Iconography: Islamic Iconography

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ICONOGRAPHY: ISLAMIC ICONOGRAPHY

Islam is generally considered an iconoclastic religion in which the representation of living things has been prohibited from its very beginning. However, the Qurʾān nowhere deals with this problem or explicitly speaks against representation. Rather, the prohibition of pictorial activities was derived from certain ḥadīth, the traditions attributed to the prophet Muḥammad and his followers. It has often been argued that the development of figural painting in Iran was due to Iran's Shīʿī persuasion, which would have taken these ḥadīth less seriously, but this idea likewise is not in keeping with historical fact, because the Shīʿīs follow the tradition as strictly as the Sunnīs, and furthermore, Shiism was declared Iran's state religion only in 1501.

Islam's attitude toward representation is basically in tune with the stark monotheistic doctrine that there is no creator but God: To produce a likeness of anything might be interpreted as an illicit arrogation of the divine creative power by humans. Such an attitude may have hardened at the time of the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy; thus, in Persian poetical parlance, "pictures" are often connected with (Christian) "convents." Furthermore, the Islamic prohibition may have first been concerned primarily with sculpture, for sculptures—as they existed in the Kaʿbah in Mecca in pre-Islamic times—could lead humankind again into idolatry, and, indeed, hardly any sculptural art developed in Islam until recently.

Emerging Imagery

The feeling that representation was alien to the original spirit of Islam resulted in the development of abstract ornamental design, both geometric and vegetal, notably the arabesque as the endless continuation of leaves, palmettes, and sometimes animal-like motifs growing out of each other; it also gave calligraphy its central place in Islamic art. However, it would be wrong to claim that early Islam was without any pictures. In secular buildings such as palaces, there was no lack of representations of kings, musicians, dancers, and the like, and expressions in Persian poetry such as "like a lion painted in the bathhouse" point to the existence of wall painting (albeit with the additional, negative meaning of "something lifeless"). Decorative painting on ceramics includes not only more or less stylized animal or human figures as individual motifs but also scenes from (often unidentified) tales and romances. Although the Arabic and Persian texts scribbled around the rims of the vessels sometimes give a clue to the scene, little is known about such pictorial programs, which are found on metalwork as well. Theories about pre-Islamic (Sassanid or Turkic) or astronomical symbolism have been proposed. In the early Middle Ages, certain Arabic books were illustrated either for practical purposes, namely medical and scientific manuscripts, or for entertainment, as in the Maqāmāt (Assemblies) of al-Ḥarīrī or the animal fables known as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah.

New stylistic features came with the growing Chinese influence during the Mongol occupation of Iran in the late thirteenth century. (Persian literature speaks of China as the "picture house," where Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, acts as the master painter.) Henceforward, illustrative painting developed predominantly in Iran, where the great epic poems (an art form unknown to the Arabs) inspired miniaturists through the centuries to the extent that the iconography of Firdawsī's Shāh-nāmah (Book of kings) and Niẓāmī's Khamsah (Quintet) became almost standardized. Early historical works, such as the world history of Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1317), were rather realistically illustrated. Human faces are clearly shown (and later sometimes mutilated by orthodox critics), and even the prophet Muḥammad appears with his face uncovered.

The same originally held true for a branch of painting that has continued from the fourteenth century to the present day, namely, pictures of the Prophet's night journey (isrā ʾ, miʿrāj ) through the heavens on the mysterious steed Burāq. In the course of time, Muḥammad's face was covered partly, then completely; at present, no representation of the Prophet is permitted at all: In the numerous popular pictures of the Miʿrāj, he is represented by a white rose or a cloud. Burāq, meanwhile, has become a centerpiece of popular iconography: Pictures of this winged, donkey-shaped creature with a woman's head and a peacock's tail not only appear today on cheap prints but are also painted on trucks and buses, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a kind of protective charm.

Truck painting in these areas has developed into a new art form, and the religious and political ideals of the owners become visible in the pictorial and calligraphic decorations of their vehicles. Similarly telling are wall paintings in Turkish or Afghan coffee- or teahouses, where one may find realistic scenes from the Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (Stories of the prophets) or allusions to folk romances.

There was and is apparently no aversion to representing angels in Miʿrāj scenes, romances, or works on cosmology, or else as single figures, even in relief on walls. Their faces are always uncovered. Gabriel with his many enormous wings and Isrāfīl with the trumpet of resurrection are most prominent.

Islamic painting reached its zenith in Iran and India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, partly under the influence of European prints, naturalistic portraiture was developed to perfection. The Mughal emperor Jahāmgīr (r. 1605–1627) inspired the court painters to express his dreams of spiritual world-rule in his portraits by using the motif of the lion and the lamb lying together, or by showing him in the company of Ṣūfīs.

The Shape of Spirituality

Portraits of Ṣūfīs and dervishes are frequent in the later Middle Ages: Many drawings capture the spiritual power or the refinement of a solitary Muslim holy man or illustrate the "sessions of the mystical lovers" (majālis al-ʿushshāq ). Ṣūfīs are also shown as teachers or in their whirling dance. However, little has been done to identify them, although the color of their garments (or the shape of their headgear) sometimes betrays their affiliation with a certain Ṣūfī order (thus, a cinnamon- or rose-colored frock is typical of the Ṣābirī branch of the Chishtīyah). Colors are also used to indicate the spiritual state the mystic has reached.

Manuscripts of the Qurʾān and ḥadīth s were never illustrated but were written in beautiful calligraphy that sometimes assumes an almost "iconic" quality, as Martin Lings has pointed out. Qurʾanic themes, however, as retold in the stories of the prophets or in poetry such as the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā by Jāmī (d. 1492), have developed a pictorial tradition of their own. Some mystical epics, especially ʿAṭṭār's Manṭiq al-ṭayr (The conversation of the birds), have inspired painters, but the few examples of Rūmī's Mathnavī with pictures, which date from fourteenth-century India to nineteenth-century Iran, lack any trace of Ṣūfī spirituality.

Sometimes seemingly simple motifs are interpreted mystically; this author's Turkish Ṣūfī friends explain the frequent use of tulips on the tiles in Turkish mosques with the fact that the word lālah ("tulip") has the same letters and thus the same numerical value as the word Allāh, that is, sixty-six. This is also true for the word hilāl, "crescent," and the hilāl has come to be regarded as the typical sign of Islam although its first appearance on early Islamic coins, metalwork, and ceramics had no religious connotations. It seems that in the eleventh century, when some churches (such as Ani in Armenia) were converted into mosques, their cross-shaped finials were replaced with crescent-shaped ones. A ḥājj ("pilgrimage") certificate of 1432 shows drawings of the sacred buildings in Mecca with such crescent finials. The Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) used the hilāl on his flag, but only in the early nineteenth century was it made the official Turkish emblem, which appeared on postage stamps in 1863. Other Muslim countries followed the Turkish example, and now it is generally seen as the Islamic equivalent of the Christian cross (thus, the Red Crescent parallels the Red Cross).

There was no inhibition in representing pilgrimage sites in medieval guidebooks for pilgrims. In the late nineteenth century, photographs of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina became prized possessions of pilgrims and of those who were unable to perform the ḥājj, just as many Muslim homes now contain prints, posters, or wall hangings with representations of the Kaʿbah and/or the Prophet's mausoleum.

While naturalistic representation of the Prophet and his family was increasingly objected to, other ways of presenting him developed. One might put a ḥadīth in superb calligraphy on a single page or write his ḥilyah, an elaboration of the classical Arabic description of his outward and inward beauty, in a special calligraphic style, as was done in Turkey from about 1600. The Prophet's footprints on stone, or representations of them, along with more or less elaborate drawings of his sandals, still belong to the generally accepted items in the religious tradition. One could also produce "pictures" of saintly persons such as ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib from pious sentences written in minute script (although in Iran quite realistic battle scenes showing the bravery and suffering of Ḥusayn and other members of the Prophet's family are also found in more recent times).

Calligraphic images have become more and more popular: The letters of the word bismillāh ("in the name of God") can be shaped into birds and beasts; Qurʾanic passages of particular protective importance, such as the "throne verse" (sūrah 2:256), appear in animal shape; and whenever a calligraphic lion is found, it usually consists of a formula connected with ʿAlī, who is called the "Lion of God" (Asad Allāh, Ḥaydar, Shir, and so forth). Most frequently used is the invocation "Nādi ʿAlīyan …" ("Call ʿAlī, who manifests wondrous things …"), which appears on many objects from Safavid Iran and Shīʿī India, as do the names of the twelve Shīʿī imāms. The names of the Panjtan (Muḥammad, ʿAlī, Fāṭimah, Ḥasan, and Ḥusayn) combined with the word Allāh are used to form human faces, as in the Bektāshī tradition in Turkey. The names of protective saints such as the Seven Sleepers (sūrah 18) are also used as a calligraphic design (but their figures appear as well in Persian and Turkish painting, with their faithful dog Qiṭmīr or his name always in the center). Invocations of Ṣūfī saints may be written in the shape of a dervish cap (typical is that of Mawlānā Rūmī); other pious exclamations appear as flowers or are arranged in circular form.

Indeed, the most typical and certainly the most widely used means of conveying the Islamic message was and still is calligraphy. The walls of Persian mosques are covered with radiant tiles on which the names of God, Muḥammad, and ʿAlī in the square Kufic script give witness to the Shīʿī form of faith; Turkish mosques are decorated with Qurʾanic quotations or with an enormous Allāh. In Turkey, various calligrams are based on the letter w, and the central statements of the faith are written in mirrored form.

Lately, under European influence, a very colorful popular iconography has developed in some parts of the Muslim world. On posters, religious motifs from various traditions are strung together in highly surprising form: Raphael's little angels appear along with the Lourdes Madonna around a deceased Muslim leader in a lush Paradise, or an apotheosis of Ayatollah Khomeini is coupled with the earthbound figure from Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. (Here one is reminded of some pictures in the Indian Ismāʿīlī tradition that show ʿAlī as the tenth avatāra in the blue color of Kṛṣṇa, with Hanuman the "monkey-chief" carrying the royal umbrella over ʿAlī's white mule, Duldul.) Such syncretistic pictures are certainly not acceptable to the large majority of pious Muslims. On the other hand, the calligraphic traditions are gaining new importance from Morocco to Indonesia, and some attempts at producing a kind of Qurʾanic scriptorial picture (thus Sadiqain and Aslam Kamal in Pakistan) are remarkably successful and deserve the attention of the historian of religion and the art lover.

Bibliography

Most histories of Islamic art deal with the topic of so-called iconoclasm in Islam. One of the latest publications is Mazhar Ṣevket Ipşiroğlu's Das Bild im Islam: Ein Verbot und seine Folgen (Vienna, 1971), which stresses the Ṣūfī influence on Islamic painting but is not completely convincing. The only scholar who has devoted a good number of studies to Islamic iconography is Richard Ettinghausen; out of his many valuable works I shall mention especially "Hilāl in Islamic Art," in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1960–), with a thorough historical survey; "Persian Ascension Miniatures of the Fourteenth Century," in Oriente ed occidente nel medio evo (Rome, 1957), which treats the early pictorial development of the ascension theme; and his religious interpretation of a Mughal painting of Jahāmgīr preferring a Ṣūfī to worldly rulers, "The Emperor's Choice," in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, edited by Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), vol. 1. See also Ettinghausen's Islamic Art and Archaeology: Collected Papers, prepared and edited by Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (Berlin, 1984). The volume dedicated to Ettinghausen, Studies in Art and Literature of the Near East, edited by Peter Chelkowski (Salt Lake City, 1974), lists more of his relevant works and contains some articles pertinent to the problem of iconography.

The best pictorial introduction to the miʿrāj miniatures is The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet, edited by Marie-Rose Séguy (London, 1977), based on a Uighur manuscript from the Timurid court at Herat. Popular painting has been dealt with in Malik Aksel's Türklerde dinï resimler (Istanbul, 1967), a delightful book with many examples of folk painting and calligraphic pictures from the Bektāshī tradition. A very useful introduction into Islamic iconography in Africa (a much neglected topic) is René A. Bravmann's African Islam (London, 1983). The calligraphic and iconographic aspects of the Qurʾān are lucidly explained in Martin Ling's The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination (London, 1976). A general survey of the calligraphic tradition in connection with the mystical and poetical expressions can be found in my Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York, 1984).