Images and figural art
Family: Religion and custom · 14 entries
Entries on this theme
Object
The Pisa Griffin
The great 11th-century Islamic bronze that crowned Pisa's cathedral for centuries — the largest Islamic bronze animal sculpture.Painting of the Six Kings
A fresco in the Umayyad palace of Qusayr Amra in Jordan showing six kings, including Kisra, Caesar and the Negus; among the oldest surviving Islamic wall paintings.
Work
Concept
Aniconism in Islam
The avoidance of depicting sentient beings in formal Islamic art, especially in worship; a rule that channelled Islamic art toward calligraphy and ornament.Horse colours and markings in Timurid painting
Timurid manuscript painters drew horses in distinct colours (white, red, yellow, black) and markings (blazes, leg whites, spots). Fayed reads these differences as evidence of real horse types in Samarkand, Herat and Shiraz, and uses them to place paintings in their centres.Tasweer (making and keeping images, and the view on living beings)
Tasweer is making an image; a likeness is what matches a thing and reproduces its form, three-dimensional or flat, and may be fleeting, like a reflection or a shadow. Making images of man-made objects is lawful by agreement; of inanimate creation, lawful unless made for worship; of plants, lawful by the majority (Mujahid alone forbade fruit-bearing trees). The prohibition concerns images of living beings. On images of humans and animals the jurists give three views; one permits them except a worshipped idol, another permits flat images but forbids three-dimensional ones with shadow when complete in limbs, and the entry proceeds to the third.
Person
Ahmed Karahisari
Draft card for Ahmed Semseddin Karahisari, the celebrated Ottoman calligrapher of Suleiman the Magnificent's era who mastered thuluth and naskh and wrote renowned mushafs, d. 1556; the biographical entry is not yet checked on the page.Hafiz Osman
Draft card for Uthman ibn Ali, 'Hafiz Osman', the Ottoman master calligrapher whose naskh codified Ottoman script forms, d. 1698; the biographical entry is not yet checked on the page.Ibrahim Adil Shah II
Draft card for Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the Adil Shahi sultan of Bijapur and poet-musician author of the Kitab-i Nauras, r. 1580-1627; the dynastic handbook entry is not yet checked on the page.
Screening Room
The Message
1976 CE · 1396 AH†Epic film about the birth of Islam, shot in separate Arabic and English versions with different casts; the Prophet is never shown or heard.Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World
2011 CE · 1432 AH†Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World.Muhammad: The Messenger of God
2015 CE · 1436 AH†Majid Majidi's Iranian epic about the Prophet's childhood in Mecca; he is shown from behind and in silhouette, never his face. It was planned as the first part of a trilogy.Norah
2023 CE · 1444 AH†Tawfik Al-Zaidi's Saudi film about a girl in a remote 1990s village dreaming of art; the first Saudi film in Cannes' official competition.The Lady of Heaven
2021 CE · 1442 AH†British film about Fatima, daughter of the Prophet; it drew wide controversy and was seen by many Muslims as offensive in its depictions.
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