Reframing ‘Violence’, Transforming Impressions

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Notes

1 Iqbal describes khudi as ‘the spark of life in our dusty being’, lit by a divine light and discovered through active engagement with life's ‘hardships’ and challenges (in Mir 32).

2 Mir notes the shaping influence of the historical context in which Iqbal developed his concept of khudi in the early twentieth century, when ‘the majority of the world's Muslims were politically weak, economically backward and socially disintegrated’ (33). In Iqbal's opinion Muslims had lost faith in their ability to solve their own problems as a result of becoming disconnected from the ‘dynamic Islamic spirit’ of the traditions central to their sense of selfhood and too reliant on decadent institutions of ‘mullahism, mysticism and kingship’, which needed reforming and reinvigorating if society were to progress and individuals realise their potential within it (ibid 122–24).

3 In Rana's The Red Carpet (2007), re-exhibited in ‘Letters to Taseer’ (2012), the harmonious Islamicate aesthetic initially established by the richly woven Persian rug is violently de-composed by the materials used to create it; the blood, flesh, fur and bone detailed in digital prints of slaughtered animals contribute to its textured beauty. The reader is invited to ponder a paradox between this aesthetic culture and bloody butchery; to reconsider how images of slaughter – not just of animals, but also of humans – daily exhibited on television and in print media are something to which viewers in Pakistan have grown immune; and perhaps to seek a deeper truth. Some might accuse Rana of using his two-dimensional artworks to bolster Western prejudices about a brutal Islam. Others clearly see them as highly representative of the ‘shocking indifference’ and ‘deafening silence’ that ‘surrounds horrors unfolding at home’ which are metaphorically swept under the carpet (Rafiqui in Naqvi, M, ed. Festival! Karachi: Scheherzade, 2012. 89). What Rana's uncompromising juxtapositions of surface and content do not attempt to do is guide viewers towards an ‘authored’ understanding of what it is that binds them in the fabric of Pakistan's Muslim society or force audiences to consider how they might ‘transform’ the connection between the two.