KARACHI, Feb 25: People in hundreds attended the Arts Council’s programme “Life and Aesthetics” based on lectures by eminent Indian scholar Ayatullah Syed Aqeel al-Gharavi and known poet and critic Sehar Ansari, held here on Sunday.

Allama al-Gharavi, who is also Secretary of the Forum of Philosophers of India, discussed the topic with precision and great insight, and kept himself confined to the theme so scholarly that in spite of discussing the Holy Quran and Islam throughout his lecture, he succeeded in avoiding the discussion to become religious.

“The aesthetics is nothing but light and what makes different levels of aesthetics depends on strength and weakness of light,” he said, adding that light is existent reality and darkness not. Darkness itself is nothing; it manifests just absence of light. Likewise knowledge is existent reality and ignorance shows just absence of knowledge.

Allama al-Gharavi believes that life is the name for the aesthetics of existence and the death denotes a state in which aesthetics disappears. God has no face but the languages, which disseminate human expressions, do not have enough power to describe ‘Allah’ and call him ‘beautiful’.Divinity is the ultimate source of aesthetics; that it was why everything which manifests itself perpetually brings aesthetic value of a new kind because it has inherent orientation of light.

Al-Gharavi also supervises PhD students at the prestigious Aligarh University. He said the Holy Quran reveals in the language of aesthetics whereas Shariah came later. “The Holy Quran was revealed in the language of aesthetics and human values after which our Muftis took guidelines from it and evolved Shariah and a set of laws and regulations,” he pointed out.

He said Shariah was guardian of the values of life and there were some Muftis without adequate knowledge of Shariah who would violate human values.

“What is Sharia is to preserve and protect the aesthetics of life,” said al-Gharavi, author of 14 books on religion and literature. “Difference of opinion and thinking is aesthetics of Ijtehad (deducing rules of law through juristic reasoning from original sources).”

Prof Sehar Ansari, in his brief lecture, gave references of different scholars from a region from Greece to Germany and also those of modern times, and said aesthetics was an abstract thing that gave meaning to life.

He recited couplets of various classical and neo-classical poets of Urdu, and said life was a name of composition and equilibrium and what kept it intact was aesthetics.

“Aesthetics is an automatic process, which gives beauty to culture and life at large. It is an integral part of human thinking,” said Prof Ansari.