“When I’m standing in front of Allah on the day of judgement, he’s not going to ask you and me about my writing. He’s not going to ask me about any of that. None of it will matter in the end.”

Those were the words of my colleague and friend, a sprightly Muslim woman with an active background in social justice. We have talked about writing with each other on many occasions, and together we expressed our frustrations about not being able to pen the stories that tugged at our hearts. In these conversations, we covered all the many factors that stopped us from writing as much as we both wanted to: being too busy (ha!), writer’s block, and ultimately fear. But on that late March evening, I didn’t expect her to pose such a scenario. I had never, even for a second, imagined that my career as a writer could be a waste of time in any kind of way. The day got busier and my colleague had to leave my side to tend to some urgent queries. I sat staring at a small patch of sky, watching it turn darker and darker until eventually, it was a shade of blue I had never seen before. Maybe my colleague was right. This novel that I had suffered for, for almost two years, the one I am still suffering for, could all just be an empty hole in my existence. For the next few days, I experienced a unique brand of dissociation and practically outdid myself in the intensity of my writing-related self-doubt. I found myself unable to sit at my desk and write. I found myself looking around at other people I knew, even at strangers in the street, wondering if they were wasting their time too.

 “Recite, and your Lord is most generous, Who taught by the pen…” [96:3-4]

To write is not to create

To be a writer – to be an artist of any capacity – is not to be a creator, as nothing in our mortal world can be created by us, only examined or reimagined at best. Mine is probably an unpopular view since many artists consider themselves to be creators. The Quran makes a case for itself as the most perfect poetic and prosaic entity that will ever exist. Knowing this as a Muslim and a writer I became humbled and I began to form a new relationship with perfection. That is where my quest for the truth started. I began to contemplate the relationship between my creativity and my deen. I had to think about all the time’s that art had served as a medium for beholding Allah’s creation and His very nature, even when I didn’t realise that it was happening.

Fiction, even when the story was not spiritual in any way, had softened my heart on many nights and from there I found myself silently calling out to Allah. Writing Fiction often gave me the means of expression that I needed, in order to empty the contents of my heart and mind to my Creator.

When it comes to visual art, we should not take experiences of awe-inspiring beauty for granted. We are told that ‘Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty.’ This is perhaps the philosophy behind the golden era of Islamic art, as it was in Istanbul where I witnessed how the Ottomans had rendered the Mosques as canvases for their artistic imaginings.

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Islam’s history of art

Some of those pieces that adorned the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia took decades to craft and required the full concentration of the artist for prolonged periods. Sometimes they dedicated their whole life to just one piece of work. Just gazing upon the calculated beauty of the tiles used to decorate ancient water fountains in the street, left me trembling giving me a glimpse of something beyond our realm; some kind of divine inspiration.

The Poet and Scholar Al-Hariri defended the role of the fiction writer in his Maqamat, a collection of some 50 stories written from 1054-1122. He argues that ‘If deeds are but by intentions, then what is wrong with one who writes stories, intending thereby to highlight some issues, for the purpose of promoting good morals, and his intention was never to tell lies? Isn’t he, in that case, like a teacher who teaches good manners and guides people to the straight path?’  If we are to believe that the pursuit of art is a waste of time, then we are suggesting that our religion’s greatest artists have contributed nothing to our world-view. We would be suggesting that hundreds of years of Islamic artistic enlightenment were not a period of enlightenment at all, or that the effort to translate thousands of books, including poetry, from around the classical world during the Abbasid era was an effort in vain.

If we tell our creative Muslim friends to put down their pens and do something more ‘beneficial’, we could be cutting off their means of expression and ultimately their way of remembering Allah.

So, thinking back to my colleague’s statement: will Allah ask about my writing career on the day of judgement? Of course, He will. After all, what is the purpose of art? It is, borrowing from the words of the late Nina Simone, our way of reflecting the times. It has served as a mirror inside ourselves and mirror from without. What we do with this mirror is our task as artists. In one way we can choose to hold this mirror up to people misunderstood or forgotten by history, or we can hold the mirror up to the reader by offering some illumination in their time of need. Most of the time when I write I have to admit that I am holding the mirror up to myself because it allows me to see parts of my soul. I see its basal desires, its ugliness, its beauty, and how it is central to my striving towards being a better person.

Sometimes I stay awake until dawn after a night of writing. The glare of my laptop is the only source of light in the room. In these nights I feel like the only person left in the world. I have found that my writing flows better in the later hours, the time where Allah is said to be closest to us. I learned that my art can be a form of worship if I intend it to be. By making the intention I approach my work with more confidence and a new-found sense of purpose. The truth is that dhikr, the remembrance of Allah, is a multi-layered experience. Sometimes I remember Him by uttering his names aloud, and sometimes I remember him between the notes scrawled in my journal.