Ottoman History Podcast - What is Islamic Art?

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

with Wendy M. K. Shaw hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine. « Click for More »

Basically what I was starting with was thinking about this term Islamic art history and the into the term, the more all of the words started to disappear. That was Wendy Shaw talking to us about her book, What is Islamic Art? My name is Zainab Azhar Badagan. Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. In this episode, we discuss, question and reconceptualize the main building blocks of the discipline of art history and the place of Islamic art within it. Wendy Shaw recounts the colonial and Eurocentric history of how the image became central to art history, and seeing as an act only done by the eyes. In questioning these concepts, she offers the alternative of seeing with the heart as intrinsic to understanding Islamic art. By considering the heart and the soul as the place of reception of the art, and art as a representation of the divine, she puts back the Islamic into Islamic art.

So why did you decide to write this book? I wanted to find out how did Islam get taken out of Islamic art history? What happened? And how I, like many people, was really caught up on the Islamic aspect that is always being told, no, it's not really Islamic, that's just a category. There was something about that's just a category, which really bothered me. Because when one studies European art history, one ends up learning a lot about Christianity. That wasn't the case for Islam. Islamic art history would generally avoid everything that could possibly be theological. And when one looked at images, it was that they painted because they weren't really good Muslims. was I was living in Switzerland, and there was this perennial discussion of the so-called image prohibition and women veiling. And it occurred to me that it was really strange that there were all these ideas about Islam, which were predicated on the visual. It was all about the women having to cover and the images being forbidden. And the great irony, of course, is that neither of these things are absolute in Islam.

So what was the subscription of the absolute towards Islam? And that's still a problem that I'm working on in different ways. But this book was one way of thinking about this question of, is there an image prohibition in Islam? Ultimately, I find it really boring. Because there are so many images, and there are so many different kinds of images,

and why are Europeans so obsessed with the image? What is this supposed to show anyway? And instead I started saying, what is an image. So where did questioning what is an image in Islamic art history take you? I think there are a lot of ways in which I could do this. And when I was starting the book, I actually didn't know how this would work out. What I did when I started was I sat down and I read the Quran. Of course, as I think most people know, there are no references to images in the Quran. So generally people just say, okay, it's not relevant to this question of the image.

And instead, well, if I'm not thinking about the image and I'm thinking about the act of perception, then what I was interested in was references to the senses, references to perception. And of course, the Quran is all about perception. It's all about the eyes and the ears and the heart. And what I noticed was, first of all, you rarely have the eyes without the ears and the heart, and that the eyes don't have preference. The heart seems to have preference. The ears seem to have preference. The eyes are important. I'm not like getting rid of eyes, but they're not there by themselves. And so that was sort of one basic source.

And then I was thinking about, well, if the ears are so important, then I really need to think about music. So then I was looking up things about music and I was like, okay, they didn't really debate issues of are images allowed, but the issue of is music allowed was huge because music was associated with forbidden acts such as gambling, drinking, and fornication. And so is music permissible? So I was looking at these discussions of permissibility, and I probably don't have all the discussions of permissibility, but I had enough to get a sense that this was probably a much bigger issue than the issue of the visual image,

because it was conceived as more of a threat. So that's one way of thinking about it, is to think about these levels of permissibility discussions of when and where. And I think what was most interesting to me, aside from is it permissible or not, was the ways in which different thinkers were coming up with arguments and how diverse their arguments were. And the discursive flexibility and the centrality of debate in articulating what was the ideal behavior. The second thing that became really important to me was that I noticed that many of the experiences people who weren't theologians would be having would be taking place through storytelling.

And this probably became one of the most important things that I came away from that book with and that's affecting what I'm doing after. And that's that, you know, in most of our lives, and I think this is pretty much true for most people, we don't deal with the law very often. We deal with the law when there's a big problem. But unless you're taking somebody to court, you know, the law is there. We kind of know it, you know, but even when things were forbidden, probably people were whistling while they worked. So the law isn't everything. Most people don't want to read academic work today.

Obviously, most people don't want to read theological treatises. People read or tell stories. And a lot of the most important texts that were circulating are stories. texts that were circulating are stories. And so along those lines, there's a story that I actually have done as performances, and right now I'm making it into an illustrated book, which is told in the biographies of Abu Nasr al-Farabi. And what I find interesting about this story is that it probably never happened. It is in two of his biographies, and it's about him going to the court of Saif al-Fawla, the Hamanad ruler, or emir, and actually their dates don't match. So why is this story told? Abu Nasr al-Farabi was a 10th century scholar renowned as a philosopher, scientist, and jurist.

In this visit, al-Farabi, similar to Nizami's story about Plato putting animals to sleep by playing the music of spheres, communicates to his audience through music, and plans to apprehend and change their souls. So in this story, Abu Nasr al-Farabi goes to the court of Saif al-Dawla, and in different variations, he's sitting with the ulema, he's sitting with the scholarsama, he's sitting with the scholars and at the beginning when Al-Farabi comes in, Al-Farabi asks where should I sit?

Saif al-Daula says stay where you are. Al-Farabi says, well he doesn't say anything, he walks up and he sits right next to him on the throne. Can you imagine? I'm going to pause my story and say, wow, all of a sudden we have this situation in which this old bedraggled man who looks horrible is in the court and he's sitting next to on the throne with the emir. It's an extraordinary confrontation. Okay, so here we're here at the court. Al-Farabi starts to talk with the scholars. Saif al-Dawla is very impressed. And so we have sort of this calming down of the situation. And Saif al-Dawla asks his guests, may we offer you something to eat? And Al-Farabi says, no, alhamdulillah, I'm full'm full everything's fine may we offer you something

to drink no thank you everything's fine and Saif al-Dawla wants to invite his guest to something because you know that's what one does he says well shall I call in the musicians and al-Farabi says that would be excellent so Saif al-Dawla is relaxed. The musicians come in. They start to play. And Al-Farabi is like, no, stop. It's horrible. Now, Saif al-Dawla is, of course, really pissed off at this point. This guy has come in.

He has sat on his throne. He has said his musicians are horrible. What do you do? He says, well, can you do any better? And Al-Farabi says, well, actually, yes. So he has this little bag and he takes out a bunch of pipes from the bag and he puts them together. He starts to play and everybody in the hall starts laughing hysterically. Once they're all like beside themselves, rolling on the floor he takes the pipes apart he puts them back together he starts to play and everybody starts crying every sorrow they've ever

had they're pouring their eyes out and while they're sitting there flooding the audience hall with their tears he takes the flute apart, and he puts it back together again, and he plays the flute, and everybody falls asleep, and then he leaves. The point is that there's a whole discussion of authority. that there's a whole discussion of authority. There's a discussion of relationships of station, power, the role of the intellectuals, the role of the musicians. And there's a discursive space in which they're talking. But then there's the effective space in which the philosopher actually communicates meaning. And that is the heart. So what does that mean, to communicate to the heart, to see with the heart? So the general idea there is that one has a soul which is prepared to take in things. And it's that preparation and the deep subjectivity of that experience

that produces the perception. And that's something that's really interesting because with all of these discussions of the heart as a perceptual organ, one moves away actually from the source of the sensation so that the source isn't what's important but the preparation of the soul is what's important one takes in the world and it's that sensation that allows one person to perceive say music or geometry or a tree or a butterfly or your child through the sensory organ that's prepared in the heart and what you're taking in there is the grace, ultimately, right? Because your ultimate goal is not to objectively describe and articulate the world.

It's to recognize the signs of divine grace. So seeing does not only happen with the eye, and one can see or perceive with the ear and the heart. What is particularly Islamic about this, and how does that change our understanding of what constitutes as art? The story about the nature of art that I think is really important to think about is that what is art doing is really central. That is, in the European tradition, we have a modern understanding of artists as being, they're in competition as individuals. What they're producing is the product. I think that is reflected by looking at masterpieces, looking at works, and expecting the work to be conveying the needed information.

So how does one rethink artists? So I was looking at a lot of stories in which there are figures of artists, but I think one of the ones that for me was the most evocative was the idea of a competition between artists. Now this is evocative because the European idea of the artist is based, rooted in the story of a competition. So the idea of the competition of the artists from this selection that became dominant in the modern period is one in which the two artists, Zoixas and Paraisos, compete for the highest level of verisimilitude, right? So the best work is the one that fools you. So it happens that there are a lot of stories about competitions between artists in Islamic sources as well. And the one that I focused on is one that circulates in several texts.

And what I like about it circulating in several texts is two things. One of them is, to me, this circulation means it was worth repeating. And if it's worth repeating, that means it's considered as particularly valuable. So what is this story? And why do I think it's a good complement to the normative ideas we have from the ancient story of Zoixos and Paraisos? So I'll just tell you the story. But before getting to that, I just want to say one thing.

There are two sets of characters here. There are the Chinese and there are the Greeks. And these characters switch in different versions of the story. Some people say that this is sort of arbitrary. I tend to think it has to do with the context of what Chinese and Greek meant at different times in Islamic history and how both functioned as foils of foreignness that were familiar, right?

So they're not absolutely foreign, they're not alien, but they're familiar and yet not yourself. So they can not absolutely foreign. They're not alien, but they're familiar and yet not yourself. So they can function against each other. OK, so this is the story as Rumi tells it. Once the Chinese said, at art we are the best. The Greeks said, with more talent we've been blessed. The Sultan said, I'll set a test for you to see which of your claims is really true. They all prepared to paint a room's interior. In knowledge, though, the Greeks were far superior. Come, show us a room, said the Chinese, and give the Greeks one similar to it,

please. They found adjoining rooms which formed a pair, one half for each group, thus completely fair. Then the Chinese requested lots of paint. The king supplied them, generous as a saint. Each drawn form from his own storehouse men would bring, more paint for them as gifts from this kind king. More paint for them as gifts from this kind king. The Greeks said, colorful paints will not prove successful. Color is what we must remove. They closed their space off, polished every wall, clear as the heavens up above us all.

Color to colorlessness can change quite soon color is a cloud colorlessness the moon if in the clouds some radiance should that came out from the Oxford University Press. What happens in this story farther on is that the king is called upon to choose whether the Greek artists or the Chinese artists have been better. The king looks, and he's sitting between these two images. In the paintings of this scene, the king always has his finger to his lips, so he's completely astonished, because one wall is absolutely gorgeous. It is beautiful. It is wildly detailed. There's unfortunately no description of the painting, but of course, that's not accidental. And then he looks to the other wall and it's even more beautiful. It's

even more astounding. It's even more scintillating. And he's caught between the two. It's only when the curtain is lowered that he recognizes that one of them is a painting and the other is a reflection. And the reflection ends up being considered the greater of the works. Okay, so there are a lot of things that are happening in this. One of them that first comes to mind is that if we think about the mirror from a contemporary standpoint, we expect the king to see himself in the mirror. The king does not see himself in a mirror, right? There isn't a reflection of a king. So the mirror we're talking about is not the mirror that Lacan talks about. It's not the mirror that we look at in the morning.

It's another mirror. It's the mirror of the soul, right? And so the mirror is often used as a metaphor for the heart or as a sensory organ or the soul, and polishing the mirror is the training of the individual to receive perception. to receive perception. So what do we have? We have an image that's a representation of the world that's highly accurate. It's very beautiful. It does all the things that the winning image

in the Zoixos and Paraisos does. It's deceptive. But unlike in the Zoixos and Paraisos, it's not described as deceptive. And unlike in the Syksos and Paraisos, it's not described as deceptive, and this isn't negative. This is a valorization of the beauty of the physical world. However, it's in the reflective space of the heart that it gains its more scintillating and authentic beauty, because in that reflective space of the heart, it takes on the elements of the real, which can only be recognized internally rather than externally.

So it's kind of the opposite of representation. If you didn't have the painted image, you wouldn't have the reflection. And of course, here we're not simply talking about images as in painted images. We're talking about, in the platonic sense, the world as the representation of the real, right? Because particularly in the thought of Ibn Arabi or Suhruwardi, the physical world that we're living in is but a manifestation of divine grace. And so without that manifestation, the divine wouldn't have had a means of being manifest

in order to be recognized, right? That's the desire. The divine desire is recognition. So manifestational enables recognition, but it's not only manifestation, it doesn't suffice. You have to have the heart which can perceive this as manifestation and as grace in order to recognize the real behind the physical world. So this manifestation does not have to be in form of a painting or an illustration. It doesn't have to be an image.

If we are redefining art history, especially Islamic art history, as not preoccupied with the image, then where would you look to talk about Islamic art? Which sources would you use? Particularly the sort of normative overall discussion about Islamic art history is this issue of the lack of painting or the lack of images and the lack of perspective. That is, they weren't able to do perspective, they weren't able to do foreshortening. That is, there's a sense of deficiency that's attributed to the Islamic.

So one of the problems that I had in writing this is that art history generally starts with the visual image. So I was starting off with the text more than I was starting off with the image, and then thinking about how the image was engaging with these stories and these texts. What I was trying to do was find elements that ricocheted within Islamic discourses, that moved around between often the Quran, often the Hadith, and particularly commentaries and poetry in mostly Persian and Arabic, so that I could see that these ideas were part of a discursive cloud. They were part of what people think is normal, and maybe don't even, they're articulating what people think is normal. So just to give a parallel example in the modern context, when we say, from my perspective, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we rarely think about the history of perspective.

But just saying from my perspective puts us into a world in which the subject has an overview, is seeing things from a particular place. and that place is oddly both personal, it's my perspective, but it's also something that has a claim on objectivity, and so on. So what happens when we denormalize perspective? What does perspective mean? Of course, because of the vocabularies through which we talk about perspective, perspective also indicates a sense of order and objectivity. Now that's actually itself a fairly modern idea, but it was very widespread in the 20th century. And so I talk about how this idea of perspective and perspective as a symbolic form,

as Panofsky says, of the West corresponds with an increasing recognition of the West as a colonial subject, as a modern subjectivity that has a colonial agency over the world. So perspective, when they're saying it lacks perspective, it's also a way of saying it's not rational. It doesn't order the world properly. And so from that issue of lack, one of the things I was trying to do is not explain what's lacking, but saying what's there that we're not seeing if we're conditioned by the categories that we bring to the table.

bring to the table. So if we think about perspective, what does perspective do? It positions the subject in the relationship with the plane in which the subject has to be in a particular position for the whole system to work. That is the place of authority is that system. system to work. That is the place of authority is that system. So that subjectivity isn't only about where we're standing in relation to a picture plane, but it's what I talked about earlier in terms of in order to be the proper subject, we have to absent ourselves. And what I read about so often and I talk with my friends is, I love this, but I can't put that into my text. I have to take out the thing that makes me personal to me in order to make it authoritative. And that seems very weird to me. Why should I be lying about where I am in order to make something true? It's a very weird

habit that we have. And the metaphor for that is perspective, because the reality is we are never standing still in front of things. We are not looking at that landscape and taking a picture of it and just like this fixed eye, we're walking and we're shorter, we're taller, we're fatter, we're thin. All sorts of stuff is happening. We're talking to people. That is the reality, not the landscape. what happens if you live in a world that's out of perspective one of the things that happens when one looks at people talking about geometry basically for outsiders let's say people who aren't used to it who are like responding to islamic culture they're like it's dizzying i don't know where to situate myself. And Peter Schettdahl, whose name I don't know how to pronounce, but who's a art reviewer for The New Yorker, he has a really, really interesting and very telling

interpretation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art galleries that opened in 2012, in which he sort of reaffirms his identity as a Judeo-Christian scion of the Greco-Roman past, and he thinks Islam is looking at him, and he finds it dizzying, and all this stuff. What's going on there? He's feeling a need to reaffirm his absolute subjectivity and mastery in who he is.

He is feeling displaced. And so, to my mind, one can think about what it means to be out of perspective as a liberation from this fixity of the authoritative position that's absolute and external to the self. And instead, think of it as a metaphor for something which has come up in different critiques of the humanist subject, of what it means to take on multiple subjectivities, what it means to shift where you're looking from, how you can learn from multiple subjectivities and not become lesser or miscegenated, but become more because you are able

to recognize multiplicity and live in multiplicity. And of course, for me and for many of my friends and for you and for so many of us, that is our lives. We are not the enlightenment subject. We are multiples. We live in multiple places. We have multiple heritages. I am no less from the United States than I am from Turkey or vice versa. It's a boring question. I've lived outside of both for over a decade. That's, you know, I have these multiplicities. This isn't a deficiency. It simply is. For me, that is the center of subjectivity because here I am. It may not be the center of subjectivity for somebody else. That's fine too. However, if somebody is saying,

ah, but my subjectivity is the best way to master the situation and I have the ideal perspective on the whole thing, not so great. So that's, in a way, goes back to this idea of history, because there's nothing wrong with history, but it's like the image, it's insufficient. In rethinking the category of Islamic art history, you have reconceptualized the place of Islam within it, you have redefined what art is, how does that work with the way that we think about history in this category? How is history insufficient? Yeah, I mean, it's weird, because I mean, I'm the child of historians. I grew up up in history I grew up going to the Middle East Studies Association conference in fact when I went there when I was like 21 or something these older scholars kept coming up to me and being like oh my god I knew you in diapers

and I was like yeah that happens in 20 years like I was not happy. Bless them all. Now I understand them so well. Anyway, but the thing is that history is not culture. And I think the thing that I noticed is that with all of my colleagues, we have an enormous affection for the things we work on. And by colleagues, I mean art historians, as well as historians, we are fascinated by them, we imagine through them. And all of this gets suppressed in various ways in academic writing, in museums, that is, everything gets reduced to the information. And if you're not into this stuff, that information is often not satisfying. So that's not to say that history is irrelevant. It's to say that history allows objects to function as evidence in relation to

historical narratives. But if you're expecting people to know about dynasties and then get some sort of cultural meaning out of that, they need a lot of background. In European contexts, until recently, people had that background or in Euro-American context. So, you know, on a very basic level, we can look at a painting of a naked guy on two sticks that are crossed together and say, ah, the crucifixion, right? We have that basic cultural knowledge. In relation to the Islamic world, most people don't. And even many Muslims won't, right, have that information. And so the act of mediation has to shift. That's not that history is wrong. It's that historical evidence functions for historical narratives. And if you want to have cultural communication,

you have to function on a level of being able to take things in while respecting the culture that you don't know. Now, what do I mean by that? If we come in to any situation with our own categories, we erase the categories through which that situation understands itself. So we give it meaning, but we only give it meaning as an articulation of ourselves. The real issue is to think about how can we give these things meaning as they might be articulated in the situation of the culture that they were in. And this is very problematic. It's a very hard thing to do because it's partly imaginary. That is, you're dealing with a time-transposed subject who doesn't exist. But I would still say that's closer than we might be able to get through our own categories. Another part is that art history is about the production

of political historical narratives, both for superiority, which country has the best art and so on, but also for the construction of national collectives. And so there's a political reason that history has been the primary manifestation of thinking through how works function together, because that is how one articulates a seemingly logical nation state or a seemingly normal practice of this thing we call development. Art functions as a metaphor for all sorts of other things, including ethnicity, including economic development, including sophistication, and so on. guitar solo?

? ?