PORTRAITURE IN ISLAMIC ART

Early interpretations of religious texts understood warnings about idol worship in the Qur’an and hadith solely as a deterrent against sympathy for the Gods of other religions. This broad interpretation of the law meant that pictorial representations of the Prophet Muhammad were not considered to be heretical, because they did not encourage the worship­ping of false idols.

The use of images in Islamic art was so prominent at this time that a literary genre of explanatory hadith developed in the ninth century known as Shama’il al-Rasul or ‘Features of the Prophet’, which acted as a manual for artistic representations of Muhammad the Messenger.^[1186] This consisted of a compendium of information about the character and physical features of the Prophet as they were recalled by his friends and Companions, and provided a foundation for the black beard, turban, robe, long dark plaited hair and round cheeks that came to provide a visual cue for recognising his presence in artworks.^[1187] One example of this is Sa‘di’s Bustan (Fruit Orchard), which was painted in 1292 and is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The artist’s unconcern for the representation of the Prophet is reaffirmed by the image’s accompanying text, which explains his desire to create as close a portrait as possible.

It is important here to note that although the artist does attempt to visually replicate the Prophet’s image, his reference to the impossibility of such a venture can be read as an attempt to demarcate his work from a perceived attempt to compete with God through the creation of the human image. This goal is further achieved by the intentional stylization of the figure, a trope characteristic of Islamic art which involves devoiding figures of character and personality such that they are identi­fiable only by aforementioned visual cues. The Islamic miniatures also display the artist’s intention to self-consciously avoid realism by refrain­ing from giving their figures a three-dimensional quality through the use of depth and shadow.^[1189] This is often incorrectly and condescendingly interpreted as artistic ‘ignorance’^[1190] by Western historians. However, this methodology is not indicative of an intellectual primitivism, but is instead a fulfilment of the artist’s purpose, that is, to avoid giving the figure a distinctive quality that could deem it an attempt to replicate the diversity of Gods creation.^[1191]

Over time, the use of figurative representations of the Prophet evolved with the changing influence of certain passages of the Qur’an on Islamic thought, especially in the practice of Sufi mystics. After 1400 AD, representations of the Prophet began to reject the use of Shama’il to describe the Prophet visually. Instead, artists began to prefer the use of what Gruber describes as kalima or nur Muhammad portraits, whereby the Prophet’s facial features were replaced with either a word or symbol.^[1192] Kalima (meaning ‘graphical’ or ‘word’) portraits, for example replaced the face of the Prophet with a circular disc inscribed with the words ‘Ya Muhammad!^[1193]

It is important to note that this development did not arise out of a fear or prohibition of creative representation of the human figure, but rather an attempt to more effectively portray the spiritual quality of the Prophet as a quasi-Divine being that transcended his human body, and was unable to be truly captured in Islamic art by representation in human form. In other words, obscuring the Prophet's face with a graphic or word sought to convey the essential nature of the Prophet as the manifestation of the Divine word of Allah.^[1194]

Another way in which symbolism is used to more accurately represent the Divinity embodied by the Prophet is through the use of a flaming disc of light to obscure his facial features.

However, it is not only the Prophet who was the subject of images in early Islamic art. Portraits of kings, heroes and princes were common motifs in the ‘picture galleries’ of royal residencies, as well as on coins, medals, floor paintings and in sculpture.^[1200] These images also employ the use of intentional stylization, and often showed ‘no likeness to the person they were supposed to represent’,^[1201] perhaps in an attempt by the artist to defer any accusation that he had attempted to exercise the power of God by exactly replicating his creation. Baer, in her article The Human Figure in Early Islamic Art, also draws attention to the growing trend in the sixth century for artists to employ elements of satire and caricature in their figurative portraiture, which enabled the images to be lifelike and personified without necessarily imitating life. There is even evidence of at least one case where realism in an early Iranian painting was used for the purpose of creating a portrait of a man who had been issued with an arrest warrant.^[1202] Evidence of this relaxed contextual approach to the image also comes from the renowned Persian epic poet Nizami Ganjawi, who, known for his realistic style, is recorded as noting that as men can only be created by God, the painted image bears no threat to his power as it itself has no corporeal power and cannot match his creation.^[1203] This more liberal and rational approach to the legal position on the image was common in the regions of Persia and Mesopotamia, which, removed by geography from the centre of Islam in Mecca and Medina, were also removed from compliance with the proscriptive laws of the Caliphates, and were free to pursue their own legal interpretations of the holy texts.

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