Islamic Art

Can Islam and the Museum Coexist?

The recontextualisation of figural representations within the museum setting raises interesting questions regarding permissibility

Photo by Jonas Smith on Unsplash

Whilst the Muslim attitude towards the visual arts is overall aniconic, there exists a wide variation in opinion regarding the secular arts, resulting in a large corpus of objects with figural representations with origins from the Islamic lands. Over the past couple of centuries, Islamic art has been collected and displayed in private and later public collections primarily in the West but more recently also in Muslim-majority countries. Objects made for everyday use and deemed permissible in certain contexts have since been recontextualised as display items in public and private forums, potentially changing the status of their permissibility. In this essay, we will first regard the permissibility of figural imagery within Islamic law by looking at the Qur’an, hadith and scholarly opinions on the matter, and then assess whether this permissibility is altered when the context of objects is changed to a museum setting.

Juristic Rulings

Islamic rulings regarding permissibility rely on the four primary sources of the Qur’an, hadith, general consensus of the legal jurists, and…