Nadia Ghauri, Bournemouth
My recent attempt to take another one of those ‘sunset shots’ ended in that all too familiar sense of dissatisfaction. No phone camera, no filter, no level of photoshop could do justice to the resplendent spectacle before me. The luminous skies which swathed the landscape in a soft apricot glow, flecked with gold, were unnaturally compressed into the flatter version, downsized on a 5” screen. The awe-inspiring splendour of the natural world is unparalleled. Be it the emerald northern lights, the rugged Karakoram peaks, the aquamarine oceans of Zanzibar, or even the leaves amassing on my lawn with the arrival of autumn – nature stirs something deeper within us.
Through our sense of sight, the physical world is a passageway to a spiritual one. Nature offers an accessible form of contemplation of the Divine. Since time immemorial, the natural world has inspired millions of artists, poets, philosophers and writers in both the East and West. Many of the Romantic artists of the 19th century, such as J.M.W Turner and Caspar Friedrich, sought a spiritual kinship with nature, experiences of the sublime or a realisation of man’s insignificance. As a result, they produced some of the world’s most famous landscape art. No artist, however, has ever reproduced the sublimity of nature, creating nothing more than inferior imitations. For our natural surroundings have been sculpted and given their distinct form by Allah alone – Al-Musawwir: ‘The Fashioner’. While some atheists argue against God’s existence by claiming He cannot be seen with the naked eye, truly He manifests Himself through His Divine attributes.
Al-Musawwir comes from the Arabic root ‘sawwara’[1] meaning ‘to shape’, ‘to form’ or ‘to fashion’. Everything He has created has its own form. Nature is the paragon of an objective kind of beauty. While the works of Botticelli, Van Gogh, Tracey Emin and countless other manmade art pieces will elicit differing responses of love, hate, even disgust among their viewers, the raw beauty of nature is by far one of the universally admired. If we focus upon nature simply on an aesthetic level, this attests to the existence of Al-Musawwir. And this is before we even begin to think about the practical role assigned to every creature for our ecosystem’s upkeep. The Holy Qur’an also affirms:
“Have they not looked at the sky above them, how We have made it and adorned it, and there are no flaws in it?
And the earth — We have spread it out, and placed therein firm mountains; and We have made to grow therein every kind of beautiful species,
As a means of enlightenment and as a reminder to every servant that turns to God.” [50:7-9]
This intimates how all the elements and the vibrant diversity of the plant and animal kingdoms are a manifestation of God that draw us towards Him. This attraction we feel should be nurtured; it divinely guides us towards the Creator behind the world’s marvels. Is it a coincidence that the millions of microscopic cone cells in the human eye are most receptive to the colour green – the colour which arguably dominates the world’s natural landscapes[2]? Indeed, Al-Musawwir has fashioned our physiology in such a way to optimise our perception of His countless wonders.
The notion that nature reminds us of our Divine Creator is by no means limited to Islam. ‘Natural theology’, although a term which came about in the 14th century, has existed for thousands of years, including in pre-Socratic and Roman thought[3]. It is a philosophy that promotes the use of rational arguments based upon our experiences of the world to prove the existence of God, independent of revelation. His Holiness Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad has written:
‘When a person views a magnificent work of art, they recognise it has been created by a skilled artist and when a person reads a fine piece of literature they are able to discern it has been produced by a distinguished writer…How then can people imagine that such a beautifully arranged world came into existence arbitrarily and by itself?’[4]
These words illustrate how we are living and experiencing a gallery provided and created for free by a Living God. No wonder, then, that my artificial filters or cameras fail to immortalise the sunset. Al-Musawwir’s (The Fashioner) creations can be admired, loved and imitated, but above all, their beauty lies in their quality of bringing us closer to Allah Almighty.
[1] https://www.alislam.org/mta/summary/february14-2003.html
[2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/SusanZhao.shtml
[3] Introduction: Natural Theology, Leading up to Bacon, S. Peterfreund
[4] Ten Proofs for the Existence of God, p. 24
Voice of British Muslim Women 
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