QUR’ANIC VERSE IN ISLAMIC ART

The holy text of the Qur’an is considered to be the most valuable and pure source of Islamic law. As God’s express words, the text of the Qur’an is believed to be Divine, and the validity of its proscriptive verses are generally considered to be closed to ijtihad.

Historically, Islamic culture has favoured the use of word over image as a means of self-expression, and as the mechanism most suited to expressing the values of a culture by enabling ‘intellectual faculties and human consciousness to incorporate certain meanings... while leaving room for new interpretations, explanations and comprehension’.^[1224] This ‘culture of the Word’ is at odds with the Western ‘culture of the image’ inherited from the Greek and Roman artistic practices from which a progression toward the most accurate embodiment of the human figure in Western art practice can be traced. It has also been argued that the departure from the use of the image in Islamic art was also a conscious attempt to demarcate Islamic art and the Islamic message from the proliferation of Christian art that dominated the visual culture of the eighth century.^[1225]

The use of Qur’anic verse in Arabic writing has long been considered synonymous with the Arabesque. Its widespread use in artistic practice is largely thanks to the development of calligraphic styles where each letter and word could be legibly and aesthetically joined together in one continuous line through the ordered manipulation of letters and words into a form of religious expression.^[1226] This had the dual effect of stating the will of God through the text while expressing His unknowable, infinite qualities through symbolic representation,^[1227] with the continuous line acting metaphor for his ceaseless existence throughout time.

Attitudes toward the use of the holy legal text of the Qur’an in artistic practice vary greatly across geographical boundaries. Controversy sur­rounding the use of Qur’anic verse in contemporary art, is, perhaps surprisingly, uniquely concentrated in Asian Islamic countries. This can be largely attributed to the fetishisation of the language of Arabic by Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims as the sacred language of Divine law.^[1228] That is not to say that the use of Qur’anic verse in contemporary and commercial art is prohibited, but rather that it is considered to be an unethical use of text of the Divine revelation. After all, Muslims have a duty that is steeped in generations of Islamic tradition to act as custodians of the language of the Qur’an,^[1229] and to ensure God’s word is respected and protected for future generations.

Concerns about the appropriateness of using the holy text in art are usually voiced by Indonesia’s religious communities, including radical street organisations such as the Islamic Defenders Front, who are opposed to the moderate approach to Islamic law exhibited in academia and broader society,^[1230] and act as a watchdog for the misuse of Arabic language and Qur’anic verse.^[1231] One example of this was the uproar from the Islamic community in response to the designer fashion label Chanel’s show in January 1994 which unveiled a dress bearing the Qur’anic phrase ‘and they are rightly guided’ in its original Arabic in an upward direction across the model’s bust.^[1232] This prompted the head of the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars, Hasan Basri, to persuade his organisation to file an official complaint of protest. In a response indicative of the universal Western understanding of Islamic approaches to legally prohib­ited art as requiring iconoclastic elimination, Chanel burned the dresses and destroyed all photographs of them.

Another example of the practical relationship between Qur’anic art and Islamic law is through an understanding of the contemporary art practice of A.

The Holy Qur’an itself must not be changed, but to understand it, you must be free to interpret it... So I take a verse and I try to animate it with my personal vision, with my personal understanding... When I express it in visual language that’s when I use aesthetic knowledge in composition, colour, texture, line, rhythm, everything.,.^[1233]

In this approach, Pirous applies his own personal process of ijtihad to derive personal meaning from religious texts, conveying his relationship and understanding of the passages of the Qur’an through an expressive use of technique and materials. His use of Qur’anic verse has been subject to extensive scrutiny and even censorship when exhibiting his work. After an ‘ulama accused him of marring the Qur’an when a painting he exhibited suffered some scratches in installation,^[1234] Pirous changed his approach to public exhibitions to comply with cultural standards. Prior to an exhibition in Indonesia in 2002 which showcased a retrospective of his career, he had all his paintings checked by an Arabic expert and made adjustments where they were recommended, despite having previously exhibited and sold works without issue or alteration to Muslims in the Middle East to whom Arabic was an everyday language. This decision of self-censorship was largely ethically and culturally motivated by the expectations of the Islamic community, rather than by his own relationship and understanding of religious law.

These examples show that there is significant concern for the way in which misrepresentation of Islamic law in art can result in a denigration of the holy texts. Academic Kenneth George not only appreciates the value of understanding approaches to Islamic art as reflective of ethical understandings and ideologies of the religious texts, but also lists three ways in which these incidents of censorship show an understanding of the relationship of Islamic art as inextricable from Islamic law.

Although this notion of religious censorship can be alarming from a Western perspective where freedom of expression is a core value of contemporary artistic practice, it is important to remember the import­ance of the contextual legal environment in which the art is being produced. In the United States, many non-Muslims are engaging with Quranic verse in ways that would be illegal to many conservative religious elites, but which prompts a debate about the use of the Qur’an in a modern context. For example, in Sandow Birk’s creative project ‘American Quran’, the artist transcribes passages from the holy text in contemporary graffiti script, illuminating the text with cartoon images of twenty-first-century life to invite the viewer to consider the Qur’an as a ‘universal message to humankind’.^[1236] In many cases, works which are censored for breaching the established legal and cultural boundaries for Islamic art are still accessible over the internet, and successfully promote discussion across the developing transnational Islamic public^[1237] (assisted by the proliferation of internet fatwa) about how the law can be interpreted and applied to contemporary artistic practice.

VIII.