“He shaped you and then made your shapes beautiful (Fa aḥsana ṣuwarakum)” (40:64)

This Quranic verse has been kicking around in my head for the past week, trying to unravel its intrinsic meaning. I’ve read the tafaasir on it but wasn’t satisfied.

Usually, the first question that pops into one’s mind is, if Allaah shaped us in the best forms, then why do many of us have physical qualities that are deemed universally unaesthetic? The more I mused about it, the more its profound truth hardened in my head.

You see, one of God’s names is Al-Musawwir (The Shaper of Beauty). In this verse, Allaah says not only did He sculpted each and every one of us but that He did it so well and with perfection. Allaah uses the verb ahsana, which carries multiple meanings, including excellence and making things beautiful.

Conventional wisdom already teaches us that the concept of beauty is relative to the individual, hence the hackneyed expression: beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. However, in reality, media and society have established unrealistic standards of beauty, capitalising on the resultant and growing insecurities of millions of folks. But let’s flip the script a little and let’s try to contemplate why Allaah says that He made our shapes beautiful even though we still emotionally harbour physical insecurities based on how others perceive us.

Allaah shaped each and every one of us with the real properties of objective beauty. Our natural and inalienable asymmetries that make us who we are, already exist in the metaphysical realm (physical world). This is what one calls objective beauty. It’s out there. Just like physical objects exist without people observing it, so does our objective beauty exists in its natural state.

It’s only when humans interact with each other’s objective beauty that different subjective interpretations are initated. For example, two individuals that interact with each other will acknowledge what John Locke categorised as ‘primary qualities’. They are the mechanical makeup of the individual being: his/her size, shape and motion. These two same individuals will subsequently utilise their ‘secondary qualities’ (i.e. colour, taste, smell and sound) to establish their perception of beauty/taste For instance, two individuals will recognise the shape and figure of an apple (primary qualities), but one might love the taste of an apple whilst the other might detest it.

In the same way, these two individuals will have established a form of a subjective measure of beauty based on each other’s physical attributes even though it doesn’t alter the real beauty that Allaah endowed us with. In other words, how others might perceive your physical appearance (based on their taste) does not change in any way or form the objective beauty you were shaped with. Similarly, how people’s opinions cannot change the facts.

Allaah says in his Qur’an that the human being was created weak — forever bound to the inherent constraints of human nature. And we judge each other based on these superficial beauty standards that we constructed in our weakened state. Which is why the Prophet (SCW) acknowledged that some people will always assess others based on their subjective interpretations of beauty: “Allaah does not look at your outward appearance and your wealth. He looks only at your hearts and your deeds.” (Muslim). Essentially, saying that Allaah already knows our objective beauty since He shaped us with excellence and as such can never become the fundamental criterion that humans already judge each other on.

If Allaah, in His infinite wisdom, proclaimed that He not only shaped you but made your forms beautiful, who can say otherwise?