In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, I thought it would be a good idea to provide background information on the prohibition of depicting the human form in Islam, including the Prophet Muhammad. Here’s a 13th century illuminated manuscript from Tabriz (now in Iran) which depicts the Angel Jibril revealing the Qur’an to Muhammad:
So if there are historical depictions of Muhammad from within Islam, where does this current controversy over cartoons come from, is it universal, and what does it mean in terms of conflict within Islam and between fundamentalist jihadis and the West? Follow me below the orange icon for some art history, a discussion of aniconism and iconoclasm, and the confusion over whether the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are merely sophomoric or images capable of being objects of veneration.
Islam’s embrace of aniconism – the rejection of icons – started as a reaction against the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary in the Eastern Roman Empire (AKA Byzantium), of which the Middle East and North Africa was an integral part until the Islamic conquest of the 7th century. Islam’s main critique of Christianity was that it diverged from monotheism to erect a pantheon of false gods. The rapid adoption of Islam in much of the Middle East owes a debt to the unresolved theological debates of the previous centuries, in which the nature of the Trinity was hotly debated and in which Christians in the Middle East tended to take a more unitary view of the nature of the Trinity than those in the West. The debate over images also became political: During the 8th Century, the Muslim Caliphate and the Christian Byzantines struggled to understand why neither side was able to prevail against the other. The sudden loss of the entire Middle East to wild tribes from Arabia was a shock to the Byzantines, just as the inability to conquer “Rome” was incomprehensible to the Muslims who viewed their conquests as proof that Allah was on their side. Since Christianity was central to the very identity of the Byzantines, and Islam was obviously central to the identity of the Caliphate, the search started for some sin or mistake in religious practice rather than belief that would account for the endless military stalemate. Between about 700 and 850 CE, both Islam and Eastern Christianity struggled with the idea that God was displeased with the “veneration of idols”. In Byzantium this resulted in a period of “iconoclasm”, or literally the “breaking of idols” in which works of art were destroyed and icon painters were blinded. In Islam, it resulted in a series of “hadiths”, or stories of the Prophet, which enshrined the prohibition of the human form, and caused the decapitation of many Hellenistic statues. By the end of this period, orthodox Sunni Islam had effectively prohibited depiction of the human form and Byzantine Orthodox religious practice focused on the literal veneration of holy icons.
Would you like some visual examples of what I am talking about? Very little original documentation remains from the first century of Islam. Fortunately, there is a ubiquitous and almost indestructible source of images that literally carries the official stamp of approval: Coins.
The coin on the left depicts the Byzantine emperor Heraclius with his sons, from about 650 CE. The coin on the right is one of the first issued by the Islamic Caliphate, and depicts the Caliph with advisers on either side, from about 670 CE. They had the same value and probably passed through the same merchant's hands in the eastern Mediterranean. On the Islamic version, the crosses are replaced with staffs, and the Caliph is wearing a flat hat
rather than the Byzantine crown. Clearly it depicts the human form. It's also inscribed with the Islamic shahada: "There is no God but God and Mohammed is the Messenger of God". But it is an imitation of a Byzantine type. Did early Islam depict living humans on coins that were not simply copies of Byzantine coins? It turns out they did, as this copper coin (r) carries the image of the Caliph Abd al-Malik, from about the year 700 CE. This is not a copy of a Byzantine coin; this is an official image of the living Caliph himself.
There is other evidence pointing to an Islamic figurative tradition in art during the very first century of Islam. The first Caliphs built a series of pleasure palaces at the edge of the desert. Qusayr Amira in Jordan survives to this day, and the dry air of the Syrian desert preserves frescoes that include scantily clad women. Ironically, the so-called Islamic State would surely dynamite this building, even though it is one of the earliest structures built by the Caliphate they claim to restore.
But aren't pictures of half-nekked women un-Islamic? Well, the plain text of the Qur'an prohibits idolatry, but nowhere does it explicitly prohibit the depiction of the human form. Rather, these restrictions started to appear as the "hadiths" or stories of the Prophet that were recorded and cataloged after about 70 AH, or about 700 CE.
At the same time, interestingly, the Byzantines were creating the first modern "iconic" images of Christ that we are now familiar with in the West, and they were creating them in their own image as on this coin from 705 CE (r). Previously most images of Christ depicted him clean shaven and with curly hair. In the 7th century, beards were in fashion - a fashion that has persisted in contemporary images of Christ and the facial hair fashion of both jihadis and Muslim clerics to this day.
Right about this time, hadiths prohibiting the depiction of the human form became accepted in Sunni Islam, as the Caliphate began to create a distinctive Islamic art and society. A new iconoclastic movement began in the Byzantine Empire, in an attempt to explain why the Middle East had been lost for a generation and to regain God's favor. The art and imagery of the two great empires evolved in parallel. Again, let me use coins to illustrate this. By 715 CE, images had disappeared from Byzantine coins (l) and also from Islamic coins (r)
At this time, the first major division in Islam had already occurred: Ali, the 4th Caliph and the cousin of Muhammad, and his son Husayn were killed in a succession conflict in 61 AH (680 CE). The Sunni and Shia' traditions diverged, and the fact that this occurred before the prohibition of images in Sunni Islam is still reflected in the visual culture of Iran versus Saudi Arabia. This contemporary image of Imam Husayn is widely available on black velvet paintings in Iranian flea markets, and is ubiquitous in Iraq. It could get you a beating in Saudi Arabia, and would get you beheaded in the so-called "Islamic State":
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Islam as practiced in Arabia and the Levant tended to stop producing human images by 700 CE or so. But the figurative tradition flourished in Iran and India, especially after the Mongol invasions. The image of Muhammed at the top of this diary is from one of the Mongol successor states in Iran, which heavily influenced India and the Ottoman Empire. These images are so beautiful and interesting, I feel like showing you another. This is Muhammad as a boy, meeting a monk named Bahira, from 1315 CE:
The image above was created by a tolerant and vibrant Islamic society in which many of the artists were Armenians, and in which there was a surprising amount of tolerance for Buddhism and Christianity and even Judaism. There's not sufficient space to go into the art history of Central Asia, but Ilkhanid Mongol paintings like this one influenced and were influenced by traditions of Central Asia and Tibet. Interestingly, Persian art influenced the solidly Sunni Ottoman Empire, which developed its own tradition of miniature painting - which actually includes images of Muhammad himself. Here are two, both from the 16th century. The first depicts Muhammad and shows his face. The second uses the popular convention of leaving Muhammad's face bright white and blank, in deference to the Sunni hadiths. Still, they depict Muhammad, and they were produced in Istanbul, the seat of the Caliphate when the Ottoman Empire was a world power.
Islamic civilization extends over 14 centuries and half the planet, so it should come as no surprise that Islam is as diverse as Christianity. This is reflected in the diversity of Islamic art and attitudes about the human figure. It is, however, absurd to say that Islam has
never depicted the Prophet Muhammad, or even that such images are offensive to all Muslims. I find the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo kind of stupid, honestly, but the prohibition on images was always intended within Islam to prevent veneration of icons rather than satire. It is probably true that these cartoonists would have been beheaded during the early Caliphate, but they would have been killed for being cheeky and not for drawing pictures. It is worth remembering this, and also reflecting on the way that Islam and the West have been involved in a sort of cultural dialectic for more than a thousand years - one that continues in Syria and in our popular culture here to this day. We should also constantly remind ourselves that many Islamic societies have been open, creative, plural and tolerant - and that the end result of all this turmoil in Syria and Iraq and Paris will hopefully be a reformation of Islam that embraces its tolerant and brilliant past.