chapter 5
Seeing the Light: Enacting the Divine at Three Medieval
Syrian Shrines
Stephennie Mulder
One of the most challenging issues in Islamic art is
the question of meaning. Beginning in the 1980s
and continuing through the early 2000s, scholars
of Islamic art frequently approached the issue of
the presence of symbolic or socio-cultural mean-
ings using two distinct methods: either traditional
iconographic analysis, which ultimately traces its
roots to the work of Erwin Panofsky—or semiotic
analysis, whose intellectual genealogy derives
from various modes of structuralist linguistics in
the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, usually via
Ernst Gombrich. Using such approaches, research-
ers have, over the past thirty years, generated a
copious tradition of iconographic and semiotic
analyses that engage a broad range of objects, from
early Abbasid lusterware and Fatimid architec-
tural decoration to Timurid illustrated manu-
scripts and Safavid painted tiles.1 Much critical
1 An impressively comprehensive bibliography of studies
on iconography can be found in Robert Hillenbrand,
ed., Image and Meaning in Islamic Art (London: Altajir
World of Islam Trust, 2005). Studies employing semiotic
approaches include Caroline Williams, “The Cult of
ʿAlid Saints in the Fatimid Monuments of Cairo, Part I:
The Mosque of al-Aqmar,” Muqarnas 1 (1983): 37–52;
Caroline Williams, “The Cult of ʿAlid Saints in the Fatimid
Monuments of Cairo, Part ii: The Mausolea,” Muqarnas
3 (1985): 39–60; and Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “The Façade
of the Aqmar Mosque in the Context of Fatimid
Ceremonial,” Muqarnas 9 (1992): 29–38. For an elaboration
of similar themes with respect to Fatimid ritual, see Paula
Sanders, “From Court Ceremony to Urban Language,” in
The Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in
Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. C.E. Bosworth et al. (Princeton,
N.J.: Darwin Press, 1989), 311–21; and Paula Sanders, Ritual,
Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press, 1994), chaps. 2 and 3; and
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insight has been gained from these studies, and
they have made rich contributions to our under-
standing of Islamic art and its semiotic and sym-
bolic world. However, it is rarely remarked that
these systems of interpretation were initially
developed for understanding Western, typically
European, visual culture, and their adoption out-
side of that context has not often been questioned
by scholars in the field of Islamic art.2 Intuitively, it
would seem, for example, that semiotic interpreta-
tion might work differently when applied to
non-representational art, and that a system of
meaning developed for the interpretation of the
Irene Bierman, Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For later
periods and other localities in the Islamic world, recent
scholarship includes Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll:
Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa
Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1995), esp. 217–23; Yasser Tabbaa, The
Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); and a sophis-
ticated rethinking of semiotic theory as a process of transla-
tion can be found in Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation:
Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2 A similar critique was made many years ago with respect
to European art, especially regarding the way its study was
shaped predominantly by the art history of a single time
and place—the Renaissance in Italy. See Svetlana Alpers,
The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Oleg Grabar
often questioned these methods, albeit rather indirectly.
See his “Symbols and Signs in Islamic Architecture,” in
Architecture as Symbol and Self-Identity, ed. Jonathan Katz
(Philadelphia: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1980),
25–32.
Seeing the Light
predominantly representational art forms of
Europe such as sculpture, or paintings on wood or
canvas, might not transfer seamlessly to Islamic art
forms such as ceramic glazed tiles, calligraphy, or
textiles. But for the most part, scholars of Islamic
art have simply adopted the semiotic model, rarely
questioning its methodological value or limita-
tions when applied in a non-European context.3
One problem that arises from the use of such
models is that when specific symbolic or semiotic
meanings have been assigned to works of art from
the Islamic world, they are frequently limited by
what Oleg Grabar called their “low symbolic
charge.” By this, he meant that objects that may
have had a “highly intense meaning… provided for
the time of their creation—all lost their specific
meaning soon thereafter.”4 While this is true, to
some degree, of all works of art, Islamic art seems
particularly difficult to pin down when it comes to
meaning, and those meanings that can be assigned
seem especially transient, changeable, or often
deliberately ambiguous. A classic example, the
Dome of the Rock, is a case in point: probably
created to convey a specific message of a religio-
political character, it later lost these associations to
become the site of the miracle of the Prophet’s
Ascension—the miʿrāj—through a process that is,
as yet, little understood.5 Thus, a central challenge
of using these methods for defining meaning
in Islamic art is that any such definitions are not
fixed, and are instead shifting, varied, and socially
nuanced. Their apprehension and perception are
dependent on a myriad of factors, including time
elapsed from creation, the attitudes of artists,
patrons, and later caretakers, and their reception
by the viewer, all of which shift profoundly between
individuals and over time and space.
3 Since it was as a student of Renata’s that I first began to
think about the complex multivalency of Islamic visual
culture, a deeper exploration of the issue of meaning
seems an appropriate subject for this volume.
4 Grabar, “Symbols and Signs,” 27.
5 Nasser Rabbat, “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of
the Rock,” Muqarnas 6 (1989): 12–21.
89
The past decade has seen a turn toward increas-
ingly sophisticated modes of analyzing this inter-
action, drawing attention to the ways not just
patrons, but also viewers and recipients of visual
culture themselves possess agency and are dynam-
ically engaged in the process of meaning-making,
and emphasizing the recipient’s critical role in gen-
erating fluid meanings over time and geography.6
Going a step further, anthropologists have argued
that the work of art itself can be proposed as a kind
of active social catalyst, engaged in the process
of continuous and shifting creation of significance.
In this reading, a subtle shift in emphasis occurs:
instead of the traditional art-historical focus on
aesthetics and symbolism, attention is paid to
action: to “agency, causation, result and transfor-
mation,” and art is defined not as primarily an
aesthetic system but as “a system of action intended
to change the world, rather than encode symbolic
propositions about it.”7 This approach, first put
forward by Alfred Gell in the late 1990s and now
developed into a body of scholarship loosely
6 Already in the 1960s, Ernst Gombrich spoke of the “behold-
er’s stare,” the stock of images stored in the viewer’s mind
which he/she brings to the interpretation of art. See Ernst
H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960),
pt. 3. In the past two decades, art historians, particularly
Donald Preziosi, have challenged the primacy of aestheti-
cism and iconography. See his Rethinking Art History:
Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989). Many of these scholars have been concerned
with reception theory and the performative aspects of
art. See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies
in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989); Hans Belting, Likeness and
Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Jaś Elsner,
Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from
the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures
Really Want?,” October 77 (1996): 71–82; and Richard H.
Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
7 Emphasis added. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An
Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 6.