the invisible God of Islam.^51 As in the Platonic tradition, visuality may thus
sometimes be suspect in its production/recognition of false icons, but
nonetheless serves as a bridge toward recognition of the invisible divine.
The interplay between the necessity and dangers of materiality emerges in
three juxtaposed parables repeated in the standard sequence of Quranic
recitation: the stories of the failure of Iblis (Satan) to bow before Adam, the
fall from the Garden of Eden, and the golden calf.^52 In these passages, Iblis
obeys God’s commandment to worship only him, and so is alone among the
angels in not bowing before the created form of Adam. He is then banished
from heaven for dishonoring God’s creative power. Subsequently, he tricks
Adam and Eve into consciousness of materiality, causing their banishment
from the garden. Their descendants worship the golden calf, neglecting the
miracle of creation while worshiping ostentatious false idols. Their transgres-
sion diametrically opposes and thereby complements Iblis’srefusaltobowto
man. Sufiinterpretations of the narrative see him not as the arch-enemy of
humankind, but as subject to pity for his downfall, admiration for his prin-
cipled refusal, and confident of God’sultimatemercy.^53 An illustration of the
angels bowing before Adam as satan walks away (at the upper right of the
image) memorializes the moment in which Satan, a dark form in the back-
ground placing hisfinger to his lips in wonder and wearing a ring around his
neck as a sign of his enslavement to God, walks away. While a later reader saw
fit to deface the representation of a somewhat hermaphroditic Adam, in the
original the warning against idolatry was clear enough to depict the inap-
propriate worship of the human form.^54 [Figure 4] Likewise, Adam and Eve, as
metonyms for humankind, live through a necessary relationship with the
material world bracketed by the opposing excesses of both Satan and the
idolaters. Considered beyond their historical genesis as segregated parables
inherited from the Abrahamic tradition, the stories become links in a discourse
of materiality as the necessary substrate of divine transcendence.(^51) The Quranic tale abridges longer Midrashic mythologizations of historical encounters. As
Judaic and Islamic commentary interacted over time, earlier accounts of verbal competition
later became increasingly sexualized. These include descriptions of the need for Bilqis to use a
depilatory cream so that Solomon can show her his full power. Lassner,1993: 20, 128–130, 136;
Soucek,1993. Valérie Gonzalez suggests that the description of the glass produces a“sort of
textual‘icon’,”which“‘represents’an architectural feature one can enter, made with an overall
glass setting, transparent, bright, white or green, isotropic, with a perceptible linear design,”
that conflates the isotropy of pattern with the deceptive nature of vision itself. Her
interpretation anachronistically projects the use of pattern from later periods in Islamic history
to the era of Quranic emergence, preceding both isotropic geometries and their underlying
mathematical theories (discussed inchapter 8of this book). Gonzalez,2001: 31.
(^52) These sequences are repeated in verses 2:34–37, 51, 88–89 and 20: 88–89, 116–18.
(^53) Boyle,1979:13–14. (^54) Rührdanz,2017: 1035–1036.
120 Seeing with the Heart