Image in Islam: La Longue durée

Figural representation in Islamic art is a controversial topic in classrooms and museums.

by

Zainub Verjee is a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, a fellow at McLaughlin College at York University, and a laureate of the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She has held leadership positions in the arts, culture and heritage sector, and is now executive director of Galeries Ontario Galleries, a voice for the visual arts in Canada. 

A kerfuffle erupted south of the border after Erika López Prater, an adjunct art history professor at Hamline University, a small liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota, found herself out of work for showing two medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a world art class last fall. PEN America, which advocates for open expression, has called the university’s decision not to renew her contract an “egregious violation” of academic freedom. The professor has since filed a religious discrimination and defamation lawsuit and there have been calls for the university to fire its president, Fayneese Miller, for mishandling the situation. 

In this ongoing debate, the issue has been framed, both by the university and others, largely as two people making claims: a professor citing academic freedom and a student complaining about an offensive act of Islamophobia. But is it so simple? Amna Khalid, a history professor at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, who disagrees with the university’s decision, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view. The administrators have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought.” 

Indeed, the crux of the Hamline controversy, as with other similar disputes, is first, the history and place of image within Islam, and, second, the response to that primary issue given today’s cultural politics ­– particularly around issues of equity, diversity and inclusion.

It’s a relevant issue for Canada, where mounting incidents of Islamophobia against the country’s growing Muslim population prompted Ottawa to appoint Amira Elghawaby as a special representative on combatting Islamophobia. Moreover, courses in Islamic art are offered at many Canadian universities, and institutes of Islamic studies exist at both the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal, along with the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. Among these, McGill’s institute is the oldest, founded in 1952 by Wilfred Smith, a Canadian Islamicist who understood the importance of contemporary scholarly approaches and bringing both Muslims and non-Muslims to the study of a tumultuous Muslim world. 

Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who has spoken in support of the dismissed American professor, worries that the university’s response was inflammatory. “Such condemnations can pose a threat to individuals and works of art,” cautions Gruber, whose authoritative scholarship includes her 2019 book, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images, which foregrounds the “lost” history of imagining the Prophet in Islamic cultures.

Prater showed two paintings of the Prophet Muhammad to her Hamline students in an online class, after warning them about the content and giving them the option to turn off their screens. “The next two slides that I am going to show do contain figurative depictions of the Prophet Muhammad,” she said, according to the Hamline Oracle, the university’s student newspaper, which obtained a video of the lecture. She cautioned the students: “I am showing you this image for a reason. And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.” Then her power point presented the contested images: One from the 14th century, and another from 16th century, which shows the Prophet with a veil and halo. As Gruber notes, this juxtaposition lets students consider why the facial veil and flaming nimbus developed as prophetic motifs. “The images help a teacher guide a collective conversation that explores how the prophet was conceptualized in more metaphorical ways – as a veiled beauty and as radiant light – over the course of those two centuries in particular,” Gruber writes.

The conflation of this standard teaching practice with equity issues and academic freedom is startling. It also highlights how academia has become a neoliberal apparatus. Hamline’s haste in adopting the garb of diversity, equity and inclusion has only exacerbated matters. Khalid, and fellow Carleton College professor Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, have observed that in this new model: “Education is a product, students are consumers, and campus diversity is a customer-service issue that needs to be administered from the top down.” They say the diversity, equity and inclusion framework purveys “a safety-and-security model of learning that is highly attuned to harm and that conflates respect for minority students with unwavering affirmation and validation.” As well, given Prater’s non-tenured status, concerns that the “systematic evisceration of tenure-track lines will be the death of academic freedom in America” have also been raised. This concern should not be lost on Canadians, where the ranks of temporary contract instructors in universities and colleges have expanded rapidly in recent years, by some estimates to as many as half of those filling teaching roles. 

The Hamline University brouhaha has largely skirted the history of scholarship that has engaged and framed the image debate in Islam. But one only needs to look to the 2019 Slade lectures at the University of Oxford, where Finbarr Barry Flood, an expert on Islamic art and architecture at New York University, presented eight lectures on the topic. He highlighted paradoxes in iconoclasm – the destruction of images for religious or political reasons. For instance, those committing acts of iconoclasm often demand images to document the event, observes Flood, who is researching a book project, Islam and Image: Contested Histories. He says the compulsion for iconoclasts to have an image, while intending to destroy them, suggests an underlying issue – the pursuit of greater power. 

Similarly, another scholar, Stefano Carboni, now the CEO of the Museums Commission in Saudi Arabia’s culture ministry, wrote a foreword to a 2019 collection of 13 essays by leading scholars, The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World, which examines some 1,500 years of artistic development, including post-9/11 works that address image practices within Islam and the making of contemporary Islamic culture, including ongoing debates about freedom of speech versus respect for religious beliefs. The book, edited by Gruber, lays out evidence that depictions of Prophet Muhammad’s face appeared in manuscripts from the 13th century onwards and cites examples of figurative Islamic art in various societies across the centuries.

Major institutional surveys that reveal the breadth of Islamic art are rare. But this year is an exception: a moment in the spotlight is now underway with the first major international exhibition of Islamic art in almost half a century – the inaugural edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale, on view until April 23 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the religion’s birthplace. The vast exhibition includes contemporary artists from around the world, as well as some 280 historical works that bring together centuries of faith and artistic expression. It is a critical marker, the first such comprehensive exhibition since the 1976 World of Islam Festival in London.

Last year, Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum organized Image? The Power of the Visual, which explored figurative imagery in Islamic art. In a lecture offered in conjunction with the show, I spoke about today’s ocular regime, suggesting that images are political, and that both the making of images and the consumption of them are political acts. In that talk, I showed one artwork – a portrait of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist fatally shot last May while covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. A photo collage created by Ramallah-based artist Sharif Mosa shows Abu Akleh reporting on her death at her own funeral, as Israeli police confront mourners carrying her casket. The image is accompanied by Mosa’s poetic message:

“We die twice, once we die in life, and once we die at death.

Coverage continues until we live a normal life and die a normal death.

Always with you Shireen Abu Akleh.”

It will surprise no one that the role of image in Islam has become a controversial global issue. Although the sites of its eruption may vary from cartoons to classroom lectures, it stirs primal emotions and informs the politics of display within cultural institutions. At a time when public trust is low and disinformation is high, Louise F. Ryan, an Australian scholar, rightly suggests museums are good places for dialogues about contentious subjects.

As she says: “Underlying many arguments in the museological world favouring the display of such representations is the notion that art alone has a universal language that can transcend all boundaries (religious, cultural, political, and social), and find a common ground for humanity to unite by restoring harmony and building cross-cultural understanding.”

And, for her part, Gruber implores, “now more than ever, a rigorous study of such Islamic paintings proves necessary – and indeed vital – at a time of sharp debates over what is, or is not, Islamic.” ■

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