In these tapestries different times sit together without difficulty.
The overload and tension of the carpet also create room for the speculative and the fantastical. Abstract motifs and fantastical figures engage me in a similar way, despite their supposed contrast. In al-Qazwini's The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation, otherworldly beings sit seamlessly within the natural world. The battle of Karbala has always been depicted like this too, with a plethora of divine interventions: the blood of the martyred infant rising to the sky, angels flying above and watching over the battlefield, the skies turning dark at the moment of Imam Hussein's death, like an eclipse or some cosmic mourning. Alongside these, I allowed myself to speculate on moments that feel charged with a magical essence. When Saida Zaynab spoke, those around her saw, for an instant, her mother Fatima reflected in her. From this I made a figure with two faces.
Through seven woven tapestries I depict events from the battle of Karbala. At their centre is the martyr, a figure of sacrifice, resistance and spiritual transcendence. The tapestries carry symbols from the battle while searching for parallels with the landscapes of Karbala and Najaf, where traces of Mesopotamian history still remain. Many Iraqi and Arab artists have been inspired by the stories left to us by the family of the Prophet and have drawn parallels with what has happened in Palestine and Iraq: Abbas Al-Musavi's The Battle of Karbala, Dia Al-Azzawi's Folkloric Mythology, Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades. These works push for a dignified presentation and understanding of such events.
Ibn Arabi, far from systematic in the philosophical sense, scatters interrelated concepts throughout a work and repeats them through different examples, so that they trigger unplanned mnemonic responses and spontaneous flashes of insight. For me the fantastical elements can do something similar. They loosen fixed readings and ask the spectator to look with modesty and patience. Perhaps even humility.