Abdal Hakim Murad – Monotheism, Images, Idols
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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, and multiculturalist worship of the,
as they say, inviolable otherness of the other.
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls this almost the hegemonic ethical,
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.
So, this arid but dominant intellectual position tends to
place Muslim on a similar ability with all other signs of otherness,
whether these be post heteronormative sexual identities
or animals with rights or Cinti antinomianism. It's a pas
permissiveness whose rigidity 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 according to Eric Rasmussen is the super ego
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 enraged the other in his
or her sanctuaries. But as Dziedzic adds, the price we pay
for the absence of guilt is anxiety.
We're going to accept this Jackie and take on things we might find a
diagnostic which helps us to understand the striking the
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 to 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 their icons, which have to
be smashed by the populist of the increasingly coercive nation
state.
European is itself increasingly seems to require Donato memoria is
an extirpation of the other symbols. The most thorough and
Frank instantiation having been Serb and Croat policies of
systematically uprooting mosques, cemeteries and inscriptions during
the 1990 to 1995 Bosnian War
but Europe has more than one orthodoxy, or in this case, more
than two. 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 at the Danish cartoons showcased as he
says ordinary racism on the cover of freedom of expression, fellow
travelers rushed in to defend Islam from charges of a vulgar and
foreign icon of phobia.
Against the chauvinism of growing numbers of Europeans. These voices
earnestly prized Islam out of standard definitions, presented by
essentialist on both sides, Islam turns out to be far from Icona,
phobic, and beyond pulsar 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 and 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. 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 or 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 us oppose it. Unanimous
Muslim Magisterium, Christianity often accomplish accustomed to its
own firm regulatory hierarchies and detailed, Creed's has often
struggled to recognize the very plural vocal nature of the Jewish
and Islamic Semitism. Surely, religions of the law must be more
tightly regulated than the religion which has proclaimed a
gospel freedom. 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 initiate uninitiated
secular minds, expect to find a detailed and comprehensive code
for believing life useful stereotype of what a Muslim
flipbook is like, actually hardly mentioned the crime of image
making, which is certainly never subject to canonical punishments
of the HUD type in any school of Islamic law, but falls always if
the judge is bothered at all, into the category of tau zero, where
the punishment or lack of it is left entirely to the discretion
and local wisdom of the magistrate.
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 there sits in Laban. The Cradle of Islam has to be
understood in terms of continuity with wider Mediterranean habits.
The lesson driven home by Glen Bower sock Garth Foden in most of
the currently significant history writing, Islam is not some kind of
unique singularity. Its founding moment is not a strange, exotic
outlier.
nascent Islam, of course knew very well the Rabbinic Judaism of the
medina Hasidim vehement in their culture despite for indigenous
Arab fetishism, not only the 10 commandments, but numbers 3352,
Deuteronomy 416 and the Hebrew Scriptures in general use the word
Purcell and she could 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 Shulhan arrow, 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.
Of the axial religions, both Buddhism and Christianity refused
image making for the first two centuries of their existence. Both
it seems then alter their position through Greek influence. Both
remain subject to sharp internal arguments about the viability of
sacred images and in the case of Christianity, these debates are
closely associated with some of the religions greatest historical
traumas. The era of iconoclasm, launched by Byzantines bishops was
the greatest disruption ever experienced by the post Caledonian
great church, and the Reformation fiercely reopened the debate in
the West. To this day, the dolls of Amis children have no faces.
Byzantines 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 Messel puts it the three ways of the one, a ternary
of interlocking families have discussion and debate.
On this argument, some might even see Islam as Hilaire Belloc
famously did in his book on Harris's as a first and more
successful reformation. Calvin rejects priestcraft relics,
indulgences, organs and images and so does Islam.
airlock actually construes Islam as functionally a Protestant
Christian heresy, rather than a new religion.
So when the Norwich chapel in which my own family worship 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
playing.
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.
Perhaps then, if our purpose is to do other than 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 love him.
And yet the two most interesting recent discussions of Muslim
iconology by an old bezel song and fan litigant, 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.
For bears on assault in some suggestive and luminous passages
in his book, The Forbidden image, Israel's burning bush, and its
unpronounceable name for God's 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 provision, ality 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 14
Jews in iconified, 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 waiting.
There's also contrasts contrast 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 streaming figures, for God is not
absent, and man is not fallen, only a kind of Platonic
recollection is required. Art therefore simply brings to the
visible surface, the nature of things.
A confirmation of this comes from two recent Christian essays on the
famous Mughal miniature based on a Jura engraving of St. Jerome, now
held in the Qatar Museum of Islamic art.
One of these two authors Jabara Dwyer he is a Maronite, Lebanese
Catholic, and Rajat she had it 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 right cannot
bear the straining of the Christian saint, his irata phobia
is determination to treat exile in the natural world as mortification
rather than reunion. Islam's insistence on God's mercy makes
the images original purpose, a punitive meditation on suffering
unintelligible wherever Muslims attempt to painting, even for the
Emperor's discreet private case, the veiling of God, accomplished
by the Western Christian pessimism about nature proved just
intolerable. And hence the rich palette of torn human emotions,
which makes figurative art great, simply struggles to find roots in
Muslim soil.
There's also 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 in conceivability. In any case of a Muslim icon.
Judaism needed the commandments to limit the risks of its often
anthropomorphised scriptural theology. The Quran evidently
dispenses with them, Lisa CAMI 3d shape. The Quran announces which
as the mystics point out, means not just that God has no likeness
but literally that nothing resembles a likeness of God.
Introducing a double distance or double apparatuses.
The interdiction is fully supplied in the verse in Surah 112 Nothing
is like him. The macro level, cool one I had, the explicit
prohibition of something impossible would be otiose and
strange.
Based on song, of course, does notice the luxuriant and
luxurious, who might have images of hunting scenes and buxom
maidens. But like Creswell before him, he observes that image making
an Islamic civilization was a private, rather than a public
pursuit, maintained not on walls, but in books, which were usually
kept closed. Sumptuous Ottoman albums in which miniaturists
depicted the sagas of Prophet Sultan's Persian kings, dragons
and demons were understood to be for the personal delectation of a
palace elite, on whom formal religious edicts might sit rather
lightly. Such cognoscenti also maintained distinctively
transgressive traditions of pederasty and wine consumption as
part of a refined quarterly culture with roots in ancient
Persia.
These pictures are still Islamic eight, not Islamic. They're no
more indicative of Islamic concerns than is, for instance,
the purchase of Leonardo's painting, Salvator Mundi, recently
by angels, buying agents understood to be acting for King
Salman of Saudi Arabia. muddied culture is not necessarily
reflective of the deep impulses of a developed civilization. Abu
Dhabi spent 10s of millions on a Picasso exhibition in 2008, but
only a handful of locals attended. Katari led by Damien Hirst, but
his motto death without redemption is probably not shared by most
Doha residents.
The second and most recent author is the art critics fan litigant.
His book appeared in the wake of the Danish cartoon debacle, and he
reflects on the UN's post on depictions of the Holy Prophet,
which I quote, as he says, character tooled him in ways that
sometimes seemed racist, and oddly reminiscent of anti semitic
caricatures of old,
the icon or dual European self definition as non Semitic. Again
fixes on the image question.
But actually, the real trigger for his book seems to have been
acquired a moment 2007 exhibition by Amsterdam artists get the
uncocking which took the form of fine grained photographs of
statues, which had been defaced by the Reformation and its building
stone.
Well, Cochon holds no religious brief, he challenges us to view
the headless statuary as less aesthetically fulfilling than our
imagining of the intact originals. There is here an aesthetic realism
of iconoclasm, which is not simply a provocative, warranting of the
modernist turn away from representation by violently
insisting that stone cannot do justice to the Imago Dei or to our
complex and fleshly, not stony humanity. These photographs forced
us to wonder whether any serious humanism with a sacred or profane
can be carried by representational art.
Due to gun teases us with this thought, but he then traces
monotheism is travails with images back to their origins in Plato.
This incidentally has been considerably clarified by
Robinson. In an article on early Christian and icon ism, published
last year in the Journal religion. Early Christians declined the use
of images not out of obedience to the second commandment, but
because they were themselves invested in complex Hellenistic
arguments about the religious efficacy of images,
logic and sketches Plato's distinction between true and false
images, idols an idol on the form of being only accessible to Gods
and true philosophers, and the latter being necessarily
contaminated by human psychic residues.
When Christians identified the logos as identical with God, the
Son, He says, They faced a problem from which Philo and Judaism had
been exempt. The sun is quite substantial with the father, but
he too is an image of the Father.
Like the Semitism, Christianity affirmed that man is in God's
image, and yet so to is Christ, physical images then logic and
says we're apt to involve the Christian in a destabilizing
paradox. Judaism, by contrast, could maintain the logos in it on
the incarnated form, and Islam also, although its thinkers tended
quite often to vacillate between considering scripture or the
normal hamady, or both to be a sort of Lagace principle.
With the two reformations, the founder of Islam in the seventh
century and Calvin's in the 16th. This unresolved tension broke
surface again, how could an artist depict the intersection of
infinity but the sublunary world they were in Cambridge, there were
many arguments. Launcelot Andrews at Pembroke College insisted that
images of Christ were Nestorian because they could show only one
of Christ's natures. And Calvin, who had his followers here
preached as follows. Behold, they paint and portray Jesus Christ who
as we know is not only man but also God manifested in the flesh.
And what a representation is that he is God's eternal Son in whom
dwells the fullness of the Godhead, yea, even substantially,
seeing it is said substantially, should we have portraitures and
images, whereby only the flesh may be represented. Is it not a wiping
away of that which is chiefest in our Lord Jesus Christ, that is to
wit of His divine majesty. Yes, and therefore whatsoever a
crucifix, dance, mopping and mowing in the church, it is all
one as if the devil had to faced the Son of God.
Again in Cambridge, the populace readily further worried that the
extreme difficulty of a crystal logically proper iconology would
lead the masses into idolatry. And this to really echoes a very
familiar Islamic concern
Not everyone bowing to an image, even when sanctioned by the church
is theologically sophisticated. And again, Islam and the Reformers
here seem to share a concern for the dangers of an elite Hellenized
theology which was hardly suited to illiterate practitioners of a
mass religion. Instead, the ayah Sophia is tempting images would
one day be prudently whitewashed and replaced with Scripture, the
word made word as it were, much less liable to be idolatrous Lee
misunderstood. Only then, did the mighty structure truly point
everyone rather than just theologians, towards the Bible's
God?
Well, if this is the case, then perhaps we need to revise our
earlier judgment, which proposed an Islamic age rather than Islamic
nature for Islamic miniature painting. Of course, despite the
determination of iconic or Western art historians to make a case for
it even sometimes, an Islam affiliate case, the cartoon
characters of most Muslim figurative art are deliberately
two dimensional, humorous and crude their emotions, always jerky
and puppet like fingers in mouths, they're barely capable of
expression. When surrounded on their pages by the superb hieratic
abstractions of Islamic calligraphy. Their status as a
minor art becomes flagrant painters needed to earn their
keep. But as John Renard observes, they ensure that their figurative
art was never representational. Indeed, the images are almost
purely indicative rather than substantive. As low as for raw PCs
matters. Islamic miniature painting, renders superficially
Anthro anthropomorphic forms into abstractions.
Even the Mogul image of St. Jerome, which we spoke about
accomplishes this. And hence these cartoons are surely at their most
aesthetically impressive when the childish faces are no longer
trying to say anything, when they are raised, smeared by the wet
finger of a pious passion. For this veiling by the smear however,
shocking to the European curator is not the modern desecration of
our thier morphic nature, represented by say, Lucien Freud,
but something quite different, a sign of ineffability man alone,
not his image is the image of God. We might say that the faces are
smeared up, not down.
This truth theistic humanism is well summarized by Titus
Burckhardt, who writes this, the portraying of divine envoys,
Russel, prophets, and Viet and saints Alia is avoided, not only
because such images could become the object of an idolatrous cult,
but also out of respect for what is inimitable in them, they are
the vice judgments of God on earth. It is to them that the
thier morphic nature of man becomes manifest. But this thier
morphism is a secret, whose appearance in a corporeal world
remains ungraspable. The inanimate and congealed image of the man God
would be merely a shell, an error, an idol.
This general summary other considerations have habitually be
made by Muslim skeptics. It's not only that an image of a created
entity when purporting a spiritual or aesthetic purpose necessarily
falls blasphemously short of the luminous reality, after all, who
had preferred the rook be Venus over the lady herself.
But image making passes the sublime through a more or less
fallen human filter, precipitating the congealing of which Burkhart
writes, feminists nowadays object to much Christian iconography as
pushing God down into agenda, which is why Mary Daly thought
that Christology is idolatry. While Rosemary Ruth found a new
Christological paradox by theorizing on the non masculinity
of Jesus.
Similarly, race activists habitually protest representations
of the incarnate God as white, and black Muslims in America have seen
this as a token of Islam's universality. Only an icon ism,
being without images can save us from intermediary representations,
which introduce racial or gender specifics.
Moreover, Muslims that included observe that iconographic genres
are vulnerable to a decline into sentimentality, which can make the
spaces the condition uninhabitable. Observing the
iconography of many churches, young visitors often find
themselves alienated. Those images of the Sacred Heart which wants
there to facilitate the religiosity of the masses, now
often seem to obstruct it. Those who have worked with the young
often find that it is a clear space, which celebrates geometry
and stylize tessellations and vegetal motifs which best
proclaims monotheism, universal and urgent charm.
Cambridge Muslim college training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers