and perpetuated in the thought of al-Ghazali, emphasizing moral, practi-
cal, or spiritual virtues. Yet in this discussion of a specifically aesthetic
beauty, he uses the rare passive form of the word,mustahsan, emphasizing
the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment.^59 The overarching inclusive-
ness of ibn al-Haytham’s categories gives us little guidance if what we seek
in aesthetics is a means to categorize quality or taste. Yet in providing a
very different system of measurement, it disturbs and threatens our taxo-
nomic habits.
Ibn Khaldun’s description of taste similarly requires the deep apprehen-
sion of the subject of the situation at hand. In the Muqaddima
(Introduction to the Human Sciences), he says:
It should be known that the word‘taste’is in current use among those who are
concerned with the various branches of literary criticism. It means the tongue’s
possession of the habit of eloquence. What eloquence is, was explained above. It is
the conformity of speech to the meaning (intended), in every aspect, (and this is
achieved) by means of certain qualities that give this (conformity) to the word
combinations.^60
A person of taste is so deeply embedded in the situation at hand that (s)he
knows what to say intuitively, responding to the world through an“intui-
tive non-demonstrative process”of the sort described in Aristotelian, and
later Avicennean, poetics. Including the allegory of the competition of the
artists within an otherwise demonstrative text, al-Ghazali demonstrated
the taste of an intellectual who knows how to address his reader with
appropriate tools for the rhetorical job at hand. Similarly, in revising and
elaborating the story with a plethora of allusions which recall a wide range
of associations, from the Quran and Manicheanism to the specific poetic
imagery that traces through the discourse, each of the authors cited here
asserted their taste, and thereby the validity of their knowledge of author-
ity, through a demonstration ofmutabaqa, conformity to a situation which
involves“a neutral and objective comparison the purpose of which is not
praise or satire...[which] expressed a whole vision of the world according
to which a divine order corresponded to a social and a linguistic order.”^61
Thus taste was conferred not by distance, but by situating a narrative
within a discursive context, internalized by the subject, through which to
apprehend the world.
Kantian disinterest depends on an externalization of the subject from
the object similar to the outward mimesis of an image that represents an(^59) Sabra, 1989 : 97. (^60) Ibn Khaldun, 1980 : 358. (^61) Lelli, 2014 : 204.
182 Deceiving Deception