If it burns out of control,
who can be blamed for loving?^44
Ibn Arabi thus describes Quranic lightning as simultaneously enlightening
and destroying the seeker in love with God. As in the Platonic tradition, the
boundary betweenerosandagapéremains ambiguous, as the analogy for
(longing for) disembodied annihilation in the divine hinges on the bodily
experience of longing, desire, and transcendence experienced through the
erotic. Thus, in contrast with dominant interpretations in Christianity,
sexuality comes to be interpreted not through a paradigm of sin so much as
through thepharmakonof transgression and transcendence.
In a broader framework, the Quran indicates materiality as a struc-
ture through which to comprehend essential immateriality. The mate-
riality of the world, its practical and its sensual presence, provides a
vital backbone to both the pragmatic instructions in the Quran, such
as the distribution of wealth, alms, and inheritance, and the real and
metaphysical utility of objects and creation:“The love of desirable
things is made alluring for men–women, children, gold and silver
treasures piled up high, horses with fine markings, livestock, and
farmland– these may be the joys of this life, but God has the best
place to return to”(Q3:14).^45 The passage does not disparage love of
wealth so much as recognize its worldly transience in contradistinc-
tion to the immaterial offered by the afterlife. The material world
cannot be disassociated from creation, thus requiring materiality for
worship: religion cannot function in pure immateriality, since the
distinction between humankind and the divine relies on matter.
Yet Islamic art history has often implied that luxury goods are inherently
irreligious. One of itsfirst experts, Henri-Michel Lavoix, asserted this in
saying:
The truth is that Muslims do not conform their habits and their tastes to the law of
the prophet except where it does not encounter excessive resistance to their
passions and pleasures...One reads in the Quran:“Certainly thefire of hell will
thunder like the roar of camels in the stomach of someone who drinks from golden
or silver chalices.”^46
While avoiding any similarly laughable misquotations, Ernst Grube and
Oleg Grabar likewise declare religious knowledge inaccessible from the(^44) Sells, 2008: 8–9. (^45) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 34. (^46) Lavoix, 1875 : 100.
118 Seeing with the Heart