The Qur'an as a visual work of art?

I've just finished watching "Art and Islam" with Hari Kunzru on BBC World, part of the BBC's commercial arm (the other arm of the BBC has a fist with which it can extract a yearly licence and then play repeats of Only Fools and Horses).

The programme was brief (around 30 minutes), so it was only an overview of what "Islamic art" means. They had brief interviews with various people associated with Islamic art, like Nasser D. Khalili, who is not only a scholar of Islamic art but also has one of the world's largest collections of such art; Robert Hillenbrand, a professor of Islamic art; and the artist Ali Omar Ermes. Having challenged the belief that Muslims have never depicted people or animals, the discussion moved to 'abstract' Islamic art and what exactly makes art 'Islamic' (it should be noted that this programme appears to have been made long before the cartoon saga). They never really managed to discuss in any great detail what makes art 'Islamic', although several interviewees mentioned how vital 'the beautiful' was in the 'Islamic' sense of the aesthetic. My thought here is: why is 'Islamic art' judged any differently from any other piece of art? Isn't drawing a line around 'Islamic' art, as opposed to other forms of art, a sort of orientalist view? (Oliver Leaman makes this point.)

For me, the most interesting subject of discussion was on the collection of Qur'ans, including the famous "Blue" Qur'an. One point made by Hillenbrand on early Qur'anic calligraphy was that it was often deliberately obscure and difficult to read off the page, thereby drawing the reader into the Qur'an. The experience of the Qur'an in this case is not only a question of only reading the words off the page. Instead the experience becomes a literary and visual experience. Now, Muslims have developed an entire art (or science, i.e. body of knowledge) with respect to recitation (tajwid). And even if you don't understand Arabic, a Qur'an recited with near perfection can be a moving experience, especially in an act of worship like prayer. And Qur'anic verses in elaborate calligraphy have been used to decorate everything from mosques to cermamic tiles for centuries. But I have to admit I've never thought of the Qur'an as a visual work or considered how powerful a beautifully crafted Qur'an can be aesthetically, except perhaps in a very superficial way. I wonder in such a visual world (or 'post-literate' as described aptly by Eteraz) how important the Qur'an is visually and how it adds (or detracts?) from its intended purposes?

(See also this article in the New York Times in a somewhat similar vein.)

Comments

[Lorena]

Very interesting! Beauty or aesthetics reaches into the soul faster than words. Even religious words.