The best way to write an article about a movie you haven’t seen is to approach it obliquely. The movie would be Noah, starring Russell Crowe; the approach would be iconoclasm. Unsurprisingly, the film’s been banned in several Muslim-majority countries, though not as many as you’d think. Then again, in light of how many Muslims in many such countries want to watch Russell Crowe embody a significant Muslim Prophet, such a ban may well be superfluous beyond the oil-rich Gulf.
But why was it banned? What does it say about Islam? Have I watched other movies I’ve written long, ponderous reviews of? Is the movie faithful to Noah’s chronology, like 1,000 years of waiting and then 40 days of flooding? If you get up to get a snack during the movie, do you miss anything?
I will not answer some of these questions. I will however talk about why some Muslim countries might see Noah’s physical depiction as blasphemous.
First, let’s scramble your sense of chronology. Commonly, we hear Islam described, like Christianity, as a descendant of Judaism. However, in the Muslim opinion, that’s the other way around: Christianity and Judaism are descendants of Islam.
Before you go off wondering what kind of timeline can support such a preposterous inversion, bear in mind the Muslim worldview: God creates Adam and Eve in the garden; they eat from that one tree; they’re sent down to Earth as a consequence of their transgression, but they’re forgiven. Morally, that is; physically, they’ll have to be on Earth despite their penance having been accepted. Because it’s on Earth that human destiny is meant to be unveiled. (Sorry, I had to.)
Karmically, then, as the Qur’an would have it, they were meant to be on earth all along. But God doesn’t abandon them to the Earth. Rather, it’s a mix of occasional interventions as against the general theme of moral autonomy.
In the Muslim conception, God selects Prophets to not only preach but embody the same religion, over and over again, which religion is at its core the same—Islam, or submission to the Divine. On this view, Noah and those who believed in him were Muslims; the same goes for the Children of Israel and for Jesus and for John the Baptist and for the Apostles. Muslims. When inevitably the message gets scrambled, as all things eventually will be, a new messenger is selected. The last of these many messengers is Muhammad. Therefore, in the Muslim view, Muhammad did not found a new religion. His job was to preach and to embody a correction of Moses’ and Jesus’ message, among others, where it had gone off the rails—again, as a Muslim would see it—and simply confirm it where it hadn’t.
Essential to that message is a photophobic and iconoclastic monotheism. No graven images. Etc. Ad infinitum—at least until the end of the world.
Idols are bad news, a theological travesty, as a Muslim would see it. Blasphemous type news. But Islam also prohibited the visual depiction of Prophets—not always honored by Muslims, to be wholly fair, but then again how often is any religion internally homogenous or consistent? This ban on representation is a limited one, however—it depends entirely on what representing means. In the Muslim view, God delivers revelation through human beings, and by modeling ourselves on their actions, inward and outward, we become closer to God. (In theory.) So, you can’t make pictures of Noah, or Jesus, or Abraham, or David, or Solomon, but you’re supposed to live a life that looks a lot like theirs. Which means looking like them, which perfectly unfolds in the awesomeness that is Americana.
At a conference at Yale University some months ago, I found myself sitting beside a Muslim chaplain. We were looking at an image of Christ that some Christians had (in my opinion, very reasonably) found objectionable. Apparently, the two of us were the only folks in the room who found that depiction objectionable, however, because we were offended on behalf of Jesus and on behalf of Christians. Not because it was a picture of Christ, mind you, but because it was a picture of Christ subjected to treatment nearly everyone would find objectionable if done to, say, a loved one’s picture, or their own. (You could get Facebook to take it down.)
This is the reality of religiosity and democracy. We can not only take offense but express that offense, but equally we defend the right to give offense and to offend others. Contrarily, the Muslim countries where the film was banned are, so far as I have seen, all non-democratic states with national religions.
To me, Noah hints at the great cultural challenge that will be delivered to the doors of persons of faith in an increasingly multifaith and multicultural planet. It is one thing to protest. It is mere passivity to consume. But what does it mean to produce? I do not expect that Muslims who take their faith seriously will ever be comfortable visually depicting the Prophets, but there are other forms of representation and there’s more gray.
A few weeks ago, Columbia University’s Muslim Students Association held an outstanding conference called The Muslim Protagonist. (Not because I was speaking; the lineup was just wonderfulness.) After my presentation, a student asked: Is there any parallel between the influence of Jesus in Christian art and the influence of Muhammad in Muslim art?
First, I would footnote, because I tend to answer questions backwards: Any generous definition of Muslim art would not preclude Jesus, of course.
As for the main body of my response, addressed to the original query: Not “is there,” but “will there be…”? Looking ahead. To the future. To the arts and ideas that will come, and on what grounds they will be defended, and in what language articulated, and to which audiences presented. That’s the question I see many young American Muslims wrestling with, as we struggle to produce, to define, to narrate, to tell stories and to share ideas.
You can’t watch Superman without seeing Jesus Christ behind the comic book. (He sends His only son; he arrives from on high; his parents aren’t really his parents; he’s all-powerful; he’s a force for good; for God’s sake [sic] he’s 33.) How will the Muhammadan example, however, emerge in contemporary and future Muslim arts and culture? Where do we draw the line between influence and allusion and representation and depiction?
What does it mean to embody Muhammad—except that you can try to be him, but you’ll never be him, so maybe you can aspire to him, as much morally as creatively, but you cannot capture him, because to take a picture is to freeze an icon, and to put it into stasis, and perhaps we would like a religion more dynamic and unstable than that. Maybe the point to prohibiting images isn’t to preclude representation, but to push the sacred to become all the more universal, all the more accessible, and all the more profound.
