Thus discourses between philosophy, music, and poetry add nuance to
discussions of the image beyond the blinkered question of permissibility.
The tradition of music in Islam developed in concert with the discursive
procedures defining juridical Islam during the ninth and tenth centuries
and established the basic codes through which mimetic representation in
its multiple forms–poetic, calligraphic, visual, musical, architectural, and
cosmological–circulated. Within this mimetic panoply, the image was not
banned but marginal. When visual practices increased following the thir-
teenth-century Mongol invasions, they encountered relatively little legal
resistance. The sophisticated development of visual representation in post-
Timurid courts suggests that al-Nawawi may have responded to an increas-
ing practice, but the implementation of hisfatwaagainst painting was
limited. Rather, the high cost of paintings, combined with the unimpor-
tance of the image in Islamic ritual, led to its paucity in everyday Muslim
life. Nonetheless, images functioned as a religious trope in poetry. What
Hamid Dabashi refers to as“repressed visuality verbalized in the medieval
text”may suggest less a psychoanalytic repression essential to Islam than
the material conditions in which the sonic, oral, and verbal culture embo-
died in poetry and music circulated more inexpensively, and thus more
readily, than painting.^76 Visual art was just not that important.
The problem with understanding a culture different from our own is that
its answers rarely match our questions. This difference belongs not only to
space, culture, or religion, but to time: across the course of history, all of us
moderns, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, become foreign to Islam’s pasts.
As Emmanuel Levinas points out, often the expressions of the culture of an
Other can, at best, enter into a conversation with a culture we define as our
own, thereby producing an ethical relationship, despite the inalienable
boundaries produced between the analyst and the analysand.“To approach
the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression...It is therefore to
receivefrom the Other beyond the capacity of the I...this also means: to be
taught.”^77 If we are to understand the perceptual culture of Islam, we
cannot rely on the paradigm of art or the backdrop of prohibition. We
must instead learn to see with the ear and recognize with the heart.
(^76) Dabashi, 2003 : 965. (^77) Levinas, 1969 : 51.
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