Islamic iconoclasm, visual communication and the persistence of the image

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Notes

1. Although it is difficult to find evidence for the destruction of images, Finbarr Barry Flood has demonstrated, through a careful analysis of primary verbal and visual sources, that the most common form of iconoclasm in Medieval Islam would alter rather than destroy images (Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm and the Museum,” The Art Bulletin 84, 2 (December 2002): 641–59, see in particular p. 646).

2. For a brief report on the destruction of antique artifacts by ISIS, see for example http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroy-ancient-artefacts-mosul-museum-iraq (accessed June 2015). For an analysis of the Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, see Flood, “Between Cult and Culture.”

3. Finbarr Barry Flood indicates no less than sixty examples from the eighth century. See idem, “Christian Mosaics in Jordan and Early Islamic Palestine: A Case of Regional Iconoclasm,” in Helen Evans (ed.), Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 117–19.

4. These mosaics are today in the Archeological Museum of Madaba in Jordan.

5. Cited for example in Silvia Naef, Y a-t-il une « question de l'image » en Islam ? (Paris: Téraèdre, 2004), 21. The translation is mine.

6. For other examples, see Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” figures 4 and 6.

7. For other ambivalent images that oscillate between iconophilia and iconophobia, see Finbarr Barry Flood, “Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, 3 (2013): 566–69.

8. Bruno Latour, “A Collective of humans and nonhumans: following Daedalus’s labyrinth,” in Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

9. Most primary and secondary sources date the discovery of Idris II’s tomb to the fifteenth century. Writing in the eighteenth century, Muhammad al-Qadiri gives the date of 1437-38, which he saw in an epigraphic inscription placed near the tomb (Muhammad al-Qadiri, Nashr al-Mathani: The Chronicles, Norman Cigar (transl.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), for the Arabic text, see p. 53-54 and for the English translation, see p. 161-62. ) This date will be used by most scholars (see for example Roger le Tourneau, Fès avant le Protectorat (Casablanca, 1949), 599).

10. No documents survive on the commission of the mihrab’s decoration. However, given the dating of the tiles as well as the history of the building’s renovations, the mihrab was more likely decorated either in the seventeenth century or at the turn of the eighteenth. For a history of the mausoleum and its transformations over time, see Georges Salmon, “Le culte de Moulay Idris et la mosquée des chorfa à Fès,” Archives marocaines 3 (1905): 413–22 and Roger Le Tourneau, Fès avant le Protectorat (Casablanca, 1949), 599–604.

11. These tiles are typical of late sixteenth-century Iznik. We can compare them with the collection of the Louvre Museum (accession numbers OA 3,939/2–268, OA 3,919/2–297, OA 3,919/2–247d, OA 7,455, OA 3,919/2–247b, OA 3,919/2–287, OA 3,919/2–277 or OA 3,919/2–271, images can be searched on this database: http://cartelfr.louvre.fr (accessed June 2015)). One might also compare them with this tile from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to the end of the sixteenth century (accession number 1971.235.2, published in Maryam Ekhtiar (ed.), Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 309). For more examples, see Walter Denny, Iznik: the Artistry of Ottoman Ceramics (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004) and idem, Gardens of Paradise: Sixteenth Century Turkish Ceramic Tile Decoration (Istanbul: Ertug & Kocabiyik, 1998).

12. For references and examples, see Nadia Erzini and Stephen Vernoit, “The Marble Spolia from the Badi‘ Palace in Marrakesh,” in Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen (ed.), Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World: Art, Craft and Text: Essays presented to James W. Allan (London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2012), 317–36, see in particular p. 326.

13. If the use of Delft tiles is less unusual in Morocco than Iznik tiles, it remains largely undocumented. In fact, the only examples mentioned in written sources seem to have been destroyed during recent renovation work. One example is the fountain of the mausoleum of al-Jazuli in Marrakesh, begun in the sixteenth century. While today it appears whitewashed, it used to be decorated with blue-and-white Delft tiles (Georges Marçais, Manuel d’art musulman (Paris, 1926), vol. 2, 748).

14. Erzini and Vernoit, “The Marble Spolia,” 321.

15. J.M. dos Santos Simoes, Carreaux céramiques hollandais au Portugal et en Espagne (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1959).

16. Hans Theunissen, “Dutch Tiles in 18th-Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: Hünkâr Sofası and Hünkâr Hamamı,” Sanat Tarihi Dergisi 18, 2 (October 2009): 71–135 and idem, “Dutch Tiles in 18th-Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: the Sabil-Kuttab of Sultan Mustafa III in Cairo,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 9, 3 (2006): 1–283. Also see Agnieszka Dobrowolska and Jaroslaw Dobrowolski, The Sultan’s Fountain: An Imperial Story of Cairo, Istanbul, and Amsterdam (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011).

17. For comparable examples from the eighteenth century, see the tiles of the Carshalton house in Surrey, England, published in Alun Graves, Tiles and Tilework of Europe (London: Victoria and Albert publications, 2002), 71.

18. This tile can be compared to numerous examples disseminated across Europe in the eighteenth century. They display bucolic scenes inscribed in circular medallion. One often sees a meadow in the lower half of the picture, with one or two characters in the foreground as well as architectural elements, such as churches or mills. Several examples are conserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (ibid., p. 104) and in the Museum of Philadelphia (Ella Schaap (ed.), Dutch tiles in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), 113).

19. Seascapes with sailing boats are frequent subjects in Delft ceramics, see ibid., 145.

20. About this iconography, see Gordon Lang (ed.), 1,000 Tiles (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 116–17 and Schaap (ed.), Dutch tiles, 148–51.

21. These tiles recall the use of spolia in the Middle Ages. For a definition of this concept with examples from Latin Europe, Byzantium and Islam, see Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in C. Rudolph (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Oxford, 2006), 233–52 as well as Bente Kiilerich, “Antiquus et modernus: Spolia in Medieval Art – Western, Byzantine and Islamic,” in Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (ed.), Medioevo: Il tempo degli antichi (Milan: Electa, 2006), 135–45. This practice of reuse is also documented in Morocco, as one can see in Erzini and Vernoit, “The Marble Spolia” as well as in C. Déléry, Y. Lintz and B. Tuil (ed.), Le Maroc médiéval : un empire de l’Afrique à l’Espagne (Paris: Louvre Museum, 2014), 462–63.

22. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27. For the original text in French, see Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 1–29.

23. Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” 642.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 651 and 654.

26. Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 22.

27. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 284–307.

28. Bruno Latour, “A few steps towards the anthropology of the iconoclastic gesture,” Science in Context 10, 1 (1998): 65.

29. Bruno Latour, “Flot et défaut des images : de l’iconoclasme à l’iconoclash,” in Laurent Gervereau (ed.), Dictionnaire mondial des images (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2006), 201. The translation is mine.

30. For a summary of these stories of idol breaking and for more pictures, see David J. Roxburgh, “Concepts of the Portrait in the Islamic Lands, ca. 1300–1600,” in Elizabeth Cropper (ed.), Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, Studies in the History of Art (Washington, D.C., New Haven and London: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 118.

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Lamia Balafrej

Lamia Balafrej is an Assistant Professor of art history at Wellesley College. A specialist of Islamic art, her research addresses a broad range of issues, from cultural appropriation to artistic reflexivity. [email protected]