A note on the metaphysics of Roya's art

 Originally posted, here: https://www.facebook.com/nwahidazal/posts/2618472251813407?comment_id=2618561765137789&notif_id=1593232353634280

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As I started teaching Roya classical Arabic just after Nuri was born in March 2012 -- because she wanted to be able to read Qurʾān and ḥadīth in the original (a few years later we started on Persian as well) -- her interest in Shaykhī metaphysics was seriously piqued. So, among other things, I would regularly read to her from the writings of Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsaʾī (ر) and others in the larger Shaykhī pantheon. What hooked Roya especially to Shaykhī metaphysics was its reverse hylomorphism where Matter precedes form as an active principle (reverse hylomorphism also, by the way, occurs in a few classical Ismāʿilī theosophers like Abu Yaʿqūb Sijistānī but not as pronounced and sophisticated as how al-Awḥad dealt with it).

She once said to me that this idea of reverse hylomorphism appealed and resonated with her especially as an artist because this was how she approached her own art where the blank canvass represents the infinite possibilities of representation in its primal undifferentiation (or the 'hyle' prima materia) which then the canvass itself formulates into its myriad of differentiated form(s). Yet the blank canvass remains the principia of all the forms that are already-always latent within its intelligence, as it were. Once she outright confessed that it was really the canvass who was the true painter with the artist merely the canvass' instrument for the realization of the forms upon it by drawing them out. This blew me away because she had grasped a quite involved metaphysical concept better than anyone I know.