A melting pot of undergraduates, graduate students, doctoral candidates, faculty and other interested parties filled a room in Macaulay Hall last Thursday afternoon to hear New York University (NYU) Professor Finbarr Barry Flood lecture on Islamic art and architecture.
Flood, his university’s William R Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities, spoke on the reception of the image by Islamic cultures.
The Department of Anthropology hosted Flood to open their spring colloquium. Flood’s talk was based on a book he is currently working on called, Figures, Flowers and Photographs: Islam and the Image Revisited.
Flood focused his talk on the evolving Hadith, or tradition, within Islam with regards to images.
“Insofar as there is a concern with material images. . .the problem is not what people assume,” Flood said.
Flood focused on the historical origins of Islam’s policies regarding the representation of the human form and how the culture is making the transition into modernity with ever-evolving technology to capture images. He described the Hadith as both proscriptive and prescriptive, outlining protocols for having certain types of images and forbidding others.
The idea of representation in art is of utmost importance to the Islamic faith, Flood said. Playing God by creating an image of an object with a soul is strictly forbidden. Instead, images are repurposed by transforming them into vegetation or minerals.
Partial bodies have been allowed, as often heads would be replaced with images such as flowers, as in the one Flood displayed in his presentation of three bodies with peonies instead of faces.
“My talk was an attempt to address the idea that Islam is universally hostile to figurative art by drawing out complexities and attitudes to images through showing manuscripts, texts and images,” Flood said.
Niloofar Haeri, chair of the Anthropology Department, invited Flood to Hopkins. His multidisciplinary focus and broad interpretations appealed to Haeri and inspired her invite.
“[Flood] has a very broad and ambitious sweep to his work and we thought that many people would be interested,” Haeri said.
Photography is seen more as a mirror than as image making, Flood said, adding that the idea of images as a mirror is one more easily accepted by Islamic authorities. Flood, however, was sure to make the point that there was no singular attitude about figures in images in Islam.
“Through my work I hope to stimulate discussion and conversation across the traditional borders of disciplines,” Flood said.
With few classes about Islamic and Middle Eastern studies available on campus, Haeri thought it was important to continue to spark interest in the subject at Homewood.
“I wanted Finbarr Flood to come in part because there is now more interest in Islamic studies on campus and he is a very good representative, in that he does not work on tired old political and historical debates about what ‘Islam’ is and how it compares to other religions,” Haeri said.
Freshmen Carissa Zukowsk and Alexa Rangecroft attended the talk on Thursday. After having read Flood’s work in an art history survey course last semester, they were excited to hear what he had to say.
“Seeing him actually speak about [Islamic art] gives a new perspective, we read a bunch of scholars but being able to have the opportunity to hear one speak and also in more detail because we had a survey course and were both interested in Islamic art especially,” Rangecroft said.
With interest for Islamic studies growing on campus and few courses offered to satiate such an interest, speakers such as Flood provide the opportunity for students to hear more perspectives.
“Basically the focus of the anthropology department is to be able to get the rest of the campus to get to know the non-European world better,” Haeri said.
With a majority of humanities classes at Hopkins focusing on European culture, Haeri believes students should take it into their own hands to learn more about what they are interested in, especially if that’s what is going on in different parts of the world.
“The most important thing is for undergraduates to tell their professors, and tell the deans office, and tell their directors of undergraduate studies that this is what they are interested in and they would like to see more of that on campus,” Haeri said.
