Interesting observations. One thought I’d like to share with you, which may have a bearing on the issue of ‘representation’ in Islam, is that the early Muslims inhabited a world where signifiers and the signified were not yet divorced (as they are in our modern consciousness). The most evident example of this is in the Divine Names - the name Allah, for instance, was for them not just an arbitrary handle for referring to God (as it is to our post Saussurian consciousness) but the actual manifestation of God in the form of speech. Likewise with the name of a person - if one invoked the Prophet Muhammad in conversation, it was of course necessary to add ‘peace be upon him’, because he was being called to presence, not merely referenced (similar to Christ’s ‘when three or four are gathered together in my name, there also am I’).

The philologist Owen Barfield referred to this stage of consciousness (in ‘Saving the Appearances’, a book that influenced both Marshall McLuhan and David Bohm) as ‘original participation’. His thesis was that (western) humanity began to enter an era of unparticipated consciousness towards the end of the middle ages and, amongst other things, this made possible the ‘Scientific Revolution’, For us, things are entirely external to one another (a way of seeing the world that Henri Bergson called ‘the logic of solid bodies’) and thus a name or an image can at best only be associated with a person or an idea - a process that happens as a result of habit and usage, without any ‘necessary’ connection (in the philosophical meaning of that word). Barfield’s ideas become particularly interesting when he suggests that this unparticipated consciousness is only a stage - and that human destiny is to reach ‘final participation’, to bring what was originally a superconscious unity into full consciousness.

Anyway, my point is that if one believes that a name or image is integrally connected with the being referred to, then the creation or manipulation of that image may be an attempt to exercise power over that being. This is, after all, the basic premise of magic. Thus it might be sensible to look at the issue of representation in Islamic Art in the light of the Quranic categories of ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ magic. So, for instance, the representation of the grapevine (either literally, or abstracted into an ‘arabesque’) is permissible, because the vine is the symbol (and its name is derived from the same root) as the Divine Name ‘Al Kareem’ - the Generous. Indeed, it is an invocation - a Zikr - of the Generious by the artist, in symbolic and imagistic rather than verbal form. But the making of the golden calf by the Israelites, as described in the Quran, is idolatrous because it is the outward form of an inward intention of setting up a being alongside Allah - it is ‘Shirk’, polytheism. And ‘the value of the act is in the intention’, as the Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) tells us.

Which leads us on neatly to ‘fundamentalism’. I can’t think of a better definition of fundamentalism than this - that it is the attempt to apply the principles of an earlier state of consciousness to a later one. Taking the proscriptions against representational art from the participated consciousness of the seventh century Hijaz and applying them to the unparticipated consciousness of twenty-first century Britain is inevitably a travesty. More interesting, though, is the thought that applying the ‘scientific’, ‘secular’ and ‘materialistic’ values of an unparticipated world view to those who are attempting to cultivate ‘conscious participation’ may be equally misconstrued.
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One other thing… I heard a very different interpretation of the destruction of the ‘idolatrous’ Buddhas of Bamiyan from an architect who works in Central Asia with the UN. Apparently the head of one of the figures turned up in a baggage handling depot in Pakistan - the shipper hadn’t paid the appropriate baksheesh, and the baggage handlers were rifling through the cases to see what they could find. The story is - and I can’t vouch for it, only repeat what I was told - that a Swiss collector had paid a large sum to the Taliban for key parts of the Buddhas. Having removed the saleable elements, the rest of the statues were then dynamited to cover up the looting.

Hi james - how are you? Haven’t heard from you for a long while, good to hear from you again.

I think you raise some interesting points. The issue of representational art does to some extent extend into the area of ‘magic’ (though imo, this is not as marked a factor as might be supposed), particularly as an inheritance of earlier Jewish tradition. I suppose it is a fairly obvious leap that depictions of someone may be used magically to harm them or affect them in some way but this would still not account for the misunderstandings of ‘rivalling God’. I think Creswell (the great art historian of the Islamic field) suggested this line as well as perhaps the idea that the prohibition may have been an extension of earlier Jewish scriptural prohibtions introduced by Jewish converts. This I do not agree with though.

I think there is a lot of evidence that the ban, such as it was, applied only to art in a religious context. There are no illustrated Qur’ans for example and never have been. Similarly there is no such decoration known in any mosque and none are known to have ever existed.

There is a classic piece of supporting evidence for this from an 8th century (CE) Islamic palace in Jordan. This palace called Mshatta had walls which featured various depictions of animals and other living forms but the interesting thing is that the mosque inside the palace had a rear wall which formed part of this exterior wall. Although this outer mosque wall continued the theme of the complete wall, all the living forms were omitted for the length of the wall which coincided with the mosque. I have some photos of both segments of wall which I could post to clarify if anyone is interested.

I’m highly sceptical of this Bamiyan explanation and have never heard it before. Do you have more data? It is possible I suppose but surely it is highly unlikely - the Taleban did actually believe in the prohibition against figural representation so why not?

I am more inclined to view the phenomena as an inescapable part of literalist thought. Iconoclasm always occurs at a certain point (in fact I believe it should be possible to map literalism and fundamentalism like a disease and isolate exact stages which occur at precise times. it would be an interesting study - Islam is 500 years younger than Christianity and roughly at the place where Christianity was 500 years ago), it certainly was a marked figure of Christian church history and is significant in other religions to the degree that the adherents become ‘obsessive’.

There is one other point that has been left out, one that is found in many cultures but not often acknowledged, and that is that proscriptions of certain behaviors can arise to protect people from people of their own culture.

In the context of this discussion, the cultural proscription against representational art arose to prevent people from being falsely accused of creating idols. 

In the West, it would correspond to the proscription against western/European style witchcraft and the Inquisition.

fjm

I suppose in terms of the original Judaic formulations against graven images this may be true but in the Islamic context there is certainly more to it - it would be an obvious explanation if representational art was not tolerated at all but the conundrum is that it is believed to be not tolerated but in point of fact it is actually so commonplace as to be a virtual leitmotif of Islamic art.

It’s not that it is a minority or heterodox interest - the figurative tradition is as developed and accepted as the figurative tradition in the west.