The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University.

The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Comment on this article

Distorting History
September 9, 2009
by Sheila S. Blair

Sheila S. Blair is the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and holds the Hamid bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. This account originally appeared August 17 on the listserv of H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

I was one of the “experts” asked by the president of Yale for my opinion about publishing two color images of the Prophet in Jytte Klausen’s book on the Danish cartoons. One image was a painting from Siyar-i Nabi, an Ottoman history of the Prophet, and the other was the cover of a Danish children’s book; it is modeled on a depiction made for the sixteenth-century Savafid shah Tahmasp but with the veil removed from the Prophet’s face. Before I received the inquiry, I knew nothing about the project, but a quick Google search showed that the author is a well-respected and well-qualified academic, and the captions showed that this was a serious investigation of the multiple meanings and interpretations of a set of visual images. It was, in short, scholarship, not sensationalism.

I replied:

“There is absolutely no problem with the Ottoman image (plate 6): everyone concurs that this is acceptable as the Prophet is veiled. More controversial is the previous one (plate 4) that shows the Prophet unveiled from the Danish children’s book, but I would argue strongly that YUP should publish it.

“As you may know, my husband and I published a book with Yale on the art and architecture of Islam 1250-1800. It has been through numerous reprints and editions, including one in the subcontinent. The distributor there was worried that the pictures of Muhammad would provoke controversy and insisted that they be cropped to avoid Muhammad’s face. Against our wishes (we see this as censorship, since our illustrations were created by and for Muslims) several images were cropped. But whoever did so did not read the text and cropped only those illustrations that had Muhammad’s name in the caption. Several other illustrations that showed Muhammad unveiled were left as is. We never received any comment about any of them: no one seems to have been offended by anything. It was, in short, a tempest in a teapot. But there is a further intellectual point that demands that such illustrations be shown, for it seems to us that to deny that such images were made is to distort history and to bow to the biased view of some modern zealots who would deny that others at other times and places perceived and illustrated Muhammad in different ways.

“The caption to your plate 4 clearly states that it is modeled on a Persian miniature in which the Prophet was veiled, and that the Danish one takes a different approach. If you omit the illustration, then you undermine the author’s point.”

I was therefore somewhat miffed when I read Patricia Cohen’s story in the New York Times on August 12 and sent them a letter expressing my dismay at Yale University Press’s action and the mischaracterization of my opinion. [The Times article quoted Yale Press director John Donatich to the effect that the experts were “overwhelming and unanimous” on the risk of violence. Donatich says he has since written the Times to say he “was remiss” in not clarifying that it was “the national security and intelligence experts we consulted” who were unanimous.—Eds.]

I wrote:

“I was one of the 'two dozen authorities' consulted by Yale University about the publication of images of the prophet Muhammad in Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, “ and I strongly object to the characterization of our opinion. To paraphrase the late Molly Sugden, I was not unanimous in that. As the author or co-author of numerous books about Islamic art, including several published by Yale University Press, I strongly urged the press to publish these images. My own book, The Art and Architecture of Islam, written with my colleague Jonathan Bloom, includes several pictures of the Prophet made over the centuries by Muslims for Muslim audiences, including one miniature from the same Ottoman manuscript misidentified in the article as a print. To deny that such images were made is to distort the historical record and to bow to the biased view of some modern zealots who would deny that others at other times and places perceived and illustrated Muhammad in different ways.”

There are, it seems to me, several intersecting matters that demand consideration. One is the question of purpose. From what I know (and I have not read the text, only the captions) Professor Klausen’s book was pedagogical, not inflammatory, and based on sound data. This conclusion seems to be verified by other commentators cited in Patricia Cohen’s article. Another is the question of making historical information available. Her first image was created by and for Muslims, and there are others made at other times by and for Muslims that show the Prophet unveiled. To refuse to illustrate such subjects in an academic work is to deny the value of art history as a source to help us understand the past and therefore to render us less able to see how viewpoints change.

Reproduction of such images is all the more important because of a third, and interconnected problem: visual illiteracy. I was not asked to comment on the Danish cartoons themselves, and from the plates that I was sent, Professor Klausen did not intend to reproduce them, only the Ottoman painting and Danish book cover. [Klausen did plan originally to reproduce the cartoons.—Eds.] Unlike the cartoons, these were not satirical. Only by analyzing images can we learn to understand the difference between visual propaganda and information.

Related

“Yale University Press and the Danish Cartoons” (9/9/09)

©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu