Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [176]
There is a never-ending debate among scholars about the language and meaning of images. Some perceive them as one element in some vast structure of signs, others as a map of “multimodal texts, vectors and forces.” At the other extremity, images become discrete and powerful entities with a life of their own, “icontexts.”46 Relating the theories to the real world is not easy, especially since images printed in books and other publications are often ignored. Unlike works of art or even artists’ prints, they do not stand alone. They are bound in with the words around them. And just as the words that make up the written text have to be learned or deciphered, so too the images have to be understood.47 But as with the Codex Seraphianus, understanding what an image means is virtually impossible if nothing about it is recognizable. Images remained an unfamiliar, alien presence in the Muslim world before (at the earliest) the eighteenth century. In practice it was not until the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries that they became more commonplace, even in the major cities. For this reason most of the theories produced in the West concerning the nature of images do not seem to have much obvious relevance to the Islamic condition.
Over many centuries Western (and Eastern) Christians had become adept at understanding figurative images made by a human hand. They were instructed that a statue of a saint had special qualities relating to the saint’s life and story, that a golden reliquary enclosing a withered hand or a bejeweled skull was a holy relic and had meaning. They were taught how to read the image or object by seeing it. Those same visual skills of interpretation were later employed in literacy, in learning to read the written texts.48 The Protestant iconoclasts of the sixteenth century rarely abominated images in an absolute sense: the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” meant for them the ungodly worship of images.49 Nowhere in the world of Islam were painted or printed images as common as they were in the Christian world. Muslims, the literate and the nonliterate alike, lived among voices. They learned by hearing, recitation, and repetition. Knowledge was transmitted through the spoken voice, which was more resonant and truthful than mute words printed on a page.50 It was a culture in which the printed image (of animals and human beings) had none of the educational role that it did in the Christian world. Children were not taught to read using visual images, but through recitation and through deciphering a written text.51
However, the contrast between the two worlds—the West with images and the East without—was not truly absolute: a range of public depictions did exist in the Islamic world and were widely used. As d’Ohsson observed, while Muslims themselves made no coins that bore human images, they were happy to use Western money that did. The silver thaler of Maria Theresa and later the British gold sovereign with the head of Queen Victoria became the trusted common currencies throughout the Arabian peninsula. But nonetheless they belonged to the distant, alien, and infidel outside world.
It was not until after the development of photography in the nineteenth century that human and animal images entered the Muslim domain more generally. Thereafter, while purists might still anathematize any image that showed a human or animal figure, photography cut