Cultivating an ethics of beauty and excellence in planetary times: An engaged Muslim's anthology (Awqaf SA, Cape Town, December 2024).
We are living through a time of rupture, ecological collapse, deepening inequality, genocide, and the unchecked spread of algorithmic technologies.
These are not isolated crises. They are interwoven symptoms of a civilisational failure driven by a violent modernity: one that separates humans from nature, commodifies life and sacrifices the vulnerable at the altar of progress. Amid this, a pressing question emerges: how do we remain human?
To remain human is not simply to survive. It is to live with purpose, dignity and ethical clarity. It is to stay awake, to respond with heart and thought to the suffering around us.
Yet, the dominant rhythms of our time militate against such wakefulness. We are seduced by mechanised time, numbed by spectacle, and entrapped in lives that rush past the cries of the earth and people with low incomes.
An ethical and spiritual reorientation
Against this backdrop, I propose a reorientation: a call to embrace the ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual principles of moral beauty and excellence. Moral beauty draws from the deep well of the Islamic tradition, particularly the Qur’an, the prophetic example, Sufi ethical insight and classical moral thought. However, it is not confined to a narrow notion of piety. I argue that all moral traditions contain the religious and spiritual resources to support such an ethical approach. I draw from within my own tradition while remaining fully attentive to the cross-pollination of traditions and ideas.
I share with many others the concern for living with care and for showing up in the world with humility, attentiveness and generosity. Such an orientation rejects brutality and indifference. It compels us to engage the inner and outer dimensions of existence, our moral selves and the shared wounds of the world.
In our planetary moment, the relevance of such an ethical orientation cannot be overstated. The genocidal erasure of the Palestinian people, the destruction of Gaza’s education systems, the suffering of displaced communities and the intensifying climate crisis all confront us with the collapse of meaning.
In my book (Fataar, December 2024), I argue for the urgent need to respond meaningfully to what I describe as “planetary times.” This requires a theological reorientation that moves beyond the destructive egoism embedded in modern, human-centred worldviews. Instead, I advocate a process theology that recognises the profound interdependence of all forms of existence.
Such a theology recognises that the animate and the inanimate, humans and non-humans, are all linked in attunement across ecosystems and planetary life systems. This shift invites us to rethink our ethical, spiritual, and ecological commitments in ways that affirm the interconnectedness and sacredness of all life.
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Algorithms increasingly determine what we see, how we relate and what we believe. Language is no longer a space of encounter, but a site of manipulation. What then becomes of ethical life, of discernment, of spiritual presence?
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And now, in the age of AI, even the domain of meaning-making is under siege. Algorithms increasingly determine what we see, how we relate and what we believe. Language is no longer a space of encounter, but a site of manipulation. What then becomes of ethical life, of discernment, of spiritual presence?
I do not pretend that ancient concepts alone can resolve these dilemmas. But they offer us tools, not for retreat, but for rethinking. My anthology’s emphasis on an ethics of beauty and excellence invites a posture of search: a willingness to think and feel across traditions, to seek meaning in a fragmented world and to refuse the numbing effects of neoliberal modernity.
I call this a “process theology of response”, an approach that acknowledges divine presence as unfolding with human life and as deeply immanent in our ethical struggles. It is not about clinging to dogma. It is about moving with discernment in complexity. This is a call to shared becoming amid collapse, an invitation to re-envision our moral/spiritual commitments for life-affirming planetary transitions.
Living and acting in solidarity
We need to recover our capacity to feel, to be wounded by the world without being paralysed. This is not a call to sentimentality, but to spiritual courage. To write, to speak, to testify in the face of erasure is not just expression. It is resistance. As the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer reminds us, “If I must die, you must live to tell my tale.” Bearing witness is a moral duty in the age of forgetting, falsification, and digital amnesia.
Here, the ethics of beauty and excellence become more than an ideal. They become a method, shaping our writing, our actions and our presence. They compel us to ask: how do we show up? With what care and comportment? In what ethical form?
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Modernity’s assault on the sacred has rendered time mechanical, place disposable, and death invisible. But in religious and indigenous cosmologies, time is rhythmic, layered and attuned to divine presence. Space is thick with memory, sacrifice and community.
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In this spirit, time and space must be reclaimed as sacred. Modernity’s assault on the sacred has rendered time mechanical, place disposable, and death invisible. But in religious and indigenous cosmologies, time is rhythmic, layered and attuned to divine presence. Space is thick with memory, sacrifice and community. Death is not an end, but a seed of life. In this view, ethical life must begin with attentiveness to time, place, mortality and the cries of the vulnerable and dispossessed.
Ethical attention also means recovering storytelling. Stories interrupt the repetition of trauma. They weave broken lives back into meaning. They connect the past to the present, the personal to the political, the local to the planetary.
In South Africa, our theologies must emerge from the backstreets of Grassy Park and Langa, from District Six, die Vlaktes’ and Kayamandi’s memories, university students’ struggles and from the rituals of township churches, temples, and mosques. These are not peripheral spaces. They are the crucibles of moral imagination.
Our ethical traditions are not frozen. They are alive, indigenous, transoceanic, continental, intergenerational and continually reformulated in and enacted through struggle. They speak not only to African traditional religion practitioners, Muslims, agnostics, Christians, Hindus or Jews, but to all who seek to live justly, with the earth and with one another.
To embrace an ethics of beauty is to move across boundaries, listen deeply, and act with ethical form. It is to ask: How do I show up? With what comportment? What care?
In this sense, solidarity becomes more than politics. It becomes a spiritual commitment to walk with others, to bind our fate to theirs, and to participate in the labour of ethical repair.
A call to stay human
We need new forms of moral friendship rooted in humility, accountability and recognition of shared vulnerability. An ethics of beauty becomes the bridge across race, faith, geography, and memory. This is not to offer a fixed programme, but a disposition – an invitation to dwell differently in our world on fire.
The question is not whether we can save the world, but how we can remain faithful to it and recompose life ethically and beautifully amid its collapse.
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If there is hope, it lies not in technological salvation or ideological purity. It lies in ethical reawakening and in the recovery of moral clarity, spiritual humility and attentive presence. It lies in the courage to stay human.
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If there is hope, it lies not in technological salvation or ideological purity. It lies in ethical reawakening and in the recovery of moral clarity, spiritual humility and attentive presence. It lies in the courage to stay human.
And to stay human, we must learn how to live with the earth and one another again. This requires more than just coexistence; it involves recognising the inevitability of death as a fundamental structuring principle of life itself. In colonial modernity, death has been denied, sanitised and removed from the every day, enabling the machinery of genocide and the accelerating collapse of planetary ecosystems. By severing the natural rhythms of life and death, modernity has constructed a world that pursues endless progress at any cost, ignoring the moral weight of mortality.
In response, we are called to embrace an ethic that re-centres death and its moral accountability in our structuring of life. This means living with a renewed sense of sacredness and responsibility towards one another, the earth and the broader existence. It is a call to return to an ethic of beauty and excellence that honours the finitude of planetary life and the dignity of all beings.
This article draws on a speech delivered by the author at a book launch discussion hosted at the Beyers Naudé Centre, Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University, on 21 May 2025. The author, Aslam Fataar, is a Research Professor in Higher Education Transformation in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University. His book is titled Cultivating an ethics of beauty and excellence in planetary times: An engaged Muslim's anthology (Awqaf SA, Cape Town, December 2024).
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