Why is human depiction frowned on in Islam?
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God.”
Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4–5)
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The larger context for the injunction against figurative art in Islam is that it shares with Christianity and Judaism the belief in the oneness of God, and a hatred of idolatry. However, how this has been interpreted by believers of different time periods has varied widely.
Ian Black in the Guardian notes that:
“The Qur’an does not explicitly forbid images of Muhammad, but several hadith (sayings and actions attributed to the prophet) prohibit Muslims from creating visual depictions of human figures. Traditionally, the concern has been that images may encourage idolatry, the scourge of the jahiliyya period of pre-Islamic Arabia.”
At the current moment of outrage at the events that have happened today in Paris, it might be a good idea to dig a bit deeper into the ideological foundations on which these attacks are based to see whether they hold up to critical scrutiny. What are our best defenses against this kind of extremism, or the racist, nationalist extremism it begets in response, other than our own intellectual understanding?
Firstly, we must understand the historical context of the birth of Islam and the Jahiliyya period if we are to understand how the injunction against visual images came about. Jahiliyya is an Arabic word meaning ignorance, and defines the period before the Islamic revelation in central Arabia, in which the worship of idols was the religious norm. This idea defines the start of the Islamic period as an absolute break with the past, whereas in fact the birth of Islam adapted many aspects of pre-Islamic paganism. One example of this would be the continued reverence of the Kaaba and the practice of the Hajj.
It seems clear from the hadiths which report on the Prophet’s view on the depiction of figures that there was an instinctive dislike among the Prophet and his companions for making images, due to their association with idolatry.
The following are two hadiths attributed to the Prophet Mohammed:
Narrated ‘Aisha (the wife of the Prophet): Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, “If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection.”
Narrated Ibn Abbas: When the Prophet saw pictures in the Ka’ba, he did not enter it till he ordered them to be erased. When he saw (the pictures of Abraham and Ishmael carrying the arrows of divination, he said, “May Allah curse them (i.e. the Quraish)! By Allah, neither Abraham nor Ishmael practiced divination by arrows.”
In the context of the time in which Mohammed made these pronouncements, if we take them as authoritative, it seems clear that they specifically refer to the danger of worshipping anything else on the same level as Allah.
I think it is fair to ask the question, 1400 years after the life of Mohammed, whether the creation of realistic images of people hold the same danger of creating idolatrous objects as they did in the 7th century?
In light of today’s terror attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, I wonder whether those responsible decided to murder people who depicted the Prophet Mohammed because they were trying to prevent idolatry, or because their dogmatic beliefs justified in their own minds the use of murder in response to being offended. In short, the terrorism witnessed today has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics.
Here I think it’s worth repeating another Hadith reporting something else Mohammed said.
This is a screenshot from an essay from 1994 by Asad Abu’Khalil called On the Incoherence of Islamic Fundamentalism. This essay makes it plain that modern Jihadism is a political tool. It has nothing to do with a person’s individual relationship to God, and everything to do with utilising religious conformity for political purposes.
It is worth reminding ourselves that within Islamic thought, there is no injunction on criticism of Mohammed, as he himself authorised it (as long as you accept this Hadith).
If this is the case, even if Mohammed is reported to have said “The people who will receive the severest punishment on the Day of Resurrection will be those who try to make the like of Allah’s creations”, it should be acceptable to discuss whether this injunction applies anymore, or in what circumstances it might apply. Is the creation of photographs to do with religion, or with ‘earthly matters’?
When a photographer captures Lionel Messi scoring a goal, is she encouraging us to idolise him? One could argue in a way that she is. Yet even the meaning of the word ‘idolise’ has a different meaning to how it would have been understood in Mohammed’s day.
What about when a photographer captures an image of the suffering of a Palestinian family that lost its home to an Israeli airstrike? Are we being instructed to idolise these images or figures? Or are we being encouraged to have empathy for our fellow humans who are suffering?
What we must preserve, whether we are culturally Islamic, Western or anything else, is our ability to think for ourselves, free of dogma and the norms of our societies. When it comes to our response to terrorist events, we should be aware that an escalation of violence and hatred serves the purposes primarily of extremists on both sides.
Like many conventional views of Islam, the belief that there is a blanket ban on making images is a conventional idea that we, as modern people able to think for ourselves, do not have to accept at face value. In reality, Muslims living in Islamic societies make realistic images every day. If this were not so, there would be no television channels owned by Islamic countries, and Muslims would never use a camera. We live in a different world now from the one in which Islam was born, and most people don’t have a problem with this.
The nostalgic belief that things were better in the past and that we should return to the values of a previous time is not one exclusive to Islamic extremists. It is a tendency in all societies, but one which people living in poverty and oppression are particularly susceptible to. If we are to undermine the ideological basis of extremist dogma, we must be willing to face the social causes of radicalisation, and not treat it as an expression of pure evil with no prior causes.
Maajid Nawaz received a lot of criticism from other Muslims for this tweet, but in hindsight, he is brave to have raised this issue. We must support liberal Muslims who are willing to talk about these issues, because they are more likely to be listened to by others from Western Islamic communities who may feel besieged by criticism from others outside of their communities.
I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody what to think, and I hope nobody would interpret this in such a way. This is an attempt at understanding political causes, and to historicise the culture on which these political beliefs are supposedly based. This understanding takes more effort than simple condemnation or reactionary hatred, but the reward such an effort promises — peace and stability — is worth the effort a million times over.
