ICONOCLASM
The proliferation of images of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic art continued until around the fifteenth century AD despite edicts issued from devout individual political leaders, most notably that of the Caliph Yazid (Abd al-Malik) in 721 AD, which had limited cultural effect outside the geographical region under his direct control near his residence in Jordan.[1204] It is with Yazid’s edict that the first records of a practice known as iconoclasm emerged.
Early Islamic iconoclasts generally restricted themselves to the removal of Christian and Jewish images as icons of other Gods, however, in later years, cultural understanding of the law expanded to include the representation of any human figure.Generally, iconoclasm can be reduced to two forms; instrumental iconoclasm, where action is taken for the purpose of achieving a greater religious goal, and expressive iconoclasm, in which a desire to express a belief or feeling is achieved by the act itself.[1205] Instrumental iconoclasm seeks to solve the problem of idol worship identified in the Qur’an by ‘de-animating’ or neutralising the images by removing the features that make them recognisable as icons or replicates of God’s creation. This usually takes the form of defacement by burning or chiselling depending on the artistic medium used, but also includes less aggressive manifestations of censorship such as the painting of a white veil over the shama’il of the Prophet when his facial features are represented in artworks.[1206] These practical manifestations of instrumental iconoclasm are undertaken by persons who believed that such action is sanctioned by Divine law. A purposive distinction can be drawn here between kalima or nur Muhammad portraits and those portraits which are the censoring practice of instrumental iconoclasm. Whilst the former constitutes an artistic attempt to more accurately represent the qualities of the Prophet as man who transcends his earthly body, the latter is an act that takes a strict objective approach to the legal texts by replicating the Prophet’s proactive removal of images, rather than seeking to understand the law purposively by analysing the reasons behind his actions.
Expressive iconoclasm, on the other hand, has no legitimate legal grounding. Often overrepresented and exaggerated by Western media, contemporary expressive iconoclasm is singularly practiced by Muslim fundamentalists of the Wahhabi and Salafi school revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, and includes such acts as the infamous destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the response to the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands- Postern in 2005 and the attacks on French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2011 and 2015. The leaders and proponents of these movements claim legitimacy for their actions by taking a strict interpretative approach to the Qur’an, ignoring and denying value in the traditions of ijtihad that defines what has historically been the accepted practice for determining Islamic law contextually, with reference to changing social and cultural values.[1207]
Their approach to figuration in Islamic art is almost anarchic, and utilises fatwa and doctrinal edicts as ‘instruments for legalising un-Islamic behaviour’[1208] without reference to any legal authority that validates their ideology. In 2001, for example, the Taliban issued an edict validating the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.[1209] The publication of this edict was not motivated by religious piety, but was intended as a public statement of rebellion against the international community of the Western world through an elaborate performance[1210] of expressive iconoclasm that served a political purpose. The fact that this act was politically motivated is confirmed by evidence that the Taliban rejected offers forwarded by the MET Museum in New York to pay for the statues to be moved to a different location[1211] and by the fact that the statues had already been beheaded by early iconoclasts in the fifth or sixth century,[1212] and thus presented no threat as icons of worship at the time they were destroyed by the Taliban in the new millennium.
Thus, despite the official edict that stated the action was taken ‘on the basis of religious judgements of the ‘ulama (clerics) and rulings of the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’,[1213] the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas had no basis in Islamic law.In contemporary Western discourse, iconoclasm is used to create an image of Islam as inherently brutal and irrationally aggressive, furthering the narrative of the primitive ‘other’. The reduction of Islam to the practical application of Islamic ‘law’ by fundamentalist schools of thought is a continuing problem that contributes to the perceived ideological divide between Islamic and Western cultural practice. It is also important to understand that iconoclasm as a whole is a cultural phenomenon geographically restricted to Islamic practice in the Middle East. Thus, by applying the iconoclastic narrative to Islam as a whole is to ignore that Islam, like any system of law, ‘is not constituted solely by its “fundaments”... but is enacted within cultural products that can alter how those fundamental are understood within any given context’.[1214]
VI.