Image as Animation:
Mysticism, Magic, and Poetry in Byzantine Christian and Islamic Religious Experience
Stanford University, May 10, 2013
Workshop Description:
In the Bible, when God created Adam and breathed life into him, he made him into an
“eikon tou Theou” translated as “an image of God” (Gen. 2:7). A hadith reported in
Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal states similarly that Adam was created in God’s image. The
Qur’an tells of Jesus shaping a bird from clay and investing it with the Spirit with God’s
permission to make it come alive (5:110). In these examples the concept of “image” does
not conform to our standard definition of it as a pictorial form, but to an enactment of the
descent of the Spirit in matter. The resulting entity participates in the divine through the
presence of the Spirit in it. This process of embodiment of pneuma/ruh has its roots in
gnosticism and ancient magic, and is manifested among other occurrences in the liturgy
of Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople, Sufi thought, and Arabic and other
Islamic poetic traditions. By simultaneously exploring Greek Christian and Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish Islamic sources, this one-day workshop will focus on the
metaphysical dimension of “image;” the connections between “image-making” and
magic; as well as “image” understood as a creation of the mouth, breath, and orality and
manifested in the actions of the body such as prayer, the singing of psalms, or the
recitation of the Qur’an and poetry. Similarly, participants will reflect on the role of
imagination as defined by Sufi texts in structuring the religious experience of “dwelling
in the divine;” and seek parallels to these cultural phenomena in the Greek literature of
ekphrasis and Anacreontic poetry, and in the multisensory aesthetics of the
Constantinopolitan liturgy.
Paper Abstracts:
Panagiotis Agapitos (University of Cyprus)
“The Word as Animated Image: Inscribed texts in the frescoes of the church of the Virgin
Mary at Laghouderá, Cyprus (AD 1192)”
The mural decorations of the small church of the Virgin Mary of Arakas (Panaghía
Arakiótissa) outside the village of Laghouderá on the north-eastern slopes of Mount
Troodos in Cyprus survive almost intact and are dated by the founder’s inscription to AD
1192, the year that King Richard the Lionheart had just taken the island from Isaac
Komnenos, a usurper against the Byzantine government in Constantinople. The frescoes
(carefully and thoughtfully restored by David and June Winfield between 1968 and 1972)
are an outstanding example of late Komnenian painting and the product of a
Constantinopolitan artist and his team, who were active in Cyprus in the last decade of
the twelfth century. The fact that the founder “inscribed” himself through the inclusion of
two texts—one in prose and one in verse—in the painterly decoration of the church
allows us to examine the presence of these and many other texts as an essential part of the
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building’s iconographic program and to look at their multiple functions. More
specifically, the paper will examine the typology of the inscribed texts, their position in
the building and their performative functions during the liturgy. Moreover, the paper will
look closely into the theological, mystical and penitential aspects of the Word as
Animated Image within a single building situated in the “periphery” of the Byzantine
empire. It will be shown that the complex and multi-layered functions of the texts as
“speaking voices” enhance the notion of God’s spiritual presence in the building and
support the process of theosis (assimilation to God) through a movement from the higher
to the lower parts of the church (the light and sound of God and of his saints) and from
the ground upwards to the dome (the light and sound of monks and laymen), reflecting
the famous definition of divine kinesis (motion) of Dionysius the Areopagite (early 6th
c.): “Each procession of the Light moved by the Father spreads itself generously towards
us, and, in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oness and
deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in” (Celestial Hierarchy 3.1). The
movement of the voices in combination with the movement of the eyes activate the space
of the church and transform it, together with all the other aspects of the liturgy, into an
animated image of God’s Kingdom on Earth.
Shahzad Bashir (Stanford University)
“The Past as Garden and Palace: Metaphor and Phenomenality in Persianate Narratives”
In Persian works in numerous genres, it is common to represent the past as a multi-part
garden or edifice. The usage of the image of the garden or palace has at least three
dimensions: (1) it structures the narrative and provides contours to the flow of time; (2) it
allows authors to assert the moral status of particular earthly abodes by making them
comparable to the perfect gardens and palaces of paradisiacal after-lives; and (3) it
provides a template of sights, sounds, dreads, and amorous encounters that can be utilized
for narrating the particulars of human experience. The garden or edifice thus acts as
imagined space in which metaphors give meaning to time by turning it into space as well
as re-enliven the dead past to make it apprehensible in phenomenological terms. I will
explore these themes in detail through attention to particular works produced during the
period 1400-1600 CE. I hope that my readings will illuminate Persianate understandings
of the past as well as highlight metaphysical notions that underpinned the creation of
physical gardens and palaces in Persianate Islamic societies.
Persis Berlekamp (University of Chicago)
“The Roar of Battle: Activating Military Talismans in Medieval Anatolia”
Within the history of Islamic art, Seljuk art from 12th-13th century Anatolia is particularly
rich in both sculpture and talismans. Surviving talismanic sculptures are generally bronze
or stone, and include not only apotropaic sculptures found on the walls of cities or on the
doors of civic institutions such as mosques, but also military objects such as maces,
helmets, and drums. “The Roar of Battle: Activating Military Talismans in Medieval
Anatolia” explores the roles of speech and sound in the activation of Seljuk talismanic
military objects, as part of a broader project of relating their visual forms to the
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knowledge systems that allowed intelligent, educated people to expect them to work.
While the profusion of Seljuk sculpture is usually explained by supposed shamanistic
tendencies in the Seljuk’s Central Asian Turkic background, I propose instead that it has
more to do with the dynamic interaction of Muslim and Christian populations in medieval
Anatolian court culture, with the heritage of classical astrology they shared, and with the
central place of astrology at the Seljuk courts. The period offers an unusually useful
source for relating the visual forms of the actual talismans to the astrological theories that
explained their efficacy. This is the Daqa’iq al-Haqa’iq (The Fine Points of Truths), an
illustrated Persian manuscript of multiple astrological texts probably presented to the
Seljuk prince Ghiyath al-Din Kay Khusrau III by his court astrologer in Nasir al-Din in
1272-3. Its stylistically complicated images have previously been analyzed as indications
of the cultural diversity of medieval Anatolia. However, as “The Roar of Battle” will
discuss, they also relate the astrological theories written down in the manuscript to the
talismanic sculptures that visually resemble the manuscript’s images, and place both
firmly in culture shared by both Muslim and Christian courts of the period.
Jamal Elias (University of Pennsylvania)
“Mevlevis Imagining and Imagined: Rumi and His Order in Pre-Modern Anatolia”
The Sufi poet and teacher Mawlana (Mevlana) Jalal’uddin Rumi, the eponymous founder
of the Mevlevi order, enjoys wide popularity among Muslims and non-Muslims alike in
today’s world. Reading his poetry selectively and almost exclusively in impressionistic
translations, his modern admirers construct images of him which reflect their own
(frequently ecumenical) religious values and aspirations. Such imaginings of Rumi are
not new, however, since the textual construction of his image began very shortly after his
death in 1273. Perhaps more than in the case of any other surviving Sufi group, the
Mevlevi order has been shaped by the imagined figure of its founder, whose poetry, prose
treatises and letters, complemented by biographical accounts of him, are used to construct
the order as a neo-religious group, with Rumi as a founder prophet, his poetry as
scripture, and the Mevlevis as its adherents. In turn, the Mevlevis have occupied a very
distinct place in religious, social and cultural constructions of the Ottoman world. This
paper explores the representation of Rumi in the prose and poetic works of the Mevlevi
order, juxtaposing the evolving images of Rumi against the process by which the image
of the Mevlevis sediments in Anatolian and Ottoman society from the period before the
emergence of Turkish linguistic and culture hegemony in Anatolia until the consolidation
of Ottoman Turkish society (14th to 17th centuries CE). The poet and i possesses a large
and positive reputation in the modern world within and beyond the Islamic world.
Beatrice Gruendler (Yale University)
“Text as Image in the First Arabic Books”
Text often comes together with images, and images with text in many variaties of mutual
correspondence, but text can also become itself the image. This is obvious in Arabic
calligraphy, a prestigious artform that was applied first to Qurʾāns and later to all sorts of
writings and was executed by professional calligraphers (khaṭṭāṭ). Less obvious is the
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kind of image a text constitutes through its layout, i.e., the organization of the page. The
sophistication with which early Arab (Christin and Muslim) writers shaped the page is
remarkable, and this does not mean copyists (nāsikh) who received a finished text to
reproduce, but authors (muṣannif, muʾallif), who conceived works from the very
beginning in a way that would make them easy to access and information quick to locate,
such as in dictionaries, which make up a fair share of the first Arabic books. This is
partially owed to the fact that two ways of writing existed: the transcription of an existing
oral text or the composition from scratch on a subject on which no book heretofore
existed. In the second case, the skill to present information clearly and systematically was
soon recognized by readers, and “good book writing” became a skill rated as highly as
excellence in a specific discipline. Authors, for instance, subdivided units of sense by
separating them by line spaces and stretching chapter titles so as to fill the full breadth of
the line. Paragraph markers (dotted circles) further set off different types of text, such as
primary source from commentary or the different meanings of a lemma in a dictionary.
Sometimes blank spaces within the line would fulfill the same purpose. Furthermore,
diverse styles of writing would be marked by different line breadths, such as prose and
poetry. Finally writers aimed to achieve a harmonious balance of the page and played
with text borders by extending parts of letters visually across them without optically
disturbing the boundary. All this occurred already in the earliest preserved specimens of
the third/ninth century and constitutes a visual vocabulary that aided the reader as well a
being pleasing to the eye.
Alexander Key (Stanford University)
“The Lexicon and the Image”
Arabic intellectual culture was in thrall to its own lexical processes, and this produced
taxonomies and theories of language distinguished by a high degree of originality and
sophistication across a broad range of genres. How did this lexicon deal with images? By
focusing on the lexicon, and its iterative development at the hands of its lexicographers,
this paper will avoid direct engagement with the established trope (in the secondary
literature) of Islam’s iconoclasm. Instead, I will look at how scholars working in both
hermeneutics and poetics dealt with “form” (ṣūrah) and “image” (tamthīl). I will
highlight the distinction between imagery in the flesh (or stone etc.) and imagery in the
mind. It is mental imagery, and the cognitive associations to be made therein, that is the
key site for the both the animated religious image and the animated artistic image.
Bissera V. Pentcheva (Stanford University)
“Icons of Sound: Spirit, Chiasmus, and Chant in Hagia Sophia”
To capture spirit (pneuma in Greek, rūḥ in Arabic) is the Byzantine answer to W. J. T.
Mitchell’s question. His book explores the continual fascination with images within our
contemporary culture, it does not go back to the Middle Ages. Yet, I believe, it is in the
context of Byzantine Greek and Arabic, that we can arrive at a more solid theoretical
foundation about the power of images and their alluring pull. This paper explores the
concept of eikon in the Byzantine tradition, focusing on sixth-century church of Hagia
Sophia and its Eucharistic rite. In part exploration of architecture and ornament, in part
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textual analysis bringing together the Greek of psalms and hymns with the Arabic of
Qur’ānic verses concerned with rūḥ, this study will begin to uncover the presence of an
alternative understanding of eikon, not linked to pictorial representation, but to the
practice of imparting spirit into matter known from the practices of ancient magic, linking
Byzantine chant to Qur’ānic recitation.
Michael Sells (University of Chicago)
“The Staff, the Power, and The Voice: Trans-locution in Qur’anic Musa Passages and a
treatise by Ibn al-`Arabi”
The qur’anic accounts of the prophet Musa (Moses) sharpen and intensify the theme of
Musa’s staff (whether used as an extension of his right hand to strike objects and
transform them--dry to wet and wet to dry - or thrown to the ground where it takes on an
agency physically separate from Musa) through intense use of lexical, syntactical and
acoustic correspondences between the staff-power incidents: his throwing the staff to the
ground where it takes on the appearance of a writhing snake; his later encounter with
Pharoah’s magicians during which his cast staff swallows their magic; his striking of the
sea to part the waters; and his striking of the stone to open up twelve springs. Also
“throwing” something to miraculous effect is Umm Musa, who receives a divine
command, reported as direct speech in the Qur’an, to throw Moses into a basket and then
into the river. The theme of miraculously powerful speech seems to hover around these
incidents, framed by Musa’s request to have his brother Harun help him speak and the
later speech acts that he performs or that are performed through him. A multi-voiced
treatise by Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 638H/1240CE) on the cosmic tree and the four birds, serves
as both an exegesis and a performance of these qur’anic moments. I will read qur’anic
Musa passages through Ibn al-`Arabi’s treatise and Ibn al-`Arabi’s treatise through the
qur’anic passages. I focus this textual dialogue on what I call the translocutionary speech
act. Here, I view the qur’anic use of shifting personas for the author/speaker (we, I,
Allah, etc.) and for the listener--a phenomenon known as iltifat-- not to be a rhetorical
tactic to shift through different registers (distant to intimate address for example) only
(although it certain is that). Iltifat serves as a locutionary switch. A chain of seemingly
separate speech acts (to Adam, Umm Musa and her son, to the Prophet, to the listener
anytime) collapse, when the switch is made (both literally through a switch in pronoun
and in a more figurative sense), and the seemingly separate speech acts are united as they
echo down and through the various hearers. Ibn al-`Arabi’s multiple author/speaker
personas in his treatise and the multiple personas of the addressee, will be found to reflect
and perform the trans-locution, as the speech act (auditory image, perhaps) of
author/speaker echoes down and through the treatise’s implied authors and hearers.
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