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| @Larry Catá Backer, St. Martin's Cathedral, Utrecht, Netherlands 2022 |
"Iconoclasm has taken different forms in different contexts, among them Christian destruction of pagan images, Byzantine, Islamic, or French Revolutionary iconoclasm, pre-Conquest Mesoamerican ritual mutilation of sculpted and painted heads, and political erasure, both ancient and modern, such as the shelling of the Bamiyan Buddha figures by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2000. . . Ancient Egyptian iconoclasts hacked the faces from stone images of pharaohs, and cartouches of their names were erased. The Roman practice of damnatio memoriae involved the physical erasure of the name or image of the dead for political reasons . . . [but] the face was universally selected for destruction."(C. Pamela Graves, "From an Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body," Current Anthropology (2008) 49(1):35-57, 35.
Iconoclasm is a semiotic act--the performance of power effectuated through the control of the visual spaces within which collectives are managed. Within it objects acquire a specific representation character that signifies the core alignment with a way of interpreting the world or of manifesting relations within it, or as declarations of allegiance to an ordering framework (whether cultural, political. religious, natural, or otherwise divine) generally overseen by a corp of interpreters and enforced by a population that has been thoroughly imbued with the natural authority of an exogenous source--represented in text as some manifestation of [T]ruth.
Most societies function well enough within the parameters of its iconoclasms. Though in many the borderlands are sometimes the site of vicious and cruel battles--from ideas to the bodies of believers. The presentation of images of or around divine or divinely inspired objects, persons or other manifestations is one such point of internal contestation. The imagery, signification, and representative truth of the images of the Trinity or any of its three forms, and the Saints serve as a reminder of the power of such discussions over meaning and representation that can rend apart even the most other coherent faith community. And these sorts of internal theological or interpretative battles are not con fined to Christianity--then or now. The cruelty, of course is augmented when individual encounters with the divine are made a function of conformity and surveillance by either dominant or powerful communal minorities.
Yet it is when these iconoclasms are then exported out from one faith community to another that the signification of social relations become more complicated. For here one deals not just with internal or intra-communal disciplines, but with the power realities among communities that share the same space but not the same realities. There are, of course, many ways in which communities can impose order and stability where inter-communal iconoclasms conflict or are disjointed. The simplest is for the majority to privilege its own iconoclasms and tolerate to some extent the preferences of those who do not share their views. A more traditional approach, still followed in some states is to reject toleration at all--so that the iconoclasms of a majority must necessarily be incorporated into the private practices and public manifestations of minorities within a larger iconoclastic community. Sometimes energetic minorities within a faith community can strategically leverage their zeal to impose their own views not just on the otherwise indifferent or unwilling within their faith communities, but export those preferences outward to communities for which such encounters with representation are normatively incompatible. Sometimes efforts are made for mutual toleration understanding that the preference of one faith community may be binding within but inapplicable to another. And sometimes one encounters the complexities of formal rules of equal toleration as a function of offense principles applied to public spaces. Nonetheless these are difficult to navigate the the temptation of corruption--to use strategically offense to push forward the privileging of one set of iconoclasms above another, always remains present.
The international community, through the efforts of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights once sought to suggest a means of balancing iconoclasms with the broader field of mutual toleration and the protection against hostility or bias where communal groups with incompatible beliefs occupy the same spaces. This Rabat Plan of Action (Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the expert workshops on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred, A/HRC/22/17/Add.4 (11 January 2013) had among its provisions, the following conceptual baseline for managing these situations:
Second, restrictions must be formulated in a way that makes clear that its sole purpose is to protect individuals and communities belonging to ethnic, national or religious groups, holding specific beliefs or opinions, whether of a religious or other nature, from hostility, discrimination or violence, rather than to protect belief systems, religions or institutions as such from criticism. The right to freedom of expression implies that it should be possible to scrutinize, openly debate and criticize belief systems, opinions and institutions, including religious ones, as long as this does not advocate hatred that incites violence, hostility or discrimination against an individual or group of individuals. (Rabat Plan of Action on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Introduction ¶ 11; Rabat Plan ¶¶ 10-11)).
Though the Rabat Plan of Action may have been slated for the dustbin of international efforts, some of its insights might appear useful.Especially in the context of the imagery around which disciplinary systems of iconoclasm are built, what may be sacrilegious in one faith community may be an act of faith in another. Nonetheless for both each devotional act may be viewed as an act of hostility directed against the other.
It is with all of this in mind that one might usefully consider the recent actions of officials at Hamline University, whose determine to terminate a faculty member has become quite controversial. "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job: After an outcry over the art history class by Muslim students, Hamline University officials said the incident was Islamophobic. But many scholars say the work is a masterpiece." New York Times (8 January 2023) ("The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318). Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation." Ibid.).
The Art History Faculty Statement on Recent Events at Hamline University (Note: no images other than the painting of Jonah and the Whale appear in this story), January 13, 2023, may provide a valuable perspective on the public space and education issues. It leaves open the harder issue of reconciling competing theologies within and between religious communities in shared spaces and where the production and interrogation of knowledge is itself of central concern--to the communities, to society, and to the state. It follows below.
Art History Faculty Statement on Recent Events at Hamline University
The tenure-stream faculty of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota writes to address the recent non-renewal of adjunct instructor, Dr. Erika López Prater, from her term appointment at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As has been widely reported, and especially well documented in a New York Times article of January 8, 2023, Dr. López Prater showed a 14th-century manuscript painting depicting the Prophet Mohammad in her art history survey course, prompting student complaint and the subsequent cancellation of Dr. López Prater’s spring semester course. This happened without the due process of formal investigation, without an opportunity for Dr. López Prater to respond to the administration’s ill-informed and unfounded accusations, and without good-faith institutional investment in open dialogue or the restorative practices of communication and relational repair. The blame for the mishandling falls entirely to Hamline’s administration.
In response, we offer this unanimous statement from our position as tenure-stream faculty at the only PhD-granting institution in art history in the state of Minnesota and as faculty in a department that has long been proud to be a leader in the field of Islamic art. These distinctions overlap. We are uniquely positioned to serve and learn from Minnesota’s rich and diverse Islamic communities, which include students whom we know regularly negotiate an educational landscape often pitched against them. It is in view of all of this that we offer our strong support of Dr. López Prater, an alumna of our graduate program who achieved her PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota in 2019. We view her course at Hamline to uphold the standards and norms of our discipline and its changing, global canon. We also admire Dr. López Prater’s thoughtful approach to teaching, as demonstrated by, among other things, her clear and sophisticated understanding that historical knowledge always intersects with contemporary circumstances and experiences.
As art historians, we believe that images and objects are unique sources of cultural information. Our job is to study them in their original and ongoing historical contexts -- contexts that we understand to be widely varied, overlapping, and dynamic. As art historians, we believe in the unique power of images and objects in social life. Our discipline treats that power with responsibility and respect. As educators, we are challenged to make past worlds alive and relevant to contemporary viewers, which we do through the conveyance of artworks, even when it means presenting cultural realities that are distinct from or even anathema to our own. Indeed, we study artworks from the past precisely because they were understood in their own time very unlike how viewers might apprehend them now. This is what makes them indispensable records of individual, cultural, and historical difference.
Dr. López Prater’s course included a discussion of a medieval Persian painting, commissioned by the Il Khanid Prime Minister, Rashid al-Din for an illustrated manuscript known as Jami al-Tawarikh: Compendium of Histories. The Compendium itself is widely considered to be the first truly global written history, covering all time periods and religions of the known world. Illustrated copies were made in both Arabic and Persian, the main languages of the Muslim world at the time, and distributed widely to libraries. Rashid al-Din established a trust so that at least one copy would be made every year to ensure its longevity and spread. In other words, the book’s paintings had a wide audience in the 14th century, achieving something akin to what we might now call public domain. Illustrations from the Compendium, including the image at the center of the Hamline controversy, are considered masterpieces in Islamic art history, commonly taught in college and university courses, and reproduced in Yale University Press’s textbook, The Art and Architecture of Islam, by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, as well as in many other specialist publications.
Including the Jami al-Tawarikh illustration in a classroom lecture and displaying it at length allowed Dr. López Prater to analyze its considerable formal merits, to explain the artistic and theological diversity of Islamic visual histories, to demonstrate their change over time and across cultural geographies, and indeed to present Islamic artistic and scholarly traditions as having always been central, not peripheral, to a global, cosmopolitan world. For all these reasons, we agree with the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s statement of January 9, 2023, which affirmed Dr. López Prater’s lecture as useful to the effort “to combat narrow understandings of Islam” and so also “to combat Islamophobia” writ large. Such a perspective does not delegitimize student experience or obviate the need for sustained conversation when classroom harm and cultural offense occurs. It is this experience of active discussion, response, disagreement, and curiosity about alternative perspectives that we as art historians and college educators often enjoy most about our classrooms.
In its removal of Dr. López Prater from its teaching roster, Hamline’s administration took an explicit stand against higher education’s longstanding tradition of instructional prerogative, compromising the freedom of college-level instructors to make individual selections and decisions in presenting expert knowledge of all stripes (factual, theoretical, interpretive, editorial). This prerogative goes by the term “academic freedom” and it is an extraordinary privilege. As faculty, we cherish this privilege as necessary to our scholarly enterprise and earned through our pursuit of scholarly inquiry, knowledge, and insight. We take the responsibility that comes with this privilege seriously, practicing it within the social contract of the university classroom and the responsive learning communities we seek to forge there. Academic freedom, too, is a privilege we fear is currently under threat, a precarity made worse specifically by the casualization of academic labor via the underpaid adjunct gig economy and the disposability of expertise in pursuit of rising revenues.
In response to Dr. López Prater’s non-renewal, we speak strongly against Hamline’s intertwined attacks on academic freedom, on the integrity and dedication of faculty (especially those vulnerable to dismissal), and on the related enterprises of knowledge dissemination and debate. We strongly urge Hamline’s administrative leadership to examine critically its approach to this instance and its broader policies and procedures, not only regarding student complaints and controversies, but also with respect to hiring, training, setting expectations for, and listening to adjunct faculty.
At the University of Minnesota, all ten of us in the tenure-stream faculty of the Art History Department views the event as an opportunity for renewed attention to our practice as art history professors, which, necessarily, requires showing diverse and powerful images to diverse and dedicated student audiences, and to listening to the discussions that ensue when we do. Our goal is always to call our audiences into academic study through art -- not discourage them from it. We are in the process of planning activities for the coming calendar year, which will take the form of events convened both for the department’s immediate stakeholders and the wider community. In this way, we can continue the conversation and, we hope, demonstrate art history’s vital role in higher education, cultural competency, and contemporary life.
Sincerely,
The Tenure-Stream Faculty of the UMN Department of Art History
Dr. Jane Blocker, Professor
Dr. Emily Ruth Capper, Assistant Professor
Dr. Sinem Casale, Assistant Professor
Dr. Michael Gaudio, Professor
Dr. Daniel Greenberg, Assistant Professor
Dr. Laura Kalba, Associate Professor
Dr. Jennifer Jane Marshall, Professor & Chair
Dr. Steven Ostrow, Professor
Dr. Anna Lise Seastrand, Assistant Professor
Dr. Robert Silberman, Associate Professor
Co-signed by Dr. Catherine Asher, Emerita Professor, in her capacity as an expert in Islamic art
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