Ihsan, Beauty & Mastery
Ihsan is one of those Arabic words that is impossible to translate. One could translate it as excellence, perfection, or beauty – its root literally means “to make beautiful.”
Why do we human beings love something as undefinable as Ihsan - the excellent, perfect, and beautiful? We know intuitively these three items are intimately related, but how?
There is one theory which propagates that ethics is just a subtopic of aesthetics, because an ethical act is simply a beautiful act. When someone seems someone do something good, the viewer perceives the good action as pleasing to the senses. When I see an elderly woman deliver food to a food bank kitchen, I admire her contribution and expenditure of energy for a noble cause. When my sister sees a family reunite at the international arrivals area of an airport, she literally cries.
In Signs on the Horizon, Michael Sugich recounts his experiences meeting many awliya: people considered to be so saintly and near-perfect in character that they are referred to as “friends of God.” Sugich narrates multiple instances in which he lays his eyes upon one of these great people, and then he breaks down into tears as a result of their piercing beauty. A particular man is so beautiful that Sugich cannot look straight at him. Making eye contact with these other worldly souls strikes Sugich straight in his heart—because spiritual excellence can manifest in a perceivable aesthetic.
Moreover, it is our primordial nature—as human beings—to love what is beautiful. Some things of beauty, like the Himalayan mountains in Ladakh or the sand beaches on the islands of Greece, are naturally awe-inspiring and mesmerizing. But many beautiful things, particularly those related to humans, are the product of years of hard work. Generally speaking, the awliya spent lifetimes striving to perfect their souls in order to achieve their spiritual stations. That effort is why we feel their presence.
This beauty achieved through mastery extends likewise to the achievements of the masters of other crafts and fields. Tailors, watchmakers, shoemakers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, knife-smiths—each are craftspeople who could achieve mastery in their field. But achieving mastery is an extremely difficult task and we find these people to be fewer and fewer in every generation. The giants of Italian tailoring today are mostly old men, and the majority are at least second-generation tailors. Most began learning their craft as teenagers; their reputations are the reward of decades of work. A good master, it would seem, is increasingly hard to find.
This too, is the story in fields like scholarship, music, athletics, and medicine. To be considered a top scholar in Western academia, one must complete about 12 years of regular schooling: four years of undergraduate college and three to seven years for a doctorate. Yet, the PhD is just considered a credential to be able to speak and publish in the field. It is only after another decade of researching and publishing peer-recognized work that someone will be considered a distinguished scholar in a particular subject.
Mastery is about something more than the material. I feel something when I see a religious man chanting with prayer beads, a hand-made oriental rug, a treatise on the American civil war, or even Lebron James dunking on a fast-break. The feelings for each thing are not the same. But they all share a sense of reverence for human excellence, achievement, and beauty—because it is human nature to love ihsan. We would do well if we, too, strove to embody ihsan, wherever we are in our lives.