Discuss the origins of Muslim prohibitions against some types of visual imagery and explain their connection to the iconoclast controversy that started under Byzantine ruler Leo III

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. The ideal response would include the following:
Muslim religious architecture is so notably free of figurative decoration that many people assume that representative images are forbidden in Islam. The Byzantine emperor Leo III attributed the successes of the Muslim armies to their ban on human figures in their mosques, and he subsequently banned human figures in Christian houses of worship, thus igniting the iconoclast controversy.
2. The passage from the Qur’an calling “idols” an “abomination” (5:92) is often cited by Muslims who worry about the role of image-making in Muslim art and decoration. It can be argued, however, that “idols” here refers only to pagan idols; after all, Muhammad had allowed a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus to remain in the Kaaba at Mecca. The hadiths, however, appeared to support those who opposed image-making—for example, in reporting that the Prophet warned, “An angel will not enter a house where there is a dog or a painting” and that “those who make these pictures will be punished on the Day of Judgment.”
3. Some religious scholars believed that the ban on representation applied only to “living” things. Thus, the depiction of Paradise, as on the walls of the Great Mosque of Damascus, was acceptable, because Paradise is “beyond the living.” Such thinking would also lead a Muslim owner of a miniature representing persons to erase the heads of all those depicted, as no one could presume to think that figures without heads could possibly be “alive.” In fact, as we will see, Muslim artists in Persia took great delight in illustrating literary texts, creating scene after scene depicting people in various forms of action, including lovemaking. Their freedom to do so is partly explained by their distance from more conservative brands of Arabian Islam, but also by their belief that they were not illustrating “living beings” so much as fictive characters.
4. Whatever an individual Muslim’s feelings about image-making might be, all Muslims recognized that it posed a problem. The practical solution to the problem was to decorate without images, and this was especially true for the decoration of both the Qur’an and religious architecture.