In colonial accounts of the Middle East, the Bilderverbot (image prohibition) imputed to Islamic cultures was often represented as an impediment to modernization. The reception of the first public statuary erected in the Middle East (primarily Egypt and Iran) in the nineteenth century is instructive in this regard, calling into question simplistic binaries of image/negation that are often mapped onto modernity/tradition. This early history of public statuary undermines any notion of a monolithic ban on images in Islam while highlighting the way in which a series of interrelated concerns about images could be mobilized as anti-colonial resistance.
** Co-sponsored with the History of Art Program