Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition

Aesthetics, Politics and Desire in Early Islam

Mohammed Hamdouni Alami

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857731753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

What is 'art' in the sense of the Islamic tradition? Mohammed Hamdouni Alami argues that Islamic art has historically been excluded from Western notions of art; that the Western aesthetic tradition's preoccupation with the human body, and the ban on the representation of the human body in Islam, has meant that Islamic and Western art have been perceived as inherently at odds. However, the move away from this 'anthropomorphic aesthetic' in Western art movements, such as modern abstract and constructivist painting, have presented the opportunity for new ways of viewing and evaluating Islamic art and architecture. This book questions the very idea of art predicated on the anthropocentric bias of classical art, and the corollary 'exclusion' of Islamic art from the status of art.
It addresses a central question in post-classical aesthetic theory, in as much as the advent of modern abstract and constructivist painting have shown that art can be other than the representation of the human body; that art is not neutral aesthetic contemplation but it is fraught with power and violence; and that the presupposition of classical art was not a universal truth but the assumption of a specific cultural and historical set of practices and vocabularies. Based on close readings of classical Islamic literature, philosophy, poetry, medicine and theology, along with contemporary Western art theory, the author uncovers a specific Islamic theoretical vision of art and architecture based on poetic practice, politics, cosmology and desire. In particular it traces the effects of decoration and architectural planning on the human soul as well as the centrality of the gaze in this poetic view - in Arabic 'nazar'- while examining its surprising similarity to modern theories of the gaze.
Through this double gesture, moving critically between two traditions, the author brings Islamic thought and aesthetics back into the realm of visibility, addressing the lack of recognition in comparison with other historical periods and traditions. This is an important step toward a critical analysis of the contemporary debate around the revival of Islamic architectural identity - a debate intricately embedded within opposing Islamic political and social projects throughout the world.

1

Introduction

We must look for the ways in which a given epoch solved for itself aesthetic problems as they presented themselves at the time to the sensibilities and the culture of its people. Then our historical inquiries will be a contribution, not to whatever we conceive ‘aesthetic’ to be, but rather to the history of a specific civilization, from the standpoint of its own sensibility and its own aesthetic consciousness.

(Umberto Eco)¹

In the mid-1980s, the rabbi of Rabat, Morocco, having decided to restore the old synagogue of the city, commissioned a local architect to carry out the restoration project and asked him to present his very best ideas. The architect, a young Muslim with little knowledge of traditional Moroccan Jewish customs, was eager to do his best, and prepared a few sketches based on his estimation of what would please the rabbi. When the rabbi was presented with the architectural drawings and their modernist approach, he could not help showing his disappointment, and told the Muslim architect:

My son, the community of the faithful will be disappointed by these bare spaces you are proposing, for we Jewish people, too, love ornament, stucco, plaster, woodwork, and all that. Our people, like yours, like their spaces of worship to be richly decorated. That is how we like our synagogues.²

The young Muslim architect who told me this story was taken aback for, like most of his Muslim compatriots, he did not imagine that Moroccan Jews shared with them a taste for architectural ornament. Yet one need simply visit a few traditional Jewish homes in Rabat or Fes to recognize the similarity in taste. Although the existence of this similarity is not, in itself, extraordinary, this anecdote has always had the most amazing effect on my students in Morocco, for there is a strong belief that traditional ornament is Islamic, has an Islamic content, and must therefore be foreign to Jewish, among other, traditions. That belief, in both its overt and covert forms, is in fact very widespread in and outside Morocco, and it seems to me that academic scholarship is partially responsible for this.

This is why I believe that until more conclusive research is conducted we should suspend the use of the term Islamic to qualify the architecture of the Islamic world after the rise of Islam. As the anecdote above suggests, what has been called ‘Islamic architecture’ has little if any religious content. The elaboration of the architectural types at hand appears to have been a complex synthesis of different legacies, and cultural and political statements as well. As Oleg Grabar pointed out, the role of the new faith seems to have been limited to a few features, such as the ban on the representation of living beings in religious buildings, the appearance of the house of the prophet and his pulpit, and the requirements related to the form of the ritual prayer in the organization of the mosque.³ The Qurʾan, which is the original source of Islamic religious knowledge, does not contain any doctrine of the arts. The traditions of the prophet that are related to the ban of images date to the eighth century and are later than the formation of the basic architectural typologies.

Even commemorative structures do not have, against all expectations, any religious basis, as exemplified by the Taj Mahal, the most celebrated among such structures, a monument dedicated by a prince to his beloved deceased wife. As Robert Hillenbrand⁴ argued, the geographic extension of the Islamic world, the assimilation of different cultures, and the consequent formation of regional styles that are very different from each other (Ottoman, Moghul, Andalusian, Syrian and Iranian) plead against any trans-historical definition of this fundamentally diverse architectural corpus. We should, in fact, consider this diversity in the same way as we view Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and other architectural legacies of Europe as different forms in European architectural history.

Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the history of the Islamic world bears witness to a constant and reciprocal flux of exchanges and influences with other civilizations. Thus, for instance, Umayyad architecture, albeit the product of an Islamic society, may appear to bear a closer kinship to Byzantine art than to the Safavid architecture of Iran; and the Romanesque architecture of southern France, despite its European character, may appear closer to Moorish art than to Rococo architecture.

It is also well known that the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus has been mistakenly thought of as a converted Byzantine church,⁵ and that still today some Islamists condemn Umayyad architecture as being Christian in inspiration. I will therefore restrict myself to use the dynastic appellations of the different styles, and following K. A. C. Creswell I will refer to the formative period of the architecture of the Islamic world as that of early Islam, which would include the Umayyad and the ʿAbbasid styles.

The Stakes of the Present

In this book I discuss the common belief that the art and architecture of the Islamic world have a fundamentally Islamic content, and endeavour to show how even scholarly debates about that art and architecture are often framed within a set of theoretical considerations that are no longer relevant given new approaches to the study of art. The reflections and reassessments I pursue in the following chapters stem from an awareness that the history of the art and architecture of the Islamic world has hitherto remained confined to a limited circle of the initiated, and that such isolation from the larger milieu of art historians and theoreticians is caused by a certain epistemological imbalance. It is not accidental that among the North American and Western European universities that have departments of art history, only a select few offer courses on the art and architecture of the Islamic world. I believe that to level this imbalance and to free the history of art and architecture of the Islamic world from its confinement, it is necessary to engage this scholarly field with the types of questions and reflections that animate the larger debates about art and architecture. I am well aware that attempts to do so have already been made, as in the work of Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament.⁶ Indeed, the pages of this book are greatly indebted to Grabar’s work, even when critical of his approach or conclusions.⁷

I am convinced that, despite the importance of those attempts, a rift remains unbridged. Perhaps the most significant trait of this discrepancy is the peculiar way in which the majority of scholarly work on the art of the Islamic world revolves around the question of representation: all discussions about the early Islamic community’s attitude to the arts, and to Islam in general, are framed within the context of the ban against representing living beings in Islam – and this is evident in the writings of Western and Middle Eastern scholars alike. This tendency is based on a vision of art limited by the classical conception of art as a representation of the human body, one that implies an opposition between the art of the Islamic world, and that of the West.⁸

To tackle this issue Gülru Necipoğlu writes in a remarkably erudite book: ‘This binary opposition, grounded in the construction of a sharp dichotomy between abstract pattern-making and mimetic representation in the Western tradition of art, has deeply coloured the literature on the “character” of Islamic art.’⁹ Seeking to overcome this ideological split, and to address what she calls ‘the issue of cultural specificity and meaning in a visual tradition that employed repetitive abstract signs’, Gülru Necipoğlu advocates the recourse to a ‘semiotic framework’. In her perspective that would ‘help dissolve the sharp dichotomy between the ‘iconographic’ and the ‘decorative’ by investing abstract patterns with a wide range of culturally relevant associations’.¹⁰

I believe, however, that even though the semiotic approach can be fruitful, it does not address the core of the problem, but only circumvents it. For the dichotomy at hand is the result of the very limits of the classical conception of art as a representation of the human body, a bias exposed early in the twentieth century by the abstract turn in Western modern art. We now know, from Mondrian’s grids, Malevich’s ‘Suprematist Composition: White on White’, the constructivist movement, and abstract art in general, that art can be something other than the representation of the human body, that art is not neutral aesthetic contemplation but is fraught with power and violence, and that the presupposition of classical art was not a universal truth but the assumption of a specific cultural and historical set of practices and vocabularies.

Such an approach, limited by the classical conception of art, not only marks the academic fault line between art history and the history of art of the Islamic world, but has precluded a meaningful exploration of the specific Islamic attitudes towards the arts per se. The Taliban Edict in February 2001, calling for the destruction of all statues in Afghanistan in the name of an alleged observance of the Shariʿa ban on idols (which led to the destruction of the fifth-century buddhas of Bamiyan) revealed how problematic that view is, and was testimony to the urgent need for serious debates about art in Muslim countries.¹¹

In this charged ideological context, one can question the theoretical underpinnings of current debates about reviving or creating an architectural style in the spirit of Islam. My years of architectural practice in Morocco, and teaching in Morocco, France and the United States, have led me to realize that it has become a political responsibility for architects working in the Muslim world to develop a new reflection on the history and formation of the architecture of the Islamic world. In the realm of architecture and urban planning, proponents of the recent Islamic revivalist movement have espoused the need to reroot modern urbanism in an ‘original Islamic model’. This has created a sense of urgency among architects practising and teaching in Middle Eastern countries, who do not share this view, to refute stereotypical and idealized representations of what a contemporary local architecture and urbanism inspired by Islamic values might resemble. The fact is that the view advocated by Islamic revivalists – today aggressively promoted in most universities and professional schools – is gaining ever more ground, for there has been no real debate on the post-colonial, postmodern condition of these societies in scholarly or political circles in the Islamic world.

The near absence of architectural criticism in many Arab and Muslim countries facilitates the largely unquestioned propagation of these views, and has opened the door to superficial speculation about the meaning and identity of art and architecture of the Islamic world. Sometimes to frivolous and politically harmful speculation as, for instance, in Roger Garaudy’s The Mosque, Mirror of Islam where the space of the mosque is mistakenly presented as decentred, and the ‘forest of columns’ in the Mosque of Córdoba is described as an illustration of ‘the Revelation of the Qurʾan’. This interpretation wholly contradicts the well documented history of the building, which shows that the structure was designed to recall the great mosque at Damascus and other Umayyad structures, and that its forest-like character actually resulted from the successive extensions of the building.¹²

In the post-colonial era, architecture became a primary medium in the construction and display of identities in some Arab and Islamic states, for the malaise generated in the West by modern architecture in the 1970s, and the appearance of postmodern approaches was felt in the Arab-Islamic world as well. In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, for instance, urban planners began searching for ways of reproducing earlier urban patterns in modern cities.¹³

In other countries, among them Morocco, the state carried out a policy of urban design and national architecture. At the same time, the Aga Khan Foundation promoted the idea that Muslims should search for specific elements of architectural design based on Islam, and sponsored a series of seminars and publications on this topic.¹⁴ Despite the fact that its cultural activism can lend itself to controversial interpretations, in the sense of identity politics, the Aga Khan programme was a unique opportunity to foster debate on the history of the architecture and urbanism of the Islamic world, and current issues concerning architecture and housing.

All the aforementioned complex ideological and architectural developments have been based on the assumption that architecture was always a formative component of Islamic identity and culture rather than a simple reflection of that culture. This search for specific ‘Islamic architectural values’ was not limited to Arab-Islamic countries: it was also burgeoning in the West, where Muslim immigrant communities were creating Muslim spaces.¹⁵ Western interest in the revival of an architecture inspired by Islam was neither simply academic nor limited to the relatively small group of Western architects working in Muslim countries. Muslim communities in the West were also seeking to create a symbolic space for Islam through interventions in the built environment. In the Arab-Muslim world, however, this search cannot be said to have brought about a renewal of architectural theory. The debate about art and architecture remained far less developed than that about Western art. In particular, an ‘Orientalist archetype’ remained predominant in the discourse and practice of urbanism, restricting its development to a set of poor and unreconstructed functionalist tropes.¹⁶ Thus, this inherited discourse on the unchanging essence of Muslim space, and the corollary commitment to implementing an ‘Islamic urbanism’, today remain at odds with a critical understanding of history, in the sense that none of the conditions that determined the production of the ‘Islamic cities’ of the past still exists.

The Sense of Ambiguity

The absence of written sources attesting to the existence of a doctrine of the arts in the early Islamic period encourages speculation about the art of that epoch and its meaning. It makes it difficult to criticize such stereotypes as those promoted by the functionalist or Sufi schools of thought, and remains a serious impediment to understanding the formation of the architecture of the Islamic world. Oleg Grabar’s questio...