Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art—Keynote Lecture

About the Event

For the 29th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art, Christiane Gruber will deliver the keynote lecture, “Islamic Images of the Prophet Muhammad Today: Pietistic Superscripts, Motions to Dismiss, and Mocking @IslamistAgendas.” Gruber is a professor of Islamic art at University of Michigan.

Devotional depictions of the Prophet Muhammad made between 1300 and 1600 have long served as core content in university courses surveying the history of Islamic art. In such pedagogical settings, students view a range of pictorial materials, participate in visual analysis exercises, and discuss the role of figural imagery in Islamic lands across the centuries. Over the past two years, however, three events have challenged the display and teaching of these images: first, the debacle at Hamline University, where administrators mislabeled premodern Turco-Persian paintings of Muhammad as Islamophobic, leading to the non-renewal of an adjunct faculty member and her subsequent lawsuit; second, the Asia Society Museum’s blurring of several such images in a virtual tour; and third, an Islamist “crashing” of a Muslim devotional arts exhibition in Istanbul that included modern images dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad. All three incidents placed art historians and artists in the crosshairs, while Islamic paintings of the Prophet themselves became the targets of pietistic superscripts, motions to dismiss, and Islamist attacks, the latter of which were countered and mocked within a Muslim cultural context. This talk explores these episodes to pinpoint and disambiguate the various machineries and matrices of meaning-making within global identitarian politics as these intersect with—and even endanger—historical Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammad.