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Material ReligionThe Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

ISSN: 1743-2200 (Print) 1751-8342 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmr20

Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporaryiranian visual culture

christiane gruber

To cite this article: christiane gruber (2016) Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporaryiranian visual culture, Material Religion, 12:3, 259-293

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2016.1192148

Published online: 22 Aug 2016.

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prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culturechristiane gruber

university of michigan, ann arbor, mi

Christiane Gruber is Associate Professor of Islamic Art in the Art History Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written two books and edited half a dozen volumes on various topics, including Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islamic ascension texts and images, and modern Islamic visual and material culture. cjgruber@umich.edu

This article contains historical and contemporary images of the Prophet Muhammad from Iran.

ABSTRACTMuch like religious objects produced and consumed else-where in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often associated with acts of play and worship, their power to cultivate joy and direct religious feelings in various faith communities strengthened in large part by their remove from the commodity situation. As scholars of visual and material culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized com-modity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiving social messages—that take place in regimes of value. Within postrevolutionary Iran in particular, images and objects depicting the Prophet Muhammad have been manu-factured en masse over the past three decades, catering to of-ficial regime ideology and popular devotional practices alike. This study explores how these types of prophetic products serve to visually reinforce and materially reify narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran.

Keywords: the Prophet Muhammad, Iran, Shi’ism, carnival, martyrdom, Islamic visual and material culture.

Material Religion volume 12, issue 3, pp. 259–293DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2016.1192148© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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Holy figures and saints play a number of significant roles in Islamic traditions. Whether acting as agents for intercession, transmitters of baraka (blessings), or conduits to the sacred, they essentially function as liminal beings that connect the realm of the human with that of the divine. As spiritual middle points, saintly personages provide pivots for the riveting and molding of religious, political and cultural identities. Like other holy figures in Islam, and indubitably much more so, the Prophet Muhammad has been central to a wide range of Muslim devotional practices at different times and places. From his own lifetime in the Arabian Peninsula, throughout the centuries in many Islamic lands, and into the postrevolutionary period in Iran, Muhammad has held pride of place for his many roles: as the seal of all prophets from the Abrahamic line, the blessed carrier of God’s revealed word, the leader of the community of the faithful, and the intercessor on the Day of Resurrection. His many mediating functions make him a holy figure par excellence as well as a key asset for the expression of both piety and politics.

Like saintly people, images and objects carry many meanings that change according to historical and social settings. They also play intermediary roles in constructing knowledge and faith, in turn helping individuals conceive of and communicate with the realm of the sacred. Within Iranian visual culture, pictorial representations of the Prophet Muhammad have tended to manifold devotional, political and pedagogical needs for centuries. From ca. 1300 to 1900 ce in particular, paintings of Muhammad were included in Ilkhanid world histories, Timurid books of ascension, Safavid illus-trated poems and Qajar lithographed books. In these pictorial materials made in premodern eastern Islamic lands, Muham-mad is depicted veiled or unveiled, with a flaming nimbus or inscribed with pious invocations. He is also portrayed as a world leader marked by divine selection, a miracle-working prophet capable of traversing the celestial spheres, and a close companion to God and Imam ‘Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the figurehead of Shi’i Islam. These varied illustra-tions aimed to promote Muhammad’s prophetic status and worldly authority while also serving as creative tools to bolster a particular individual’s or community’s worldview, which is at times expressed in sectarian terms. Over the course of approximately seven centuries, depictions of the Prophet thus have shifted along with aesthetic, political, cultural, and social contexts (Gruber 2009).

Although historical Persian paintings of Muhammad have become a subject of scholarly interest over the past decade, much less is known about images representing the Prophet that were produced in Iran during the twentieth century. From stamps to cartoons, postcards, posters, wall hangings and chil-

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dren’s books, images of the Prophet appeared in a wide vari-ety of mass-produced goods during the period between the 1979 Revolution and 2006, when the publication of satirical cartoons of Muhammad in Denmark seems to have launched official Iranian attempts to curtail—or at least exercise some degree of control over— the output of figural representations (Gruber 2013; Klausen 2009).

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in Tehran, I have been able to track the changing trajectory of the pictorial arts in contemporary Iran. For example, during Muharram (Decem-ber) 2010, the large-scale religious posters used in ‘Ashura ceremonies included depictions of Imam Husayn and other protagonists of the Battle of Karbala (680 ce). These posters employed a number of visual abstractions, most notably a disk of light in lieu of a visage with facial features. Some years prior, these kinds of religious posters did not shy away from veristic modes of portraiture (Flaskerud 2012, 109–156).

In a similar vein, a visit to the shrine (imamzada) of Zayd in the Tehran Bazaar in December 2010 revealed that a prominent icon of the Prophet Muhammad surrounded by mirror-work had been replaced by a roundel inscribed with pious inscriptions. When asked about the epigraphic sub-stitution, the superintendent of the women’s section of the shrine stated that the Ministry of Endowments and Charitable Works (sazman-i awqaf va umur-i khayriyya) had issued an internal memo sometime in 2008 requiring that all shrines remove their pictorial icons, or shama’il. Although the text of this communiqué is not publicly accessible, there is no reason to doubt that the ministry issued an order prohibiting figural representations in shrines under its purview. For these reasons and others, pictorial images of saints and holy figures are rarer in Iran today than they were before 2008. Their removal seems driven in part by contemporary practices of cultural differenti-ation, in which figural imagery is especially vulnerable to acts of erasure when official agents decide to amplify what they (wish to) see as the uniquely “aniconic” character of Islamic culture.

Popular practices are persistent, however, and authorita-tive commands are not always followed. The shrine’s superin-tendent stated that she and other women missed the shama’il, which they deemed especially efficacious in visually trigger-ing devotional thought during silent and spoken prayers per-formed in shrine visitation. For these reasons, images of saints and holy figures, especially the imams, still can be found in some shrines in provincial cities or processed on ceremonial standards in the streets of the capital city, despite increasing official restrictions.

Much like religious objects produced and used else-where in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often

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associated with acts of worship, their power to cultivate and direct religious feelings in humans strengthened in large part by their remove from the “commodity situation” (Starrett 1995, 59). In devotional contexts, an item’s sacred alterity is essentially secured by its removal from more profane milieus. However, is this true of other representations of saintly figures, such as postcards sold in supermarkets or wall posters displayed in hotels and homes? These mass-pro-duced commodities do not seem to be the stuff of shrines and religious ceremonies, and yet they appear in arenas of “ritual pageantry” (Bakhtin 1998, 250), as well. To give but one example, postcards representing the Prophet Muhammad can be sold in supermarkets, given as personal gifts, placed on walls in private homes, processed in musical performances, or appear as framed icons in shrines (Figure 1). From commodity settings to cultic milieus, they roam freely between profane and sacred realms.

As scholars of material and consumer culture have high-lighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On

FIG 1The Prophet Muhammad standing in a landscape and holding the Qur’an, with the shahada inscribed in his radiant halo. Postcard purchased by the author in Tehran, 2000.

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the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized commodity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiv-ing social messages—that take place in various regimes of value (Appadurai 1986, 6–9, 31). Indeed, an object or image provides humans with a potent ideational view of the world, delivering an index of reality while also helping individuals organize their private and public affections (Brown 2001, 7–8). Whether an item retains its sacred “aura” or not when it is mechanically reproduced is not so much a question of the production process, however (Benjamin 1968). Rather, its “aura” is the outcome of a reception and behavioral process that occurs in an open network of human interactions and narratives. Whether in shrines, quotidian life, or play-spheres, the commodity thus carves out a ritual domain in devotional life as well as an ideological position in its related politico-cul-tural settings (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989; Kopytoff 1986). Such diverse possibilities are especially characteristic of pictorial products depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which have been manufactured en masse in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Without a doubt, such prophetic commodities visually reinforce narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran. They likewise cater to the particular needs of individuals in both private and communal practices of mourning and celebration.

The return of Muhammad’s ummaAt the height of the 1979 Revolution, iconoclastic practices played a key role in abrogating Pahlavi political legitimacy, and the production of new slogans and images aided in creating new conceptions of a distinctly religious identity for the nascent Islamic Republic. In its most acute form, the rejection of both the Pahlavi monarchy and the pre-Islamic Persian past signified a desire to completely break with

FIG 2Nine-rial stamp showing the Apadana at Persepolis overwritten with ‘Islamic Revolution’ and the profile of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi canceled by vertical lines. Iran, 1979. Stamp in the author’s collection.

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history. At this time, mass-produced commodities were mobilized in the drive to create a distinct identity for a social upheaval that, although at first varied in its ideological constituencies, eventually became “Islamized” through a number of rhetorical tools and visual products (Dabashi and Chelkowski 1999, 22–28).

One typical revolutionary act consisted in the destruc-tion of the icons of state on both currency and stamps. For example, one Iranian stamp shows the Apadana Palace at Persepolis, overwritten by the words “Islamic Revolution,” and Mohammad Reza Shah’s heraldic profile overprinted with vertical lines that look like the window of a jail cell (Figure 2). Here, the desire to break from the past, both recent and distant, is expressed by overwriting and pictorial cancellation. Like graffiti sprayed on walls and statues torn down in the streets, the stamp captures the immediacy of the Revolution through its discursive oppositions and visual annihilations.

Such fervor in the field of philately is not entirely anath-ema. Other countries in the midst of regime change have used similar techniques of overprinting to exhaust supplies of old stamps (Chelkowski 1987, 556; Siebertz 2005). Like paper money, stamps comprise a form of mass media and therefore provide highly accessible visual statements about identity through an apparatus of state: that is, the postal service (Dabashi and Chelkowski 1999, 193–211). With the erasure of Pahlavi and pre-Islamic iconographies at the height of the Revolution came a philatelic void, which was quickly filled with a variety of new icons, including images of Ayatollah Khomeini, martyrs of the Revolution, important Shi’i figures, and, last but not least, the Prophet Muhammad.

Iranian images of Muhammad exited the more restricted confines of book production after 1979. Produced as stamps, they entered the public sphere as overt declarations of Mus-lim identity befitting the newly emergent visual regime of the Islamic Republic. They circulated in the public domain during this tense “season of demand” (Starrett 1995, 54), at which time the consumption of goods signaled the explicit staking of an Islamic political stance.

Issued on the heels of the Revolution and replacing Persian-Pahlavi iconographies, an innovative stamp dated 1980 shows a radiant Muhammad, silhouetted in white, as he embarks on his emigration (hijra) from Mecca to Medina (Figure 3). Mecca is symbolized by the Ka’ba in the lower left corner, while Medina is recognizable in the background due to the green dome topping the Prophet’s mosque. Muham-mad is centrally placed between the two localities, bathed in rays that fan out as from the sun at daybreak. The stamp commemorates the establishment of a new Islamic calendar system based on Muhammad’s emigration. More significantly,

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it also celebrates the ideal Muslim community (umma) that the Prophet established in Medina after his hijra from Mecca. Within this stamp, Muhammad’s umma serves as an emblem-atic foil for the new Islamic Republic, itself conceived as an ideal Muslim community witnessing the dawn of a new day thanks to prophetic guidance and enlightenment.

In the stamp, prophetic iconography is rendered through the metaphor of light rather than mimesis or synecdoche. The latter method of physical representation was used in a 1984 stamp that depicts Muhammad’s arms wielding an axe and breaking the idols at the Ka’ba during the Muslim conquest of Mecca in the eighth year of the hijra (Figure 4). The later stamp partially depicts the Prophet’s body while simulta-neously commemorating a pivotal event in early Islamic history: the destruction of polytheistic beliefs and practices and the reconsecration of the Ka’ba to a single God. Like the hijra stamp, it bears contemporary connotations, in this case the abrogation of an old, secular system of rule (the Pahlavi monarchy) in favour of a new, religiously guided government (the Islamic Republic). In a manner similar to the toppling of “pagan” statues of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi during the Revolution, the arm of the Prophet offers an allegorical channel for the emerging umma to dismantle the pagan past through the breaking of its idols. It also provides a visual mechanism to reconstitute the body politic under the exem-plary guidance of Islam and its Messenger.

These two revolutionary stamps of the Prophet Muham-mad offer a new set of religious icons deployed in the public domain, in effect signaling the supersession of both the pre-Islamic and Pahlavi pasts. They also display what Belk has called the “ritual substratum of consumer behaviour,” in which the selling and buying of commodities can exhibit certain aspects of the sacred, in the process being invested

FIG 3Three-rial stamp depicting a radiant Muhammad standing between Mecca and Medina, issued to commemorate the Prophet’s hijra. Iran, 1980. Stamp in the author’s collection.

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with devotional meaning or even triggering religious tran-scendence (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989, 2). Stamps bearing representations of Muhammad pictorially concretize the sacred via commodification and objectification. Through epistolary exchange and connectedness, they also unite cul-tural interlocutors into the “shared flow” of dialogue, thereby creating like-minded communities (Turner 1977, 51–52). Everyday acts such as the sending and receiving of mail thus build lateral connections while at the same time reinforcing top-down efforts to promote religio-political consensus across a broad consumer base. In this and other cases, state ideology intersects with popular devotion through prosaic acts, the lat-ter undertaken within—yet, depending on the buyer’s private inclinations, also independent from—the regime’s agenda.

Although the stamp in Figure 3 is novel in its depiction of Muhammad, the conceptualizing of the Prophet as radiant flux is not at all new. On the contrary, the idea that Muham-mad existed as incarnated light finds its genesis in the Qur’an, which mentions a light (nur) and a book (kitab) sent to the people in order to lead them out of darkness (5:15 and 33:46). From the revelation of the Qur’an onward—whether in the Hadith, prophetic biographies, world histories, eulogistic poems or Persian paintings—Muhammad is repeatedly likened to the sun’s glowing radiance. The “light of Muham-mad” (nur Muhammad) is described as engendering all of creation from beginning to end; it is also a palpable sign of the Prophet’s emanation from the sacred domain of God (Rubin 1975). Its transcendence of time and place, along with physical matter itself, endows Muhammad with a transub-stantial quality, itself an attribute frequently associated with saints and holy figures. As a result, light metaphors found in Persian pictorial arts provide a potent visual argument for the Prophet’s ontological link to the divine, especially as devel-

FIG 4Five-rial stamp commemorating the conquest of Mecca and the destruction of the pagan idols at the Ka‘ba. Iran, 1984. Stamp in the author’s collection.

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oped within Iranian spiritual philosophy (Corbin 1994; Gruber 2009, 247–252).

Such claims buttressed the sacrality of the prophetic corpus for Iranian Muslim devotees, especially those with the more mystical proclivity to imagine Muhammad as primordial light. In addition, they also fortified a number of political and religious concepts essential to the religio-political platform of the Islamic Republic. At the apex of the regime’s ideological structure stand the immaculateness and indisputability of spiritually inspired leaders contributing to Iran’s vilayat-i faqih (Guardianship of the Jurists), an Islamic form of governance based on the principle of divinely decreed custodianship (Khomeini 1978; 1981). Political power in this “cleriastical” system resides with expert jurisconsults, whose mandate encompasses the preservation of the primacy of Islam along with the implementation of its highest moral values in the domain of everyday life. As Khomeini noted in this respect, it is God, via his chosen Messenger, who “sent laws that astound us with their magnitude,” and such laws must be instituted

FIG 5A radiant Ayatollah Khomeini stands on the map of Iran, while an inscription on the lower horizontal proclaims that “The Truth Has Arrived” (Qur’an 17:81). Tehran, 1980. University of Chicago Library Special Collections, poster 43.

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through “laws, practices, and norms for the affairs of society and government” (Khomeini 1981, 29–30).

Under the vilayat-i faqih, ultimate authority is vested in Iran’s supreme religious leader. Such authority was granted to Ayatollah Khomeini, and it was buttressed by discourses that portrayed the imam as essentially combining divine light and prophetic sinlessness with political infallibility (Fischer 1980, 26). Mass-produced commodities similarly conveyed this religio-political synthesis, praising the imam’s providential—almost messianic—return, consecrated by the granting of God’s divine light (Figure 5). With the added Qur’anic caption declaring that “The Truth has arrived” (Ja’a al-haqq),1 posters of the early revolutionary period do not shy away from equating the ayatollah with absolute truth or true reality (al-haqq), itself one of the many names of God (al-asma’ al-husna) as well as a descriptor of the religion of Islam as an absolute, divinely revealed reality that must not, and cannot, be challenged (Hooglund and Royce 1985, 104). In the poster in Figure 5, a textual legend introduces into the image’s discursive field what Bourdieu calls a “surplus of meaning which gives it its illocutionary force” (Bourdieu 1991, 109). Indeed, the caption does not constitute merely a descriptive or constative state-ment; culled from the holy text, it is instead the declaration of a decisive and ultimate moment of truth.

Qur’anic fiat aside, at this time Khomeini’s ascendancy to power was also a fait accompli. Postrevolutionary religious commodities such as the poster in Figure 7 are the products of state or state-friendly industries, whose target demographic included consumers partisan to pro-regime precepts as well as dispassionate individuals who might benefit from some nudging in the right direction. By heralding Muhammad’s umma as righteous in the here and now, and by analogizing Khomeini’s theocratic mandate to Muhammad’s prophetic call, these products enable an association between the Mes-senger of Islam and a similarly lambent Ayatollah Khomeini as spiritual guides and political leaders. These visual products therefore rely on carefully “coded” or “inculcated” content (Hall 1993), which, per Pierre Bourdieu, is most accessible to those who possess a “mastery of a refined code, of successive codes, and of the code of these codes” (Bourdieu 1993, 120). From miniature stamps to large-scale posters, these encoded com-modities expand prophetic paradigms, figuratively extending Muhammad’s revered presence into the political and civic life of postrevolutionary Iran.

Bearing witnessRepresentations of Muhammad and other holy figures central to the Shi’i faith fulfill important religious and social needs in contemporary Iran. They can visually stimulate

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FIG 6The Prophet Muhammad standing in a hilly landscape while holding the Qur’an and pointing his right index finger toward the shahada inscribed above his turban. Postcard purchased by the author in Tehran, 2000.

FIG 7Sani‘ al-Mulk, painting of the Prophet Muhammad kneeling on a carpet, included in a Qajar verbal icon (shama’ilnama). Iran, ca. 1842. Islamic Period Museum, Tehran, No. 4882.

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personal devotions within shrines and ceremonial settings or bolster interpersonal exchanges in more circumscribed environments. Traversing public and private domains, as well as sacred and secular milieus, mass-produced images of Muhammad remain rather standardized in their iconographies. This pictorial uniformity suggests that the divide between the fine or high arts, “middle-brow” artworks, and popular commodities cannot be upheld in the case of Iranian religious representations, which span the gamut from one-of-a-kind canvas paintings to serially produced sets of stickers (Bourdieu 1993; Venbrux and Rosi 2004). Just as significantly, these migratory images of Muhammad also indicate that the field of the sacred is not always marked by a tightly regulated “set-apart” quality (Evans 2003). On the contrary, the sacred permeates all aspects of spiritual life through symbolic goods and quotidian exchanges, whether these take place in a religiously demarcated zone or in the living room of a private home.

Before the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005–6, I recorded postcards of the Prophet Muhammad that were offered for sale in shops and supermarkets in central Tehran (e.g. Puin 2008, vol. 2, 523–548). I bought several that were displayed next to fruits and vegetables, while Iranian col-leagues and friends similarly picked up these items while running their daily errands. Some of these images were sent onward by regular mail while others were framed and hung on the walls of houses, where at times they were rubbed and kissed in a pious and physically enacted form of daily saluta-tions to the Prophet. The oral salutations usually involved a repetition of prayers and salams (greetings), along with the occasional supplication or thanks-giving.

In these popular prints, Muhammad is often shown as an inspired prophet: he is bearded, cloaked, poised, mature, beautiful and radiant. He stands firm and upright, looking intently toward the sky, which is perforated by the light of God’s revelations. Often, he holds a copy of the Qur’an, which is identified as “Qur’an-i Majid” (The Glorious Qur’an), brimming with the sparks of the divine logos (Figure 6). Muhammad is also depicted with a flaming halo encircling his visage and with Mecca visible in the background as he points his index finger upward toward the sky. At the top of many postcards appears the shahada (credal dictum), that “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger,” inscribed as a curved epigraphic band above the Prophet’s head. As the foundational pillar of Islam, the witnessing of the faith is of paramount declarative value for its believing viewers, who are confronted by its assertion via both oral-textual and figural modes.

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The iconographic details in Figure 8 are neither haphazard nor without meaning. Rather, as a collective whole they aim to depict Muhammad as an authoritative leader, an inspired and irradiant prophet, even a kind of theistic embodiment of holy scripture. They both depend on and diverge from antecedent images of Muhammad as found in Persian artistic traditions. Earlier iconic, and thus non-narrative, paintings of Muham-mad from the Qajar period share some similarities, depicting the Prophet as beautifully bearded and cloaked (Figure 7). However, in such depictions he is typically kneeling or sitting cross-legged, not standing upright. In Qajar painterly tradi-tions, moreover, Muhammad does not hold the Qur’an as a kind of authorial emblem; he does not point upward with his index finger; and he does not appear against background landscapes (which in the postcards function as markers of prophetic geography). Thus, although contemporary Iranian postcards do follow on the heels of seven centuries of pro-phetic imagery, they clearly include newly formulated features and themes diverging from earlier Persian pictorial practices.

In a noticeable twist on tradition, modern images of Muhammad not infrequently draw inspiration from European modes of representing holy figures and saints. Medieval Christian representations of Jesus—available to Iranian artists through a variety of introductory art history textbooks trans-lated into Persian during the past two decades2—can shed some light on the issue. For example, a number of textbooks illustrate Byzantine and Coptic icons depicting Christ with a golden halo as he holds a jewel-encrusted Bible while making a gesture with his right hand. Often, both Christ and Muham-mad gesture with their right hands, the symbolism of the right-hand side (Latin, dexter; Persian, rast) closely connected with notions of purity and righteousness in both Christian and Islamic traditions. While Christ typically makes a rhetor-ical gesture of address, commanding the viewer’s attention, Muhammad points his finger up toward the

FIG 8Figural wall hangings depicting, from left to right, the Prophet Muhammad, Imam Husayn, and Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, included in a public fountain (saqqakhana) decorated for ‘Ashura commemorations. Vali Asr Street, Tehran, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Nasser Palangi.

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shahada. In Islamic thought, the index finger is called the “finger of witnessing” (shahada) as well as the tahlil, the declaration that there is only one God (Steingass 2010, 114, “shahadat”; Eberhard and Boratav 1953, 350–351). In the Persian postcard illustrated in Figure 6, Muhammad’s pointing of the index finger is thus eminently suitable to the declara-tion of the monotheistic creed inscribed above the Prophet, who himself pictorially incorporates the shahada’s last clause, “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

In both Christian and Islamic artistic traditions, Jesus and Muhammad directly address the believing viewers, inviting them to bear witness to God’s singularity through their unmatched propinquity to the divine. Reading such gestures within their cultural contexts and through cross-cul-tural framings allows for an exploration of the meanings of pictured signs in Islamic artistic traditions in a manner similar to Michael Baxandall’s work on the symbolic meanings of gestures found in Renaissance paintings (Baxandall 1972). By adopting an approach that scrutinizes the culturally encoded rhetoric of gestures, one possible reading of the Persian post-card can be proposed: Muhammad is addressing his audience through sign language (and not through an exchange of gazes), and this kind of gestural engagement is meant to help the pious viewer reaffirm his or her faith through a visual-spiritual encounter with the shahada, itself exteriorized by written word, gestured symbol and embodied prophethood.

Pocket-sized and portable, postcards of the Prophet are easily purchased and placed on a shelf, mantle or table top in a private home, or given to friends as gifts that might con-fer special blessings to their owners and viewers. Religious commodities such as these—from models of the Ka’ba given to family members after an individual’s completion of the hajj, to Christmas cards depicting the infant Christ—benefit from high circulation in the weeks surrounding holy days. For these reasons, they also play a function in ritual behaviors and settings by taking part in milieus designed to fulfil a conse-cration function (Bourdieu 1991, 121). Within Iranian Islamic cultural contexts, postcards of the Prophet and other figural representations of holy people cater to personal needs and religious rites for individuals who crisscross the mundane and sacred spheres of everyday life.

Postcards and posters of the Prophet have appeared in a host of imamzadas, where they have served as visual focaliz-ers for private devotion (at least until 2008, after which their presence tends to diminish). Beyond their inclusion in shrines, mass-produced images of Muhammad also partake in Iranian ‘Ashura ceremonies, which commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and the death of his companions at the Battle of Karbala in 680 ce. On this tenth day of the month of

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Muharram, Iranians memorialize a pivotal moment in Shi’i sacred history by reciting tales and staging passion plays of the battle, listening to edifying sermons, praying and eating in communal settings, participating in ceremonial proces-sions in the streets, and visiting each other’s homes. From one place to the next—from gathering halls to public streets and beyond—figural representations of the Prophet Muhammad, the virtuous heroes of Karbala, and the supreme leader(s) of the Islamic Republic come together to formulate a panoply of narratives extolling the redemptive power of self-sacrifice for the Shi’i community as a whole (Ayoub 1978).

More than at any other time, during ‘Ashura festivities depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are removed from the market and embedded into a cultic complex. Within their new religious milieus, they are not deployed in a haphazard or unconsidered manner. Rather, such images frequently appear in the presence of complementary representations and inscriptions that allow interrelated storylines about religion and state to unfold. For example, one typical pictorial assem-

FIG 9Carpet depicting the panj tan, or five members of the prophetic household: Muhammad, with Hasan and Husayn sitting on his lap, ‘Ali and Fatima kneeling beside him, and the Angel Gabriel standing in the background. Qaysariyya Bazaar, Isfahan, 2009. Photograph courtesy of Nasser Palangi.

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blage in halls used for ‘Ashura gatherings (majalis) includes wall hangings of the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Husayn, as well as posters of other battle heroes along with portraits of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei (Figure 8). The woven representation of Muhammad on the far left obviously follows the pattern of depicting the Prophet holding the Qur’an with his index finger pointed toward the sky, a motif also found in mass-produced posters and postcards. Other textile representations of Muhammad displayed in audience halls during ‘Ashura gatherings also show the Prophet kneeling, with his grandsons Hasan and Husayn on his lap, his son-in-law ‘Ali and daughter Fatima seated beside him, and the Angel Gabriel standing in devotion behind these five core members (panj tan) of the Prophet’s household (Figure 9). Like the wall hanging of a single Muhammad, the carpet composition relies on printed postcards of the ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s house-hold), which also appear as framed icons in shrines (Khoshknabi 2000, 106–109, and 156).

Migrating between the graphic and textile arts, such prophetic products are serial as well as cross-medial. As a visual totality, they help buttress Shi’i sectarian discourses and postrevolutionary ideologies. During ‘Ashura festivities, Iranian religious commemorations and tales deftly weave narratives about the righteousness and infallibility of the ahl al-bayt and their descendants, the imams. Muhammad’s prophetic aura thus percolates through his family and his martyred progeny, through the imamate, and onward to the supreme religious leaders in a Shi’i Iranian context. In ‘Ashura oral narratives and pictorial palimpsests, martyrs, leaders and heroes of the past and present are not at all disassociated. To the contrary, they symbolically conjoin and inhabit the same transhistori-cal continuum, thereby collapsing time and space while also catalyzing interlocked religious and nationalistic narratives for Iranian citizens united in both celebration and mourning (Pierre, Hutchinson, and Abdulrazak 2007).

The visual compendium achieved by figural hangings and posters is not just a miscellany or mosaic work, but a grand—even Olympian—gathering of saintly figures and godly men. The portraits are brought together within ‘Ashura practices of pictured oration, offering an abundance of connected scripts and scenarios. In this regard, the telling of tales with images is an old tradition in Iran: before and after the advent of Islam the practice was used to activate popular folk belief (Mair 1998, 120). Persian practices of pictured storytelling grew exponentially during the nineteenth century, at which time large-scale canvas paintings (pardas) were deployed during ‘Ashura festivities to accompany the recitation of stories about the Battle of Karbala. The growth in the genre was in no small part due to the official sponsorship of the Qajar court, itself

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keenly interested in promoting Shi’i rituals through a num-ber of mechanisms, including the visual and performing arts (Chelkowski 1989; Peterson 1981, 110–127; Sayf 1369/1990). Practices of conveying religiously edifying tales through images and orations have continued in Iran during the Pahlavi and postrevolutionary periods—placed, depending on need and circumstance, in the personal and/or political service of the Shi’i faith.

In ‘Ashura picture-making practices, the Prophet Muham-mad frequently does not appear in a single image but rather as a companion to other depictions of Shi’i holy figures—such as the panj tan or martyrs of Karbala—and Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Images of Muhammad are thus enframed by motifs, images, texts and tales that reflect a contemporary Iranian Shi’i worldview. No matter how “folk” or “popular” they might appear, images of Muhammad are overlaid with a range of solemn narratives about worldly and otherworldly rulership. In general, this is quite typical of an object’s liturgical condition: it emerges from top-down constructs of authority and is deployed by institutions that are invested with the power to control its manipulation (Bourdieu 1991, 115). To be sure, prophetic paraphernalia are not only religious commodities; indeed, they are the stylized stuff of politics, too.

Images of Muhammad are used for position-staking by both producers and consumers, who themselves operate within a system of subjective representations and social relations facilitated by the use of material objects. The cere-monial standards carried during Muharram street processions (dastas) brandish this kind of surplus of meanings within a ritual context (Chelkowski 1985). The typical metal stand-ard—known as ‘alam, or “sign”—often includes incised figural depictions of imams Husayn and ‘Ali as well as the Prophet Muhammad (Calmard 1985; Newid 2006, 173–177, 274–276). Despite recent directives aiming to curb veristic figural imagery in ‘Ashura visual products, including large-scale posters, lavishly decorated standards bearing representations of holy figures and saints are often too expensive to replace and so continue to be used in ‘Ashura parades. Beyond their high cost, they also are prized for their inclusion of artistically executed imagery and calligraphy.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad on ‘alams that were carried in ‘Ashura processions during December 2010 vary but clearly fall within the compositional parameters of print media. At times, Muhammad is represented holding a bound copy of the Qur’an while he points his index finger to the sky (Newid 2006, 173–177, Figures B7–9), as is frequently the case in postcards. At others, he is shown holding an unwound scroll bearing an inscription that invites pious devo-

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tees to “Say that there is no god but God” (Figure 10), another pattern found in postcards.3 In these types of standards, the depiction of Muhammad adorns the ‘alam’s tall central finial. Above and below him appear invocations that call out: “Oh Muhammad, Oh Messenger of God.” Calligraphic cartouches surround the tear-shaped composition; these include state-ments that invoke Imam ‘Ali and Fatima by their given names and respective epithets, “The Chosen One” (Murtaza) and “The Radiant One” (Zahra).4 Yet again, a figural representation of Muhammad is used to witness the unity of God and Muham-mad’s prophetic calling, all the while inscribing a visual-tex-tual shahada within a larger Shi’i signifying system, which is activated by vocative inscriptions that echo the prayers and songs uttered during ‘Ashura ceremonial processions.

The image of Muhammad holding the Qur’anic proc-lamation of faith on a mountaintop recalls paintings and prints of Moses standing atop Mount Sinai while displaying one or two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Numerous European and American depictions of the sub-ject—from Rembrandt’s oil painting of 1569 to the 1956 film The Ten Commandments—have been available in Iran for the past half-century via art-historical survey texts, popular

FIG 10Central finial of an ‘alam with a composition depicting the Prophet Muhammad standing on a hilltop as he holds up an unwound scroll inscribed with the proclamation: “Say there is no god but God.” Tehran, December 2010. Photograph by Christiane Guber.

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prints, and imported Hollywood movies. As Wansbrough has highlighted, it is not surprising to find a “Moses paradigm” within Islamic prophetology, as the “historical portrait of the Arabian prophet conforms to a pattern composed partly of the Qur’anic data on prophethood, in character emphatically Mosaic, and partly of motifs drawn from a narrative tradition typically associated with men of God” (Wansbrough 1977, 78; also see Wheeler 2009). The Moses pattern is followed here once more—pictorially rather than rhetorically—in effect driving home the argument that God’s divine logos is not a spiritual call extended to Muhammad alone.

Moreover, the Qur’an is a divinely revealed code of conduct governing a community of believers, much as the Ten Commandments contains “goodly rules” that must be obeyed.5

The theophanic Qur’anic sign is clearly in tune with the Islamic Republic’s “goodly rules as entrenched in law. In following a Mosaic model developed in non-Islamic artistic sources, the ‘alam’s image of Muhammad provides an appo-

FIG 11The Prophet Muhammad holding the Qur’an, illustration by Jan Verhas (1834–96) included in Louis Figuier’s (1819–94) Vie des savants illustres du moyen âge (Paris: Lacroix, 1867). Image after Figuier 1867, 2.

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site setting to promote the Qur’an as a larger civic emblem of justice and morality. It also reveals the clear influence of Euro-pean iconography on the depiction of saints and holy figures in modern Iranian visual culture (Mostafawy 2010a).

At the same time as the image of Muhammad on the ‘Ashura standard captures an artistic intersection between religion and politics, it also engages in a process of icono-graphic co-optation and orientalization. Several visual elements—such as Muhammad’s fluttering cape and his curly-toed sandals—evidently draw upon European artistic precedents. Indeed, the Iranian image of the Prophet chiseled into the ‘alam displays a strong resemblance to a depiction of Muhammad executed by the Belgian painter Jan Verhas (1834–1896) and included in Louis Figuier’s (1819–1894) French-language Vie des savants illustres du moyen âge, published in Paris in 1867 (Figure 11). Covering the eminent learned men of the Middle Ages, Figuier’s text also includes a chapter on “The State of Sciences in the Arab Nations from the Capture of Alexandria to the Thirteenth Century.” The print image of Muhammad functions as a frontispiece to this section, in which Figuier lauds the Prophet as “the first and

FIG 12The Prophet Muhammad holding the Qur’an, illustration and print by Mustafa Tutunchiyan, Iran, ca. 1900–1950 ce. National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam, Frederick de Jong Collection, 7031-7033. Photograph courtesy of Pooyan Tamimi Arab.

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principal founder of this memorable revolution [Islam]. He also had great intellectual and moral qualities, which com-prise true superiority. Moreover, he had a certain genius. This man was Muhammad” (Figuier 1867, 2). Through both text and image, Verhas and Figuier offer unadulterated praise of the Prophet.

This positive, Moses-like European rendition of Muham-mad appears to have directly influenced Iranian prophetic iconography during the second Pahlavi period (1941–79), if not prior.6 For example, one printed version of the image was made during the first half of the twentieth century (Figure 12). Signed by Mustafa Tutunchiyan, a designer and printer who signed his name and claimed image and printing copyright, this Iranian composition depicts the Prophet standing (with his curly-toed sandals) on a mountain top while displaying an unwound scroll proclaiming God’s all-encompassing unity. In this creative twist on Verhas’ original image, however, Tutunchiyan has filled Muhammad’s robe with micro-scripted verses from the Qur’an, thus suggesting that the Prophet is fully enwrapped or encloaked in holy scripture.

While serving to bear witness to the faith and its ultimate rewards, this and other Iranian images of the Prophet engage in a modification of global art forms through the mass media. As a result, they provide individuals in distinct groups with symbols with which to communicate and to build narratives of religio-cultural cohesion (Papastergiadis 2004, 331). In addition, they invite their beholders to proclaim the shahada, thereby beckoning the translation of visual expressions into oral ones.

Depictions of the Prophet such as these are excerpted from their European milieus of production, their interpreta-tions altered by contemporary Iranian artists and viewers. When such images leave their original cultural zones they often undergo a process of transvaluation (Appadurai 1986, 23). Translocated and translated, European representations of Muhammad undergo a similar transition when they are adopted and adapted in Iran, where visual signs are carried into new semiotic territory.

This new terrain involves the visual lauding of the Prophet (and imams) within the ‘Ashura complex, itself a ritual expe-rience that blends worship and mourning with carnival and merriment. Beyond expressions of grief and sorrow, music, singing, and parading construct a dynamic “play-sphere” (Huizinga 1949, 164), in which fun and joy carve out their own cheerful domain. For instance, young participants in ‘Ashura festivities happily beat on drums—and often on their own breasts, in the ritual practice of chest-beating (sina-zadan)—transforming their physical bodies into locomotive boom boxes that fill up urban space. Oftentimes youthful partic-ipants bust a rhyme and jam away, with colorful feathers,

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banners, and textiles dancing in the wind. These practices of mourning and play coalesce into a “carnivalistic misalliance” that unites high and low, sacred and secular, sadness and laughter (Bakhtin 1998, 251). Within such ritual pageants, images of the Prophet Muhammad raising his hand in the air thus become rather ambivalent. While these types of depic-tions may point to the seriousness of Qur’anic revelation, they also may refer to the clanging of music, especially if prefaced by drummers merrily thumping away on both foot and drum. As Johan Huizinga elucidates, “dancing is a plastic creation like sculpture, but for a moment only” (Huizinga 1949, 166). In ‘Ashura practices, performers likewise remodel their bodies into plastic art forms that mimic prophetic representation, in the process catalysing an energetic “pathos of shifts and changes” (Bakhtin 1998, 252).

Images of the Prophet have been produced en masse in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Not infrequently, they adopt and adapt external prototypes, ranging from medieval European Christian icons to modern European print images.

FIG 13Postcard of the Young Prophet Muhammad. Purchased by the author in a Tehran supermarket, 2000.

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These modern Iranian depictions of Muhammad should not be seen merely as co-optations of “Western” paradigms that contaminate Islamic artistic practices, which many scholars have deemed laudably creative only when they incorpo-rate Eastern—rather than Western—forms. As Barry Flood has astutely observed, traditionally, scholars have deemed Islamic art masterful when interacting with Chinese forms in the fourteenth century, but degenerate when turned into a Euro-Islamic hybrid in the contemporary period. He rightly criticizes this scholarly bias, noting that “while engagement with a non-indigenous Asian tradition is a sign of artistic inventiveness, the faltering reception of European artistic conventions is a sign of aesthetic decadence characterized by a loss of artistic autonomy” (Flood 2007, 36). Indeed, to reject such pictorial interactions as derivative and thus debased, or unworthy of academic attention due to their commodity sta-tus, is to dismiss the vibrancy and ingenuity of visual culture in the contemporary Iranian world at a time when its artistic entrepreneurs turn to experimenting with global artistic forms to express local identities and values.

Many a Young MuhammadAs noted previously, a number of multi-media depictions show Muhammad as an embodied witness to the true faith, as a heroic figure heralding the return of Islam as a system of governance, and as an emblem of authority girded by Shi’i Iranian political and religious discourses. In such serially produced images, Muhammad is often an enlightened adult, mature and bearded, upon whom revelations have already been conferred and whose prophetic career is clearly confirmed. He also is depicted via palpably Christological and Orientalist paradigms, rather than within the pictorial traditions of Persian painting—an engagement that, following Flood, must be seen as a sign of lively artistic exchange.

This phenomenon of transculturally tailored prophetic products also holds true for yet another corpus of images of Muhammad, in which he is represented as a teenage boy (Figure 13). Highly popular in Iran especially during and after the Iran−Iraq War, postcards, posters, stickers, and wall hang-ings of the young Muhammad were omnipresent from the 1990s until ca. 2008. Even Ayatollah Khomeini owned a copy of this image, which he deemed permissible since it depicts Muhammad prior to his prophetic appointment—a position echoed in the 2015 Iranian film Muhammad, Messenger of God (Muhammad, Rasul Allah) directed by Majid Majidi. For many years these representations could be purchased in supermar-kets and stores, given as gifts to friends and family, hung on the walls of private homes, made into pious icons in public shrines, and pasted to the relic cases of the young “martyrs”

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(shuhada’) of the Iran−Iraq War. From quotidian interactions to funerary devotions, images of the young Muhammad fulfilled a variety of interpersonal and religious needs in Iran during the aftermath of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century.

Much like a number of representations of the adult Prophet, Iranian images of a young Muhammad were largely inspired by yet another outside pictorial source, in this instance a 1905–1906 photograph of a young boy taken by the Euro-pean photographers Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock while they were based in Tunisia between 1904 and 1914. During the 1920s, Lenhnert and Landrock’s photograph was circulated in black-and-white and colour variants inscribed with the caption “Young Arab” (Jeune Arabe) or “Mohamed,” both typical Orientalist descriptors for Arab boys. Forgotten for some decades, their photographic oeuvre was rediscovered in the 1980s, at which time it became the subject of several exhibi-tions and publications.7 Via these public projects the European photograph of a “Young Arab” or “Mohamed” became known to Iranian artists and producers of devotional images, who subsequently interpreted the image of the Jeune Arabe as the Prophet Muhammad in his adolescent years.

Whether this was simply an innocent misreading of the original picture or whether the reinterpretation was purpose-ful remains unknown. What remains clear, however, is that images of the young Muhammad have dwindled considerably in Iran today. On the one hand, the general avoidance of pub-lic images of the young Muhammad seems to have emerged in part from discourses accentuating the putatively aniconic nature of Islamic artistic expression, which emerged during and after the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005–2006. On the other hand, efforts to curtail this image also occurred after its European source had become more widely known within Iran, due to a Persian translation of Centlivres’s 2006 study tracking its non-Islamic origins.8 Thus, official attempts to prevent the use of images of the young Muhammad in popular religious practices combined with a growing public awareness of the image’s iconographic reliance on an external source resulted in their incrementally disappearing from view. As George Kubler reminds us, to discard something (including representations of the Prophet) is far from a simple decision; instead, it marks ritual obsolescence as well as the “terminal moment in the gradual formation of a state of mind” (Kubler 1962, 77, 79).

Many questions about the young Muhammad images endure. From ca. 1990 to 2008, to which Iranian “animus” do these images speak? Which narratives did they convey to consumers and believers alike? What were their uses once dislodged from the marketplace and embedded within

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domestic, ritual or funerary contexts? Aside from their known European iconographic roots, what were their new routes through Islamic space and meaning? And, finally, did this flow of religious pictures effectively create a sense of consensus and community for some segments of Iranian society?

In attempting to answer these questions several factors must be considered. First are the iconographic and tonal var-iations of the compositions, which emphasize the Prophet’s youth and purity, or his cosmic origins and stature. Second are the added Persian inscriptions, which construct stories around Muhammad’s youthful portrait. And third are the places in which these postcards are located, the visual and textual materials that accompany them, how they are approached and used, and the ways in which they fit into a larger Shi’i worldview, especially one concerned with family and togeth-erness as well as the redemptive value of suffering and death. Through their iconographic language, textual expansions, contextual framings, and devotional uses, these images’ primary and contingent meanings within the social and reli-gious life of contemporary Iran can be unravelled, at least to a certain extent. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the detectable drive to elevate deceased boys into sinless martyrs through their and Muhammad’s intertwined infancy stories.

The Iranian postcard of the “Young Muhammad” alters the original photographic image in a number of significant ways. Besides slight manipulations of its iconography, a significant alteration has occurred at the textual level. The Orientalist “Jeune Arabe” caption has been removed to make way for a detailed inscription in Persian, running over the course of two lines at the bottom of the Iranian postcard. The text not only identifies the portrait as that of the Prophet Muhammad, it also adds a number of salient details that help expand and delimit the depiction’s symbolic and narrative meanings. Just as in the original postcard, the captions in the Iranian composition function as “voice-overs” that quicken the visual messages (Barthes 1978, 25–26; and Bourriaud 2005), in this instance explicating the circumstances under which this “blessed icon” of Muhammad came into existence. The inscrip-tion reads:

The securest guardian of truth and righteousness, the glorious and eminent leader of Muslims, his Holiness Muhammad, son of ‘Abdallah, may God bless him and his family.

A blessed icon of his Holiness at the age of eighteen, depicted by a Christian monk when he [Muhammad] was in the company of his noble uncle while on a trading caravan from Mecca to Syria. The original copy of [this icon] is now held in the “Museum of Rum.”

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In these lines, Muhammad is described as a holiness or majesty (hazrat), a guardian (pasban), and a leader (pishva) of the Muslim community, while the blessings of God are called upon him and his family. These textual details certainly abide by Islamic traditions of naming and praising the Prophet. However, such honorifics and prayers gain a further semiotic charge within their Iranian setting of the 1990s, in which the nation’s foremost leaders were likewise the guardians of the faith, with the supreme religious leader at the helm. That the blessings are upon Muhammad and his family also suggests a Shi’i milieu, in which the Prophet’s household—the ahl al-bayt—and their descendants form the focal point of religious doctrine and devotional practice. Last but not least, the image of Muhammad is not merely a portrait, painting or depiction; rather, it is a self-proclaimed “blessed icon” (shama’il-i mubarak), a term that clearly points to its elevated status and thus its potential use in pious practices.

The second part of the Persian inscription provides his-torical and contextual information. It notes that the original “icon” of the eighteen-year-old Muhammad was created by a Christian monk (rahib-i nasrani) while the Prophet took part in a caravan mission to Syria with his uncle, Abu Talib. This original “icon,” we are told, is now held in the “Museum of Rum” (muza-yi Rum), which might mean a “museum in Rome” or a “museum in Europe,” the term Rum signifying the culturally “Roman” domains of continental Europe. Despite subse-quent research proving the image’s reliance on an Orientalist photograph of 1905–1906, the Persian caption claims that the work is a printed copy of a seventh-century Byzantine icon executed by a Christian monk while the young Prophet was standing before him. The icon is thus truly “blessed” in that it is believed to have been made by a man of God in honor of the last prophet of God during their overlapping lifetimes.

The icon also involves a recognition and acceptance of the Islamic faith, as it refers to a widely known story about Muhammad that both foretold and legitimized his prophetic career as an adult. The episode, recounted by the Prophet’s biographer Ibn Ishaq, occurred when Muhammad was an adolescent. When he arrived with his uncle, Abu Talib, to Busra, Syria, he encountered a monk named Bahira, who lived in a monastery and was well versed in the Torah and the Bible. When Muhammad approached Bahira, the monk noticed a mark (athar) on the boy’s body, recognizing it as the seal of prophecy (khatam al-nubuwwa) as it was described in his “sacred books.” Upon witnessing this mark—and other natural phenomena aiming to protect the Prophet, including a hovering cloud and a tree bending its branches to provide shade—Bahira was able to decipher the signs of Muhammad’s

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apostleship years before the Prophet began to receive revela-tions from God.

Upon witnessing Muhammad’s predestined vocation, and worried about his wellbeing, Bahira then warns Abu Talib to “guard him carefully against the Jews because they will want to do evil to him” (Ibn Ishaq 1985, 81). This was not the first time that Muhammad’s prophecy was recognized by the “peo-ple of the book” during his youth. Years earlier, when he was a young boy living with his milk nurse, Halima, Abyssian Chris-tians also examined him and, upon recognizing his prophetic marks, petitioned Halima: “Let us take this boy, and bring him to our kind and our country; for he will have a great future. We know all about him” (Ibn Ishaq 1985, 73). Jointly, these infancy stories aim to establish that Muhammad’s prophetic call was physically discernible on his bodily self and that he was fore-told and accepted by Christian communities from Levantine to African lands.

Cued to such symbolic motifs as elaborated in Islamic liter-ary traditions, the Iranian postcard of the adolescent Muham-mad depicts him pure and elect already in his formative years. Iranian artists and publishers indeed appear to “have chosen a model of the Prophet Muhammad representing an ideal of youth, beauty, and harmony” (Centlivres and Cen-tlivres-Demont 2006, 19). However, the story of these pictures does not halt there. Tracking their routes and functions reveals that much more is at stake with this image, which flour-ished from the 1990s to 2008. During the aftermath of the Iran−Iraq War, postcards, stickers, posters and wall hangings of the young Muhammad could be purchased in stores and markets as well as being found in hotels and private homes. In domestic spheres, images were (and sometimes continue to be) rubbed and kissed while individuals utter salutations and blessings. These prophetic images also were used as devotional icons within prayer practices undertaken within imamzadas, including the Shrine of Zayd in the Tehran Bazaar. Lastly, still today they can be found pasted on or placed in relic cases dedicated to martyrs of the Iran−Iraq War.

Many of the young men who died in the war are buried in the sprawling Bihisht-i Zahra (Paradise of Fatima) cemetery in southern Tehran, which I visited in December 2010. There, tombstones lay flat on the ground, while relic cases include a number of personal objects recalling the martyrs’ lives. The cases’ artefacts include photographs, letters, drawings, prayer beads, vases with plastic flowers, and other paraphernalia that aim to commemorate the deceased in what is essen-tially a hearth reliquary. Other objects, especially landmine shells, also transform these relic cases into a kind of “trench art.” Beyond their visual and material qualities, these artfully arranged projectiles and explosives carry the olfactory and

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auditory memories of war (Saunders 2002, 183). These war-time objects thus are filled with sensual ambiguities, not the least of which is the metamorphosis of grotesque debris into aesthetic amalgams (Saunders 2002, 199–200).

The relic cases frequently include an Iranian flag, as well as figural postcards and stickers that are both religious and polit-ical in character. For example, at the top of one case, images of the young Muhammad, Ayatollah Khomeini, and a boy martyr create a pictorial collage in support of both religion and state (Figures 14 and 15). Just like ‘Ashura wall hangings that create a visual palimpsest of the Prophet Muhammad, Karbala martyrs, and the Ayatollahs, these wartime memorials likewise promote the salvific value of martyrdom according to a Shi’i soteriological worldview that was both officially endorsed and popularly embraced in postrevolutionary Iran.

Engaging a largely non-verbal form of communication, the spatial arrangement of images in relic cases reveals the power of images to express or trigger pious emotions (Fletcher 1989). Among them, in December 2010 I witnessed visitors to these relic-tombs engage in silent contemplation and mournful lamentation. On Fridays in particular, families and friends came together in the cemetery in order to socialize

FIG 14A relic case, Bihisht-i Zahra Cemetery, southern Tehran. Photograph by Christiane Gruber, 2010.

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over a picnic. They also washed and offered flowers to the tombstones and vitrines. At times, visitants kissed and rubbed images of the deceased and young Prophet, admitting that they felt a sense of closeness and intimacy through these acts of rapprochement towards the depicted objects of their affec-tion. Through their physical-visual engagements, individuals treated Muhammad as if a close companion or family mem-ber. Within the all-encompassing, agonizing reality of death, images of the young Prophet no doubt provided individuals with a “comfort zone” of sorts.

Besides these image-based practices, the collation of visuals demonstrates that ritualized interactions with images are the products of change, not stasis—a change that enables viewers to make certain symbolic links, in the process creating and/or deciphering a particular set of messages (Morgan 1998, 50–58). In the relic cases, combining images of a young Muhammad (provided with the Bahira narrative inscription), Ayatollah Khomeini, and a boy martyr can forward several culturally encoded transcripts. For instance, the viewer is invited to draw a parallel between the young Prophet and the boy martyr, by virtue of their placement, their ages, and their compositional similarities. By visual juxtaposition, narratives about purity and faith are begotten. For example, Muham-mad’s prophetic marks (athar) are visible to the monk Bahira, while the martyr’s relics (also athar) are plainly visible to cem-etery visitors, especially family members and close friends. The Prophet wears a white garment (ihram) symbolizing his purity and belief, while the young martyr also is buried in a white shroud (also ihram). The image of the young Prophet narrates a story from his adolescence, while the boy martyr’s relic case relates his own biography, albeit one cut dreadfully short. Finally, Muhammad is God’s messenger and prophet while, according to Ayatollah Khomeini, during the Iran−Iraq War the

FIG 15Detail of Figure 14 showing a postcard of the young Prophet Muhammad placed alongside images of Ayatollah Khomeini and a boy martyr of the Iran-Iraq War at the top of a relics case located in the Bihisht-i Zahra Cemetery, southern Tehran. Photograph by Christiane Gruber, 2010.

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boy martyr was truly “our leader” (rahbar-i mast). Within this sepulchral environment are buried many young Muhammads, bearing the observable marks of purity, election and leader-ship.

These images invite mourners to see within the boy martyrs a reflection of the prophetic call, a mission that is divinely decreed and that must be steadfastly pursued, even unto death. The postcards of the young Muhammad are thus not only about depicting the Prophet as a paragon of beauty and purity. Much more significantly, they collapse a martyrial course with the prophetic path, creating coming-of-age sto-ries that are sanctified by belief and practice. Consequently, these images must be seen as chronotopes—products of their time and place (Clifford 1988, 236)—that served a bereaving community to find meaning and comfort in the face of horrific loss of life. As a visual narrative addressing its viewers’ anxie-ties and hopes (Morgan 2005, 61), the Orientalist photograph of a Jeune Arabe diverted into a portrait of the young Muham-mad was therefore a function of desire and demand during the postwar years. However, its utility in mourning rituals appears to have diminished with the passing of time, while its lifespan also seems to have been cut short by cultural agents attempting to envision Islam and its Prophet in a markedly different way in the postcartoon era.

Symbolic goodsObjects give sociomaterial form to culture. Indeed, as Boris Arvatov underlines, a “person’s cultural type is created by all of his material surroundings, just as a society’s cultural style is created by all of its material construction” (Arvatov and Kiaer 1997, 120; emphasis original). Perhaps even more so than objects, pictures and images reveal the ways in which the representational mode creates structures and fields of meaning for society, functioning as heuristic devices or aids to learning about cultural practices and individual subjectivities. As religious commodities, images of the Prophet Muhammad within postrevolutionary Iran thus are diagnostic of a sphere of social and religious consciousness, in which they act as identity markers as well as visual devices used in prayer, mourning, and even play.

Commodities such as these are thoroughly socialized objects that circulate in regimes of value. Their production is based on demand, and this demand reveals a desire for something new and different—yet still familiar and valuable according to inherited systems of knowledge. This twinning of the old and new engenders a kind of “inventive behavior” (Kubler 1962, 82), including, as in the case of contemporary Iranian images of Muhammad, a recurrent turning to Euro-pean pictorial models. This inventive behavior also includes

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the insertion of new, politicized messages into older devo-tional images, thus allowing the political and personal use of images to exist side-by-side.

At times, such co-existence is smooth and seamless. At others, however, images inhabit a zone of contention in which official authorities attempt to curb popular image practices while the pious themselves question (or even ignore) official sanctions. As a result, these types of prophetic products cater to individ-ual pietistic needs while concurrently serving to implement consensus and cohesion among various social groups within the commercial, carnivalesque, and funerary landscape of contem-porary Iran. From the revolution until today, such images depict the Prophet Muhammad as the highest denominator for a target public, for whom he fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, a wide range of doxic and devotional needs.

notes and references

1 Qur’an 17:81. The full verse reads: “The Truth has arrived and falsehood has disappeared. Indeed, falsehood had to disappear.”

2 Most important among these is Anthony Janson’s History of Art, published in multiple Persian editions under the title Ta’rikh-i Hunar-i Jansun.

3 In metal standards, sometimes the scroll’s inscription is expanded to read: “Say ‘There is no god but God’ and you will attain salvation” (Newid 2006, 173, Figure B7).

4 The invocations read “Ya ‘Ali al-Mur-taza” (Oh ‘Ali, The Chosen One) and “Ya Fatima al-Zahra” (Oh Fatima, The Radiant One). Other standards include similar variants, such as “Ya Amir al-Mu’minin” (Oh, Leader of the Faithful [= ‘Ali]) and “Ya ‘Ali Wali Allah” (Oh ‘Ali, Viceregent of God). For these inscriptions on ‘Ashura standards, see Newid 2006, 174.

5 For the Qur’an’s description of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, along with its particular stress on following divine law, see 7:145: And We ordained for him in the tablets (al-alwah) all manner of admonition, clearly spelling out everything. And [We said:] ‘Hold fast unto them with [all your] strength, and bid your peo-ple to hold fast to their most goodly rules.’’’

6 See the illustration by Jan Verhas in Puin 2008, vol. 3, Figure 56. For its influence on Iranian visual materials, see the poster in Puin 2008, vol. 3, 904, plate J-4 and the carpet in Puin 2008, vol. 3, 976, Figure 41.

7 For a detailed study of Lehnert and Landrock’s 1905–6 photograph of the “Young Arab” and its subsequent Iranian versions, see Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont 2005, 2006. For a brief analysis of one Iranian postcard, published prior to the discovery of its European origins by Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont, see Grabar and Natif 2003, 35; Figure 4; Mostafawy 2010b.

8 See Centlivres and Cen-tlivres-Demont 2006, translated into Persian under the title “From Where did the Photograph of the Young Prophet Muhammad Come?” at the website http://www.1doost.com/Post-3,395.htm. Below the article appear readers’ comments reacting either positively or negatively to the image’s original source.

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