indirectly with a widespread understanding of idolatry not simply as idol
worship, but as a broader ethical demand to maintain a critical distance
from the sacrosanct.
The blessing of exile in the intermediate world of sleep depends on
rejecting idolatry. Our era is not that different from the one preceding
World War II, in which Massignon found succor in the parable. Writing
today, as neoliberalism appropriates isolationist and racist populism to
conquer the global political stage, imperiling liberalism and intellectual-
ism, the story of the Seven Sleepers feels like a ray of hope: an escape from
the difficult political labor of resistance. I doubt I am alone in wishing I
could sleep in a cave for a while, until things get better.
Yet if, like ibn Arabi, we understand the cave not as sleep but as exile,
and exile not as physical uprooting but the recognition of all our homes as
ephemeral, then the cave becomes not a place of retreat but a place of
engagement. We gain critical alertness based on our ability to reject the
ideologies embedded in our idols. As in al-Hallaj’s incitement to“destroy
your Kaaba,”this rejection forces us to put the sacrosanct object on the
chopping block for evaluation, as did Abraham.
As an idol, art history does not simply reflect ideologies of content, such
as nationalism or patriarchy, as has long been critiqued, but also of
method. It assumes that art is necessarily a physical entity endowed with
the capacity to act as a metonym for some greater reality. What if we
destroy this Kaaba and, at least temporarily, step out of the art-historical
cave?
Thisbarzakhof interpretive meditation allows us to consider how rhetoric
mediates our relationship with things. The rhetoric of art history is grounded
in empirical historicism, situating its object of study along the vectors of time
and geography. In contrast, ideologies such as religion and nationalism rely
on symbolic rhetoric to communicate parables about how to live. By margin-
alizing this mechanism of conveying knowledge, we construct an edifice of
demonstrative expertise at the cost of allegory. This reduces the efficacy of
empirical knowledge in the public sphere. We expect popularizers or creative
professionals, to take up our work, to manipulate our research willy-nilly,
and communicate it somehow in the form of public narrative, as documen-
tary,fiction, exhibition, or art. We then complain that, perhaps unable or
unwilling to read our long, academic texts (including this book), they did it
wrong. When we lose the symbolic range of our rhetorical toolbox, we also
lose our self-authorization to communicate through the rhetorical range of
the entities we study. In doing so, we occlude the expressive agency of artists
and their artworks. Empiricism applied to art dooms it to silence.
Exile and the Seven Sleepers 203