I wish to discuss the spiritual power and ramifications inherent to visual art, and by extension, the responsibility held by those who create it. I reflect on two examples from my own experience which includes two of the most widely known masterworks over the last 500 years and how these experiences shaped my own religious understanding and identity.

It is common for us to build meaning from the narratives that we create throughout our lives, namely in the key decisions that carry us from our past through our present circumstances and allows us to continue building a trajectory into the future. In my case, my identity as a practicing artist has been the central narrative of my life: drawing was something I liked to do in middle school and I started to get awarded for it. I then applied to an art magnet high school which was situated on the opposite end of the county from where I lived. In order to continue pursuing my interest I applied to an art college in another state, and so on (all of the above with the support of an institutional framework and supportive family, which I readily acknowledge). This awareness le me to locate or recreate one of my earliest memories, which was drawing with watercolors at the kitchen table at the age of three, the morning sunlight streaming into the room from behind me.

As a committed atheist for most of my life, religion did not form a part of my narrative until very recently, when I accepted Islam at age 28. Now historical revision has kicked in: it has become central to the plot. For example, the time when I was four or five years old and I was scared in the night and prayed to God is now understood to me as an example of fitra of humanity in childhood, the primordial connection that creation maintains with the Creator which is then diluted, perverted or lost when one enters the Dunya, or world of outer forms and illusions.

My experience may be unique because the path that leads to religion was through my explorations in art, and the witnessing and studying of Islamic art opened the doors to the heart which otherwise would not have. Although many contemporary Muslims under the influence of the prevailing Wahhabi ideology will be quick to dismiss artmaking as bid’a (an innovation in religion) or shirk (association of power with God, often in attributing power to images or statues which they don’t have), I ask for them to consider these examples before passing all too quick biases as judgment.

In regards to my atheism, I don’t remember the exact motivations at the time, but I do remember making a formal declaration within myself rejecting the concept of God at around 13 years of age. At about double that lifetime later, as I contemplated accepting Islam and the commitments that it would require, I spent time unpacking the reasoning that buttressed this conviction for so long. One of the primary facets of this conviction was the rejection of a God that is conceptualized in human form. When confronted by the vastness, intricacy and ultimate unknowability of nature and the cosmos, I could not accept the idea of a humanoid creator which could create, let alone fully know, anything bearing life, let alone the scope of the cosmos itself. I am fully aware of the limitations of my own knowledge and power as a finite being. Therefore it makes no sense to formulate a finite being as possessing infinite power and knowledge. Humanity prides itself on its scientific advancements yet the thinker does not know how one’s own brain functions, the nature of consciousness or the purpose of being.

Now central to that concept of God-as-man is an image which is known to every human with access to the modern economy of images. I refer to Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel with the painting of God Creating Adam as a central motif and which has been reproduced ad nauseum and has been appropriated within multiple contexts from satire to camp. The fresco was painted on the vault of the chapel over the course of four years starting in 1508 as a commission by Pope Urban II. With its multiple planes of illusionistic space, trompe l’oeil architectural renderings and Biblical scenes depicted over multiple spatial registers this is regarded as one of the great artistic achievements in human history.

Michelangelo would have surely been aware of the lasting impact of his achievement but I doubt that he could have anticipated the coming ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ in which images would be photographed, mass-produced, replicated by digital code and circulated throughout the world. His fresco was applied to the vaulted ceiling which rises 20.7 meters (68 feet) from the chapel floor. For those who are able to travel to the Vatican in Rome and visit the chapel, they know that one peer with head thrown back in an uncomfortable position to take in the whole composition which appears rather small in one’s vision. The Creation of Adam is one section in a much broader composition but today we view it as a disembodied image that circulates everywhere – it is a cliche. The concept of God as a white man with a long white beard reclining on a red cloth, surrounded by figures and proportionally to scale to a human being is therefore projected ad infinitum throughout the world, a concept that I have personally rejected throughout my life.

The transition into Islam that I experienced happened after a visit to India in 2004 and 2005 with a group of friends from my college. We had recently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which was the first art academy founded in the United States and therefore had grown to have a large endowment and a generous network of local patrons. Each year, the Academy offers travel scholarships and prize money to third and fourth-year students. A friend had been awarded a travel scholarship and so she decided to travel to her native India after being abroad for several years, and she invited four of us, all Americans, along.

During this trip I was lucky to have the opportunity to visit three of the great architectural masterworks of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, including the Taj Mahal, which is another example of one of the most iconic and often represented masterpieces in the world, as well as the Jama Masjid and ruins of the Red Fort in Old Delhi. Visiting the Taj Mahal is a great opportunity for many foreign tourists in India to experience traditional Islamic forms although they may not be specifically traveling to see them. So, I was exposed for the first time to monumental Arabic calligraphy from the Qur’an inlaid into the facade in jali-thuluth script with black marble; I enjoyed the perfect symmetry of the char bagh, the four-squared gardens divided by water channels which were influenced by the Persian garden and represent an earthly simulation of the Jannatul-Firdaus, the gardens of paradise “under which rivers flow.”

I did not know what to expect by traveling to India for the first time, and besides having my limited Western worldview painfully (at the time) blown apart to gain a greater understanding of what it means to be in the world, the beautiful form and harmony of the great Mughal architecture lingered with me. There was something to the harmony and symmetry of form that I kept returning to and couldn’t disregard. It was as if the harmony of man-made form reflected some greater harmony which I was not able to realize intellectually, but on a spiritual level already understood. Also, the fact that there was no object framed by the architecture and the emptiness of the void was emphasized was and continues to be profound and compelling to me.

Either way, the beauty of what I witnessed stood in stark contrast to the ugliness of the milieu in America at the time, as the horrific and unacceptable war in Iraq ground on and the mainstream media projected predominantly negative ideas and images about Islam to the monocultural masses. The contrast between what I saw and experienced in the erstwhile lands of Islam versus what the culture attempted to inculcate in me created the dynamic whereby I began studying Islam and which lead to eventual acceptance.

Like Michelangelo, we can be confident that Shah Jahan would have had a sense of the historical import of his greatest masterwork. Would he know that up to 8 million people from all over the world now visit every year? By the mid-1600s he would have known of the European conquest and settlement throughout the Americas. Would he have guessed that the buildings that he undertook would have lead some guy from a country called the United States, a descendant of Christians but a kafir, to accept Islam four centuries later?