Christiane Gruber

The Martyrs' Museum in Tehran: Visualizing Memory in Post-Revolutionary Iran

The Central Martyrs’ Museum in Tehran is the largest cultural repository in Iran displaying personal items and art relating to individuals who died during the Islamic Revolution (1979) and the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Although scholarship often considers the museum a secular invention of the Enlightenment, this study argues that it also can provide a ceremonial setting that prompts ritual activity. The Martyrs’ Museum, a case in point, reveals how a cultural institution can provide a dramatic field in which visitors engage in communal acts of remembrance and mourning, thereby uniting them into a civic body. Based on analysis of this museum, its layout and displays, and interviews with its staff and visitors, this study explores the institutionalization and aesthetizication of trauma and violence in post-revolutionary Iran with the aim to expand and challenge prevailing theoretical approaches to the concept of “the museum.”

‘King of Kings of Africa’: Racializing Qaddafi in the Visual Output of the 2011 Libyan Revolution

During the 2011 uprisings, artists and cultural agents unleashed biting pictorial forms of ridicule in Libya’s public domain. Their chief target was Muʿammar Qaddafi, the ‘Brother Leader’ of the Libyan Arab Republic and the so-called ‘King of Kings of Africa’. After failing to win support from Arab governments, Qaddafi campaigned for African unity, fashioning himself as a traditional sub-Saharan chief during the decade leading up to the ‘Arab Spring’. His bombastic African title, his Afro-like ( shafshufa ) hairstyle and his eye-catching robes made him an easy target for visual satire, which turned visibly more racist when he and his son, Sayf al-Islam, resorted to using mercenaries from the Sudan, Chad, Niger and Mali to violently suppress street demonstrations. Throughout the uprisings, anti-government actors sought to degrade Qaddafi through the use of ethnic stereotypes, revealing that, in the particular case of Libya, satirical contentions during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ were not just transgressive and factional, but instrumentally racist as well.

Back to Nature: The Votive in Islamic Visual and Material Cultures

For decades, European and American scholars of Islamic art have asked what makes Islamic art “Islamic” (Grabar 2006). Some have proposed that it consists in its emphasis on the unity of God, proclivity for Arabic calligraphy and surface ornamentation, and shying away from (or even active animosity toward) figural representation. These inherited paradigms have been subjected to much-needed revision and nuancing by recent scholars laboring to re-imbricate the art and visual culture of Islam in global and regional systems of creative expression. Instead of asking what makes Islamic art different or “other,” the time has come to pose a seemingly more mundane question: namely, how creative practices in Muslim majority countries partake in a larger system of human activity that cannot be considered wholly contradistinctive. Asking what makes Islamic art similar to—rather than poles apart from—other world cultures can, to a certain extent, enable us to un-otherize its status in the fields of art history, visual culture, and material religion. Through ongoing research we can expand our corpus of visual and material evidence without rejecting a priori some data that we might deem non-canonical or impertinent. This flexibility in gathering evidence in turn can prompt new methodological approaches and theoretical models, thereby allowing for a more capacious and textured exploration of the visual cultures that have thrived across Islamic lands from the seventh century until today. Dodging dogma as verbalized in prescriptive texts and modern curbs implemented in more conservative milieus, votive practices and objects have long been a hallmark of creative activity among members of the global Muslim community. Early Arabic narrative sources tell us about devotees placing votive candles in shrines, while contemporary Muharram mourning ceremonies provide their participants with a rich Gesamtkunstwerk, blending processional and musical performances with votive objects and foods (Gruber 2016). By and large, votive practices construct and reflect sacred rhythms of life for members of the non-elite classes, and therefore have much to tell us about “folk” or “popular” religion within Islamic spheres. The revelations that emerge from Islamic votive arts and cultures include, among others, the extent to which Islamic religious beliefs remain inextricable from nature as well as rooted in pre-Islamic traditions. To give just one example of this phenomenon one need not go any further than Mount Ida on Turkey’s Aegean coast. In Hellenistic times, the rocky outcrop was associated with Ganymede, Paris, and Anchises, for whom a shooting star fell onto the mountain in response to his prayer. The Altar of Zeus marked this sacred spot and served as a center of pilgrimage and visitations during the Roman period—its holiness enduring into Byzantine times thanks to its connection to St. Paul. No doubt this sacrality stretching back up to two millennia carried over to the Muslim communities inhabiting the Aegean coast from Ottoman times onward. Today, the Altar of Zeus still stands tall on Mount Ida (Figure 1). It is nestled in a forested area whose trees provide arboreal scaffolds for the affixing of votive objects by its visitants, most of whom are Turkish citizens who embrace the Islamic faith to one degree or another. The items folded and tied include wet wipes, water bottle labels, ribbons, instant coffee packaging, even the occasional latex glove—in other words, whatever happens to be available in one’s hand, pocket, or purse. This votive debris of Islamic devotional practice studding the perimeter of the Altar of Zeus pays witness to the site’s perceived efficacy, most especially through its connection to holy springs and rain prayers. Within Islam, the “prayer for rain” (salat al-istisqa’) forms part of traditional Sunna prayers, which also include orisons celebrating solar and lunar eclipses. Besides petitioning or praising these natural phenomena, the tree, too, acts as a powerful symbol of sacrality that is “rooted” within Islamic religious traditions. Arabic textual sources speak of the Prophet’s beloved date tree in Medina as well as miraculous palm trees that sang his praises as they lifted their roots and ambled towards him. Sacred trees have endured since then: for instance, when the Wahhabis (neo-conservative Unitarians) burst onto the Arabian Peninsula in the 1800s, they destroyed trees and objects that were venerated by local Muslims. These included a male palm tree at the center of Najdi Islamic worship along with shrines and idols associated with fertility (Noyes 2013, 61, 68, 80). Christiane Gruber is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. cjgruber@umich.edu

Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture

Abstract Much like religious objects produced and consumed elsewhere in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often associated with acts of play and worship, their power to cultivate joy and direct religious feelings in various faith communities strengthened in large part by their remove from the commodity situation. As scholars of visual and material culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized commodity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiving social messages—that take place in regimes of value. Within postrevolutionary Iran in particular, images and objects depicting the Prophet Muhammad have been manufactured en masse over the past three decades, catering to official regime ideology and popular devotional practices alike. This study explores how these types of prophetic products serve to visually reinforce and materially reify narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran.

The image of the Prophet between ideal and ideology : a scholarly investigation

By crossing disciplinary boundaries in the field of the humanities, this volume aims to elucidate Muhammads visualization in the West vis-a-vis his image in Islam. It does so not by relegating materials to geographical and/or linguistic spheres or by separating texts from images. Rather, it seeks to place various articles in thematic and theoretical conversation so as to explore more broadly how the Prophet has been constructed, visualized, narrated, encountered, revised, adapted, and adopted in multiple cultural traditions, in European and American traditions and in the world of Islam from the medieval era until the modern period.