How do you determine what believers make of their religious art? Do you fabricate a questionnaire and report the resultant statistics? Can it be retrieved from an historical record established only by the literate elite? Do you watch what ordinary people do with that art and decipher the meaning from the concepts and relationships they form as a result of their encounter? Or do you spin out a theory, born of your own sense of explanation and elegance, which you then fit over the presumed facts?
Elias Jamal is too sophisticated and modest to claim that he has penetrated the mind of all Muslims at all times as they approach their religious art. But he would love to be able to do so. In an attempt to get as close as he can he sets out to circumscribe his subject. His mode of triangulation consists of a series of chapters in which he considers how thinking in a variety of domains may bear on the way religious art is grasped by ordinary people. His says he does not want to simply proceed from the top down: he eschews discussion of the usual subjects of Islamic art – Persian miniatures and other forms of elite production – focusing instead on more ‘popular’ writers’ interpretations of material culture, and the actual uses of such art. An image, he says, is not “defined by beauty or an aesthetic admiration for the skill of its creator, but by … the effectiveness with which it allows the observer to access what is perceived through the image…. I proceed,” he says, quoting Hans Belting, “from the belief that visual images ‘reveal their meaning best by their use’”.
But even though the author speaks of “adopting a position of methodological promiscuity” he sticks pretty close to home, saying that “my examination of these images and of the people in whose lives they are imbricated is mediated by texts and textual culture”. He is thus not able to resist all aspects of a top down approach: “I would argue that Muslim thinkers have developed systematic and advanced theories of representation and signification, and that many of these theories have been internalised by Islamic society at large and continue to inform cultural attitudes toward the visual arts”. This strategy produces a coherent series of analyses, but it does so at the price of assuming that contemporary Muslims are almost exclusively the heirs to the views expressed in texts rather than the authors of any interpretations not elucidated in written sources.
Specifically, Jamal looks at such domains as the approach to icons and idols, writings on the nature of beauty, the practice of alchemy, the role of dream narratives, the mysticism of the Sufis, and the uses of calligraphy and monumental inscriptions. As in other realms for example, he finds that references to icons and idols are less about the objects themselves than the imagination through which they are grasped. Muslims, he says, reacted both positively and negatively to icons, not because they accepted them as direct embodiments of a spirit but because they could see that they stood for other propositions, even if that was not their way of articulating them. Knowledge of practices in India helped to exercise the Muslim imaginary no less than fuel their appreciation of the economic consequences of the circulation of such artifacts. Because artists anywhere “self-consciously work to satisfy the needs of an audience of consumers” popular concepts of beauty, while certainly having their aesthetic component, cannot, he argues, be reduced, as many scholars on Islamic art maintain, to that aspect alone. Thus an appreciation of the utility of wonder and its vocabulary become vital to honing in on the roles and meanings people bring to their viewing of religious art.
Other domains make their own contributions to the perception of religious art. Alchemy, like optics, held that perceived forms exist in the imagination and are matched to external objects, and the world can thus be embraced by direct apprehension. So, too, dreams and their interpretation, like accessing sacred text, grasp an actual reality, an ultimate truth. Similarly, Sufism, far from being a simple emotional exercise, is another way of holding a thought in one's mind and by that act attending to a thing that lies outside of oneself. Finally, the words on paper or mounted on an architectural monument may mimic the world, inspire wonder, project political messages at times of political discord, or ward off evil - all such usages functioning “not as text but as visual sign…where the interplay of the textual and the visual reflects a form of ‘iconic augmentation’ in which one adds value to the other as a signifier”.
Throughout his analysis Jamal is careful to bring in a wide range of historical figures and moments. In that sense he goes well beyond a simple discussion of religious art to offer a window into the sources upon which popular Islam would draw in the apprehension and engagement not only of art but of religion more generally.
Yet for all his criticism of prior scholarship on the subject Jamal's own project does not go terribly far beyond that of his predecessors. True, he counters those who project Western notions of aesthetics onto Islamic art or assume that there is some ethereal spirituality that explains the way Muslims must attend to such art. But these writers have long since been dismissed by the very anthropology Jamal says he would like to utilise, though with little depth of reliance upon the approaches of that discipline. His triangulation is only partially successful in no small part because the features he would have us focus on are left extremely vague. He says: “Epigraphy, like other forms of religious decoration, is repeated on different buildings because it works – in other words, the epigraphy is deemed efficacious in its context and therefore does not need to be replaced with something else.” (original emphasis). But what work such writings do or who it is who deems it efficacious is never spelled out. Similarly imprecise assertions appear throughout the book, thus leaving the reader with the shell of an argument about its central concern without ever quite getting at the thing itself.
In other instances the author does not reach beyond the textualist's approach to read between the lines of the materials he cites. For example, he does not discuss the meaning believers attach to the fascinating drawing that is so popular in Iran of the Prophet as a teenager, his shoulder bare, a flower behind his ear, his come-hither look appearing anything but holy. Nor does he discuss the recent discovery that Arab mosaics often incorporated a mathematical formula, thought only to have been cracked in recent years, that permits tiles to be fitted together in an overall pattern without any angles of their joinder being repeated. Here one would have the opportunity to ask why it mattered to the artists to find such a formula, and there is much anthropological evidence to suggest that the answer lies in their wanting to represent in a mosque context the assumption that all human relations are unique yet must cohere if the community of believers is to be preserved. Indeed, even literary sources – to say nothing of believers’ comments – suggest that the arabesque is so appealing not because it is repetitious but because it demonstrates that at every point a choice must be made.
If it is really true that contemporary Muslims, as heirs to the textual tradition, largely perceive religious art through the lens of their predecessors then it would make at least as much sense to start with them and to read backwards into their responses the sources now instantiated within them. Jamal does not quite do this, though, even in his one contemporary study (On Wings of Diesel) which concerns the art Pakistani drivers so elaborately inscribe on their trucks. There, too, sources are divorced from interview data, as if the very people he professes to be studying in each of his books either add nothing to the sources they rely upon or are inarticulate by comparison to those sources. Either way, the opportunity to further the professed project of seeing as they see is compromised.
As fine a compendium of materials as this work is, as fine a source upon which others may build, we still lack the kind of social assessment of Islamic religious art that scholars like Arnold Hauser have given us for the art of the West. Future scholars will lean on Jamal's text for guidance. But they will still have to read more carefully between the lines of the past and go out into the Muslim world for themselves if they want to understand what the populace makes of their religious art.
