It’s Good To Be Caliph
Today I got yet another object lesson in how (1) anything might be grist for the ErosBlog mill, (2) you learn something every day and (3), the Internet is a marvelous thing.
I was passing my commute with Chris Wickham’s new book The Inheritance of Rome, a demonstration of the sort of superman historical erudition that people like me can only dream of having. As my train was pulling in to its dismal destination, I came across the following passage in Wickham’s discussion of the rise and fall of the Umayyad Caliphate:
The Ummayyads had a terrible press after their fall in 750. They were seen…as luxurious degenerates, enjoying themselves in their palaces, and ignoring the needs of government. They certainly built luxurious palaces, some of them survive, in the Jordan valley and on the Syrian/Jordan fringe, as ambitious in their own way as al-Walid’s mosques, and in two cases (the stuccoes of the Khirbat al-Mafjar outside Jericho, the frescoes of the Qusayr ‘Amra bath-house east of ‘Amman) they show profusion of human forms (often naked and female) that do not look very ‘Islamic.’
Google image search time!
I turns out there are many splendid images available of Qusayr ‘Amra, and the frescoes, though not in good shape, really are remarkable. Here is one I found from at L’académie de Lille. First one:
And another:
Professor Wickham is certain right to put “Islamic” in quotes, for these images certainly seem contrary to a stereotype of Islam as a sex-negative, iconophobic religion.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3891
I’m speaking outside my comfort zone of knowledge here, so correct me if I’m wrong. I did not think Islamic law and culture permitted the creation of images of living creatures. Quote from wonderful Wikipedia:
“Typically, though not entirely, Islamic art has focused on the depiction of patterns and Arabic calligraphy, rather than on figures, because it is feared by many Muslims that the depiction of the human form is idolatry and thereby a sin against Allah, forbidden in the Qur’an.”
Alex99a, your understanding matches my own. I’d say this disjunction (between what we expect of an Islamic caliphate and the images actually found in their bathhouses) is what makes this art so fascinating. I think it’s also why the scholar Faustus was quoting put “Islamic” in skeptical quotes.
That’s the danger with stereotyping.
Islamic history and culture is as complex as any other cultural tradition.
There have been vastly different interpretations and degrees of observation of the rules in different times and different places throughout Islamic civilization.
And as with all times and places, the most powerful bend the rules more than anyone else. ;-)
Hi,
I agree with the above comment, stereotypes can sometimes (if not always) be deceiving. As a Syrian Arab who’d grown up learning Arab literature, I lost count of all the pornographic poems and other kind of writings blossoming at the time when the Islamic empire was in its power peak.
Thanks for sharing this!
I think I’d like to take mild issue with calling this “stereotyping” though.
As I understand the word, a stereotype is a special sort of generalization: it’s a generalization that has some sort of specific or special importance to the person doing the generalizing. “Basketball players are super-tall” is a generalization, but it’s not a stereotype, because nobody is gonna get all butt-hurt upon encountering a short but effective basketball player. Like all generalizations, it is sure to fail in specific cases, but that doesn’t make it a stereotype, nor keep it from being a useful generalization.
Bringing this back down to cases, if I were to think or say “Muslims are dangerous fanatics” that would be both a generalization (a bad and dangerous one, being so ridiculously over-general and over-inclusive, even in a world that manifestly does include some Muslims on the roster of dangerous religious fanactics) as well as a stereotype (because there are a bunch of Americans and a fair few Europeans who not only believe this generalization, but have invested it with special importance in their thinking and decision-making (whose country needs invading next?). People who are invested in this stereotype are going to resist contrary information (evidence of ten bazillion non-fanatic non-dangerous Muslims) whereas people who believe the generalization about basketball players, upon being shown a short basketball player, are just going to say “Wow, he must be astonishingly good at it.” Because it’s not a stereotype and they haven’t invested “basketball player = tall” with any special significance in their thinking.
Thus I’d argue that “Muslims don’t depict the human form in their art” is a generalization, a somewhat useful one despite what are doubtless many more counter-examples than I was aware of (this post by Faustus being the very *first* counterexample I ever heard of). But, I’d argue, the generalization is not a stereotype, at least in this conversation, because there’s nobody in this conversation (possibly, nobody anywhere) who has invested the generalization with any special significance. It doesn’t really matter to anybody but a Muslim whether they depict human forms in art or not. Nobody particularly cares == no stereotype.
I might propose a rule of thumb for telling the difference between generalization and stereotype: if a trait is used in caricature, it could be a stereotype. But if it’s not used that way, it’s probably just a generalization. Does “they don’t draw people” appear in any of the widespread hostile caricatures of Muslims? I’d be fascinated to see an example of that.
I do apologize for this pedantic nit-picking, but it seems to me that it’s very important to get a word like “stereotype” precisely right, given how often it appears in contentious conversations about the uses and abuses of group identities.