User:Grenavitar/mimages

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This page will contain quotes / etc. that I think are relevant to the situation at Talk:Muhammad/Mediation. Please keep comments about the mediation on that page so as not to split discussion. The second section is to help give us context of trends within Islamic art that I found relevant to our discussions.

My asides will be small.

[edit] Muhammad

  • Patricia L. Baker. Islam and the Religious Arts. London: Continuum, 2004. LoCC: N6260 .B345 2004
[Section] Images of Prophets
The Jami al-Tawarikh manuscript (Blair 1995), probably produced in north-west Iran around 1310, and now divided between Edinburgh University Library and Khalil Collection, London, contains some of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, known representations of quranic prophets, including Muhammad. It includes images of the Prophet Jonah being disgorged by the 'whale' and Ibrahim being catapulted in the the fire, while Muhammad is shown with his companions, riding into Battle or replacing the Black Stone in the Ka`ba shrine in Mecca, etc. All the prophets share the same scale as other human figures in the composition, adopting similar stances, dress and colouring. Nothing about their depictions sets them apart, although the accompanying text clearly identifies their presence. Unlike later illustrations, there is no flamed nimbus or halo around their heads, even though in earlier Islamic manuscripts produced further westwards, painters had employed haloes to highlight certain figures of importance in the accompanying narrative but who possessed no religious connotation.
However, by around 1450 such religious personae were sometimes depicted with a flamed nimbus or halo, and by the sixteenth century, increasingly their faces were obscured by a veil 'as if to cover the supernatural radiance' (Milstein 1990: 19). During the course of the century the flame-nimbus grew in size, even subsuming the head and then the entire body of the most important religious persons, such as Muhammad, some of the other quranic prophets and Ali (Guest 1949: 48-9).18 The observer is left in no doubt which are the 'holiest' figures within the compositions, but as if to emphasize their importance, such characters are placed dramatically or authoratatively on the focus direction lines, and are often portrayed in green (so identifying them as members of Muhammad's family) or in another colour which sets the wearer apart from the other characters in the illustration. Otherwise the posture, scale, the facial depiction (when visible) and the rendering of the clothing of the religious subject follow the artistic conventions of the time and reigion.
While painters in Iran continued to feature representations of the Prophet, for some reason their Ottoman coutnerparts appear to have turned aside from convention during the seventeenth century, and the later dissemination of Wahhabi ideas throughout the Middle East and then across Africa and South-east Asia ensured they never returned. As will be seen in the concluding chapter, in contemporary Arab publications primarily produced for children in a comic-book format, the Prophet is not shown at all, but his presence in the episode illustrated is often alluded to. That said, one image purporting to be a portrait of Muhammad in his youth (i.e. before receiving any quranic revelation) became popular in certain Sufi zawiyas and tekkes in Egypt, Syria and Turkey in the 1970s, and later in Iran (see Chapter 10, figure 10.2, p. 265).19 (p. 44-45)


  • Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair. Islamic Arts. London: Phaidon, 1997. LoCC: N6260 .B57 1997
Caption for image 104: "The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad from Rashid al-Din's Universal History, copied at Tabriz, 1315. Ink and colour on paper; 24.5x9.4cm, 9 3/4 x 3 1/2 in (page). University Library, Edinburgh.
An image such as the Birth of Muhammad (104) shows the range of historical and visual sources available in Iran under the Ilkhans. Like most of the illustrations in the manuscript (see 44), the scene occupies a broad strip on a large page. The image is divided into three parts. The centre shows the infant Muhammad cradled by two angels while his mother is attended by five mid-wives. On the right sits an aged figure with a staff, while on the left are four women, three standing and one huddled over a stick. None of these supporting characters figures prominently in the text, which concerns the date of the prophets birth.
Pictures of Muhammad are extremely rare in Islamic art; those in this manuscript are some of the first known and show the Ilkhan patrons did not share the inhibitions of other Muslims about representing the Prophet. The idea of the scene came from Christian art, in which scenes from the life of Christ are common. In Christian theology, the Nativity of Christ, for example, represents the divine miracle of God's sending his son to save mankind, and scenes of it became ubiquitous in Christian art. The birth of the Prophet, has no such theological [image 104 here] significance for Muslims, as Muhammad was human, not divine, and early stories of his life focus on his actions, not his birth. There was no tradition in Islamic art for an image of Muhammad's birth so the artist had to adapt a Christian model, probably a Byzantine panel painting or manuscript illustrating the Nativity. In the scene of the Birth of the Prophet, Muhammad's mother replaces the Virgin Mary, the Prophet's uncle replaces Joseph, and the three women on the left replace the Magi. The technique of Rashid al-Din paintings, where line drawing is heightened with coloured washes, is not Byzantine but derives from Chinese paintings on handscrolls, which came to the Ilkhan court with the Mongols. [goes off further and further away from our topic...] (p. 202)


Caption for image 182: Ascension of the Prophet Muhammad, from the copy of Nizami's Khamsa prepared for Shah Tahmasp, Tabriz, c. 1540. Ink, colour and gold on paper; 28x19cm, 11x7 1/2 in. British Library, London
Note: This is the Buraq with text on bottom left / top right that we have
One of the most memorable images in this manuscript depicts the Miraj, or the ascent of the Prophet to Heaven. The Event, which had been alluded to in the Koran (17.1), took on a life of its own in the hands of the mystics and poets who lovingly elaborated its details. Here, the few lines in Nizami's text have been transformed into a radiant vision of faith and glory (182). The Prophet Muhammad, dressed in green and veiled in white, blazes in a huge flaming halo against a starry blue sky, where curling white clouds obscure a haloed golden moon. Buraq, the human-headed steed who bears him through the seven heavens to the Divine Presence, is led by the angel Gabriel, crowned with a smaller flaming halo. The Prophet is surrounded by angels bearing splendid golden vessels and a book, presumably the Koran. This painting is a fitting culmination to the art of the illustrated book in Safavid Iran, for soon after this manuscript was completed Tahmsap wearied of calligraphy and painting, and many of the finest artists were forced to seek employment elsewhere [...] (p. 342)


[edit] Islamic art generalities

  • Oleg Grabar. Early Islamic Art, 650-1100. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006. LoCC: N6260 .G688 2006

Grabar is one of the foremost scholars of Islamic art. From my reading he (and his indices) are very sparse in directly talking about Muhammad.

Originally published in Iconoclasm, A. Bryer and J. Herrin, eds (Birmingham, 1977) pp. 42-52


But aniconism did not mean absence of symbols or a negative rejection of representation, at least not in early times. It rather meant the elevation of other visual forms, writing, vegetal ornament, geometry, abstract patter, possibly color, to the level of meaningful forms, around which the culture developed its own systems of association whose study is still in its infancy. (p. 55)


  • Oleg Grabar. Islamic Art and Beyond. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006. LoCC: N6260 .G69153 2006

This relates to the discussion about calligraphy being relevant art. The argument has been posited that calligraphy, while it may be more relevant, is not art in the same manner as painting, and therefore even if it is more important it is not the same and should not be substitute for pictures. I came across this by chance but it is closely related.

The tendency to avoid immediacy of interpretation is most clearly visible in the most uniquely Islamic motif: writing. It is true, of course, that the qur'anic citation on the border of the mihrab is quite legible, as is the hadith or Prophet's Tradition in the center, but the proclamation of the principles of the faith in the inner border is already far less clear, and it is not by accident that the reading of inscriptions on monuments of Islamic art has becoming a major sub-field for specialists. The point of calligraphy is not to transmit a message in written form, but to endow writing with certain aesthetic or symbolic qualities.
The point of these examples is that, many exceptions notwithstanding, it was not the concern of Islamic art to develop a language of forms comparable to the antique or medieval Christian system, in which a hierarchy of subjects and forms are endowed with a range of meanings whose truth and persuasiveness can be guaged--almost demonstrated--by a variety of stylistic and qualitative devices. Here, on the contrary, there is no such hiearchy of forms and even writing seems obfuscated by calligraphy. There is in fact an almost total equality of all possible forms and subjects, a suggestion that no visual invention or development is inferior or superior per se and that all of them can serve to endow their carriers--humble ceramic bowl, the page of a book, fancy gold jewelry, or the exterior of an Iranian dome--with a certain quality. If we recall that we are almost always dealing with useful and practical objects, the further implication is of an art which did not tell something but which made life's activities more beautiful and more exciting. Its paradox may then be that if was an art without ideal formal ambitions and depended entirely on the uses to which it could be put. To call it ambiguous or ambivalent--as many scholars, including myself, have done occasionally--is just as misleading as to define its compositions of forms as a horror vacui. It is preferable to assert that all forms were endowed with visual meaning. Can one speak of ambiguity when the point of the art did not lie in the specificity of any one of its themes, but simply in their presence on all "things" used by any man? It is precisely because of this unique quality that Christian Europe consistently copied almost all features of Islamic art, even writing proclaiming Muhammad's mission, while the reverse was rare indeed. (p. 21-26)


The economic and administrative features of Islamic urban structures were not, at least initially, particularly new, and the mechanisms of Islamicization are still far from clear. There was a new language, Arabic, and eventually a new alphabet for Persian and Turkish. There was a new morality, which some authors have called a legalistic moralism, based on a complex mixture of family and tribal ties, sectarian associations and a pervading legal system. But, most importantly for our purposes, there was a consciousness of being different from and better than earlier and surrounding cultures. The maintenance of this difference was particularly complicated in the realm of forms, where Islam had no official doctrine and the Arabian homeland of the faith no tradition to continue. The process of creating a visual expression meant, therefore, inventing new forms, for instance calligraphy, and discarding older forms which had too many concretely alien associations, for instance the representation of man. It is precisely in the new cities of Iraq and of eastern Iran that the first new "Islamic" monuments appear and that the stylistic tendencies which became constant within the culture first come into being. (p. 28)


Calligraphy, acknowledged to be the highest form of visual expression in the Muslim world, has never been adequately studied. (p. 277)
  • M. Ahuja; A. L. Loeb. Tesselations in Islamic Calligraphy. Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1995) pp 42-43
In the world of Islam the art of writing has always played a central role. "Among all arts calligraphy can be considered the most typical expression of the Islamic spirit. The Quran itself has stressed several times the importance of writing." according to A. Schimmel [4]. The growth of Islamic calligraphy followed that of Islamic art and architecture...


In the years 714-715 A.D, the Great Mosque in Damascus was built within the same traditions, but on a grander scale. Indeed, it was grand enough to make it one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. The Great Mosque has minarets and is decorated with colored marble and breathtaking mosaics and magical landscapes of mountains, valleys, rivers, towns and little houses built on rocky crags. Forbidden by religion to decorate mosques with human figures, the Muslim artists of the time satisfied their creative urge by using calligraphy.


As Islam spread to this region [i.e. India], so did activity in calligraphy. Artists from Uzbekistan, Persia and Turkey found rewarding assignments with Sultanate and Mogul kings in India. The western and northern parts of India, namely Sind, Panjab, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi, were the first to be exposed to Muslim art, and there was a mutual exchange of ideas and skills between the local artists and those imported from Muslim countries... ...Muslim calligraphers were especially fascinated by geometry, as is evident from their writings in Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Mandu. Calligraphy is not a revered vocation among Hindus and Jains as it is among Muslims ...

[edit] Google Books

2 D.T. Rice, op. cit. Plate 221. It was only in Persia that any attempt was made to depict the story and physiognomy of the Prophet or to illustrate his life with miniatures." (p. 167)

Not really from well-known press. Also, it is over generalizing.

Muqarnas Essays in Honor of J.M. Rogers: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World By J. Michael Rogers, Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Gülru (p. 21)