2. Arnold, Sir Thomas Walker.

Painting in Islam : a study of the place of pictorial art in

muslim culture. New York: Dover Pub, 1965

In this book, Arnold discusses the place of pictorial art in Islam. Arnold focuses on understanding how there are various position on the art of representation as blasphemy. Arnolds work, although dated and problematic, is important because his research is one of the pioneer studies on the pictorial art in the Muslim world. By citing various passages from the Koran to discussing historical incidents from Muhammads time, Arnold illuminates on certain traditional Islamic beliefs that are often misconstrued by fundamentalists. Direct Citations from the Texts:

Islam alone has refused to call in the aid of pictorial art as a handmaid to religion. Any observer who has lingered in one of the great monuments of Christian architecture---some gorgeously decorated cathedral belonging to the Orthodox Eastern Church or to the Roman Catholic Church--and has thence passed into a Muhammadan mosque, must at once be struch with this fundamental difference of attitude in Islam as contrasted with the rival faith. The first may be filled with brilliant paintings and frescoies representing scenes of sacred history or individual saints, or even some pictorial adumbration of the Deity, in which the highest attainments of artistic skill have been placed at the service of religion and have obviously been inspired by devout feeling, and may even have been superintedned in the course of their execution by eccleciastical guidance, while to mosque is characterized by austere simplicity and by the absence of any kind of pictorial presentation of religious doctrine or history. (p. 4)

Key concepts: Difference between Islamic art and Christian art *** It is proposed now to consider this Muslim attitude of mind in some detail. It has sometimes been stated that the painting of pictures is forbidden in the Quran; but there is no specific mention of pictures in the Word of God and the only verse (Qur. V 92)---O believers, wine and games of chance and statues and (divining) arrows are an abomination of Stans handiwork; then avoid it!---which theologians of a later generation could quote in support of their condemnation of this art makes it clear that the real object of the prohibition was the avoidance of idolatry. The theological basis of the condemnation of pictorial art must therefore be sought for elsewhere. (p. 5) Key Concepts: Passages from Koran that refers to painting of pictures as forbidden ***

On the subject of painting the Traditions (Traditions of the Prophet) are uncompromising in their condemnation and speak with no uncertain voice, e.g. the Prophet is reported to have said that those who will be most severely punished by God on the Day of Judgment will be the painters. On the Day of Judgment the punishment of hell will be meted put to the painter, and he will be meted out to the painter, and he will be called upon to breathe life into the forms that he has fashioned; but he cannot breathe life into anything. The reason for this damnation is this: in fashioning the form of a being that has life, the painter is usurping the creative function of the Creator and thus is attempting to assimilate himself to God; and the futility of the painters claim will be brought home to him, when he will be made to recognize the ineffectual character of his creative activity, through his inability to complete the work of creation by breathing into the objects of his art, which look so much like living beings, the breath of life. (p. 5) Key concepts: The position of the Traditions on the visual arts *** The Arabic word for painter, which has passed from Arabic into Persian, Turkish, and Urdu in the same sense is musawwir, which literally means forming, fashioning, giving form, and so can equally apply to the sculptor. The blasphemy in the appellation is the more apparent to the Muslim mind, in that this word is applied to God Himself in the Quran (lix. 24): He is God, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner (musawwir). Thus the highest term of praise which in the Christian world can be bestowed upon the artist, in calling him a creator, in the Muslim world serves to emphasize the most damning, evidence of his guilt. (p. 6)

Key concepts: The meaning and root word of the term artist in Turkish

*** A theological defence of the painter on somewhat different lines was put forward a little later by the Emperor Akbar who, according to the report of his devoted minister and panegyrist, Abu lFazl, declared on one occasion, It appears to me as if a painter has quite peculiar means of recognizing God; for a painter in sketching anything that has life, and in devising its limbs one after the other, must come to feel that he cannot bestow individuality upon his work, and is thus forced to think of God, the Giver of life, and will thus increase in knowledge. Such a defence obviously has in mind the condemnation embodied in the Traditions, discussed above, and attempts to refute it by suggesting that, so far from the art of painting being regarded as blasphemous, it may serve as a stepping stone towards advance in divine knowledge. (p. 37)

Key concepts: theological defence of the painter ***

But this new evaluation of the art of painting never succeeded in displacing the earlier condemnation, for the latter was too firmly rooted in popular sentiment and was too decisively set forth in theological text-books, whose authority had been recognized for centuries, to make way for any more modern speculation, and it has continued to hold sway in the greater part of Muhammadan society up to recent times. When Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839) tried to force Western manners and customs on the people of Turkey and had his portrait hung up in all the barracks, the inhabitants of Constantinople stirred up by the ulama, rose in revolt, and four thousand corpses were thrown into the sea before the rising was quelled. In considering the strong hold which this hostility towards the painting of figures had upon the consciences of orthodox Muslims, it is instructive to recognize how many instances may be quoted from Turkish history to show that those who indulged in a taste for pictorial art generally kept their pictures hidden, and the wild speculations that were spread abroad, when pictures hidden, and the wild speculations that were spread abroad, when after the death of Wazir Qara Muhammad in 1644 it was discovered that in a secret room he had kept portraits of himself and some of his contemporaries, show how rare it was (at least at that period in Turkey) for any persons but those highly placed to dare to flout the fanatical opinion of Muhammadan society. DOhsson gives an account of a picture, representing the repulse of an attack upon Aligiers by the Spanish, which Ghazi Hasan Pasha, Grand Wazir in the reign of Abd al-Hamid I (1773-1789), had had painted for himself; but he did not dare expose it in his palace in Constantinople, but kept it in his country house, to which his Christian and European friends would resort to see this picture, ---as also sometimes the Sultan himself. For the exalted position of the sovereign made him made him safe from the risks that a commoner would run; and consequently we find that many of the Sultan himself. For the exalted position of the sovereign made him safe from the risks that a commoner would run and consequently we find that many of the Sultans of Turkey, from Muhammad II, who summoned Gentile Bellini from Venice, onwards, kept painters in their service, but they generally took care not to excite the prejudices of their subjects by letting the knowledge of such predilections get abroad. (p. 38)

Key concepts: hostility of Orthodox Muslims on the art of painting *** Even the famous collection of the portraits of the Ottoman Sultans which has frequently been published, was said in the eighteenth century to have been kept concealedEven when Salim III (1789-1807) made up his mind to disregard the prejudices of his fellow countrymen and conceived the idea of having the portraits of his ancestors engraved in England, a Greek peasant, with a talent for painting, was employed to copy them in the seclusion of the palace, and the copies were sent to England in 1806 wurg express instructions that every possible secrecy was to be observed during the progress of the work. (p. 39) Key concepts: hostility of Orthodox Muslims on the art of painting

*** The difficulties that present themselves owing to the lack of the signatures of the artists are paralleled by the absence in most cases of any indication as to the subject-matter of a picture. It was not customary for a Persian painter to write any title under his painting, even if it occurred in a separate and detached form on a single piece of paper; if it was in a manuscript, presumably the reader of the text was expected to be able to connect the pictorial representation with what he was reading, and in the case of an epic like the Shah Namah or the romantic poems which were most commonly illustrated, little difficulty was likely to occur, but, when the picture had been painted on a separate piece of paper, there was often no clue whatsoever as to the subject which it was the intention of the painter to illustrate. Similarly, there are innumerable portraits of nameless historical personages, the identification of whom is now impossible, or at least has not up to the present been achieved. Such separate pictures have in a larger number of instances, been put together in albums---a practice which is as old as the end of the fifteenth century, as is evident from the preface that Khwandamir wrote to the album of paintings by Bihzad. In some instances a later owner has become dissatisfied with the anonymity of the contents of his album and has had titles invented for them, and as these in the majority of cases appear to have been selected on no other principle than that of enhancing the value and importance of the collection, the result has been a source of perplexity, if not of amusement, to the modern student. One of the most ludicrous examples of such arbitrary denomination is that of a picture in an album in the Royal Library, Cairo, which received the title Adam and Eve, and was attributed to Mani, a court painter of Shah Abbas, and as such has been reproduced in several publications; but the picture refuses thus to come within the circle of Islamic orthodoxy, and to any one acquainted with the characteristics of Indian painting it reveals itself as the god Khrishna with his wife Radha standing under a mango tree in the rainy season. In another album (Bibliotheque Nationale, Arabe 6075_ there are similarly misleading denominations derived from a desire to enhance the value of the collection by assigning to the pictures a much earlier date than they originally claimed for themselves; e.g. a group of Indian grandees of the sixteenth century is designated to Bihzad, though centuries had elapsed between the two periods. One of the most urgent desiderata in the history of Muslim painting is the settlement of the problem as to which of the pictures bearing the name of an artist are authentic and the definition of the main characteristics of his style. At present much confusion exists in regard to such matters, and there is no agreement even among the highest authorities. A critic is needed who will do for Muslim pictures the work that Morelli did for the Italian galleries in the nineteenth century. (pp. 50-51)

Key concepts: history of painting during the Ottoman period; Sultans and painting