The Gift of Presence

Overview

Impressions conveyed visually constitute a parallel and complementary arena to what we can observe about the past via words. This chapter illustrates the independent significance of the visual domain for understanding Islamic contexts by treating a range of examples: the form of a building that has dominated a cityscape for centuries, frescoes in a structure abandoned in the eighth century, paintings in a manuscript, an early twentieth-century photograph, representation of sacred figures in film and television, and a twenty-first century art installation that materializes the past.

In “The Skyline of Istanbul” I treat the impression created by the Süleymaniye mosque built under the supervision of the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in the sixteenth century. Correlating visual evidence with the narrative of Sinan’s life shows a deliberate emphasis on visual monumentality. The mosque’s form has reverberated out of the building onto paintings, sketches, photographs, and replication of the design the world over. The mosque’s visual impression carries a history unto itself that is an influential signifier of Islam irrespective of how it is interpreted.

The section “Frescoes in the Desert” discusses various evaluations proffered for a building known as Qusayr ‘Amra in the Jordanian desert. I trace the way the building came to the attention of European art historians and why it has proven both fascinating and challenging. The most recent propositions regarding the frescoes found in the building suggest that it can help to decenter textual accounts of the establishment of early Islamic communities out of religious and cultural forms that already existed in the Levant at the time of Islam’s birth. The visual evidence thus projects permeability of religious and other ideas that go unacknowledged in the rhetoric found in textual sources.

A manuscript of a famous Persian chronicle inscribed in the fifteenth century contains a set of exquisite miniature paintings. In “Beautiful Violence” I discuss the fact that the scenes contained in the paintings depict severe violence that was a part of the context in which the manuscript was produced. The manuscript raises questions about modern evaluation of premodern Islamic luxury objects as beautiful art, decontextualized from social and political circumstances. Although produced to glorify political authority, the paintings can be read against the grain as well, registering the pain of bodies being put to torture and death.

A French colonial photograph from early twentieth-century Senegal has become a potent marker of saintly presence and authority in a Sufi Muslim community. In “The Gift of Presence” I discuss the way the saint’s followers have used the photograph as a representation of his essence to creatively make the holy figure a ubiquitous presence in their lives. The case highlights how modern modes of visual reproduction are adapted to create authoritative Islamic pasts.

In “The Missing Image” I concentrate on The Message, a film released in 1976, and the recent Saudi Arabian television series What if He Were among Us to discuss how Muslims have made the Prophet Muhammad available in modern media while observing the interdiction on representing his body. While never showing him, these productions make the Prophet present through creative usage of the camera and an emphasis on the emotions of the people who talk about him as a part of their lives. The cases I highlight invite us to look beyond the notion of Islamic iconophobia to more complex ways in which the visual domain is used to engage the foundational Islamic past.

This book’s landing page contains an image from the work of the multimedia artist Lara Baladi. In “The Grave of Time” I discuss an installation by her of the same name that commemorates her experience of accompanying her father during an illness in Egypt. She photographed coffee cups used by visitors at his bedside and then inverted for purposes of telling the future. Baladi builds elements around the photographs to create a complex structure that physicalizes time. The visual impression of Baladi’s work has inspired many aspects of what is being presented in this book. Her work is a powerful reminder of the fact that sensory domains involving sight, sound, smell, and touch encapsulate temporal dimensions that are not reducible to representation in words.

Captured between 1907 and 1927, a French colonial photograph has turned out to be a premier object of an Islamic group’s life in Senegal and its worldwide diaspora. This is a picture of Amadou Bamba (d. 1927), a charismatic Sufi leader who founded the community known as the Mourides in 1883. The photograph is the only known likeness of the man and was published in a book by an administrator whose charge was to describe Muslim groups in French West Africa for purposes of surveillance and colonial control (Marty, Études sur l’Islam au Sénégal, 1:221). The image acquired quite a different life from its intended purpose once Bamba’s followers excerpted it from the original source and began to replicate it endlessly in multiple forms.

The Mourides are a prominent community in Senegal and as migrants in numerous other countries. They constitute an extensive international network known for its prosperity and distinctive religious practices that overlap with expression in music and other art forms. Due both to his own eventful life and Mourides’ worldly success, Bamba’s biography and image have received extensive scholarly attention.

To consider aspects of Bamba’s image, we can begin with the following careful description of the photograph:

The black and white photograph shows a man standing in front of the wooden building. In the blinding daylight, Bamba squints in an effort to look at the photographer, whilst we too struggle to see his gaze enveloped in a dark shadow surrounding his eye sockets. As the Saint strains his eyes, his cheeks come up and his forehead crimps creating across his face strong shadows that alternate with achromatic areas reflecting the bright sunshine. A radiant white scarf covers his head, with one end falling at knee-height, and the other arranged across the face and over his shoulder concealing his mouth and chin. Made with the same immaculate textile, his abundant boubou reaches his ankles revealing one foot on a leather sandal. Echoing the garment’s flared shape, the bell sleeves are wide and hide both of Bamba’s hands. Alongside his hands, eyes, and mouth, the Saint’s right foot also disappears into an indistinct shadow of his full body on the uneven surface of the fine white sand (Paoletti, “Searching for the Origin(al),” 326–327).

The only known image of Amadou Bamba. Source

The only known image of Amadou Bamba.

SOURCE
Paul Marty, Études sur l’Islam au Sénégal (Paris: E. Leroux, 1917), 1:221

Section REFERENCE
The Gift of Presence

In interpreting the photograph for religious purposes, Bamba’s followers have been especially attentive to the balance between the visible and the invisible in the image. Having seen a photograph like this, one would be hard pressed to recognize the person if they were to see his face in full or if he were wearing different clothes. But once the image is iconized—become a body onto itself—and widely replicated, the invisibility of half the face, the hands, and one foot becomes a mark of distinctiveness. The man’s partial hiddenness makes the image in the photograph highly recognizable.

As a still photograph, Bamba’s image is the record of a particular moment in the past, when the man stood in front of a camera in circumstances not known to us. Directly controverting this understanding, Bamba’s followers have seen it as an active agent in the various presents they continue to inhabit. In the religious interpretation, the only reason the photograph exists is because Bamba chose to make himself available, not to colonial authorities but for the benefit of his existing and future disciples. As the Mourides have seen it, the in/visibility of the man in the image makes him perpetually emerging and dissolving back into shadows.

The play of light in the photograph has infused motion into the still image, turning Bamba’s saintly body into a reflector transmitting divine blessings into the material sphere. For this reason, the photograph is seen as Bamba’s gift to the world. The image is replete with baraka, here understood as “an active energy that heals, protects, and helps them in countless other ways. Mourides often brush their fingertips over or kiss Bamba’s portrait, or touch smaller images to their foreheads to receive God’s baraka from the picture” (Roberts and Roberts, “Mystical Graffiti and the Refabulation of Dakar,” 56). For all these activities, constant replication of the image is a necessity. This is a case where making copies enhances the potential of the original.

The Generosity of an Image

Bamba’s image has not remained fixed in the original framing. As a symbol of power, it can be found in collages depicting religious authority from graffiti on city walls to posters and t-shirts. From the vast corpus instantiating its usage, I focus on three recent art works that pertain especially to Bamba’s life story as a valued Islamic past.

Mor Gueye, Amadou Bamba refusing to submit to colonial authority (1998). Source

In Sufi thought and practice, it is common for a saintly figure’s life to be narrated in a stylized form with an emphasis on miraculous deeds. This pattern is discussed in the section “Documenting the Living Dead” in chapter four. Hagiographical narratives that result are pedagogical tools as well as ways to affirm the authority of the saintly figures and their successors. Bamba’s life as celebrated by the Mourides falls squarely in this pattern, with some stories pertaining to his defiance of colonial authority acquiring special purchase on people’s imagination. The stories’ narrative forms have also been transferred to the visual sphere through art in various media.

Bamba descended from a family of religious adepts and began acquiring religious and social significance in the middle of the 1880s. In this period, the French colonial state was keen to solidify its authority in West Africa, which sometimes led to conflict with alternative loci of power such as Sufi masters. As a part of this dynamic, Bamba was called for questioning at a colonial tribunal and was then exiled to Gabon for seven years.

Bamba-glass

Mor Gueye. Amadou Bamba praying on the waters (1998).

Mor Gueye. Amadou Bamba’s imprisonment in Dakar (1996).

Painted representations of Bamba’s career carry forth many elements from the iconic photograph: his clothing, the half-covered face, and lines arching upward on the forehead. Although not a reproduction of the photograph, Bamba’s images in the paintings convey the photographic image as a kind of essence transposable to other scenes where his historical presence is needed. Based on the logic deployed here, in whatever context one might need an image of Bamba, the undated photograph that captured an unknown event can be brought into service.

In one painting, he is shown able to extract himself from bondage on a French ship to spread a prayer rug on ocean water and perform the ritual. His captors—a French soldier, a woman, and a priest wearing a cross—look on, unable to do anything. At the same time, angels with swords descend from the sky to protect him and sea creatures line up in the water as if to be led by him in prayer. As all this happens, Bamba’s figure replicates the posture familiar from the photograph.

During a period of incarceration, Bamba is supposed to have been immured in a room equipped with spikes on the walls and the floor to prevent him from praying. He breaks out of the room and, upon exiting, is met by protecting angels, his mother, and an authority no less significant than the Prophet Muhammad himself. He is presented here with his back to the viewers, the prophetic form being recognizable from the brown nimbus around his head. Bamba is, again, in the posture of the photograph, reaffirming the image’s status as a marker of his essence preserved and transmittable materially.

Elimane Fall, Ocean of Generosity (ca. 2000). Source

The last image I will share takes us to the copious amounts of Arabic poetry Bamba is said to have composed, especially during periods of exile in Gabon (1895–1902) and Mauritania (1903–1907). In this instance, a hyper-stylized face, recognizably derived from the photograph, anchors the composition by being placed at the top right corner. This image acts as the name of the author, placed at the head of the textual part of the composition that corresponds to one of his famous poems entitled Beneficial Gifts of Intercessory Eulogies (Mawahib an-nafi’ fi mada’ih ash-shafi’). The text itself is presented in two versions. One is in black and white, in columns on the left side of the work, that looks almost like a photocopy from a manuscript in West African Arabic script. The second is in vivid colors, elaborately calligraphed into multiple sizes and molded to fill all the available space. Part of the text seems also to form two animals, with eyes looking toward Bamba’s face.

In the vast and growing usages of Bamba’s photograph, a single moment in the past has been iconized to represent the man’s whole sacred biography. The image represents the man through a play on light and dark, colors that have particular valences in the religious system of which the photograph has become a part. Although the saintly body’s form is in white, the darkness is by far the more generative aspect of the image. It frames the body and is also, symbolically, the unseen realm from which divine actions and Bamba’s own continuing gifts continue to come upon the world long after the perishing of his body.

The photograph acts as a mobile shrine of the saint, able to be taken with a follower and be placed within depictions of all scenes pertaining to his life. The photograph’s story is a phenomenally compact encapsulation of a group’s past, present, and future, lodged in an image that came about through the refraction of light in a camera held by hands unknown to us.

Related Sections in Other Chapters

Overview

The Generosity of an Image

Resources

Works Cited

Further Reading