REL 420
Islam and the Image Fall 2023
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed ARTH 521
This is not the current course catalog

This seminar responds to a recent incident at a US liberal arts university where a professor was sacked for showing images of Prophet Muhammad as part of her section on Islamic art. Why is image-making so hotly contested in Islam? What is the history of figural depictions in this tradition? The seminar explores artworks made for Muslim patrons from the medieval period to the modern era, considering how paintings produced for Muslim audiences can be situated within the frameworks of “Islamic art,” a loaded historiographical term that has been questioned in recent times. The seminar also addresses some of the major problems that continue to haunt art scholarship in the field. For most of its history, the academic study of Islamic art has seldom considered contemporaneous literary voices that shed light on the motivations behind artworks. Furthermore, the historiography, deeply entrenched in its colonial and orientalist roots, has largely isolated images from their supporting texts–a curious oversight in light of the fact that painting in Muslim lands has historically been primarily an art of the book. These biases have affected the way museums have collected, displayed and interpreted paintings. For example, Western museums continue to place figural depictions made for books and albums in “South Asian” collections while textual manuscripts and calligraphic specimens made for the same Muslim audiences–even at times bound in the same albums–are categorized as “Islamic art.” What does this isolation of text from image imply about prevailing views of Islamic art? To better understand the cultural, historical and religious context surrounding artworks students will read primary literature ranging from autobiography to devotional poetry, often written by the very patrons and subjects of the paintings to be discussed.