Monotheism, Images, Idols

Monotheism, Images, Idols

By: Abdal Hakim Murad

Cambridge Muslim College

Opening

Introduction

Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim thinkers. Current European arguments about Islam and Muslims often seem to be trapped somehow between two big compulsions. On the one hand, we notice in our culture a multiculturalist worship of the, as they say, inviolable otherness of the other.

Main Discussion

European Cultural Dynamics

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls this almost the hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today's intellectuals, and this, he thinks, is intolerable because, as he puts it, the assertion of otherness leads to the boring, monotonous sameness of otherness itself. Still, this arid but dominant intellectual position tends to place Muslim unassimilability with all other signs of otherness, whether these be post-heteronormative sexual identities or animals with rights or Sinti antinomianism.

It's a permissiveness whose fragility is always exposed when the permitted, tolerated other expresses its own lack of permissiveness, as with the Danish cartoon crisis, for instance.

The Second Compulsion

The second compulsion, according to Eric Rasmussen, is the superego injunction to enjoy transgressive pleasures. This is the second compulsion. Hence, base-jumping, rave culture, tattoos, and the baiting of disliked minorities, whether through the creation of deliberately offensive images or mosque closures or inquisitorial immigration criteria, which has become a kind of bread and circuses crowd-pleaser.

However, in Congress, in a liberal society, the teasing of Muslims and sometimes others, such as Roma communities and Catholic prelates, has become a spectator sport. We playfully enrage the other in his or her sanctuaries, but, as Zizek adds, the price we pay for the absence of guilt is anxiety.

European Iconoclasm

If we're going to accept this Zizekian take on things, we might find a diagnostic which helps us to understand the strikingly anxious state of current European culture and politics. The Muslim other, the current Semitic ghetto-dweller, causes agitation because of his repressive folkways, and hence, despite Europe's Olympian superiority and philosophy of liberal indulgence, it increasingly censors and suppresses.

The visibility of Muslim otherness in Europe is to be occluded or abolished in a new wave of secular iconoclasm. Unable to bear the sight of minarets, the Swiss constitution bans them. Thus, too, has Paris prohibited congregational worship in public. And two months ago, Denmark criminalized the wearing of the niqab.

The actual meaning of these signs of otherness appears to be less salient than their performance as signs. They are icons which have to be smashed by the populists of the increasingly coercive nation-state. Europeanness itself increasingly seems to require a damnatio memoriae, an extirpation of the other symbols, the most thorough and frank instantiation having been Serb and Croat policies of systematically uprooting mosque cemeteries and inscriptions during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Defending Islam from Iconophobia

And perhaps the most tempting of third ways has been to save Islam from charges of irreducible otherness, and possibly from itself, by blurring all of the dichotomies. When Chomsky remarked that the Danish cartoons showcased, as he says, ordinary racism under cover of freedom of expression, fellow travelers rushed in to defend Islam from charges of a vulgar and foreign iconophobia.

Against the chauvinism of growing numbers of Europeans, these voices earnestly prized Islam out of standard definitions presented by essentialists on both sides. Islam turns out to be far from iconophobic, and bien pensant intellectuals are called to challenge the zealots by pouring out the unexpected treasures from the cornucopia of Muslim representational art.

Quite a few recent exhibitions in major art galleries have constituted showcases of Muslim picture making, including a famous one in Copenhagen. The political adroitness of this turn is evident and almost certainly benign.

Academic Concerns

What concerns us as scholars, academics, theologians, is its tendency to establish a stable and valid disaggregation of Islamic civilization, or at least to try and render normative a recurrent exception. Now, given the famous many-centeredness of Islam, a very ecumenical faith world which encompassed in its pre-modern expression far more cultures and perspectives than was possible in pre-modern Christianity,

we can do no more than reach for such majoritarian or recurrent patterns, rather than seek to identify a supposed unanimous Muslim magisterium.

Christianity, often accustomed to its own firm regulatory hierarchies and detailed creeds, has often struggled to recognize the very plurivocal nature of the Jewish and Islamic Semitisms. Surely, religions of the law must be more tightly regulated than the religion which has proclaimed a gospel freedom.

Islamic Law and Images

Yet, Jewish and Muslim interpretations of the image question are indeed divergent and also, perhaps strangely, really very marginal in the major theological and legal manuals. The law books, where many Christian and uninitiated secular minds expect to find a detailed and comprehensive code for believing life, the usual stereotype of what a Muslim fiqh book is like, actually hardly mention the crime of image making, which is certainly never subject to canonical punishments of the had type in any school of Islamic law, but falls always, if the judges bother at all, into the category of ta'zir, where the punishment or lack of it is left entirely to the discretion and local wisdom of the magistrate.

Historical Context

But we will still need to check the Islamic record for any recurrent patterns of thought about images. And to do this, we begin not with the scriptures, but with their late antique point of emergence, their Sitz im Leben. The cradle of Islam has to be understood in terms of contiguity with wider Mediterranean habits.

It's the lesson driven home by Glenn Bowersock, Garth Foden, and most of the currently significant history writing. Islam is not some kind of unique singularity. Its founding moment is not a strange exotic outlier.

Jewish and Islamic Traditions

Nascent Islam, of course, knew very well the rabbinic Judaism of the Medina Hasidim, vehement in their culture despite the indigenous Arab fetishism. Not only the Ten Commandments, but Numbers 33:52, Deuteronomy 4:16, and the Hebrew scriptures in general, used the word pesel and shikut synonymously for images and idols. The various cherubim and animal reliefs of the temple were taken to be exceptions that underlined this rule.

And the Shulchan Aruch, perhaps the most influential legal source book for today's orthodox, repeats that, quote, it is forbidden to make complete solid or raised images of people or angels or any images of heavenly bodies except for purposes of study.

Christian and Buddhist Perspectives

Of the axial religions, both Buddhism and Christianity refused image-making for the first two centuries of their existence. Both, it seems, then altered their position through Greek influence. Both remained subject

to sharp internal arguments about the viability of sacred images, and in the case of Christianity, these debates were closely associated with some of the religion's greatest historical traumas.

The era of iconoclasm, launched by Byzantine bishops, was the greatest disruption ever experienced by the post-Chalcedonian Great Church, and the Reformation fiercely reopened the debate in the West. To this day, the dolls of Amish children have no faces.

Convergences with Reformed Christianity

Byzantine and Reformed allergies to image-making seem to overlap, as one would expect, with many of the Islamic debates. We're dealing with, as Denise Masson puts it, the three ways of the one, a ternary of interlocking families of discussion and debate. On this argument, some might even see Islam, as Hilaire Belloc famously did in his book on heresies, as a first and more successful Reformation.

Calvin rejects priest-craft, relics, indulgences, organs and images, and so does Islam. Belloc, actually, construes Islam as functionally a Protestant-Christian heresy, rather than a new religion.

So, when the Norwich Chapel, in which my own family worshipped, became, in 1977, a mosque, no awkward iconoclastic episode was required which might obstruct the approval of the city planning or conservation department. The walls and the windows were already plain. Ditto also for the Huguenot Church on London's Brick Lane, which had served for a century also as East London's major synagogue before becoming a mosque.

Academic Analysis

Perhaps then, if our purpose is to de-other the Muslims in the face of European prejudice, we should be looking at this sort of convergence, rather than at the effulgence of Muslim figural art. One can belong to Europe and not be an icon lover.

And yet, the two most interesting recent discussions of Muslim iconology by Alain Besançon and Sven Lutikon interrogate the simple understanding of a one with three cognate ways. Islam, on their appreciation, is indeed distinctive, and its habitual iconology is new and revealing.

Besançon's Analysis

For Besançon, in some suggestive and luminous passages in his book The Forbidden Image, Israel's burning bush and its unpronounceable name for God signal the people's remaining in waiting, since the defining messianic breakthrough still lies in God's future. Then alone will the fullness of temple worship be established, Jewish law confirmed, and a decisive theology become possible.

Meanwhile, living in exile or under Roman or other Gentile rule, provisionality and circumspection entail concessions. The famous Rabbi Akiva even allowed Jewish craftsmen to fabricate idols for the Gentiles, and was happy to drink from a goblet bearing the image of fortune. Jews in iconophile Europe regularly

illuminated their manuscripts with biblical vignettes. Those who lived in the abode of Islam usually did not.

Everything seemed to be provisional while the Jews waited. Besançon contrasts this very starkly with Islam. He writes, in Judaism there is a low upper limit to art because Israel is in waiting, and the face-to-face vision that art might procure would be an illusion, in other words, idolatry.

That is not the case for Islam. There is no waiting but an eternal present under the dazzling light of revelation. He goes on to explain that there is no questing or urging in Islamic art, no dynamically straining figures, for God is not absent and man is not fallen.

The Quranic Perspective

Only a kind of platonic recollection is required. Art therefore simply brings to the visible surface the nature of things. The confirmation of this comes from two recent Christian essays on the famous Mughal miniature based on a Dürer engraving of Saint Jerome, now held in the Qatar Museum of Islamic Art.

One of these two authors, Jabur al-Dawahi, is a Maronite, a Lebanese Catholic, and Rajat Shehadeh is a well-known Palestinian Anglican, but both, reflecting on this image, comment on the peacefulness of the Muslim recalibration of the picture. Islam, they write, cannot bear the straining of the Christian saint, his erotophobia, his determination to treat exile in the natural world as mortification rather than reunion.

Islam's insistence on God's mercy makes the image's original purpose, a punitive meditation on suffering, unintelligible. Wherever Muslims attempt painting, even for the emperor's discrete private case, the veiling of God accomplished by the Western Christian pessimism about nature proves intolerable, and hence the rich palette of torn human emotions, which makes figurative art great, simply struggles to find roots in Muslim soil.

Quranic Teaching on Divine Transcendence

Besançon also discusses the conventional argument that the Quran hardly concerns itself with the question of images. He insists that this reflects the assumption carried within the text of the inconceivability, in any case, of a Muslim icon. Judaism needed the commandments to limit the risks of its often anthropomorphist scriptural theology. The Quran evidently dispenses with them.

The Quran announces:

"There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing."

Quran 42:11