Unveiling Islam's visual side

We tend to view Islam as inherently anti-art, but a new book featuring 188 images from the collection of Islamic art in the Chester Beatty Library may challenge our preconceptions

HE WAS not too tall nor too short. His hair was neither short and curly nor lank, but somewhere in between. His face was neither narrow nor round, though "there was a roundness to it". His eyes were black and his lashes long. He was big-boned and broad-shouldered. He had no body hair except in the middle of his chest. He leaned back as he walked, as if descending a slope. When he looked at anyone, he looked at them full in the face.

This description, almost novelistic in its precision and intensity, is from an 18th-century Islamic prayer book, produced in Turkey and now in the collection of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The person it refers to it is the Prophet Muhammad. Its energy derives from, on the one hand, a hunger for physical impressions of a man who dominates life and culture in large swathes of the world and, on the other, from the impossibility of creating such images. The Prophet's features cannot be depicted directly. So, instead of a picture, we get a word-picture.

Quite literally so. The manuscript that contains this description of the Prophet is a fascinating object in itself. The text on the Prophet's physical characteristics is contained in two circles on facing pages.

Around them is a highly elaborate arrangement of abstract and semi-natural patterns, composed of geometric shapes, beautifully wrought calligraphy and floral diamonds. The tension between the vivid and visceral content of the words and the necessary abstraction of the way they are set produces a tension between verbal and visual images that is, to non-Islamic eyes, strange and powerful. It also creates a synthesis of word and image, in which written language itself becomes a field of extraordinary beauty.

This complexity is not what springs to mind when one thinks of visual images of the Prophet. What we tend to think of in this context is either a crude fundamentalist prohibition on the one hand or an anti-Muslim provocation on the other. The Danish cartoons controversy of 2005, with its embattled opinions on both sides, fed the notion that Islam and visual culture, especially in relation to religious subjects, do not mix. This is a minefield on which only those who want an explosion should tread.

Contrary to the belief of most non-Muslims, however, the Qur'an does not forbid the production of images of living things. Instead, it warns against the worship of idols - an interdiction shared with Protestant iconoclasts of a much later era. The proscription of images comes from a hadith, or orally recorded saying of the Prophet, which does indeed damn those who produce them because they attempt to usurp the creative function of God. Even this, however, is not quite as clear-cut as it may seem. The context of the prohibition is very clearly that of the worship of visual representations as idols, not their creation in itself.

In practice, this somewhat ambivalent stance produced a nuanced and inventive approach in Islamic art. The Qur'an itself, as a holy object, is never illustrated. Images are extremely rare in the context of other strictly religious texts. But broadly devotional manuscripts, such as the life of the Prophet, could be illustrated, especially in countries such as Turkey, Iran and India that had a strong pre-Islamic tradition of figurative art.

One of the most spectacular examples is the Siyar-i-nabi, (Life of the Prophet) produced for the Ottoman sultan Murad III in the late 16th century. The text is an older Turkish collation of stories about the Prophet's spiritual and military career. To call Murad's illustrated copy lavish would be extremely restrained: its thousand pages carry around 800 paintings. Most depict the Prophet himself, though always with his face veiled, wearing a green robe and with a halo over his head. Of the six volumes of the work, five survive. Three are in the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul. One is in the New York Public Library. The other one is in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.

With its stunning collection of Islamic art, the Chester Beatty is one of the western world's most important centres for encountering the rich and complex relationship between faith and imagery in a religion that is so often reduced to crude stereotypes. In the last two years, the curator of its Islamic collections, Elaine Wright, has produced two ravishingly beautiful books that bring those collections out into the wider world. Perhaps sensing the urgency of connecting scholarship of Islamic culture with the general public in the west, she produced last year a superb volume on the library's paintings and manuscripts from Mughal-era India, accompanying an exhibition that toured five major American museums.

Now, Wright has published Islam: Faith, Art, Culture. It is a much wider and, in the broadest sense, a more explicitly educational project.

All of the 188 illustrations, most of them produced on a large scale, are from the Chester Beatty, and at one level the volume serves as a guide to aspects of the library's collection of Islamic art. But Wright's larger intention is to use the collection as a way in to Islam itself, to its principles, history and culture.

This very idea is a challenge to preconceptions. In an era when western notions of Islam have been dominated by the fundamentalist fringes (the Salman Rushdie case; the Taliban's destruction of ancient art and bans on virtually all forms of entertainment; the Danish cartoons controversy), it might not be immediately obvious that it is actually possible to use art as a guide to Islam. The basic idea of the book is thus a blow against prejudice, ignorance and fundamentalism.

It may, indeed, be equally disturbing to puritanical Islamists and to western Islamophobes. For what it shows, above all, is the variety of approaches and inspirations within Islamic visual culture. It is not just that there are those creative solutions to the problem of representing the Prophet, but that the whole idea of representation is so fluid. At one extreme, there is the fabulous, almost architectural calligraphy of Qu'ranic manuscripts, in which the absence of illustration is compensated for by the skill and grace of the actual writing. At the other, there is the entranced realism of Sufi dancers swaying to a music that seems almost audibly instilled into the colours and shapes of the paintings. Between them, we become aware both of the limits that Islam lays down and of the great ingenuity with which believers have managed to express themselves within them.