Craft as Remembrance

The novelist Flannery O’Connor famously wrote: “An artist prays by creating”. The lasting bastions of Andalusia, Islamic calligraphy and religious odes augment this aspect of art as an intimate form of prayer. They reveal a past where the path of walāya (sainthood) for every human being is that of the craft. And just as God reminded Moses of his memories when he sought to remember God (Q20:33-34),…