My Name is Red

Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also be blackness. Through our colors, paints, art and love, we remember that Allah has commanded us to “See”! To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see is to know without remembering. Thus, painting is remembering the blackness [… and] the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world.
-- Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

In Western art, what makes a particular piece of artwork unique and appealing is the distinctive style of the artist. For example, we like Claude Monet’s impressionistic works because they show the essence of the subject rather than its details, emphasised by the visible brushstrokes. We like Pablo Picasso’s works because of his distinctive cubist style. In Islamic art, the word style is an anathema, synonymous with imperfection. This stems from the idea that human beings perceive the world imperfectly (that is, not as how Allah perceives it) and that when an artist adds his own perception to his art, it becomes flawed. Thus “‘signature’ and ‘style’ are but means of being brazenly and stupidly self-congratulatory about flawed work.”

This relates to the ancient philosophical view (derived from Plato, I believe) that all knowledge is ultimately innate, and that knowing simply means remembering. Islamic artists believe that the artist knows innately how Allah perceives the world, and that the artist’s mission is to depict this ‘view from blackness’ on paper. Any attempt to introduce individual style corrupts the perfect image, and is thus forbidden.

Perspective is another Western notion that is at loggerheads with Islamic art. Given that the task of the Islamic artist is to depict the world in colour as Allah sees it from His blackness, the only perspective that can be used is that of Allah’s. In Western art, a fly can be rendered the same size as a mosque if the mosque is far in the background of the painting. But clearly in Allah’s mind the mosque’s size far outstrips the fly’s; and therefore it is sacrilegious for the artist to depict the world from his own perspective and not that of Allah’s, thus usurping Allah’s claim to be the universe’s sole Creator.

For this reason portraiture is forbidden in Islamic art. To place a mere human being at the centre of a canvas is to confer upon him an importance and significance that is not rightly his. To paint a person with such realism that a viewer can pick the subject out of a crowd of 100 people is wrong because eventually the painting will achieve an idol-like status; idols are, of course, forbidden in Islam.

Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red is a brilliant symposium on the philosophy of Islamic art, and the author’s craft perfectly complements the weighty subject matter. The central irony of the novel is that each chapter is written from a different perspective (for example, one chapter is from the perspective of the protagonist Black, another is from the perspective of his lover Shekure, and another is from the viewpoint of red ink!) when in fact perspective is banned in Islamic art. Another source of irony is that Pamuk’s novel chronicles the importance of miniaturist painting to accompany manuscripts, when his own writing is so descriptive and evocative that it needs no painting to enhance its effect.

My Name is Red gave me an interest in miniature painting, and I went to Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India to see real examples of 16th century miniature painting. I wanted to see a tree that was “meant to provide shade for Mejnun disguised as a shepherd as he visited Leyla in her tent” or “fading into the night, representing the darkness in the soul of a wretched and hopeless man” or “complementing the happiness of two lovers who fled from the whole world, traversing oceans to find solace on an island rich with birds and fruit or “shading Alexander during the final moments of his life” or “symbolising the strength and wisdom of a father offering advice on love and life to his son”. I never did see such trees at the museum, but that only shows that Pamuk’s writing is of far superior quality than his subject.