Madonna and the Mullah vs. Madame Rose: On Art, Sex, and Love

By Inas Younis

At the turn of the 20th century, legendary best selling author and artist Kahlil Gibran was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and exiled from his homeland of Lebanon, where state officials denounced his writings as a threat to peace and held a public burning of his book, appropriately titled Spirits Rebellious. Undeterred by the condemnation of his countrymen, Gibran lived up to the reputation of his work and its title by doing what all dangerous writers do when censored by ignorance—he issued a second edition.

The first account of his three-part book was of an 18-year-old girl, Madame Rose Hanie, who was married off to a rich and devoted man more than twice her age. Although he inundated her with worldly pleasures and material gifts, his efforts to secure her affection proved futile. She simply could not bring herself to love him. Nor could she continue to physically and bodily reward him for his kindness, without bearing the ramifications of such a pretense on her own soul.

Madame Rose’s community was unsympathetic to her plight and sided against her. The community, including her husband, was unwilling to recognize that the attainment of material wealth could not offset the spiritual poverty that arises when sex is enjoyed without its prerequisite, love. Society back then, and perhaps more so now, lived in denial of the metaphysical reality that earthly laws, transactions, and the best of intentions are not sufficient enough to force God’s meaning of love into the heart of any man or woman. But much worse then their denial was their ignorant espousal of a moral system which demanded that gratitude for material success be demonstrated through atonement by way of sacrificing man and woman's greatest spiritual needs— romantic love and its corollary, sexual fulfillment. It was then, as it is perhaps now, the subtle disease of mankind to conform to a mentality of gratitude for his newly acquired material prosperity by means of denying his spiritual potential.

In the story, Madame Rose leaves her husband to live in poverty with a man she loves. And although she is ostracized, she is not concerned with her besmirched reputation and points out the hypocrisy of those who remain in unloving marriages forced upon them by laws they do not understand and are then compelled to take lovers to fulfill their needs. The purpose is to illustrate how hypocrisy becomes the spiritual cost of living in a society which does not encourage and in some cases even does not tolerate the inherent human desire to heed the directives of the soul and in turn, how prudence and a quest for social consensus drives people to betray their ideals and dreams and rely on hypocrisy, fanaticism or hedonism as their only available coping mechanism.

Gibran believed that man-made laws have been the greatest impediment to living life according to one's highest calling. But it has never been laws, traditions, or customs, no matter how backwards, that have deprived people from enjoying the profits of the enormous progress they have made in the last century, nor from using it as a springboard towards attaining their highest spiritual potential. Laws and traditions are merely a side effect, a simple product of a more serious underlying problem. The greatest impediment to our failure to embrace progress is the neurological brain damage we have suffered from the absence of thinkers—modern day philosophers and artists whose responsibility is to reconcile that which is rational and allows humans to produce and progress with that which is moral, to reconcile them, not as mutually exclusive objectives, but as one inseparable goal so that body and soul can be united in drive, desire, and action. Stringent laws and traditions evolved to remedy what the Madonnas and Mullahs of our time have done, albeit in profoundly different ways, in reinforcing what should have long become the archaic notion that the human body is divorced from its mind and soul, and that its physical impulses have a mind of their own independent of its soul that must be set on either a carnal or cardinal course.

In other words, you can either submit to your body and its desires as your highest calling or kill your desires and become a religious ideologue. And do not take any comfort in the fact that most people are not on either end of the spectrum, but are instead apologetically and blindly shifting from one perspective to another, armed only with the rationalizations that emotions of the moment can give them. There is no dignity in straddling fences. Instead, we can take much comfort in our untapped gift to develop the intellectual arguments and moral authority to do what we should have done a long time ago: reject both world views.

But unfortunately, so ingrained is this separation between the corporeal and spiritual world that even Gibran makes his own unconscious apology for his spiritual greediness by making the character of Madame Rose’s husband, who is the metaphor for the material world, rich, and her lover, who is the spiritual counterpart, a destitute man, thereby reinforcing the flawed point of view that in order to pursue spiritual growth, the material world must be abandoned.

The objective of new Muslim scholars, our modern day mavericks, is to restore humans into the integrated individuals they were intended to be. Because for a volitional person who has acquired his identity by heeding the most fundamental directive of the quest for knowledge, a person who is not only free politically but has liberated himself spiritually by claiming the awesome responsibility of his own free will, there is no clash between love and logic. There is no disparity between that which is moral and that which is sensible. The person of free will recognizes that his free will is not a given, but is only a consequence of the first real choice he is ever called to make, the choice to think. For this kind of a person, there is no discrepancy between desires and actions, no divergence between heart and mind, and no inconsistency between body and soul .

The mature person who has thought things through rejects the notion that his desires, in the work he chooses, to the woman he loves, or the friends he keeps is separate from his higher moral calling but will insist that it is always a reflection of it. This maverick will claim that his actions mirror his wishes and desires and not the other way around. And he will also maintain that any law or tradition which violates his right to the pursuit of happiness according to the purest standard God gave him, the standard of his soul and reason, and his ability to actualize them through the medium of his body, should be denounced. Any idea, including the one that insists that sex is a corporeal pleasure to be equated with the worldly, thereby making sex and its execution a material not a spiritual question, should be rejected. Every idea that denies him the channels to communicate his world view through his chosen “art” should be censured.

And the avenue that will usher this kind of man into the 21st century, the route that will be used to communicate this new world view will be the medium of art. Art will be the instrument that produces concrete justification of his defiance of social norms in the interest of personal aspiration. Art will be the medium that will establish desire and soul as synonyms and will illustrate the penalty of hypocrisy, fanaticism, and hedonism when they are rendered as antonyms.

If there is hope and a cure for the misery of modern existence, in spite of its prosperity, it will lie squarely on the shoulders of our artists. They are the intelligentsia of the modern world. Their art will not be defined according to Madonna or the mullah, but by Madame Rose Hanie, not the young girl looking for love, but the symbol of all youth looking for the moral sanction to live according to their heart's desire, hearts that are still clinging to dreams in spite of the bombardment of messages that correlate survival with the ability to juggle their lives between the dictates of a Madonna and a Mullah.

Art will be the medium that resurrects those dreams. Because art has the natural filtration mechanism that allows flexibility in interpretation, with minimal damage to the undeveloped mind. Art is the only medium that will inoculate a message from the belief that a person can, just by virtue of their spiritual strength, stand above the laws of nature, set forth by God . The figurative nature of art is the muzzle which will silence the intellectual parasites of our culture, by overriding their literal mechanisms of cognition and going straight to the sophistication of abstract thinking.

If Gibran was forced to speak overtly without the security of poetic language, his words would have been misinterpreted as an endorsement of hypocrisy and heresy. Instead he relies on metaphors, analogies, and the art of poetry to express the height of his spiritual beliefs without sacrificing the natural laws that bind him to the corporeal world.

When I use the word art, I am speaking of the only art that counts, that which exalts and elevates humans, not the “art” of those for whom shock value is the only standard of appraisal. Shock value is useless in counteracting the conservative opposition to art. Its vulgarity only imparts credibility to the mission of those who wish to obliterate free thought. Shock value art is intellectually indefensible and explicit and therefore dismissible, lending itself to the lowest variety of literal interpretation.

Art must be the implied and indirect vehicle used to transmit moral truths and sacred messages, thereby immunizing them from misinterpretation by those who seek to obliterate the distinctions between desires and wants. Desire has its foundation in the soul and is immutable. Wants are transient, fickle, and are usually escape routes from living up to our souls' highest standard.

The only argument that literalists will have in opposing this form of art is their fallback argument, for want of an intellectual one, and that is that art is haram (forbidden). But just tell them that art is only haram if it attempts to serve as a metaphor for the divine. And they will ask, What is this word metaphor. And you will reply, It is the figure of speech used in our holy book, the Qur'an. And then they will say the Qur'an is the literal word of God, and you will say, Can the word of God in all its magnificence submit to the finitude of human language without the shroud of allegory?

They will say no. And you will say, Neither can art. Art cannot by default try to reproduce the divine, for the intensity of anything remotely divine would shatter any physical frame. They will say, But people will be tempted to commit idolatry through art, and then you will tell them that they have been doing it through their words and thoughts anyways.

Tell them that art is the medium of reconciling, the body which is bound by the laws of physics and the mind, unbound by anything but by the strength of its own imagination .

You can measure a society's values by the kind of popular art it champions. Look at the world and its art forms or lack thereof and use that as the standard of measuring the development of that society's intellectual culture, and you will see the truth of that statement. Take a country like Saudi Arabia, where many forms of art are not even permitted and where consequently there is no life, no variety, only uniformity and xenophobia. All three of the worst forms of coping mechanisms thrive there—hypocrisy, fanaticism and hedonism, which ironically is a testament to their will to survive and not self destruct. They annihilate mind and body for the sake of the soul, not recognizing that the mind is the hardware of the soul and the body is its only means of expression. In the west we have shock value being passed off as art and consequently no amount of sex or food is satiating our spiritual appetite, and the product is a culture of hedonism. Where the body is the only standard of guidance, and the mind is merely the vehicle to rationalize its actions.

Either point of view relies on the defective premise that people are multiple personality psychos unable to integrate their being and will. Or worse, that they have no will at all, that they are merely a product of their being, their bodies, their dopamine levels. I would not dispute that assertion if it weren't for the fact that it once again reverses cause and effect

The artist, whether it is a true artist like Gibran or aspiring ones like Madonna, are called to follow one criterion, and that is to take an idea or ideal and give it concrete representation, through poetry, painting, music or fiction. The problem with this is that modern day pop art is ruled by pop stars, and their only contribution to the liberation of the soul from the shackles of self imposed laws at the expense of spiritual needs is not to heed their soul at all, but to deny its existence. They celebrate the body and its impulses as if it is the only standard by which to live.

Madonna has even vocalized it in her controversial song, Justify My Love, in which she sings, in between moaning and heavy breaths, “poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” Ironically, it is that very message that we should embrace. Except it is too explicit a truth to be immunized from being misconstrued. It has divergent implications depending on the underlying cultural value system. And the value system through which all art is being filtered is the one which has been solidly ingrained in the minds of Madonnas and Mullahs alike, that people's desires are not rational, that they must either surrender to their carnal or cardinal, their physical or spiritual needs. And if it is a battle between the two, you can bet that the carnal will win. In Madonna vs. Mullah, Madonna will be the victor. The Mullah will claim that it is because humans are too weak to resist temptation, and it is thus the responsibility of a state to legislate their behavior. Madonna will tell you that your body is your highest calling. And your mother will tell you that your body must be put in its proper context, which usually means in the arms of a nice Pakistani girl or nice Arab man that she has lovingly hand selected for you.

All three will sterilize the artist in you. For the traditional person, the greatest manifestation of their ideals is expressed through sex, not as their only desire but as the abstraction of all desire. If an artist’s goal is to take an ideal and give it form through paint or words, then the common person's drive is to express the ideal of their greatest self though the only human expression where mind, body, and spirit have the potential for complete unity—through the sex act. The free person is attracted to precisely that which is a direct reflection of their own values and sense of self worth. And the fact that people are casual about sexuality is not a testament to how freedom has failed them, but on how the intellectuals and philosophers have failed us all. Freedom has never been the enemy or cause of the laxity in behavior we are witnessing. People only reflect their own intellectual impotence and lack of self respect by the sexual choices they make. They are only trying to compensate for the self respect they have lost on the altar of Madonna and the Mullah, both of them professing to sing, just like a prayer.

People of integrity cannot make themselves physically attracted to something that does not appeal to them sexually, intellectually, and spiritually, they simply will go limp, so to speak. You cannot legislate people's sex drive, you can only remind them that they will get what they deserve and that their life will either be their greatest joy or punishment. If you are attracted to a brainless barbie doll, then it is a product of your own lack of self worth which you seek to alleviate by using the neediness of someone who is none the wiser. Hold people accountable for their decisions and they will develop the kind of self respect that will force them to go impotent at the prospect of touching anyone they do not love with every fiber of their being.

Sex is valuable to a person's freedom not because it is always a spiritually uplifting experience; on the contrary, it rarely if ever is. But keep in mind the value of anything and everything is directly proportional to its inherent potential. The value of everything we know is measured not by its literal value at any given moment, but by the potential we give it through our capacity to think abstractly. Everything, including paper currency, the elemental salts turned into life saving medications, and even painting, which to a dog is just color on canvas, but to us is a million dollar Picasso, is valuable because of its potential, not because of what it is. Sex is the most valuable expression of freedom and mind because of the monumental potential it carries in the act of conceiving a human life.

Both eastern and western cultures are equally guilty of denying this most primitive human necessity, to aspire towards the highest form of sexual gratification. Instead we have the only version of sex that both the Mullah and Madonna know, secular sex. Secular sex is the antipathy of spiritual sex. It is sex devoid of a spiritual context. Sex devoid of romantic love. It is sex designed to activate everything between your legs by eradicating the activity between your ears. The mullah trusts that sex is a product of consummating a social contract and is not interested or even invested in the conditions surrounding the many unions he is called to consummate. And the Madonna culture trusts that sex is a product of an urge which needs to be relieved. They are both committing a breach against the soul, one by lying to it, and the other by denying it.

To begin a marriage or relationship on such a premise forces a person to become disembodied. It forces a man to have sordid relations where only two bodies are being engaged, where one is making love to a classification, a generalization, not a unique person, where a man’s only distinction between sex with his wife and sex with the neighbor's wife is that one is halal (permissible) and the other haram (prohibited).

So while we may not be casual about our sexuality, we are just as guilty of imposing secular sex on society as all the nipple baring, midriff gyrating pop stars in the world, not because we are hung up on the topic of sex—our less than sterile conversations and publications on the topic will easily discount that argument. Our evasiveness has never been a question of sex, but rather sex and its relation to that four letter word, love.

The Mullahs demand that we submit to an ideology which seeks to “spiritualize” our politics and public life, by secularizing our private ones. While they inject God in our government halls, they take Him out of our bedrooms. But have no fear, because if you do get nauseatingly bored with the sterile secular sordid sex life they have sanctioned for you, the Mullahs have an answer for that too. They will remind you that sex is sadaqa (charity), forgetting that any self respecting person would settle for celibacy over charitable sex any day. The notion that sex can be charity is more offensive to the recipient than to the benevolent giver.

The American response to “poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another” is to encourage man to satiate every hedonistic impulse. In turn, the Mullah's response is to bring together any two strangers faster than he can pronounce them man and wife.

But our version must read, Poor is the man who stands silent in the face of a culture, a country, or a system which denies him the right to choose his work and his love, and then punishes him and his progeny if he elects to exercise his heart's will and marry outside his tribe. Pathetic is the man whose honor and self respect can only be upheld by the reigns of a contract or a law, or on the basis of his accountability to others, without which he is nothing but an unrestrained animal at the mercy of his every impulse and urge. And spineless is the man who cannot trust himself with the awesome responsibility of freedom but would rather be shackled down by laws than bear the burden of his own free will.

And pitiable is the ideologue who, having endured his own spiritual castration, his own intellectual surrender, must now justify his own hypocrisy by conquering through dogma those who retain some remnant of the desires which were denied him by others. And poorest of all is the rebel who, after spending his youth submerged in a pop culture which fails him for the same reasons his parents have, must now shamelessly and in full blind force submit himself to the dictates of a Mullah, without realizing that both Madonna and the Mullah are essentially subscribers to the doctrine which ruled the town of Madame Rose. Poor is he who is then told that denial of the “flesh” is an affirmation of the heart and mind, instead of what it really is, a betrayal of it.

God help the man who denies the urgings of the flesh for the sake of society and then demands that society repay him by systematically dampening the song in his heart, censoring the beauty that is woman, and denying his soul its passion for life, love, and all the sacred arts which have been spoiled by the mainstream literalist mentality of his family and peers.

And thus, with our silent and acquiescent blessings, the fanatic is officially born, emboldened by his newly found source of esteem and success at having silenced the rest of us. He decides that truth and wisdom can only be expressed according to the language that his damaged literalist mind can comprehend. So he demands that the painter express herself through words, the writer through labor, and the lover through violence.

An artist allowed only to express himself according to the method sanctioned for him will say that he cannot express himself except through the medium he knows. Once his salvation depends on it, that artist, a born leader, will become the worst kind of follower, volunteering for his own castration. He will put his head through the guillotine without coercion. He will self-destruct, or if he gets lucky, he will discover an antidote to his broken spirit—hypocrisy, fanaticism, or hedonism.

So imagine the sacrifice we are asking our Madame Rose to make when we insist that she share her wisdom explicitly using only the mediums that our little half-starved intellectually feeble minds can appreciate. Imagine us all telling her “to tell it like it is” and spare us the analogies, metaphors and art forms, which are just too damn profound for us to dissect, let alone aspire to actualize. Imagine the sacrifice she is prepared to make.

Imagine Madame Rose as an abstraction of not just a woman in love, or all the youth of our nation, but as symbol of all mankind past, present, and future. Imagine her in the mind that knows no bounds except the ones you have set for it. Imagine her standing on the highest summit of the highest building that the mind of man has erected, fearful of the risk that she is taking in listening to your demands that she speak to you in a voice that you can understand. Imagine her fear at the prospect that, without the benefit of figurative speech, of metaphors and analogies, without allegory and art to safeguard all the imbeciles who will misconstrue her words and then use them to wreak havoc, the way they have used the words of Jesus and Muhammad to inflict damage, she will be unable to speak to you.

Imagine her refusing to submit to the symbol of a cross and be sacrificed lest you think that self sacrifice is a virtue. Imagine her declining to cover her body and face lest you think that she is espousing your humility through subjugation. Imagine the angelic face of Madame Rose Hanie as she holds nothing higher than her head, with eyes cast upward towards heaven and grimacing to say the words that she is prepared to say, only with the promise that you are wise enough to understand the magnitude of what it means and will resist the temptation to warp its connotation to suit your own corruption. Imagine Madame Rose Hanie as she proudly declares, Let us make love, not war and poor is the man or mullah who tries to stop us.