Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam
426
Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam
426eBook
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Overview
Media coverage of the Danish cartoon crisis and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan left Westerners with a strong impression that Islam does not countenance depiction of religious imagery. Jamal J. Elias corrects this view by revealing the complexity of Islamic attitudes toward representational religious art. Aisha’s Cushion emphasizes Islam’s perceptual and intellectual modes and in so doing offers the reader both insight into Islamic visual culture and a unique way of seeing the world.
Aisha’s Cushion evaluates the controversies surrounding blasphemy and iconoclasm by exploring Islamic societies at the time of Muhammad and the birth of Islam; during early contact between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christians; in medieval Anatolia and India; and in modern times. Elias’s inquiry then goes further, to situate Islamic religious art in a global context. His comparisons with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu attitudes toward religious art show them to be as contradictory as those of Islam. Contemporary theories about art’s place in society inform Elias’s investigation of how religious objects have been understood across time and in different cultures.
Elias contends that Islamic perspectives on representation and perception should be sought not only in theological writings or aesthetic treatises but in a range of Islamic works in areas as diverse as optics, alchemy, dreaming, calligraphy, literature, vehicle and home decoration, and Sufi metaphysics. Unearthing shades of meaning in Islamic thought throughout history, Elias offers fresh insight into the relations among religion, art, and perception across a broad range of cultures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780674070660 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 426 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From Chapter Four: Iconoclasm, Iconophobia and Islam
There is, of course, no basis to make any historical argument suggesting that the nascent Muslim community of the seventh and eighth centuries adopted its attitudes toward images and their veneration directly from the Byzantine church. On the other hand, it is obvious that early Muslims situated themselves quite squarely within a Christian and Jewish historical context through a number of ways. Among many other factors, that the Qur’an was seen as a definitive scripture abrogating the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; the real or imagined but extensively documented interactions and conflicts of Muhammad with Jews and Christians both within the Arabian peninsula and beyond its borders; the demographic dominance of Christians in important provinces of the early Muslim empire (Egypt, Palestine and Syria); and the material tastes of the early Umayyad princes as displayed in the architecture and decoration of their palaces, all go to demonstrate that Christianity and its material and intellectual environment were living concerns for early Muslims. Similarly, the Muslims, who were threatening Constantinople itself within a century of Muhammad’s death and whose early conquest of Jerusalem had implications for the relationship between Christianity and Islam that go far beyond the purview of this book, were very much on the minds of the church and imperial leadership of the Byzantine Empire. However, mutual awareness, influence and interaction do not prove, or even necessarily imply, direct influence on each other’s attitudes toward images.
As already noted, some scholars have argued that the rise of iconoclasm in the Byzantine Christian world was directly related to either the influence either of Semites or of Islam. Observing that some of the emperors who supported iconoclastic policies were of Semitic descent, they have made an outdated and thoroughly discredited argument for what amounts to a Semitic genetic aversion to idolatry. Others have made a much more historically rigorous claim for influence based on the rapidly ascending fortunes of Islam and the correspondingly diminished ones of Byzantium which placed the Christians on the defensive in their interactions with Muslims. The main historical argument in favor of seeing Byzantine iconoclasm as a response to the rise of Islam lies in the chronological sequence of the caliph Yazid II's decree for the destruction of Christian images in 721, the condemnation of images by Bishop Constantine of Nacoleia in 724, and the beginning of the active Iconoclastic movement under Leo III in 726. Perhaps coincidentally, Jewish polemic against Christian image-veneration appears to arise only after the coming of Islam. The apologia in support of image-veneration also blame the origins of Christian iconoclasm on the conniving of Jews and Muslims, though this cannot be taken seriously as an accurate view of history. There is a difference between misplaced notions of innate iconophilic or iconophobic mentalities and the historical argument that the rise of Muslim Arabs as a regional power made the Byzantines more sensitive to questions of image veneration. As stated by Brubaker:
…icons took on new significance at the end of the seventh century because they addressed the spiritual crisis and insecurities brought about by the Islamic conquests. The ramifications were almost immediate. Changes in practice by around the year 680 were countered by the institution of canonical legislation regulating the proper use of Christian imagery at the Quinisext Council of 691/2. Conversely, the following generation of churchmen, active in the 720s… represent the backlash against the new role of icons and provide our earliest documented iconoclasts.
As I have demonstrated, Christian hostility to images and their veneration was already well-established long before the birth of Islam and the life of Muhammad. And though individuals such as John of Damascus and Theodore Abu Qurrah were deeply aware of their Muslim surroundings, the train of their arguments concerning image-veneration is wholly comprehensible as one of internal Christian debate. The as-yet-unformed Muslim attitude toward image-veneration allowed John of Damascus considerable freedom in his formulation of apologia for image-veneration, such that he was arguably much better off for being at a Muslim court than he would have been were he to have lived under Byzantine territorial control.