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Chapter 2. Word/Image
image, as noted by Zakariya, because it recounts certain physical characteristics of the Prophet. The hilye is not an icon in that it is neither an image nor a stand-in for an image. And while the hilye is often thought to bring blessings, just as a Qur’anic inscription or reciting the basmalah might, this is not to say that it is meant to be an object of reverence, nor is it viewed as such in practice. The descriptions of Muhammad’s physical characteristics are vague, and the hilye is incomplete without additional accounts of Muhammad’s actions and spiritual character. Thus it is clear that the description is meant to encompass the complete, dynamic idea of a character, that is body and soul. The result of the hilye, which Zakariya calls a “spiritual image,” is a memory of Muhammad as an individual and the social and religious importance of his message. The hilye negotiates a tension between description, text and image regarding the memory of Muhammad.
2.2.3
Self-Conscious Calligraphy
What we learn from the Arabic calligram and hilye, and from Foucault and Magritte, is that just because an “image” includes “text,” we cannot simply read the textual element and expect to appreciate the full workings of the object. I cannot just read the text on Magritte’s painting La trahison des images expecting it to convey the kind of semantic meaning one expects of a textbook. To ignore this fact would suggest, for example, that the textual content of a calligram conveys the same kind of meaning and associations as that of a scholarly essay. Additionally, it would suggest that Qur’anic epigraphy could be understood as purely informational, or merely a commentary on a building (that could be conveyed equally in an informational sign, like the ones you might see at a historical site). Foucault expresses his concern, particularly regarding “Western painting from the fifteenth to twentieth century,” that text and image have always been in a hierarchical or subordinating relationship; “But no matter the meaning of the subordination or the matter in which it prolongs, multiplies, and reverses itself. What is essential is that verbal signs and visual representations are never given at once. An order always hierarchizes them, running from the figure to discourse or from discourse to the figure.”24 Even though we are not looking at Western painting, we must respond, like Foucault, to this issue of hierarchy because it has informed art historical scholarship even on Islamic visual culture including calligraphy, painting, architecture, and manuscripts. As we have seen thus far in Arabic calligrams and manuscripts of the Qur’an the text is not subordinate to the image/object. This is not to say that there is a hidden meaning, per se, to the text, but that the [text+image] is participating in a [semantic+visual] discourse larger than itself. 24
Foucault, Not a Pipe, 32–3.