“Images, Imagination and Sensory Persuasion in the Qur’an”, paper by Hannelies Koloska, IQSA Annual Meeting, 06.09.2022 Palermo, Italy
The significance of the visual and of the sense of sight in religious material and literary traditionsin Late Antiquity has long been recognized but the study of its resonances in the Qur’an is still at its beginning. The importance of the vision report of the Qur’anic messenger (Q. 53) has widely been acknowledged as part of prophetic legitimation and authority that would distinguish him from the profanity of the audience. However, the importance of eye witnessing as integral part of the Qur’an has not yet been explored. Not just verses that refer to visions or dreams but verses, phrases and passages that intend to making the listeners and reader ‘see’ in their imagination and through words alone, or verses that ask the audience to see and observe are manifold in the Qur’an, such as the description of the companions in the cave or the ruins along travel routes, not to forget the descriptions of hell and paradise. They set in motion intellectual and spiritual processes, creating an impression of sensation without involving the sense of sight directly and stimulate an illusion of presence. Is it possible that the variegated repetition of visual terms has an effect of directing more attention of the audience to those things and leave a deeper imprint than others? Can we trace the widely used rhetorical genre of ekphrasis in the Qur’an that is used to generates ‘ekphrastic hope and fear’? Is the status of vision and the visual in the Qur’an owing its importance to apocalyptic traditions in which seeing provides its theological and literary foundation; or is the pervasive verbal representation of the visual a strategy to overcome the apocalyptic dominance?
“Rethinking Female Representations in Qusayr Amra and their Qur’anic References”, paper by Inbal Kol, IQSA Annual Meeting, 06.09.2022 Palermo, Italy
How does the establishment of a distinct Islamic visual culture develop alongside the reading and interpretation of the Qur’an? This paper tries to shed light on the aspect of interpretation and representation of the female in Umayyad art. For a long time, the diverse female representations at the Umayyad palace Qusayr Amra were interpreted as visual exhibition of Walid II. hedonistic lifestyle and the reproduction of given iconographic depictions of Byzantine and Sassanian origin. Following the researches of Garth Fowden and Nadia Ali, and based on modern gender approaches, this paper claims that those representations display an active adaptation of cultural and artistic elements based also on the reading and interpretation of the Qur’an. It argues that Walid II’s role in the process of creating a distinct Islamic visual language by converging known artistic elements with new meanings should be reassessed.
