Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism (review)

By far and large, the study of Iranian Shi'ism since the 1979 revolution has focused on political, social, and gender issues. Discussions exploring other facets of contemporary Iranian religious beliefs and practices, most especially in their artistic dimensions, have been rather limited in number. More than a decade ago Hamid Dabashi and Peter Chelkowski explored the ideologically motivated visual expressions of the revolution in their groundbreaking book, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1999). Their publication provided new overtures for the study of post-revolutionary Iranian art and visual culture, to which Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert's volume of articles, Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution (2002), and Mehr Ali Newid's study, Der schiitische Islam in Bildern: Rituale und Heilige (2006), form critical contributions. On the heels of these collective efforts comes Ingvild Flaskerud's recently published book entitled Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism, a most welcome addition to the study of contemporary Shi'i devotional practices and their richly textured cultic, oral, and visual manifestations.

Flaskerud's study is significant for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is laudably interdisciplinary in its methodology, thereby contributing to the fields of Iranian anthropology, ethnography, religious and performance studies, and visual culture. It is also theoretically informed: in order to explore a variety of materials, Flaskerud makes judicious use of the conceptual models afforded most especially by semiotics, iconography, narratology, dramaturgy, text-and-image studies, and viewer response theory. Strategically situated between disciplinary fields and theoretical models, her research also delves into typically neglected forms of 'popular' devotional arts, such as postcards, posters, banners, and wall hangings. These forms of religious folk art contribute to the study of Iranian Shi'i material culture, itself a lived tradition that is quintessentially mutable and evanescent. As such, Flaskerud's book is also timely in that its results emanate from fieldwork carried out in Iran during the years 1999-2003. What she observed and recorded at this time coalesce into a 'chronotope' – that is, a corpus of data that emanates at a particular time and in a particular place. As time-place evidence that is bound to change in the future, the visual materials and devotional practices examined in Flaskerud's study indeed bear witness to the rich devotional life of the Shi'i community active in Iran at the turn of the twenty-first century.

As Flaskerud methodically argues throughout her study, vision and the image stand at the very core of contemporary Iranian Shi'i pious behaviour and imagination. Among their interpretive communities, images thus function alongside other modes of communication as a distinct mode of veneration and reinforcement of piety. Beyond their uses in political propaganda or dogmatic training, images can also function as more nuanced and open-ended visualizations of belief and piety (76). Within Iranian Shi'i cultic complexes in particular, images take part in a system of reciprocal transaction among humans while also helping to create a liturgical 'mood' for ceremonial ceremonies in which humans hope to communicate with deceased and/or saintly figures. Serving as community builders among devotees and as communicative devices bridging the realms of the earthly and the sacred, images thus thrive in multiple social and religious dimensions.

Within contemporary Iranian Shi'i ritual aesthetics, images essentially mediate spirituality via group practice and behavior. Flaskerud explores this particular facet of image making in eleven chapters divided into three thematic sections that address visual portraits of Imam 'Ali (Part I), pictorial renderings of the Battle of Karbala (Part II), and images and decorative designs in ritual space (Part III). As these overarching themes indicate, the visual and material culture of Iranian Shi'i devotional life is closely linked to the mourning ceremonies of 'Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram dedicated to commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his followers at the Battle of Karbala...