Portraiture in Islamic Visual Culture: the Problem with Charlie Hebdo

In 2005, during the massacre at the Charlie Hedbo office in Paris, the gunman shouted and claimed that they had “avenged the Prophet”. Also in 2005, there was widespread international outcry over the publishing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad unfavourably in the Danish Newspaper Jyllans-Posten. Both have led to the pervasive view of Islam and the Islamic Arts as “aniconic” in the West. This, however, is a simplistic — perhaps Orientalist — view of the Islamic Arts, ignoring whole time periods where portraiture flourished and is a view devoid of nuance and cultural interpretations. For example, illustrations of the Prophet particularly flourished in the Persian lands during the Ilkhanid (1256–1353), Timurid (1370–1506), and Safavid (1501–1722) periods. Furthermore, rather than forbidding figural imagery, Islam instead castigates idol-worship and there is no universally accepted “ban” on images within either the Hadith or the Islamic legal texts. <a href="https://rosalindnoor.medium.com/portraiture-in-islamic-visual-culture-the-problem-with-charlie-hebdo-46f26d948b4e">Click Here</a>