{"id":4,"date":"2012-02-20T23:08:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T23:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/?p=4"},"modified":"2012-02-21T16:09:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T16:09:39","slug":"calligraphy-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/2012\/02\/20\/calligraphy-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Calligraphy Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of the rules given by Al-Ghazali regarded weeping during prayer. He maintained that it not only is praiseworthy to weep, but necessary. \u201cIf you do not weep naturally, then force yourself to weep.\u201d This part of the text struck me as incredibly odd, because something as uncontrollable as weeping seems strange to force upon a worshipper. Powerful emotions can overtake a person and cause more than just weeping, such as an ecstatic joy at the prospect of being closer to God, yet here are pseudo directions on how to force one\u2019s self to weep. On closer inspection, though, I began to see that no matter how close to God one is (or thinks he is), there is always room for improvement. These imperfections and deviations from God\u2019s expectations are why one should weep during prayer, so that one can acknowledge these imperfections to God and show a desire to improve. During prostration, the time in which one is closest to God and deepest in prayer (from my understanding), this flurry of emotions should be reaching a tempest and cause uncontrollable weeping.<\/p>\n

After a bit of searching online, I realized that the inability to weep during prayer is an actual concern of some Muslims, and that it isn\u2019t just an archaic idea. I chose to depict the tears as \u201cAllah\u201d to show that weeping is correlated with (in some people\u2019s eyes) closeness to God, and it is through these tears that a person can \u201creach the rank of ihsan.\u201d (http:\/\/www.turntoislam.com\/forum\/showthread.php?t=78708<\/a>)<\/p>\n

I chose to keep the person in prayer in black and white to keep the focus on the tears, which are the only thing with color. Also, I found it interesting that there happened to be Allah written within the person (if you can\u2019t find it, it is darkened from the rest of the drawing).\u00a0 The yellow construction paper was to lighten up the drawing in general, because it wasn\u2019t meant to be a saddening drawing, and that was the feel I was getting from the picture.\u00a0 When I had envisioned this drawing, it wasn\u2019t so plain, but when I was done outlining the person, I realized that his identity was irrelevant, and so he shouldn\u2019t have details such as color or designed clothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        One of the rules given by Al-Ghazali regarded weeping during prayer. He maintained that it not only is praiseworthy to weep, but necessary. \u201cIf you do not weep naturally, then force yourself to weep.\u201d This part of the text struck me as incredibly odd, because something as uncontrollable as weeping seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4535,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4535"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mgalli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}