I’ve been going through some stuff at my mother’s house, and found a stash of what some folks would refer to as art. But this thing is freaking me out. It’s framed with a glass back, so one can see the the entire page contains text written in an Arabic language. On the front side, painted over the page of text, is a scene of what look to me as 5 people of Turkic origin in a (maybe) domestic scene. The artwork is done with a very fine line and watercolor right over the text, and the page has warped a bit under the paint.
I thought making anything like this was a free ticket to Islamic hell. Maybe this was some sort of protest art? My grandparents got around back in the day…
I tried scanning it, but the frame is getting in the way. Dark scans upon request, if you think it will help, or you can help me read it. Please?
GQ just because, if the mods think it will help, please move asap to CS.
Islam has hardly been a monolithic tradition over the centuries and prohibitions on what could be done in art have varied from place to place and era to era. This is a point that’s currently being emphasised by the curators of the exhibition of the Aga Khan’s art collection that’s on in the Louvre at the moment. From that exhibition website:
Particularly if your guessing wrongly about it being from a Koran, there’s nothing unusual about the scene you describe.
Also, it might not be Islamic. My brother’s wife is Assyrian Christian and they have some framed pages in Arabic of the Lord’s Prayer, etc. with painted figures in the margins.
Islamic fundmentalists are against depicting living things in art. But Islam is a world religion. The Persians, for example, decorated manuscripts with exquisite miniatures. They were not “displayed” as art–& definitely not in the mosque. Here, we even see pictures of Mohammed–sometimes with a veiled face, sometimes not. These are respectful depictions, but would probably outrage a mullah in Saudi Arabia.
It’s not just a Muslim thing. The Byzantine Iconoclasts also had issues with religious art. (Perusing this article, one appreciates why extremely complex & subtle issues are called “Byzantine.”) For more simplicity, read Ian Paisley’s fulminations against “graven images.”
And the Western Christians have had their moments, too. Big Calvinist and Zwinglist iconoclasms now and then in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Lots of great Islamic illumination traditions, though-- the Mughal stuff comes to mind. But in any case Jews and Muslims have varying readings of the ‘graven image’ thing just like Christians do, and both traditions have produced some great figural art.
When I was a museum guard, I worked often in the Islamic art department. The galleries were full of illuminated manuscripts from Persia (Iran), Turkey and Mughal India. The oldest were from the 14th or 15th century, if I recall correctly.
These weren’t pages from the Qu’ran (we also had plenty of those, but they were strictly calligraphic) but rather from other literary works.
Most of the Persian works were depictions of the Shah-Na-Meh (Book of Kings) which is the national epic of Persia. Shahnameh - Wikipedia