Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
6 - The Missing Body: Figurative Representations in Islamic Iconography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter considers the presumed absence of figurative representations in Islamic art, which to some is yet another indication of Islam's inability to face and represent reality (accept modernity) – as opposed to the body-centric aesthetics of the Renaissance. It is discovered that Islamic history in fact overflows with examples of representations of sentient life. The contrast between Islam's figurative art (as secular) and abstract and geometric art (as sacred) should not be seen as contradictory, but as a case of cultural simultaneity, which reflects an Islamicate daily life that has always been both religious and secular at the same time.
Keywords: Islamic art; nachleben; Islamic iconography; bilderverbot; Islamic secularity; Islamic aniconism
Bilderverbot
Who took the body out of Islamic iconography? The Quran does not have a clear or specific commandment against graven images– so why does it seem that we hardly witness the body anywhere in Islamic art? What is it about the Islamic body that calls for veiling? elision? and omission? But is it possible that the body has been always here – right at the center – staring us in the eye, seen but unnoticed?
Towards the end of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss asks (rhetorically, of course),
Why did Moslem art collapse so completely once it had passed its peak? It went from the palace to the bazaar without any transitional phase. This must have been a result of the rejection of images. (2012, 400)
Aha, it is bilderverbot(aniconism) then, that Semitic iconophobia! Being deprived of all contact with reality, the Muslim artist has become incapable of representing the reality that surrounds him. Is this a result of an artistic failure? Or is it the restrictive prohibitions of his faith? “It was chiefly the presence of Islam which troubled me,” complained Levi-Strauss (2012, 397).
French Orientalist Georges Marçais (1876–1962) seems to agree with Levi-Strauss that the issue with Islamic art lies in its rejection of images and incapability of verisimilitude. In a remarkable and densely-researched study on Islamic art entitled “Picasso the Muslim,” Finbarr Barry Flood, says Marçais “represented Arab creativity as a series of lacks that extends well beyond the realm of the visual arts, as symptomatic […] of the Arab inability to create ‘living fictions,’ among them narrative (as opposed to lyric) poetry or prose, or theater.”
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- Global Modernity from Coloniality to PandemicA Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, pp. 131 - 156Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022