DIVINE COMEDY, 2010

On beauty and gender aesthetics, today and in early Islamic art [14-18th century.] 

When Paul asked me whether I knew an artist who is specialized in drawing portraits of Islamic resistance martyrs so he could have his portrait made, I had no idea that his random question would lead me into the worlds of Islamic art and the labyrinths of sexual identities. Paul sowed me about a book, that included popular artistic images from Islamic countries; the book became one of the references of the “Divine Comedy” series.  

What first attracted my attention in the book was the image of the Buraq2. Popular artists from Pakistan, India, Egypt and Syria depicted the human half of the Buraq as an woman, decorated with jewels and long hairdos. The Buraq itself has anklets dangling from its four extremities. The image of a white Buraq, specifically the one drawn in India in middle of the preceding century, reminded me of the Lebanese pop star Najwa Karam. A few days before I had seen a billboard on which the famous singer, was referred to as “The Pearl of the Gulf”, “standing” in the air, with a tight white dress. The picture was taken from behind with Karam turning back towards the photographer. Her gaze is neutral and expressionless, her butt was projected upwards so that it was the focus of the picture. Later on, I discovered that countless Arab female pop stars, were photographed at some point in their careers in a “horse” position. 

The Horse In Arab Tradition
 Arabs holds an immeasurably high esteem to the horse. Innumerable poems about the mare are the most salient testament to this admiration. They described the mare similarly to the way in which they used to praise and woo women or young men (Ghulam). Even the ‘scientific” description of the pure Arab mare employed almost the same expressions used to describe the desired female body. For example, one online source writes, “The butt bones should be far apart and salient, and the chest should be high, wide, its muscles visible, hard, neither deep-set nor caved-in, and two muscles resembling breasts should be jutting out. Its eyes should be large, rectangular, clear and shiny, fixed and staring hard, with delicate eyelids and seeing afar…”. No wonder that the Arabs choose the horse from all beautiful animals as the one that flew and transported the prophet from Mekka to the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. 

A Return To Origins
Going through art books on Persian miniatures dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, one can see a significant difference between the drawings of popular artists depicted in Imageries Populaires en Islam, and the Persian artists. The difference was not limited to aesthetics. For while the popular artists portrayed the human part of the Buraq as female, the 16th century artists portrayed it as a human being of undefined gender.

Another book I was introduced to entitled: “Le Grand Moghol Et Ses Peintres” 3. The book includes magnificent illustrations of miniatures from the 16th and 17th century, many of which are I used as a background of the images. According to the author, Amina Okada Mughal artists were influenced by European art, which they came in contact with when Jesuit missionaries came to India. Subjects inspired by European art are encountered in many Mughal pieces, that nevertheless disregard the religious content of the European representations. The themes of Mughal painting were varied; its golden age was between the 16th and 17th centuries when it mainly portrayed glories of war, conquest, historical meetings, Imperial portraits, hunting trips; and in a later stage: animals, birds and scenes of the leisurely life at the court. 

The Female Man
Going through the books of that era, it seemed that the Mughal artists who were in fact the students of the Persian artists, adopted a drawing/painting style that feminized male features, which was fashionable at the time. Thus, not only was the human part of the Buraq indeterminate as gender, but also that of male personages such as Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and other Indian Mughal Emperors: something soft appeared there, reminiscent of the ghulam, that is the youth whose beard hadn’t yet grown. Afsaneh Najmabadi, who, in her book “Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards”4  deals with another period in history, making it interesting to note, that beauty in old Iran (at the beginning of the Qajar dynasty (1785 to 1925)) was not an exclusively female privilege: men shared in it equally with women, not to say surpassed them, particularly the ones dubbed “the beardless” or ghulams. Najmabadi writes that men were portrayed with feminine features resembling, to a great extent, those of women. The only thing setting them apart is, for example, their headdress. Moreover, “the perception of male beauty and eroticism were considered elevated feelings”.

According to Khaled Ruwaiheb in his book “Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800“ 5 “attraction to a youth whose beard hasn’t yet appeared was completely acceptable”. For this reason, they did not consider it “shameful” to project erotic rapport with such a youth. And the decrees judges made at that time varied in their severity. For example, kissing, touching and “rubbing thighs” were not considered homosexual acts. What was decreed “homosexual” and hence unacceptable was straightforward intercourse between two men.

The following is a text quoted by Ruwaiheb from the Aleppine scholar Ali Al-Dabbagh al-Miqati (1760):
“[The beardless]: In being free of a beard he is akin to the people of paradise [a reference to well-known tradition according to which the people of paradise will be beardless] … the Creator is pleased with him and so did not bring forth what would disfigure his cheeks, thus the mirror of his face is clear, as the cloudless sky….’’. 

Ruwaiheb also mentions that being infatuated with the beauty of a ghulam and desiring him were considered two different things. He quotes the following example by the jurisprudent and religious scholar (faqih) Abi Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111):
“do not think that the love of beautiful forms is only conceivable with the eye toward satisfying carnal desire, for satisfying carnal desire is a distinct pleasure that may be associated with the love of beautiful form, but the perception of beauty in itself is also pleasurable and may be loved for its own sake.”

The Third Book
My research on the Buraq was completed with the book The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet 6 which includes illustrations of the Illumination manuscript produced by the Herat school in Khurasan. The manuscript illustrates the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension to the Heavens on the back of the Buraq, in the trip known as the isra’ wal mi‘raj 7.  

Gender Aesthetic
Using contemporary technics, this work explores the aesthetic employed by 14th and 17th century Mughal artists, in addition to 1940s Iranian, Indian, Pakistan and Egyptian popular portrayals of the Buraq, and the peacock. The featured paintings are selected from Mughal, Persian and Turkish miniatures from the 14th to the 18th centuries. The original paintings were altered according to the content of the scene or to what works well visually and content-wise with the character being photographed. 

1. Pierre Centlivres, Micheline Centlivres-Demont: Imageries Populaires en Islam, edition Georg, Genève 1997.
2. The Buraq is the steed which carried the prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Jerusalem during the Israa and Mi’raj Ascension or ‘’Night Journey’’. According to Islamic tradition on the night journey Prophet Mohammad rides his Buraq touring the circles of heaven and hell. On this tour he meets previous prophets such as Adam, Moses and Jesus before encountering “in his heart” God himself. 
3.Amina Okada: Le grand Moghol et ses peintres, Miniaturistes de l'Inde au 16eme et 17eme siècles. (Flamarion, 1992).
4. Afsaneh Najmabadi: “Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards. Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity”, (California 2005).
5. Khaled Ruwaiheb: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
6. Marie Rose Seguy: The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet (Braziller, 1977).
7. There is an unquestionable similarity between the images presented in the book and Dante’s famous epic Divine Comedy, which he wrote between 1308 and 1321. Some academics claim it is probable that Dante was influenced by the story of the Night Journey and Ascension and by the Arab poet and philosopher Abi al -‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri’s (973-1057) book The Epistle of Forgiveness, a literary text that describes the state of souls in heaven and hell. 


Thanks to Paul Khodr, Alexandre Paulikewitch, Ayman Baalbaki, Alya Karame, Krikor Jabotian, George Zouain, Randa Lamri, Mia, Modi Modi, and Tina la Diva.

Technique: photomontage.
Photographs are printed with Epson UltraChrome K3 ink on Epson Somerset® Velvet (255gsm) fine art cotton rag paper.