This practice of apprehension contrasts with both Baumgarten’s hier-
archy between logical and sensory knowledge and the Kantian norms
central to Western art history. Kant postulates that the rational subject
must act from a position of disinterest to justify his subjectivity as uni-
versal. In contrast, the Islamic subject experiences the universality of the
divine through a deeply and necessarily interested subjectivity intrinsic to
divine, and therefore universal, truth.
This very different notion of representation can lead to confusion. From
a position that normalizes the outward Western image, Dabashi argues that
the preference for representing God in word rather than in image collapses
the sign into the signifier, making the unrepresentability of God into a
pathology.^26 He asserts that the absence of thevisiblealso occludes the
visual, rendering Islam-as-iconoclastic as essential to the Quran and
thereby analytically solving the paradox of Islamic iconoclasm, whereby
images are essentially forbidden without any explicit dogma. Yet the image
in the Quran is neither outward nor universal; it is inward and personal.
The divine thus infuses the human through Quranic sound, as well as in the
apprehension of creation (the physical world that we inhabit) as divine
signs identical with the Quran.
The Quran recognizes representation as an imperfect yet necessary
interface between the divine and the human. To communicate with
humanity, the Quran needs the mundane medium of language. The qua-
lities of language inherently differ from the unitary nature of God because
of the separation between form (signifier) and content (signified). The
distance between the absolute idea of the signified and its imperfect rendi-
tion in the signifier introduces a realm of play in which style emerges:
language enables multiple ways of saying the same thing, a thing that can
only be absolute in the unitary realm of the monotheistic divinity. Arabic
language, and through it stylistics, must precede the Quran for it to be
understood. Yet as a language communicating divinity, it must always
already exceed the stylistics on which it depends. Quranic text can be
understood as an external reflection of the internal speech of God, reflect-
ing an aspect of craft, which involves expressive choices for the commu-
nication of meaning to a recipient. Al-Jurjani described this process as
involvingtaswir–the same word commonly used for a likeness, as in an
image–that creates a particular form or shape in a given medium.^27
Representation emerges as a function of language rather than visuality.
(^26) Dabashi, 2011. (^27) Larkin, 1988 : 41; Elias, 2012 : 28.
Perception and the Quran 111