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From an Islamic perspective, not only Buddhism and Hinduism, but other Abrahamic monotheisms look like regressions into polytheism, which surely in some senses they are – Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, for instance, with their images and statues of God incarnate in Christ and the pantheon of prophets, apostles, and saints. The rise of Mary worship after 431 is perhaps one of the clearest examples of this.^§MS2.2a

When Alberti^§MS2.2b comes to justify the achievement of realism in linear perspective, he recognizes the same qualities in naturalistic imaging as Islam, except in his theology he will attribute divinity to the very processes that Hadith condemn as apostasy. It must be God who is working through artists and viewers transposing past and distant persons into holy presence.

Of course, it is complicated because some of the story is never pictured in Christianity – at most, God is a hand, but never more.^§MS2.2a And Islamic imagery routinely portrays other marvels of God’s creation, the twisting tendrils of plants in decorative arts for instance. So Islamic imagery is not strictly speaking iconophobic, iconoclastic, or aniconic¹⁵¹ – words that are all used at various times to describe religiously orthodox imaging practices in Islam. Nor is Islam non-representational in the senses we define in this grammar, because the Qur’an, the Hadith, and classical Islamic poetry vividly reference in text the Prophet’s and others’ experiences, both earthly-human and holy.¹⁵² And in Arabic calligraphy, this text is stunningly, alluringly visual – a textual iconography.

So, in Islamic art we are left with beautiful abstractions, marking the absence of things that in the post-Florentine world have been credited as realism, naturalism, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Imaging is all concept and no instance.

And if, following Peirce and Deacon,¹⁵³ the abstraction of the arbitrary sign is a higher cognitive form than iconic or indexical representation (a proposition with which we must disagree^§AS1.1.3a), then Islamic culture strives to a higher level than the “realism” of iconography.

If not anti-iconic or non-representational, then we may perhaps interpret what is distinctive about Islamic visual practice as its particular way of framing the self. This self is not just human, but also applies to the selves of sentient creatures granted animacy equivalent to humans because they breathe. Instead of the “anti-” or “non-” of European realism, now we may see this reaction to Islam to be a peculiar construction. We can interpret Islamic traditions of imaging as a mode of positioning of the self which, incidental to a view of the human and divine, is uninterested in realistic imaging. This is the case for all cultures in human history before modernity – including Anmatyerre^§MS0.0a – until the strange sleight of hand that is the invention of realism and its underlying techniques of linear perspective.

It is a nice irony that the Western invention of the technology of realistic imaging was inspired by Arabic optical science – though Alhacen himself figured the science purely in the abstractions of light, and the geometry of reflection and refraction.¹⁵⁴ What the Florentine Renaissance takes from Islamic science is the mathematics of light in space and the dialectical psychology of subjective self as see-er in relation to externalized space/object/other, objectified in its counter-position against the subject. Meaning is a dialectic of conceptually separated subject–object antinomies.

The difference between Islam and Florence is in the positioning and transposition of self and other, human and divine, where absence is powerful presence – not unlike the naming taboos affecting reference to certain relatives and the dead in the speech of first peoples,^§AS1.1.3c or the presence of the womanly body under the Islamic veil. These are transpositions of self and other which simultaneously amount to pointed affirmations, representational denials that exaggerate always-imminent transposability.

Here we also encounter the problematic notion of the icon,^§AS1.0b or a non-arbitrary meaning that stands for something else, contrasted with an arbitrary meaning (such as a word of text) which means something only by convention. Objects and images can have arbitrary meanings (a wedding ring, for instance), and text non-arbitrary (onomatopoeia, for instance^§MS3d).

Besides, the form of a representation, no matter how “literal” it seems at first glance, can never exhaust its meaning – let alone its interpretation, which will be even more polymorphous. So this distinction between the iconic and the anti-/aniconic is never so clear. There are just differences in the cultures of transposition from object, body, and space to text or images, where some affordances are favored, others unused or unnoticed, still others proscribed.

The Christian tradition has also had its moments of iconoclasm, where images are literally smashed for their apostasy. The Orthodox Christian Empire of Byzantium banned images between 726 and 843, also on the rationale that image worship was a form of idolatry.¹⁵⁵ There seem to be no direct connections, only a generalized zeitgeist of monotheism, for this was at the same time as the rise and spread of Islam.¹⁵⁶ Protestantism later rejects religious imagery in favor of the purely textual Word of God, inciting on this principle the wholesale destruction of statues, icons, and stained glass windows in England and parts of protestant Europe in the seventeenth century.¹⁵⁷

In more recent times, aficionados of the modern have developed other aversions to realism, as if to renege on modernity’s own invention. Modern movements in art from impressionism, to cubism, to abstract expressionism, scorn the apparent simple-mindedness of realism. With no further pretense to visual objectivity, these art forms return the manifest hand and eye of the artist. They make style and medium shockingly visible in order to express emotional abstractions. Such renditions of the modern consign to kitsch countless re-renderings of Mary by the Catholic faithful, and with equal disdain the heroic worker in the realism of the socialist faithful.

In digital modernity, moreover, there are still large areas of absent images, or at least images that are hidden for some because they are forbidden for others. Nakedness and sex acts are a case in point, ubiquitous in embodied experience, but whose images are proscribed. A largely walled-off shadow internet exists for pornography, away from “mainstream” search and social media.

Here is Facebook, drawing a visual line between what can happen in embodied experience and what can be represented: “We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple … Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited.”¹⁵⁸ We can have these things in ordinary embodied experience, we can even mention them politely in speech or text, but we can’t image them.

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¹⁴⁹ Oleg Grabar, 1975, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” pp. 45–52 in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, edited by A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Birmingham, UK: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, p. 54.

¹⁵⁰ Exodus 20: 4–5. King James Version.

¹⁵¹ Oleg Grabar, 1975, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” pp. 45–52 in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, edited by A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Birmingham, UK: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, p. 51; Marshall G.S. Hodgson 1964, “Islâm and Image,” History of Religions 3(2):220–60, p. 221.

¹⁵² Marshall G.S. Hodgson 1964, “Islâm and Image,” History of Religions 3(2):220–60, pp. 240–42.

¹⁵³ Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

¹⁵⁴ Hans Belting, 2008 [2011], Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, translated by D.L. Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–11.

¹⁵⁵ Cyril Mango, 1975, “Historical Introduction,” pp. 1–6 in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, edited by A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Birmingham, UK: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham.

¹⁵⁶ Oleg Grabar, 1975, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” pp. 45–52 in ibid., pp. 45–46.

¹⁵⁷ Christopher Hill, 1972, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London, UK: Temple Smith; Christopher Hill, 1993, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, London, UK: Penguin.

¹⁵⁸ www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 224–228. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Islam’s Imaging §MS2.2.1b