The Book of the Chair

The Interiors of Masjid Wazir Khan, Old City of Lahore

The Book of the Chair[1]

In the name of the Lord whose throne to all heavens and the earth extends.

It’s difficult. Living the life of the mind is not all fun. It’s strange how sometimes a thing as simple as a chair is all that it takes to set your mind thinking deep, dangerous, insidious thoughts. A simple, four-legged, dark-brown, wooden chair. Straight, austere, cold in the sharpness of its figure and stern too. It’s a common sight. It seems innocuous.

Prototype of the Chair

Yet, let there be no doubt that this chair is the archetype of all modern furniture.

Look around yourself. Sofas, benches, stools, they are all derivatives. The chair is the concept beh

ind them all. And dinner tables, office desks, coffee tables, kitchen tops and the like are only responses to the turn-around brought by the chair’s conquest of our architectural imagination, as a result of which, what could previously be achieved on the floor must now to be accomplished at an elevation. If they can afford it, a chair is what anyone wants to sit on. In an office. A workshop. A factory. A shop. At school. In a car. In the bedroom. The lounge. Or the garden. And even in the washroom where the chair has discreetly assumed the disguise of the utensil known commonly as a “commode”.

The only place you will not find it in, if you happen to frequent it, is the mosque. You might just chance upon one or two fold-able ones, sulking around the corners, but they’re reserved for the physically handicapped and the disabled elderly. If you are intelligent, you may count the Imam’s masnad near the mihrab as a chair, because that is what it really is. But that too is reserved. Otherwise, no chairs in the mosque. What an oddity the mosque is, in this regard. Another such place, if you’re averse to visiting it, is the shrine, that cousin of the mosque. There too, you won’t generally find any chairs. On rare occasions, you might find one, but that’s the Pir’s gaddi. Reserved.

Everywhere, the chair reigns. Well, almost everywhere.

Interiors of Masjid Mahabat Khan, Old City of Peshawar

*****

Come to think of it, the whole set of human bodily possibilities comes down to a few basics: you are either still or moving. If you are still, you are either standing or bending or sitting or prostrating or lying down. This religion of ours prescribes acts of worship for all of these postures. The tawaf is the par excellence prayer of motion. And as for stillness, the Quran commands us to be in the remembrance of God, rukka’an, sujjadan, wa ala jumbin, that is, while bending, prostrating and even when lying on one’s side. That azkar have been prescribed for all bodily possibilities and not just one, and that different azkar have been prescribed for each possibility, might be more than a coincidence. May be, it is meant to reaffirm the Islamic creed which requires us to consecrate the whole of life and not just a segment it of. And may be, each possibility has a unique advantage which then ties up with the zikr prescribed for it. But we are now straying too far now from the basic issue.

If our body is capable of achieving this whole range of postures all on its own, why do we need artificial augmentation for sitting?

As a matter of fact, we don’t.

The healthy human being is quite capable of walking, standing, bending, sitting and lying down, all without any prostheses. In fact, while sitting, we are capable of an amazing range of postures – the do-zanu, char-zunu, ukrun, chaunkri and neem-ukrun and taek-laga-kar, being just a few that come to. The chair and its likes, we need only for a few postures – such as sitting with legs hanging or legs crossed. The whole multitude of other postures, we can achieve without needing any artificial support. .[2]

The Ottoman Sultan Muhammad a-Fateh, sitting char-zanu

No matter how ‘normal’ it may sound to us today, for most human societies that we know about, sitting on the chair was not the normal way of sitting.  The chair puts one at an elevation that cannot otherwise be achieved. So, rather understandably, it was understood by other societies as a symbol of power, a marker of status, a thing that set you apart from the normalcy of the human condition. For accomplishing most of the life processes that human beings accomplish, it was not considered necessary, or even helpful.  

A look at the historical evolution of the use of this word in language helps us comprehend the sea change that has come about in the last few centuries.

Today, the Arabic textbook begins with the rudimentary sentence: “Ma haza? Ha za kur see!” On the side, they show the picture of the four-legged thing, the one I described at the start of the essay, the one I’m talking about. But let us not forget that in the language of the Qur’an, the Arabic of the classical period, the word “kur see” refers to something rather different. It refers to the much more exalted “throne”. Wasi’a kur see yuhus sama waat e wal ard”. The scripture reminds us that to all heavens and the earth does the Lord’s Throne extend. The word “chair” in classical English once carried similarly lofty connotations.

The word “Chairman” gives us some clue of that erstwhile meaning. What does the “chair” in “chair-man” symbolize, if not power and exaltation? In universities, wherever everyone now sits on chairs, the phrase “holding a Chair” still refers to the unique privilege bestowed on the select of the select. Universalizing this symbol such that every man and every woman finds it necessary to be “chair-person”, every where and all the time, is a revolutionary change. In retrospect, it does not seem a very enlightened one.

Now look a bit further. Think outside the box of the modern condition and the strictures of global monoculture, this biggest of all boxes that so few can today hope to look beyond.

The “universal right to a chair” which we have come to concede, one does not seem to find in just about any other human society before the modern world. You won’t find it in classical Greek, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian or Germanic culture. Amongst the Jews and the Arabs, the great Semitic people, it is certainly conspicuous by its absence. [3] In the Islamic, Jewish and Buddhist ritual, the memory of this chair-less-ness remains well-preserved.

The form of the namaz, immaculately preserved since when it was first revealed upon the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, neither requires nor allows for any sacraments. In the sacred space, only the believer’s mind, body and soul, are permitted. When the namaz is being performed, no individual worshiper, not even the Imam, is allowed to adopt any artificial elevation, leave alone sitting on the chair. Even standing on a higher pedestal or step is prohibited for the Imam. The believers pray to God at one and the same level, directly and without any need for recourse to intermediation or bodily augmentation. As a result, the basic architecture of the mosque is completely devoid anything like chairs or benches.

A Statue preserving the memory of Mahatma Budhdha

Although I am not fully familiar with the architecture of the synagogue and the Buddhist temple, I assume that there too one finds a certain aversion to artificial elevation of the human posture. In all of those statues which preserve a faint glimpse of his saintly presence, the noble Mahatma Buddha, may he blessed, is shown sitting either do-zanu, char-zanu or lying on his side, that too on his right side with his hand under his head. Never would you find sitting on a chair with his legs hanging. Lovers of the Sunnah of Sayyidi al-Mustafa, the Imam of the prophets, cannot help but discern a similarity.

An architectural historian’s word would weigh heavily with me on this point. But even from this cursory and amateurish survey, we can comfortably conclude that the architecture of the ancients does not betray anything close to our modern romance with the chair and its derivatives. If anything, it seems to be a rarity.

Where then does the rise of the chair come from? So why can we no longer accomplish most of what we used to, sitting simply on the floor?

When you think about it, we do get some clue about the origins of the chair’s rise.

There is a place in the ancient world where you do find people - common people – sitting at an elevation. That place is the church of Western Christianity.

In all likelihood, the early churches, which were not in Europe, did not have benches. It is only when Christianity spread westwards and came to merge with the remains of the Roman tradition that the contemporary architecture of the church, which includes benches, began to take shape. More than a millennium later, we find the chair and its various derivatives becoming more and more popular in Protestant Churches.  And after that, the chair found its way to the schools and colleges that the clergy used to run. It was the Industrial Revolution which made the chair accessible, albeit in the West, to a larger-than-ever segment of the populace. Colonialism then brought the “chair culture” to where it previously did not reign.

It is not insignificant that in the colonies, the chair, at least its earliest designs, came to be closely associated in popular imagination with functionaries of the colonial and post-colonial state. Police stations, army barracks, and other government departments were characterized by a particular make of the chair used in them – the sarkari chair. Supported in mid-air by the chair, the officer of the state sat high and mighty, peering down at the subjects who squatted or crouched near by.

It is ironic that in schools where the masnad, if there was any, was once reserved for the teacher, it has now come to be considered a necessary instrument for cultivating a fine human being. The mat for pupils to sit upon, the infamous taat, once common between the best and the worst of institutions, went on to become the symbol of education backwardness.[4] It became a cause célèbre of the sense of deprivation amongst a whole generation of the colonized whose only memory of their alma maters seems to be the lack of chairs there. The memory of having gone to schools without chairs weighs heavy on the hearts of many amongst our elders. What this tends to obscure is the much greater misfortune suffered by the generation of their children and grandchildren who had to, and still have to, attend schools full of solid wooden chairs and tables but devoid of any devoted teachers and eager pupils. I really hope that when the cultural shock of our devastating collective encounter with modernity and post-modernity wears off, people will come to see the grand folly that our present approach to education really is. They will once again come to realize that a good school does not come about through mercenaries masquerading as part-time teachers, strutting amidst piles of needless and uncomfortable furniture. A good school comes about whenever and wherever young people humbly and joyfully sit down at the feet of older, accomplished, and socially respected figures, listen to beautiful things and participate in positive activities. But we are straying from the topic of the essay, once again.

The question to ask is: What does the journey of the chair from being a potent symbol of power to a near universal piece of furniture mean? Does it have any significance at all?

A statue of Gandhijee outside the Indian Parliament

This question can best be answered by those millions of young people who grew up without ever having had the chance to enjoy themselves sitting on the floor and assuming the multitude of sitting postures which their bodies are capable of achieving. When they first enjoy the likes of do-zanu or char-zanu postures, the spark of joy in their eyes is hard to miss. It is not entirely different from the experience of the elderly who undergo rehabilitation after having lost the ability to fully maneuver their limbs. It is bitter-sweet feeling of a human being experiencing his self, exploring his own true nature – sweet because of the sense of fulfillment it brings, and bitter because of remorse at the self-inflicted deprivation which one lingered under for so long. In recent times, the immense popularity achieved by yoga practitioners in the industrialized nations of the world, is not unconnected to this phenomena. The deprivation that chair culture creates, yoga practitioners make up for, at least partly so.

The thing is, the chair is not our natural way of sitting. It deprives us of the joy of life; and such deprivation, if extended, leads to diseases. Various studies link the office chair with back-pain, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And the commode has been cited as a risk factor for constipation, hemorrhoids and even colon cancer. It may well turn out that the chair and its derivatives were a serious public health hazard all along; we just didn’t notice it earlier. Experts should explore this aspect of chair culture.

For the denizens of the Islamicate, however, the question is worth pondering from other perspectives too. Some of you may not know this, but back when our ancestors first encountered chair culture, they did not take very kindly to it. Never shy of sounding legalistic, they openly asked: Is this a permissible practice? Eating on the dinner table, just like eating with forks and spoons, became hotly contested social issues. Legal opinions were authored about this, which relied essentially on the rulings against imitating the un-believers (al-tashabbuh bi al-kuffar)

The majority of scholarly opinion at the time opposed the practice, deeming it an abdication of the Sunnah  and a symptom of mindless imitation of the colonial masters. True to the dialectical nature of our scholarly tradition, refutations also followed. And then retorts. And then rebuttals. And so on. In the scholarly circles, the debate has never really stopped, even though at the level of popular imagination, the question seems to have been abandoned as a petty one. In the year 1434 of the hijra I do not even remotely intend to stir up a legal debate that most of the ummah seems to have gotten over with. History is a reality. In our worldview, we human beings have not been given the option of re-winding the clock of time. As Gandalf said, echoing the thought of the Oxford don, “[w]e do not choose the times we live in. We only chose what to do with them.” Today, only a very extreme and uncompromising jurist would declare the practice of sitting on chairs and performing motley life-functions thereupon, as legally impermissible.

That said, in retrospect, it seems clear that the initial response of our ancestors to chair culture was based on sound insight. Today, we may no longer be able to accept their legal ruling on this issue; but one has to give it to them that their suspicion was not baseless; evidence is vindicating it. Their response reflected an intimate understanding of the Sunnah, the spirit behind which, as Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad, may Allah bless him, puts it, is to preserve of the historical norms of our species. These norms are worth conserving because, from our perspective, they cannot be entirely socially constructed or accidental. These norms are there because they respond to cues divinely planted in our nature, cues which have been explored and interpreted by generations who, in all honestly, lived closer to the Divine Being and to nature than we do today. They understood that the Sunnah represents the distilled wisdom of the ages; and it is therefore that deviations from it are to be viewed suspiciously. In the universalization of chair culture, they clearly saw one such deviation. We now recognize that their suspicion was justified: chair culture renders some of the greatest bodily gifts our race entirely redundant. And it makes us suffer, a slow and persistent suffering.

However, we may put the law aside for the moment.  The Sunnah, it may be recalled, has never been understood to be a source for legal inspiration alone. The increasingly juridical nature of our religious discourse may give that impression, but this is not the proper view or even the normal one. The Sunnah and the manner in which our ancestors practiced it over millennia is also a rich source for drawing all sorts of other inspiration - artistic, architectural, philosophical and so on.

I think only a very unfortunate community of Muslims would deliberately shape the architecture of their and their progeny’s lives around an archetype which is distinctly alien to the mosque. The utter simplicity of the mosque floor is a result of a lack of imagination or want of resources. It is the way it is, because it reflects the Sunnah’s ethos: primordiality, simpleness and naturalness. The sacred space transmits powerful architectural impulses to the believers, or, at least, to the aesthetically refined ones, every time they visit it.  Refusing to accept that impulse, and continuing to design our life spaces in mindless imitation of contemporary design fads seems permissible, though it is certainly narrow-minded and cowardly. If you eat on a chair, read and write on a chair, and do pretty much everything in your life on a chair, and the only chair-less environment you ever encounter in your life is the mosque, then you are setting yourself and your progeny for a kind of cognitive dissonance, a perpetual state of alienation with the sacred space. Not every reader is expected to appreciate this subtlety. But the aesthetically musical reader should note this point down somewhere.

Chinese Emperor sitting char-zanu in his study

And then, there is, of course, the terrible wastefulness of it all. Like most such modern departures from the historical norm of our species, chair-culture is a hugely costly venture. Now that there are no less than seven billion of us here on this planet, just imagine the wood and steel and plastic that would go into keeping us suspended in mid-air, twenty-four seven. We are not there yet, but that does seem to be the goal we have set ourselves. There is also the issue that once chairs and sofa and desks come in, they bring with them a specialization of space usage which, in turn, vastly increases the built-up space necessary per person. Previously, in a single room, you could simply roll out a dastarkhwan and turn it into dining room, then wrap it up and set up the sleeping mats, and then wake up next morning, roll back the bedding and use the place for work or study. Now each function requires a separate space. 

The toll that this civilization-wide wastefulness is taking from the earth’s resources is heavy. The earth is shrieking under the weight of our wastefulness. Hardly can it comprehend this obsession of the children of Adam with remaining afloat when they are themselves creatures of water and mud, not wind or fire. The earth, through its now obvious rumblings, urges us to accept the implications of our earthly genesis, which the Quran implores us to reflect on. : khalaq al-insan min salsaalin kal fakkhaar, was khalaqal jaan na mim marijim min naar. Fa bi ayyi alae rabbikuma tukazziban! Man was created from water and mud like the potter’s clay; it was jinn who were from a smokeless fire kindled. How many of these signs shall the two of you refuse to discern?

And let us not forget the therapeutic and ergonomic aspect of the problem. You see, “do-zanu”, “char-zanu”, “ukroon”, “neem-ukroon”, “chaunkri” and the like are earthly postures which, like other aspects of the Sunnah, come naturally to us and leave us a simple nameless pleasure. We like that pleasure but the chair, and the etiquette of sitting that has grown off it, alas, keeps us from it for most of our day. Stifled by it, our bodies are protesting and repeating the prophetic rebuke: kullu kum min adam was Adamu min turab! You are all from Adam, and Adam was made from dust!

*****

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chairs. From the clutches of the chair, he must be set free.

Let us begin his emancipation by a frankly admitting that there is no reason why the legs-hanging position should be the only posture that commands respectability. If we are a truly free people, we should be able to sit as we please and not be branded as uncivil or brutish. Surely, we should be free to re-design the architecture of our life spaces in accordance with our own tradition, ideals and aspirations.

His Royal Highness, the Poet-Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar gracing the Throne of Delhi

The white man who branded us barbarous because of our life-style departed from this continent a long while ago. Why then do we, in our heart of hearts, still feel as though he still lords over us, sitting atop a lofty throne and peering down at us, a spark of contempt flashing in his eyes, every time he notices us do something that he doesn’t? Let us remember that his power has waned as all earthly powers eventually must wane. Yes, we can breath more freely now and begin to de-colonize our minds.

Only the Lord’s throne to all heavens and the earth extends.

Further Reading:

After having composed this essay, I came across a piece on the internet which is remarkably similar in its import: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/against-chairs/.

The author of this piece writes:

It sounds absurd to claim that chairs are dangerous. They’re comfortingly ubiquitous and seem almost too boring to be harmful. But when one considers that the average Briton, for instance, spends over fourteen hours seated per day, relying on chairs for support while working, relaxing, commuting, eating, and sometimes sleeping, it’s easy to believe that chairs could have a serious impact on public health.

Footnotes

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[1] This essay is dedicated to my father whose life-long aversion to dinner-tables and unflinching insistence on having our family dinner on the floor, despite pressure from other family members and the society at large, enabled me to grow up with an openness to life-styles other than global monoculture.

[2] If you doubt my honesty, consider this statement by an expert: “There are many ways to sit and many things upon which to sit, but the seat with a back and (most frequently) four legs is generally the Western concept known as a chair” – Random History and Word Origins for the Curious Mind

 http://www.randomhistory.com/2008/11/11_chair.html

[3] Leonardo’s famous mural “The Last Supper”, which shows Jesus and his disciples sitting on table and chairs, seems, in all probability, historically inaccurate. This is not reported to have been the prevalent custom amongst the Jews of the era. That said, I am in no position to say anything definitive; the definitive word on  the matter would belong to a Biblical scholar and not a lay person such as myself.

[4] I think it is quite possible now to imagine a petitioner arguing that since a school without chairs in not really a school, and since every child has a basic human right to be schooled under Article 25A of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, pupils who are going to such places are being denied a human right. The Court should order that they be supplied with chairs or else they risk growing up to be sub-humans. Fantastical as it sound, this argument flows logically from the cultural premises which many of us hold and are, unfortunately, not even slightly willing to re-examine.