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God's Copyright
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On January 7, 2015, two terrorists opened fire at the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, shouting in Arabic, “God is great!” and “The prophet is avenged!” The attack came after the magazine had published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The gunmen killed a dozen people, including the magazine’s editor and a number of cartoonists and editorial staff. The editor’s bodyguard and a police officer were also among the dead. Another 11 people were wounded. The attackers were later identified as two French brothers of Algerian descent who acted in the name of the Islamic State, a fundamentalist Muslim organization that briefly controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria.
Religious figures of all faiths were frequent targets of Charlie Hebdo’s barbs, but its depictions of the Prophet Muhammad drew a particularly vehement response. In 2006 the magazine garnered widespread condemnation and a lawsuit by several Muslim organizations for its decision to reprint a dozen cartoons of the Prophet that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper. Then in 2011 offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed after a caricature of Muhammad appeared on its cover. No wonder its editor felt the need to employ a bodyguard.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have prohibitions against idolatry. Unlike Christianity, which considers Jesus to be the Son of God, the Muslim faith does not regard Muhammad as divine. However, some branches of Islam have extended this prohibition to images of any sentient being. The technical term for this is aniconism. Interestingly, the Qur’an itself has no such proscriptions. However, the Hadith, which contains sayings of the Prophet, does include entries that would appear in certain circumstances to prohibit the creation of images depicting living creatures. Sunni fundamentalists have interpreted these to apply generally to all figurative art — not the least images of the Prophet Muhammad.
Some Orthodox Jews, Amish and Jehovah’s Witnesses have similar aversions to displays of “graven images.” These are defined in the Book of Exodus to include “any manner of 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.” Although the prohibition would appear to be all-encompassing, it is laid down explicitly in connection with worshipping idols. The Muslim ban goes well beyond that, maintaining that the creation of living forms is God’s prerogative alone and that artists defy God by doing so.
As a fine-arts photographer — and therefore a creator of living forms myself — I seek to understand where this Muslim aversion to figurative art comes from. Perhaps the best rationale I have seen comes from the late Titus Burckhardt, a Swiss artist and Muslim convert, who wrote:
The absence of icons in Islam has not merely a negative but a positive role. By excluding all anthropomorphic images, at least within the religious realm, Islamic art aids man to be entirely himself. Instead of projecting his soul outside himself, he can remain in his ontological centre where he is both the viceregent (khalîfa) and slave ('abd) of God. Islamic art as a whole aims at creating an ambience which helps man to realize his primordial dignity; it therefore avoids everything that could be an 'idol', even in a relative and provisional manner. Nothing must stand between man and the invisible presence of God.
My only quibble here is that this rationale mainly addresses icons as such, potential or otherwise, and not the ban on figurative art more broadly. So where did the notion come from the God held an exclusive copyright on all created forms? I would point out that God as portrayed in the Book of Genesis delegates to humankind the power to name his creatures. In Judaism, to name a thing is to define its essence. Is this not a creative act? And why can’t figurative art be seen as an act of homage to the Creator?
Granted, Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures were probably not an act of homage to the Prophet Muhammad. However, the Prophet’s condemnation of figurative art in the Hadith threatened artists with God’s judgment; he didn’t saying anything about killing them. There’s an obvious irony in the fact that gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo for publishing images of living beings did do by murdering people who were actually created in God’s image.
Exodus 20:3-6
Titus Burkhart, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art (1987)
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