Islam and Democracy by Fatima Mernissi

Author:Fatima Mernissi [FATEMA MERNISSI]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

THE BAN ON IMAGES

In Arabic the word for image is al-sura. And today the only word we have for photographer is musawwir. Everyone has noticed the irritation shown by police and guards at official buildings in Muslim countries when you walk around with a camera. But it’s not about the ban on photographing which exists everywhere in the world in museums that I want to speak. I want to talk about the exaggerated aggressiveness you encounter when you walk around with a camera in an Arab medina. I don’t know how photographers make a living in Arab countries, but every time I have tried to take a picture of a tree or a door or a fly, the incident has turned out badly.

In 1987 a young Egyptian was determined to forbid me to photograph the Sphinx. I managed to calm him down by handing him my camera, just as one would do to mollify an angry child. But I was humiliated and fed up; he was spoiling my vacation. I asked in a small voice how I had disturbed al-kawn (the cosmos). Then, weeping, I told him that he was oppressing me and that I was weak (which is the best way to disarm an Arab man). My tormentor gave me back my camera, murmuring with embarrassment, “I don’t know.” However, he should have known that “the people who will be the most chastised by Allah on the Day of Judgment will be the musawwirun ’ as the ninth-century compiler al-Bukhari tells us in his Sahih (collection of authentic Hadith, traditions about the Prophet).13 The angels, it is said, will not enter a house where there is a dog or a tasawwir —any representation of a natural object. This was how the cult of idols began; human beings fashioned images that they then began to worship.

According to legend it was a distant ancestor of the Arabs, Luhayy, who “first introduced the worship of idols into the Kacba.” He is alleged to have visited Syria, and on seeing the people worship objects to have asked, “What are those?” They answered that they used them to beg for rain from the sky and to triumph over their enemies. He asked them to give him some, then returned to Mecca and placed them around the Kacba.14 The ban on producing images of human beings forever links in the Muslim unconscious two things that have emerged as supreme in the modern information age: the image and individualism. Creation, imagination, individuality—so many facets of a fabulous, dangerous en- ergy—are like mirrors and dreams. Khayal, Ibn Manzur tells us in the Lisan al-cArab, is “the images that seem to exist, whether one is awake or dreaming . . . and that is the reason the shadow in the mirror is called khayal as well as what our body projects against the sun.” The words that mean “to create,” like khalaqa and bid% are dangerous and stamped with bans. All innovation is a contravention of the order of things.

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