But the Muslim passion against images was a spontaneous by-product of Muslim history and society. Although there was never any specifically religious art in Islam, the Muslim-Arab world proved fertile of other kinds of art. The story of the arts in Islam dramatizes the struggle of Islam to establish its uniqueness, reveals its problems in a world of Unbelievers, and exposes its hopeless struggle to affirm God the Creator by denying Man the Creator.
The scriptural basis for iconoclasm, as we have seen, was Moses’ Second Commandment. The personal influence of the many Jewish converts to Islam reinforced this traditional Semitic fear of human representation in sculpture and painting. Then there was the earnestness of the Prophet and his disciples to distinguish their faith from the pagan religions that it displaced. The idols in the Kaabah in Mecca in pre-Islamic times were the special target of their fears. Yet in the earlier Arab world there had been no developed tradition of figural art which they would have to deny. So there was no need for a Muslim iconoclasm. Islam, by affirming the “stark monotheism” of a God who had a monopoly on creation, abhorred the temptations to compete with God by man’s pretended acts of creation.
At the Day of Judgment when God calls upon the painter to breathe life into the forms he has made, the painter’s mockery of God’s acts of “creation” is exposed. Then he is sentenced to the worst punishments of hell. The artist by pretending to be a creator has denied the uniqueness of God and commits blasphemy with every stroke of his brush. According to the Koran, God alone is the “fashioner” (musawwir).
He is God, the Creator
The Evolver,
The Bestower of Forms
(Or Colors).
(Surah LIX, 24)
Muslim man (and surely Muslim woman!) was not made in God’s image, but was only an image made by the unique Image Maker.
The career of the arts in Islam produced a grand irony that would have dismayed or outraged the Prophet. For Muslim history proved the powerlessness of Allah to monopolize the powers of creation, and confirmed the irrepressible human need to create, which was eventually recognized, encouraged, and rewarded by the Heroes of Islam themselves. The mosque, the building and the institution, made claims peculiar to Islam, and was shaped accordingly. But there was no distinctively Muslim tradition of religious painting, and no religious sculpture of living figures. In Christian countries the flourishing of painting and sculpture is a measure of the vitality and reach of Christian faith. In Islam, on the contrary, the flourishing of representational art measures the willingness of Muslim leaders to defy the tenets of their faith. Muslim painting, which has charmed the non-Muslim world and commands extravagant prices from modern collectors, remains a monument to artists undaunted by threats of hellfire and damnation.
Some say that the “orthodox” Muslim leaders’ disregard of the religious prohibition against representing living figures is no more remarkable than the proverbial violation of their own religious tenets by Jews and Christians and the “faithful” of other faiths. Nor, they say, was it more flagrant than prominent Muslims’ defiance of the prohibition of wine, of music, of gaming, of the building of stately tombs, or the making of eunuchs. The celebrated caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the conquering hero of The Arabian Nights, was a habitual drinker, though usually discreetly and in private. Musicians, singers, dancing girls, and eunuchs were familiar features of Muslim courts. But paintings themselves became part of the record of history, and despite all efforts to conceal or erase the sins of the painter, they would survive to our own time. The works of Muslim artists and of others inspired by Islam had the delicious taste of forbidden fruit.
At first leaders of Islam who dared violate their religious tradition with representational art tried to keep their vices private. Of the works of early Muslim artists only random fragments have been discovered. At the height of the empire of the Caliphate (from Arab “caliph” for “successor”) in the two centuries after the Prophet’s death, the caliphs and their agents were already defying the prohibition. The very first caliphs, the Umayyads (661–750), were flagrant in disobedience. For their palaces they commissioned frescoes of lions, dogs, and butting rams, and on pilgrimages to Mecca would decorate their tents with similar figures brocaded in gold. Their successors, the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258) cultivated a reputation for strict piety, but their violations were even more conspicuous. Mansur (712?–775; reigned 754–75), who built a new capital at Baghdad and founded a splendid city there, adorned the top of the dome of his palace with the figure of a knight on horseback, who served as a weather vane and also pointed his lance in the direction from which to expect the rebel army to attack. Caliph Amin (809–13) fashioned his pleasure boats for parties on the Tigris in the shapes of lions, eagles, and dolphins. Others showed more respect for popular prejudice by keeping their art indoors. In his Baghdad palace Caliph Muqtadir (908–932) built a work of legendary grandeur—a tree of gold and silver, with eighteen branches carrying precious stones shaped like fruit, and gold and silver birds that sang when moved by the wind. At each end of the decorative pool were the opposed figures of fifteen horsemen in elegant silks tilting their swords and lances.
By the eleventh century the Fatimid caliphs were shameless in their extravagance, vividly reported later by the Muslim historian Maqrizi (1364–1442). A ceremonial tent commissioned by Yazuri, minister of Caliph Mustansir (1035–1094), and decorated with the images of all the world’s animals, occupied 150 workmen for nine years. This same art-loving vizier became legendary for encouraging competition among his artists.
Now Yazuri had introduced al-Qasir and Ibn Aziz into his assembly … they each designed a picture of a dancing-girl in niches also painted, opposite one another.… Al-Quasir painted a dancing-girl in a white dress in a niche that was coloured black, as though she were going into the painted niche, and Ibn Aziz painted a dancing-girl in a red dress in a niche that was colored yellow, as though she were coming out of the niche. And Yazuri expressed approval of this and bestowed robes of honour on both of them and gave them much gold.
By about 1200 imaginary competitions between artists had become a favorite subject for poets. The Persian poet Nizami (c.1140–c.1202) depicted an ancient competition at the court of Alexander the Great. One spring day while Alexander was entertaining the emperor of China, the wine-filled monarchs debated the talents of East and West. After comparing the different attainments in magic and singing and lute playing, they mounted a competition to compare the skills of their painters. And so (in Thomas W. Arnold’s translation):
At length, it was agreed, as test of skill
To hang a curtain from a lofty dome,
In such a manner that on either half
Two painters should essay their skill, unseen …
Until, their task complete, they drew aside
The curtain that concealed each masterpiece;
But,—strange to see! no difference was found
Between the two, in colour or in form.…
Alexander ordered the curtain hung once again between the paintings. Now the Westerner’s painting still glowed, while the other’s faded and disappeared. When the curtain was drawn up again the Chinese’s mirror-picture reappeared.
For when the painters started on their task,
And hid themselves behind the curtain’s screen,
The Rumi showed his skill by painting forms,—
The Chini worked at naught save polishing.
Of form and colour which the other took.
The judges, weighing well each rival’s skill
Gave credit for the insight each had shown:
In painting, none the Rumi could excel;
The Chini was supreme in polishing.
Wherever Islam spread, its rulers brought a love of pictorial art. They left a rich legacy in Spain, where the elegant marble lions in the courtyard of the Alhambra, near Granada, still proclaim the victory of man’s impulse to create.
Although statues of living persons were r
are in medieval Islam, life-histories appeared early in Arabic-Muslim literature out of efforts to confirm the sources of Traditions of the Prophet. And history was mainly exegesis of the Prophet and of lives of the faithful. Figure painting remained a secular courtly art, a silent witness to the separation into two cultures. One was the culture of the folk with its primitive fear of images, and the other the luxurious culture of the caliphs who had the power, the wealth, and the imagination to defy ancient taboo. The earliest works of pictorial art in Islam were relics of the sybaritic Umayyad caliphs, who became bywords for their contempt of the strict commandments of the Prophet. Still the power of tradition and theologians remained strong enough to keep figure painting out of Muslim religious buildings.
The Mongols surging west were reckless in their destructive passions. In 1220, when Genghis Khan and his Mongols sacked Bukhara, cultural center of Islam, they shredded the manuscripts of the Koran to make litter for their horses stabled in the Great Mosque. And in 1258, when Hulagu, his grandson, captured Baghdad, which had been the treasure city of the Abbasid caliphs for five centuries, he murdered the last of the Abbasid caliphs, massacred eight hundred thousand of its inhabitants, and allowed his Mongols to plunder the city for a week.
And with the decline of the caliphate, the Mongols and Turks who conquered or were conquered by Islam diluted the traditions with their own tastes. By the fifteenth century, Muslim theologians had yielded to the facts of life, to their rulers’ passions for ornament and the beauties of representational art. Now some of the revered sayings of the Prophet were dismissed. The Mongol and Turkish rulers consummated their blasphemy by claiming distinction for themselves as painters. The great founder of Moghul India, Babur (1483–1530), of the line of Tamerlane who claimed descent from Genghis Khan, admired and patronized painters. By the sixteenth century the shahs of Persia, too, were expecting to be praised by their chroniclers as “delicate painters with a fine brush.”
The supreme defiance of the traditional Muslim taboo came with a luxuriant art depicting the Prophet Himself. The Mongol invasions created a “Timurid” art (after Tamerlane (1336?–1405)), bringing together Persian and Chinese techniques in the art of manuscript illumination. A brilliant surviving work from fifteenth-century Herat, the art center of far-eastern Persia, was the Miraj Nameh, or Night Journey of the Prophet. The manuscript, translated into eastern Turkish and elegantly calligraphed, was acquired by Louis XIV’s ambassador to Constantinople and survives in mint condition in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In its sixty-one gilded illustrations we follow the miraculous ascension of the Prophet Mohammed on his graceful steed, Buraq, which had the head of a beautiful woman. Led by the angel Gabriel from the “Sacred Mosque” at Mecca to the “Far-off Mosque” in Jerusalem, he ascends from there through all six of the lower Heavens up to the Seventh Heaven, and finally to ecstatic contemplation of the Divine Essence at the Throne of God. En route the Prophet witnesses the torture of those who violated the commandments of their faith by such crimes as drinking wine, fornicating, speaking evil of Muslims (and making images like these?). Their tongues are cut out by red demons, only to grow back so they can be torn out again. The clear faces and figures of Mohammed and other biblical and Koranic characters are adorned by a flame-halo.
As great painters, including many from abroad, appeared in Islam, theologians had no difficulty making their work seem holy. Poets reminded the faithful that the visual arts, too, were inspired by God. The Persian mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273), founder of the Whirling Dervish order, defended the painting of ugly as well as beautiful creatures to teach how evil too can come from God. An official Persian historian of the early sixteenth century, Khwandamir, revised the traditional Muslim view of painting in his praise of Master Behzad (c.1455–c.1536; active 1480–1536) whose brilliance as an illuminator and painter of miniatures created a newly exalted role for the painter. After Behzad proved that painting could be sublime, Muslims finally dared view God as “the Eternal Painter.” Even the artists who could not breathe life into their figures were now said to be emulating God, praising Him by their efforts. Snatched from the depths of hell, the painter was elevated to a heavenly role. So the official sixteenth-century Persian historian Khwandamir (died 1535) explained:
Since it was the perfect decree of the incomparable Painter and the all-embracing wish of the Creator—“Be and it was”—to bring into existence the forms of the variegated workshop, the Portrait-painter of eternal grace has painted with the pen of (His) everlasting clemency the human form in the most beautiful fashion in accordance with the verse “And He has fashioned you and has made your forms most beautiful.”
(Translated by Thomas W. Arnold)
Now painters were dignified along with calligraphers as among “the most distinguished sons of Adam.” The Moghul emperor Akbar (1556–1605) even argued that only by trying to reproduce living beings, as the painter did, could man become fully aware of the disparity between insignificant man and the all-creating God. In Islam, art, like everything else, came to be covered by the pall of theology. There was no Muslim aesthetic nor, despite the grandeur of their artists’ works, any suggestion that art and beauty were their own reason for being.
The Muslim world never ceased to be haunted by Allah’s monopoly on creation. And the popular fear of images never died. When the militant sultan Mahmud II of Turkey (1785–1839; reigned 1808–30) had his portrait put up in the barracks in Constantinople, there was an uprising against this unclean act, which incited the carnage of four thousand bodies thrown into the sea.
Muslim rulers of Turkey, unlike their Christian contemporaries in the West who were flaunting their extravagant patronage of artistic splendor, still took pains to conceal their sponsorship of the arts. Muhammed II, one of the first of these Ottoman patrons of art, brought Gentile Bellini (1429?–1507) to Constantinople (1479–80), where he painted one of the best surviving portraits of the sultan. But this was not public knowledge, and somehow the sultans managed to preserve their pious reputations as enemies of pictorial art. Few sovereigns have left a more vivid pictorial record than Suleiman the Magnificent (1495?–1566; reigned 1520–66), alive today in a portrait by Titian and another by his own Nigari. The illuminated manuscripts that he commissioned for the historical record are unexcelled in their details of battles, sieges, and military splendor. Suleiman too managed to keep his reputation for piety.
The later Moghul emperors in India, including Akbar the Great (1556–1605), have acquired a unique vividness among rulers East or West by their bountiful patronage of portrait, landscape, and military painters, and their scrupulous insistence on colorful detail. Still, when collections of portraits of the Ottoman sultans were published in recent times, they were concealed from any but the sultans’ closest confidants. One bold official of Sultan Mustafa III (reigned 1757–73) dared commission some picturesque views of Constantinople, and engaged a painter (camouflaged as a physician) to visit him and paint his portrait. But when presented with the finished portrait, he feared “it may even some day expose me to disparaging judgments in the minds of my family, even in those of my own children,” and so he gave back the painting to the artist under a pledge of secrecy.
When photography appeared in the nineteenth century, it offered a new challenge to the mullahs’ theological acrobatics. Muslims wishing to be photographed remembered the Hadiths against pictorial representation. They were glad to be told that since photographs were made by God Himself through the agency of His Sun they were not under the ban of the paintings by presumptuous human artists. Yet in much of the Muslim world, photographs remained under the Prophet’s ban. A Muslim photographer in Delphi, who had spent many years successfully photographing people in groups, in an onrush of conscience finally destroyed all his plates. But, ironically, when he attempted the blameless photography of inanimate buildings, he failed because he had no understanding of the laws of perspective.
Muslims who were tempted to create images that
would outlast the span of life granted them by their Creator were inhibited again and again by their overweening dogma of God’s uniqueness. “Everything is perishing,” they quoted the Koran, “except the Face of God.” By refusing to make images of living beings, they would acquiesce in God’s uniqueness and man’s impotence. Like the Japanese at Ise, in their own way they refused to battle time and became its ally, leaving permanence to God alone.
PART FIVE
THE
IMMORTAL
WORD
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
— HORACE (FIRST CENTURY B.C.)
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
— W. H. AUDEN (1962)
23
Dionysus the Twice-Born
BY creating in words patterns of experience, man found some escape from his brief and changeful years. And among the most durable and charming of Greek creations were their myths of the gods. Quite appropriately, Dionysus, Greek god of drama, dance, and music, the most insecure of the Olympians, was twice-born. The jealous goddess Hera, Zeus’ consort, maliciously persuaded her rival lover Semele, a mortal woman, to demand that Zeus appear to her in his true celestial form. The dazzling sight killed her and prematurely brought out of her womb Zeus’ child whom she was carrying. Zeus sewed this fetus into his thigh, and in full time the infant Dionysus emerged again. Unique among the gods, he was born of mortal woman. A latecomer on Olympus, he never ceased to be a stranger there, but had a fertile life on earth. Worship of Dionysus spread across Greece into the Roman Empire. God of mystery and of contradictions, Dionysus was both the reassurer of the familiar return of spring and the opener of strange vistas.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 28