Blasphemy: Art that Offends (review)

Blasphemy: Art that Offends is a magnificent book—“magnificent” in the etymological sense of “greatly made” (magnus+facere) and splendid in appearance. The text—informative and presented with essayistic eloquence—is lavishly illustrated with high-quality reproductions of pictures, ranging in display size from full double pages to smaller insets surrounding the text. Each page is designed particularly to the needs of the illustrations and text segments, yet the visual cohesion is not lost throughout the book. It makes for a pleasurable act of reading/viewing.

Blasphemy aims at bringing to attention the contracted issue of blasphemy—the kind of art that has been perceived as violating religious sensibilities, art that trespasses deliberately or accidentally into the sacred without the necessary liturgical precautions and without the blessings of religious authorities. What is considered blasphemous is, of course, in the eyes of the beholder and depends on a particular moment in history. S. Brent Plate is not developing criteria by which one can determine the blasphemous content of art, nor does he catalog chronologically the kind of art objects considered idolatrous by religious traditions. Rather, he wants “to come up with some suggestions, theories, and propositions about blasphemous images and how they function in the lives of religious and secular people in the past and present” (9). He does so by remaining within the monotheistic traditions as well as their modern spin-offs of secular nation-states and postmodernist aesthetics. Aware both of the irretrievable loss of art work—which, throughout history, has been “burned, banned, and banished” (9)—and of the difficulties of defining terms such as “blasphemy,” “idolatry,” or “sacrilege” in a “universal, timeless manner” (34), Plate nevertheless wants to “provide some working terms for the reader so as to continue conversations on issues vital to contemporary life: censorship, the religious-political divide, the role of technology and mass media, and religious fundamentalism and liberalism” (9).

Blasphemy opens with some musings on the “power of offensive images” in reference to recent occurrences of censorship and violent reactions to art (such as the Islamic responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh). Brief historical introductions of the perspectives of the Abrahamic religions reveal the tension between claims of monotheistic truth and the plurality of artistic representations of the divine: in Judaism, the orthopractical fear of deliberately or inadvertently insulting or cursing God; in Christianity, the orthodox anxiety over the true doctrine of the divine nature (with its concomitant term “heresy”); in Islam, the guarding of the singular unity of God (tawhid) and faith (iman) over against the danger of shirk (idolatry), riddah (apostasy), and kufr (disbelief). How these general views of the monotheistic traditions play out concerning the use of images, idolatry, and (visual) blasphemy is the topic of the book’s central and most substantial chapter 2.

This second chapter (“The Power of Images Meets Religious and Political Power”) correctly identifies the tension in monotheism between, on the one hand, the prohibition (or severe limitation) of the material representation of the one true and transcendent God and, on the other hand, the human need to visualize the divine. Of the three Abrahamic religions, Islam is the most consequential in avoiding figural visual representations. Instead, it developed an elaborate artistry in calligraphy, architecture, and ornamentation. The Islamic focus on the message/word has led to intricate designs of Quranic pages, in which particular Surahs (verses) are embroidered by drawings in gold, ink, and watercolor. In the rare figurative representations of Muhammad, such as in the Iranian and Turkish schools from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, his face is always covered by a veil. No wonder that the modern Western depictions of Muhammad as a man or pictures of nude or semi-nude women draw the ire of faithful Muslims. Recently, this came to the fore in the case of Van Gogh’s 2004 film Submission, which depicts Quranic verses written onto the bare skin of the backs...