Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

242 t CHAPTER NINE
The learned authorities of our (Shafiite) school and others hold
that painting a picture of any living thing is strictly forbidden, because
it is threatened with grievous punishment as mentioned in the
Prophetic traditions, whether it is intended for common domestic
use or not. So the making of it is forbidden under every circumstance,
because it implies a likeness to the creative activity of
God.... On the other hand, the painting of a tree or of camel
saddles and other things that have no life is not forbidden. Such is
the decision on the actual making of a picture. ... In all this there
is no difference between what casts a shadow and what does not
cast a shadow. This is the decision of our school on the question,
and the majority of the Companions of the Prophet and their immediate
followers and the learned of succeeding generations accepted
it.
The practice of Islam forbade, then, figurative art as surely as it
did the imbibing of wine and indulgence in homosexual love. “Islamic”
poetry is awash nevertheless with both wine and beloved
boys, and not occasionally or slyly or embarrassedly, just as “Islamic”
art is filled, from its exquisite Persian miniatures to the
“holy cards” of popular Shiite piety, with the likenesses of humans,
mythic, historical, or the Muslim next door. The appearance
of such themes in a religious culture that quite explicitly banned
them seems not so much a willful flaunting of God’s law as the
rising to consciousness of another, quite different sensibility that
found accommodation in certain places and certain circles in
Islam.
The Word as Decoration
Jews and Muslims have a particular attachment to the Word as
expressed in terms of language. Hebrew and Arabic are both sacred
languages, and both are in a sense the language of God himself.
But there is an important difference. The Jews lost their
Hebrew as a living language while the Bible was still in the process
of formation with the result that some of the last sections of the
Book of Daniel are not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, the related