The commentary echoes the Quran’s frequent reference to non-believers as
blind, as in:“It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within
their breasts”^14 (Q22:38). The problem lies not in the image itself but in the
failure of the heart to recognize the insufficiency of the eye.
Mani’s claim to truth is falsified by contrasting the Quran as the man-
ifestation of truth. Not only does Mani imitate the revelation of the Prophet
Muhammad by reenacting his meditative retreat into a cave where he
receives divine inspiration, he references the heavenly tablet on which it
was modeled. Whereas in Islam this form is aural, Mani’s tablet is visual.
For Dust Muhammad, the medium of image over sound undermines its
claim to comprehensively represent the world. As in Nizami’s rendition,
the knowing heart suffices as protection against the dangers of depiction.
7.2 The Materiality of Dreams
Under the rubric of art, the image in modern thought becomes inextricable
from materiality, equated with reality. Yet in Islamic poetry, the physical
painting was no more or less real, permanent, or believable than a vision or
a dream. This interchangeability between physically and spiritually man-
ifest images becomes clear in the parallel functions of paintings and dreams
as tropes driving action in poetic and historical narratives. Both a painting
and a dream are equally ephemeral. This reflects the metaphysics estab-
lished in the thought of ibn Sina, who conceives materiality as a contingent
expression of essence, where essence is that which surpasses the accident of
having come into being.^15 As Akkach points out, for over a millennium
Islamic discourses maintained the“Platonic–Aristotelian duality of the
sensible and the intelligible, the physical and metaphysical ... The
Islamic cosmos consisted of the seen and unseen, the divine and human
domains, with each having its own inhabitants, landscape, and order.”^16
An ontology of the image in Islam must attend not only to physical
paintings in collections, libraries, and museums, but also to narratives of
images encountered in the unseen which affect physical reality.
Lest we exoticize this inversion of dream and reality, consider for a
moment the work we moderns invest in telling ourselves that dreams are
not real, our ideological investment affirming that experiences that deeply
touch us are false. Then imagine the liberty that might come from paying
attention to our dreams, not simply psychoanalytically, but in the
(^14) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 212. (^15) El-Bizri, 2001. (^16) Akkach,2005a:3.
The Materiality of Dreams 189