What It Means - Day 86

When I'm teaching Aesthetic Expressions and we're getting ready to discuss Muslim art I'll sometimes ask the students to get out a sheet of paper and draw God, or at least their perception of the divine. After giving them a minute or two I suddenly add, "Oh, and you can't draw a human form." This leads to a combination of confusion and grumbling, although only from the students who haven't done the reading for the day (usually ch. 7 from Gombrich's The Story of Art). I'm trying to get the students to understand a number of things, among them how unconsciously hard-wired they are to the Renaissance sense of beauty and that there are actually many different aesthetic criteria guidelines (essentially, that there are many different interpretations of beauty). I also want them to understand how art reflects culture and religion and ideology, and in turn emphasizes culture and religion and ideology. Similarly, I will sometimes show these two images side by side and state that they're actually the same image, and ask them to argue the point pro and con. Islam, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, has a rule against representing God in a human form. Obviously, this provides a set of challenges, to which artists inside of the Muslim world have answered in three classic ways: calligraphy of verses from the Quran (and which is so stylized that it is sometimes difficult to sort out), images drawn from nature, and repeating geometric patterns.  The first choice is obvious,  and I'll talk more about that later, and the second and third are equally logical once you free your mind of the traditional rules that we don't even know we follow. Think back to the student I instruct to draw God and then refuse to allow them to use a human form; almost inevitably they find themselves relying upon something from nature. And, seriously, what better selection? There's a reason why the Quran, again and again, when the point is being made of the self-evident existence of God, cites nature. The repeating geometric patterns is a lovely metaphor for the logic, complexity and eternity of God.

Now, as a grey-haired bearded dude I can see the obvious advantages of representing God as a grey-haired bearded dude as Michelangelo famously did in the Sistine Chapel, but there is a danger in that. As the old Daoist saying reminds us, once you define something as beautiful you create ugliness. In this sense, anything that is not a grey-haired bearded dude is "the other," and the very definition of less than divine.

Here is one little corner of a famous mosque in Iran (thank, ArtStor) and it shows the classic aspects of Muslim art: Quranic calligraphy, images from nature, and repeating geometric patterns. If you're on the outside looking in the admonition against representing God with the human form appears limiting, but in other ways it's remarkably freeing and inspires a universe of creativity.