Beauty Belongs to Allah

The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) said in a hadith narrated by Muslim in his Sahih that "Allah is Beautiful and loves beauty." This profound declaration opens a window into the metaphysical core of Islam, where beauty is not merely an aesthetic preference but a divine attribute and existential principle.

Allah's essence is perfect and beautiful beyond the bounds of human comprehension. He is not only the source of all beauty but its very embodiment. Everything that originates from Him or aligns with His will is beautiful by nature, while whatever stands in opposition to His grace and harmony is inherently unnatural and ugly.

The magnificent names and attributes of Allah reflect His beauty, nevertheless they are but refracted glimpses of an infinite and incomprehensible reality. As the Qur'an affirms, "There is nothing like unto Him" (al-Shura, 11).

This verse decisively closes the door to any attempt at visualizing or conceptualizing the divine essence. Human cognition is confined to the realm of created things, while Allah transcends all such categories. Man, being himself a contingent being, cannot think outside the framework of contingency, yet Allah is beyond all likeness, beyond all form, beyond all thingness.

To attempt to imagine Allah's beauty is to risk distortion and reductionism, to collapse the infinite into the finite, the transcendent into the tangible. Instead, man is summoned to engage with the manifestations of divine beauty-spiritual, intellectual, moral, and even material-that permeate creation and revelation. These signs are not ends in themselves but invitations to draw nearer to the Source, to refine the soul, and to fulfill the terrestrial mission with dignity and grace.

Through this engagement, man prepares himself for the ultimate ascent: the elevation of his rank in the Hereafter, where the veils will fall and the righteous will behold their Lord in His heavenly splendor.

Man's ontological journey unfolds in stages. In this worldly stage, he marvels at the signs of divine beauty; in Paradise, the final and highest stage, he will witness the Source itself. This vision will not merely be a reward; it will be the very essence of Paradise.

The Qur'an proclaims: "(Some) faces, that Day, will be radiant, looking at their Lord" (al-Qiyamah, 22-23). This radiant encounter is reserved for the purified. In contrast, the dwellers of Hellfire will be denied this vision. Their punishment is not only the torment of fire; it is the deprivation of beauty, the severance from the divine gaze, the exile from majesty.

Beauty as a Divine Norm

Yet beauty, as a metaphysical standard, is not contingent. It is the axis of creation, the law of being. People may be permitted to develop narrow aesthetic criteria and apply them within the confines of their earthly missions, but once those confines are transcended, their criteria collapse. As soon as the jurisdictions of the Creator are encroached upon, His standards must prevail. His rules are not optional; they are ontological imperatives.

To illustrate this, Allah speaks of marriage, which is a domain where human desire intersects with divine command, and where personal inclination must yield to the architecture of lasting goodness and beauty. He says:

"And do not marry polytheistic women until they believe. A believing slave woman is better than a polytheist, even though she may please you. And do not marry polytheistic men (to your women) until they believe. A believing slave is better than a polytheist, even though he may please you. They invite to the Fire, but Allah invites to Paradise and forgiveness, by His permission. And He makes clear His verses to the people that perhaps they may remember" (al-Baqarah, 221).

Here, physical allure is contrasted with spiritual ruin. The deceptive beauty of polytheistic men and women is eclipsed by the destructive ugliness of their paganism and idolatry. They lack the highest tier in the hierarchy of beauty: Allah's mercy, forgiveness, and Paradise with all the divine prerequisites that lead to it.

Thus, there is no ugliness intrinsic to life or its purposeful unfolding. What is commonly labeled as "ugly" stems from subjective projections, individual or collective preferences divorced from divine calibration. And if true ugliness exists-in the forms of vice, sin, corruption, injustice, oppression, and distortion-it is not innate but acquired. It is the handiwork of those who have rendered themselves evil, becoming not only personifications of ugliness but its prolific source. Such ugliness is not a divine rule. Rather, it is an auxiliary exception, born not of the Creator, but of creation's rebellion.

The Beauty of Man

This verse affirms that man's physical, intellectual, and spiritual constitution reflects a divine archetype, aligned with the majestic principle that no likeness can be attributed to Him and that He is beyond any comparison and form.

Man's beauty is not simply aesthetic; it is primordial and constitutive. It emanates from the honor of being fashioned by the One who is Himself Beautiful and who loves beauty. Hence, man's dignity lies not only in his appearance, but in his capacity to mirror divine attributes through knowledge, justice, mercy, and submission.

The Beauty of Human Accomplishments

For this reason, the concept of ihsan is paramount in Islam. On one hand, it indicates the perfection of one's worship, character, and conduct in full awareness of Allah's presence; on the other, it means "beauty in action" and "to do what is most beautiful." Such a fusion clearly implies the mutually complementing inseparability between worship in both body and spirit, and beauty in both form and essence. The Prophet said in the famous hadith that ihsan is "to worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you do not see Him, then indeed He sees you" (Sahih al-Bukhari).

It is further entailed that man is not the source but the object and instrument of true ontological beauty. He is its servant. He must generate and appreciate only such beauty paradigms as are encompassed in and consistent with the beauty of Allah and with the aesthetic principles that underpin the entirety of His creation.

Man cannot develop a beauty paradigm that contravenes that of his Creator and His divine will, conflicting with Him repeatedly along the existential trajectory. Extolling the self, nature, and human fantasies in the name of aesthetics while living at odds with Allah is neither righteousness nor faith, but rather a toxic mixture of falsehood and ugliness.

Indeed, it is righteousness and faith alone that embody true beauty, while their opposites - nudity, immorality, extravagance, indecency, egotism, selfishness, and voracity - manifest only as forms of ugliness. Just as only the righteous and devout are truly beautiful, so too are their opposites ugly, marked by spiritual disfigurement and moral decay.

One cannot help but conclude that, as a corollary, the most widely used word for beauty in Arabic (jamal) is derived from and related to the words jumlah and ijmal, which mean "a complete unit, a whole structure, or a total composition" and "totality, the condensed essence, or the unelaborated whole," respectively.

From this etymological construction and relationship, it can be deduced that beauty in Islam is not a fragment but a totality. It flows from Allah, who is Jamil (Beautiful), and manifests both as jumlah-the structured harmony of creation-and ijmal-the abstract essence that precedes detail. In the same way that the cosmos is a jumlah of divine signs, each part echoing a higher order, so too is beauty the rhythm that binds form to meaning, matter to spirit. In every proportioned verse, balanced structure, and moral act, beauty reveals itself as a divine norm.

To perceive beauty is to witness the unity behind multiplicity, the summary behind elaboration, the divine signature etched into the fabric of existence. And to do all that, the five senses and reason are not enough; the sixth sense-the soul-is the most essential instrument to perceive, experience, and appreciate such an aesthetic ethos.

However, only the believers are rewarded with such blessings. Non-believers are deprived, meaning that if the greatest pain in Hellfire is the realization that they will never see Allah, they are already punished in this world by being disconnected from faith and beauty, the two greatest assets a person can possess and revel in. Their lives unfold as a continuous progression through states of destitution and existential angst, culminating in the Hereafter-as is the case with the lives of believers that unfold through ascending states of happiness and bliss, culminating in the eternal joy of Paradise.