Prophetic Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture

Material Religion The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief ISSN: 1743-2200 (Print) 1751-8342 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmr20 Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture Christiane Gruber To cite this article: Christiane Gruber (2016) Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture, Material Religion, 12:3, 259-293, DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2016.1192148 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2016.1192148 Published online: 22 Aug 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 40 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmr20 Download by: [Tulane University] Date: 22 September 2016, At: 00:36 prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture christiane gruber university of michigan, ann arbor, mi ABSTRACT Much like religious objects produced and consumed else- where in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often associated with acts of play and worship, their power to cultivate joy and direct religious feelings in various faith communities strengthened in large part by their remove from the commodity situation. As scholars of visual and material culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized commodity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiving social messages—that take place in regimes of value. Within postrevolutionary Iran in particular, images and objects depicting the Prophet Muhammad have been manu- factured en masse over the past three decades, catering to official regime ideology and popular devotional practices alike. This study explores how these types of prophetic products serve to visually reinforce and materially reify narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran. Keywords: the Prophet Muhammad, Iran, Shi’ism, carnival, martyrdom, Islamic visual and material culture. Christiane Gruber is Associate Professor of Islamic Art in the Art History Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written two books and edited half a dozen volumes on various topics, including Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islamic ascension texts and images, and modern Islamic visual and material culture. [email protected] This article contains historical and Material Religion volume 12, issue 3, pp. 259–293 contemporary images from Iran of the DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2016.1192148 Prophet Muhammad. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Holy figures and saints play a number of significant roles in Islamic traditions. Whether acting as agents for intercession, transmitters of baraka (blessings), or conduits to the sacred, they essentially function as liminal beings that connect the realm of the human with that of the divine. As spiritual middle points, saintly personages provide pivots for the riveting and molding of religious, political and cultural identities. Like other holy figures in Islam, and indubitably much more so, the Prophet Muhammad has been central to a wide range of Muslim devotional practices at different times and places. From his own lifetime in the Arabian Peninsula, throughout the centuries in many Islamic lands, and into the postrevolutionary period in Iran, Muhammad has held pride of place for his many roles: as the seal of all prophets from the Abrahamic line, the blessed carrier of God’s revealed word, the leader of the community of the faithful, and the intercessor on the Day of Resurrection. His many mediating functions make him a holy figure par excellence as well as a key asset for the expression of both piety and politics. Like saintly people, images and objects carry many meanings that change according to historical and social settings. They also play intermediary roles in constructing knowledge and faith, in turn helping individuals conceive Prophetic Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture Visual Iranian Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Prophetic Gruber Christiane of and communicate with the realm of the sacred. Within Iranian visual culture, pictorial representations of the Prophet Muhammad have tended to manifold devotional, political and pedagogical needs for centuries. From ca. 1300 to 1900 CE in particular, paintings of Muhammad were included in Ilkhanid world histories, Timurid books of ascension, Safavid illus- trated poems and Qajar lithographed books. In these pictorial materials made in premodern eastern Islamic lands, Muham- mad is depicted veiled or unveiled, with a flaming nimbus or inscribed with pious invocations. He is also portrayed as a 12 Volume 3 Issue world leader marked by divine selection, a miracle-working prophet capable of traversing the celestial spheres, and a close companion to God and Imam ‘Ali, Muhammad’s son- in-law and the figurehead of Shi’i Islam. These varied illustra- tions aimed to promote Muhammad’s prophetic status and 261 worldly authority while also serving as creative tools to bolster a particular individual’s or community’s worldview, which is at times expressed in sectarian terms. Over the course of approximately seven centuries, depictions of the Prophet thus have shifted along with aesthetic, political, cultural, and social contexts (Gruber 2009). Although historical Persian paintings of Muhammad have become a subject of scholarly interest over the past decade, much less is known about images representing the Prophet that were produced in Iran during the twentieth century. From stamps to cartoons, postcards, posters, wall hangings and chil- Material Religion Material Article dren’s books, images of the Prophet appeared in a wide vari- ety of mass-produced goods during the period between the 1979 Revolution and 2006, when the publication of satirical cartoons of Muhammad in Denmark seems to have launched official Iranian attempts to curtail—or at least exercise some degree of control over— the output of figural representations (Gruber 2013; Klausen 2009). Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in Tehran, I have been able to track the changing trajectory of the pictorial arts in contemporary Iran. For example, during Muharram (Decem- ber) 2010, the large-scale religious posters used in ‘Ashura ceremonies included depictions of Imam Husayn and other protagonists of the Battle of Karbala (680 CE). These posters employed a number of visual abstractions, most notably a disk of light in lieu of a visage with facial features. Some years prior, these kinds of religious posters did not shy away from veristic modes of portraiture (Flaskerud 2012, 109–156). In a similar vein, a visit to the shrine (imamzada) of Zayd in the Tehran Bazaar in December 2010 revealed that a prominent icon of the Prophet Muhammad surrounded by mirror-work had been replaced by a roundel inscribed with pious inscriptions. When asked about the epigraphic sub- stitution, the superintendent of the women’s section of the shrine stated that the Ministry of Endowments and Charitable Works (sazman-i awqaf va umur-i khayriyya) had issued an internal memo sometime in 2008 requiring that all shrines remove their pictorial icons, or shama’il. Although the text of this communiqué is not publicly accessible, there is no reason to doubt that the ministry issued an order prohibiting figural representations in shrines under its purview. For these reasons and others, pictorial images of saints and holy figures are rarer in Iran today than they were before 2008. Their removal seems driven in part by contemporary practices of cultural differenti- ation, in which figural imagery is especially vulnerable to acts of erasure when official agents decide to amplify what they (wish to) see as the uniquely “aniconic” character of Islamic culture. Popular practices are persistent, however, and authorita- 262 tive commands are not always followed. The shrine’s superintendent stated that she and other women missed the shama’il, which they deemed especially efficacious in visually trigger- ing devotional thought during silent and spoken prayers per- formed in shrine visitation. For these reasons, images of saints and holy figures, especially the imams, still can be found in some shrines in provincial cities or processed on ceremonial standards in the streets of the capital city, despite increasing official restrictions. Much like religious objects produced and used else- where in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often FIG 1 The Prophet Muhammad standing in a landscape and holding the Qur’an, with the shahada inscribed in his radiant halo. Postcard purchased by the author in Tehran, 2000. Prophetic Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture Visual Iranian Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Prophetic Gruber Christiane associated with acts of worship, their power to cultivate and direct religious feelings in humans strengthened in large part by their remove from the “commodity situation” (Starrett 12 Volume 3 Issue 1995, 59). In devotional contexts, an item’s sacred alterity is essentially secured by its removal from more profane milieus. However, is this true of other representations of saintly figures, such as postcards sold in supermarkets or wall posters displayed in hotels and homes? These mass-pro- 263 duced commodities do not seem to be the stuff of shrines and religious ceremonies, and yet they appear in arenas of “ritual pageantry” (Bakhtin 1998, 250), as well. To give but one example, postcards representing the Prophet Muhammad can be sold in supermarkets, given as personal gifts, placed on walls in private homes, processed in musical performances, or appear as framed icons in shrines (Figure 1). From commodity settings to cultic milieus, they roam freely between profane and sacred realms. As scholars of material and consumer culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application.

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