Why every artist should have a faith
On finding the source-code of beauty — and why I chose the picture over the firewall.
The studio
it works inside
I have spent most of my creative life chasing depth. Not decoration. Depth. I am pulled toward art that observes something true about the world and then refuses to say it plainly — the poem that circles a feeling instead of naming it, the film that trusts a held shot to do what dialogue cannot, the building that makes you feel small in a way that feels like mercy. I am drawn to people who have trained themselves to see: who notice the pattern under the noise, the grief under the joke, the order under the chaos of a culture. And then take all of that watching and pour it into form — a painting, a frame, a verse, an arch.
For a long time I assumed faith and that kind of seeing were in tension. That to be a serious artist you had to keep your work secular, unbound, free of doctrine. What I found instead — and the longer I sit in it the more sure I am — is that Islam is not a fence around my creativity. It is the studio it works inside. It gave me more questions, not fewer. More permission to play, not less. It is, for me, the most generous creative brief I have ever been handed.
This is the case I want to make: that every artist benefits from a faith-shaped lens, and that Islam in particular is built — structurally, linguistically, acoustically, spatially — for the kind of person who lives to observe and then make.
A clear pane of glass, and the light came through
Start with a story that reorganized how I think about beauty itself.
Hassan ibn Thabit was the great poet of early Islam — known as Sha'ir al-Rasool, the Prophet's poet, a companion whose verse was so valued that a pulpit was set up in the mosque for him to recite from. He was a master of the most prestigious art form of his society. And in his most famous lines praising the Prophet ﷺ, he wrote something that, if you are a maker of any kind, should stop you cold.
Here is what undid me about Hassan. He was, by his own admission, a lesser poet after he became Muslim. He said so directly: that his verse had lost some of its old force, because poetry is made beautiful by lies, by exaggeration, by invention — and Islam would not let him lie. Sit with that. The most celebrated poet of his age willingly traded his most reliable technique — embellishment — and kept writing anyway.
And the poetry survived. It is still regarded as the most beautiful praise of the Prophet ﷺ ever written. Which forces a question every artist eventually has to face: where does the beauty actually live? Hassan's answer, encoded in his own career, is that it was never primarily in the technique. The words were beautiful because their subject was beautiful. The essence made the language radiant, not the other way around. He was not decorating a flawed thing into something better. He was a clear pane of glass, and the light came through.
That is a creative philosophy. It says: your craft is in service of something true, not a substitute for it. It is the difference between a frame that flatters and a frame that reveals. The most honest thing I do as a director is get out of the way of what is already there. Hassan taught me that constraint — the refusal to lie — does not shrink art. It purifies it.
You were created free from every flaw — as if you were created exactly as you wished to be.
The word, not the picture, is the throne
When I first started taking this seriously, I assumed all art sat on roughly the same plane — that a painting, a song, a building, and a poem were just different rooms in the same house, none higher than the others. The Western canon I grew up absorbing more or less taught me this: the masterpiece is the masterpiece, whether it hangs in the Louvre or plays at the symphony.
Islam orders things differently, and the order took me a while to understand. At the top of the Islamic arts is not painting and not architecture but the recitation of the Qur'an, followed closely by calligraphy — the written word made visible. The scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, whose essay The Silent Theology of Islamic Art has shaped my thinking more than almost anything I've read, calls Qur'anic recitation the first and highest form of Islamic art, the one from which all the others are derived. Everything else — the geometry, the architecture, the poetry, the music — radiates outward from that center.
This was disorienting at first, and then it was clarifying. In the Western tradition, the human image is the summit; the Sistine ceiling, the portrait, the nude, the figure rendered in oil. The most prized act is depiction — capturing the visible world, and above all the human form, with mastery. Islam relocates the summit entirely. The highest art is not the rendering of a face but the carrying of a word. Calligraphy and recitation outrank the painted image not because Muslims couldn't paint — they could, and did — but because the tradition decided that the most sacred thing a human can shape is the revealed word itself, in sound and in script. The word, not the picture, is the throne.
For a visual person this should feel like a demotion, and for a while it did. But it reframed something for me. It meant that the discipline closest to the divine was one made of meaning carried in form — language that is simultaneously sound, image, and rhythm. Which, the more I think about it, is exactly what every artist is actually reaching for. We are all, in our own mediums, trying to make meaning take a shape you can perceive with your senses. Islam just names which version of that act sits highest, and why.
The rise and fall is the tafsir
If Hassan showed me that essence precedes beauty, and the hierarchy showed me that the carried word outranks the rendered image, Quranic recitation showed me how form itself can carry meaning in a way I had never encountered.
There is a discipline, maqamat — melodic modes inherited from a deep Arabic musical tradition — that skilled reciters use to shape recitation. Each mode carries its own emotional character: rules about which notes rest, how a phrase rises and falls, what feeling it naturally lives in. A reciter who has internalized them does not just sing pretty. They read the verse, feel where its meaning is going — a warning, a mercy, a story, a question flung at the heart — and modulate tone and pitch to match it. The sound becomes an argument. The rise and fall is the tafsir.
Some reciters train for years specifically to hit the vocal frequencies that reach the heart before the mind has time to translate the Arabic. You do not need to understand a word to weep at a great recitation; the sound arrives somewhere underneath language. And the depth of Arabic is what makes this possible — a tongue rich enough in sound, rhythm, and meaning that the reciter has room to move, to stretch a vowel where mercy lives and sharpen a consonant where the warning bites, without ever breaking the words.
I find this almost unbearably beautiful as a creative principle, because it is exactly what I am reaching for in film: the marriage of form and content so tight that the how and the what stop being separable. A great reciter at the line about the Fire does not sound the way they sound at the line about the Garden. The language is structured to permit that — Arabic's depth, its grammar, its sound, give the reciter room to move without breaking the words.
I want to be honest about the texture here, because honesty is the whole point: there is real scholarly debate about this. The tradition is emphatic that the melody must serve the text and never distort it. Beautifying the voice is encouraged — the Prophet ﷺ himself said to beautify the Qur'an with your voices — but imposing an external musical structure that bends letters, stretches what should be short, or turns recitation into performance is widely criticized. And that tension is, to me, the most instructive part. This is a tradition that takes the relationship between form and meaning so seriously that it has spent centuries arguing about exactly how much beauty is too much. That is not a tradition hostile to art. That is a tradition that respects art enough to discipline it.
Here is the single design idea that changed how I see, full stop.
The center is everywhere
It came to me slowly, across recitation and geometry and architecture, until I realized they were all saying the same thing.
In Islamic design, the center is everywhere. A Qur'anic verse can be the center of your attention whether you are reading it in Vancouver at 2 a.m. or hearing it in Mecca at dawn; the revelation doesn't have a single privileged location where it "really" happens. An Islamic geometric pattern has no true middle and no edge — it is a fragment of something that could continue forever in every direction, and wherever you stand inside it feels like the center because every point is equivalent. The pattern doesn't end at the wall; the wall just happens to be where the tile stops. The design implies an infinity it cannot physically contain.
Ogunnaike describes the moment this clicked for him: gazing at the tiles of a madrasa in Fes, he understood the old metaphor of God as "a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." That line has lived in me since I read it. Because it is not only theology — it is a complete design language. It tells you that the work you make is not a closed object with a frame around it and a focal point in the middle. It is a window onto something boundless, and your job is not to contain that something but to point at it, to make the viewer feel the part that continues past the edge of what you built.
This is the opposite of how I was trained to compose. The Western frame has a center — the rule of thirds, the vanishing point, the subject you light and the background you fall off. The composition is a contained world with a hierarchy inside it. Islamic design quietly refuses that. It says: there is no privileged point, because the divine order it gestures toward has no privileged point. The center is everywhere, the moment is always now, the pattern was already running before your tile and keeps running after it. Once you have seen this you cannot unsee it, and it has changed every frame I compose. I now think about what continues outside the rectangle as much as what sits inside it.
A circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
A room designed so that no spot in it is the spot
Now lift all of this off the page and put it inside a building.
The Great Mosque of Córdoba, built in stages from the 8th to 10th centuries in Andalusia, is one of the most famous structures in religious history — a forest of columns, hundreds of them, carrying double-tiered red-and-white arches in an endless rhythmic grid. Stand inside it and no single vantage point dominates; the repetition produces a near-dizzying optical effect, a sense of infinite space that extends past where your eye can resolve it. Architects and scholars have read this as an architecture fundamentally unlike the Western "ideal temple" — built not around a central object but around the impossibility of representing an unrepresentable, infinite God. The endless grid is an argument about Tawhid: a Creator with no beginning and no end, gestured at through space because space is the only honest medium for the infinite. It is the "center is everywhere" idea built at architectural scale — a room designed so that no spot in it is the spot.
And here is where the threads I have been pulling come together — because Córdoba is not one art form. It is three at once.
There is the textual layer: intricate Arabic calligraphy wrapping the walls, turning sacred words into visual rhythm — the second-highest art made architecture. There is the acoustic layer: when the Qur'an is recited inside, the maqamat I described carry an emotional narrative through the air — the highest art, filling the space. And there is the spatial layer: the architecture itself reflects, amplifies, and reshapes the human voice, so that recitation in that space is not the same recitation as anywhere else. A visitor experiences the same revelation visually, audibly, and spatially in a single moment. The building is a multi-sensory instrument, and the Qur'an is what it plays.
I think about installation art. I think about cinema, which is the only modern form that genuinely fuses image, sound, and engineered space. And then I realize Muslims were building total, immersive, multimodal works of art twelve hundred years ago — and the brief was always the same: make the infinite felt.
The geometry you have to perform to understand
There is one more mode, and it is the one that taught me art can be a form of prayer.
Islamic geometric patterns are built with almost nothing — a compass and a straightedge. From overlapping circles, the artist subdivides space into grids, then extrapolates stars, polygons, and interlocking tessellations that can, in principle, extend forever. The mathematics is rigorous. But what matters to me is that the pattern exists twice, in two completely different experiences.
For the maker, drawing it is kinetic and meditative — a slow, focused performance of construction, line by line, considered an act of spiritual elevation. You do not download an Islamic pattern. You build it, and the building changes you. For the viewer, the finished tessellation does something almost physical: the repetition vibrates, the surface seems to move, a static wall becomes a living optical event. That visual motion is read as the constant flow of divine order — infinity made visible, the eternal nature of God suggested by a pattern that refuses to end. And again: no center, no edge, continuable anywhere, forever.
So the same object is a meditation for the one who draws it and a vision for the one who beholds it. That is the most complete definition of art I know: a process that transforms its maker and an artifact that transforms its audience, with truth running through both. M.C. Escher built a career chasing the tessellations he saw at the Alhambra. He was reaching, his whole life, for something this tradition had already systematized into a spiritual discipline.
Imagination is not pretending — it's a way of seeing
There is a word at the heart of all of this that I had badly misunderstood, and getting it right rearranged everything.
In English, "imagination" means roughly making things up — the imaginary, the unreal, the invented. In the Islamic intellectual tradition, especially in the writings of Ibn ʿArabī that Ogunnaike draws on, imagination — khayāl — means something almost opposite. It is not a faculty for inventing what isn't there. It is the faculty that clothes pure meaning in sensory form, and that perceives meaning through sensory form. It is the bridge — the barzakh — between the world of spirit and the world of matter. It is what let the Prophet ﷺ see knowledge in a dream as a cup of milk: a real meaning, given a form you could perceive.
This is, I think, the single most important idea an artist can absorb, and it is the truest answer to what I actually do for a living. My job is not to invent fantasies. My job is to take something real but invisible — a grief, a longing, a truth about a person or a place — and give it a form that other people can see and hear and feel. To convey imagination into reality. Not to fabricate, but to make the invisible visible. Every frame I light, every cut I make, is an attempt to clothe a meaning in a form so that it can cross from my interior into yours.
Islam handed me a 900-year-old vocabulary for the thing I was already trying to do in the dark. It told me that imagination is not the enemy of truth but one of its two organs of perception — that we see God's signs with two eyes, reason and imagination, and that reason alone can only tell you God must exist the way it can tell you the Big Bang happened, which is to say without love and without presence. It is imagination that lets you feel the meaning in the sign. The artist, in this framing, is not a liar or an entertainer. The artist is a translator working at the border of the visible world, which is the most dignified job description I have ever been given.
Beauty is the bait; remembrance is the catch
If recitation is the highest of the arts, there is something higher still that all the arts merely serve — and naming it reorganizes the whole picture.
Every Islamic art, Ogunnaike argues, exists to support a supreme art that is not an art object at all: the purification of the soul, the cultivation of character, and the remembrance of God — dhikr. The geometry, the calligraphy, the architecture, the recitation: none of them are made for "art's sake." There is no art-for-art's-sake in this tradition. Each form exists because it returns the soul, by way of the senses, to the remembrance of its origin. The pattern on the wall is there to do something to the person standing in front of it.
This was the hardest idea for me to accept and the most freeing once I did. The art I make is not the point. The art I make is a means. Its purpose is to turn a heart — mine while I make it, yours while you receive it — back toward something true. That sounds like it should shrink the ambition of the work, and instead it expands it past anything the gallery could offer. It means a film is not finished when it looks good. It is finished when it does something to the soul of the person watching. The standard isn't aesthetic. It's transformative. Beauty is the bait; remembrance is the catch.
We are early, not absent
I have to register one disagreement with the scholar I've leaned on most, because it sits right at the center of my own craft.
Ogunnaike suggests that a truly Islamic cinema — film whose very philosophy and technique are rooted in the Islamic perspective, the way Bresson's camera is rooted in Catholicism or Tarkovsky's in Russian Orthodoxy — has not yet arrived. I understand the standard he's setting, and I respect how high he's holding the bar. But I think he's slightly too pessimistic, and as a filmmaker I want to plant a flag here.
Consider Moustapha Akkad's The Message (1976). It is a three-hour epic of the life of the Prophet ﷺ — and its central artistic decision is itself a piece of Islamic visual theology. The Prophet is never shown and never heard. The camera takes his point of view; characters speak to the lens; an empty space at the center of the frame carries the holiest presence in the film. That is not a limitation Akkad worked around. That is aniconism made cinematic — the same refusal to depict the sacred that gave us calligraphy instead of icons, now operating through a camera. The film makes you feel a presence precisely by refusing to render it. That is the center-is-everywhere principle turned into a directorial method: the most important point in the frame is the one you cannot see.
Or take Purple Don't Cry (2023), Mamoun S. Hassan's Toronto-set coming-of-age tragedy about a young Muslim man pulled toward fast money and street violence. It is not a film about Islam in the explaining-to-outsiders sense. Its characters are Muslim and flawed and fully human; their faith is not their alibi or their costume but one true thread among ambition and exhaustion and very bad decisions. Reviewers kept noticing the same thing — the remembrance of God threaded quietly through the whole film, present in the texture rather than the sermon. That is dhikr functioning as a cinematic atmosphere, not a message. It is a film that knows the supreme art is remembrance and lets that knowledge shape its grammar instead of its dialogue.
Neither film is perfect. The Message is heavily dramatized; Purple Don't Cry is a modest independent production. But "Islamic cinema doesn't exist yet" feels, to me, like saying a language doesn't exist because no one has yet written its War and Peace. The grammar is already here. The principles — aniconism, tawhid, dhikr, the dignity of the unseen — are already being translated into shot and cut by filmmakers who feel them in their bones. We are early, not absent. And I intend to be one of the people who keeps building the language.
Why I chose the picture over the firewall
I owe you the personal part, because none of the above stayed abstract for me.
For a real stretch of my life I stood at an intersection between two futures: cybersecurity and art. On paper, security was the responsible road — structured, in demand, legible to everyone who asked what I did. Art was the road I actually loved and could not justify. Both, oddly, rewarded the same instinct — the pattern recognition, the obsessive observation, the reading of systems most people walk past. A good security analyst and a good director are, at the root, the same kind of watcher. I could have been either. For a while I tried to be both and belonged fully to neither.
What broke the tie was not a career calculation. It was faith. Islam reframed the whole question for me. The tradition I have been describing — Hassan choosing truth over technique, the reciter bending sound to meaning, Córdoba making the infinite felt, the geometer praying with a compass, the filmmaker leaving the holiest frame empty — kept telling me the same thing: that deep observation is not a hobby to be apologized for. In Islam, seeing is close to worship. The Qur'an does not just permit reflection; it commands it, again and again, asking the reader to look at the sky, the seed, the alternation of night and day, and to think. It calls the things of creation āyāt — signs — the very same word it uses for its own verses. The world is a text. And it even, at moments, questions the very solidity of the reality we take for granted, naming everything other than God a kind of dream to be interpreted — and for a creative, that is not a threat. It is an invitation. It is permission to ask what is really there, to introspect, to play with the picture instead of accepting the frame I was handed.
Security would have asked me to protect existing structures. Art — and the faith that finally gave me language for it — asked me to see, and then to clothe what I saw in a form that could cross into someone else. I chose the picture over the firewall. And the deciding voice was not ambition. It was the conviction that the watching I could not switch off was given to me for a reason, and that the most honest thing I could do with it was point it at beauty and tell the truth.
The world is a text. And for a creative, that is not a threat — it is an invitation.
Every artist is, secretly, a theologian
So here is the claim I started with, now earned.
Every artist is, secretly, a theologian — making decisions about what is true, what is worth attention, what beauty even is. Most of us make those decisions by accident, inheriting them from whatever aesthetic happens to be in the air. A faith-shaped lens makes the decision conscious. It gives you a brief: a reason the seeing matters, a standard for the truth your work serves, a refusal to lie that purifies rather than constrains, and a center that is everywhere so your work is never just a closed object but always a window onto something boundless.
Islam, for me, did not make my work smaller or safer. It made me more ethical, yes — but more than that, it made me freer. More questions to ask. More depth to reach into. More permission to treat observation as sacred, imagination as a way of seeing rather than pretending, and form as meaning made perceptible. It gave me a hierarchy that puts the carried word above the rendered image, and a purpose — remembrance — that sits above even the highest art. The most creative tradition I have ever stood inside turned out to be the one I was afraid would fence me in.
Pre-production is the real director. And faith, it turns out, is the real pre-production — the work you do on yourself, long before the camera rolls, that decides what you will be able to see when it does.
Asad