Human and Animal imagery in Islamic art?

I found http://libcat.uchicago.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=ucres&npp=300&uri=link=3100002~!12890~!3100004~!3100019&aspect=reserves&menu=search&ri=1&source=~!horizon&term=NEHC+20632+-+Au05&index=COURSE on the library's website, and here's http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/nelc/facultypages/perry/. I wish I could parse all the info the course went through, but there's just too much.

The fundamentalist opinion appears to be that all images of animate objects are forbidden. http://www.themuslimwoman.com/beware/PunishmentForPictureMakers.htm presents a strong argument that all depictions of animate objects are strictly forbidden. Some argue that television http://www.islam.tc/ask-imam/view.php?q=7209 when actual people or animals appear on the screen. (Ask the Imam, by the way, is a good resource when you want to find out what the most conservative Sunni view on any subject is). However, as with every religion, not everyone is a fundamentalist.

human and animal imagery is not absent in painting, say in persian [iranian] art and mughal [indian] art. it is also present in ottoman [turkish] art as well. however, i am hard pressed to think of any human and animal imagery in ceramic art. there, you see the geometric designs and the caligraphic ones primarily, and some floral ones.

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2004/islamic/is a pretty decent site. Persian art is full of human imagery in painting and in tile work, their specialty. Carpets often have animal figures. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of the most holy sites in Islam is incidentally tiled in representative mosaic. Most of it was begun in the Byzantine era when the mosque was a church, but the tile work was continued and occasionally replaced over the centuries always keeping the representative style.

There are two main problem with statues and images from the Islamic perspective. The first is that they can easily lead to idolatry. Indeed, Muslims believe that idolatry first originated when people built statues to honor some pious people who had died among them, then started going to the statues and calling on the dead to intercede for them before God. The second problem is that only God creates life, and to make images and sculptures of living things could represent a challenge against God's authority as the creator. The biggest sin in Islam is called shirk, which means to worship something along with or instead of God, or to seek intermediaries between oneself and Him, or to attribute charachteristics that belong to Him alone to someone or something else. Examples of shirk are polytheism, praying to saints, and believing that your wellbeing depends on a particular human being, etc. As you can see, the problem with statues and images is that it leads to shirk. It is interesting to note the first 2 of the ten commandments, in which the Jews (and by extension the Christians) were ordered first to take no Gods apart from God, and second to make no graven images. That said, there is a wide range of opinions about what sort of images are permissible, from allowing no statues or drawings of animate beings at all (except for in children's toys and on clothing, for which there are hadiths making specific exceptions), all the way to allowing such images as long as they are not meant to be objects of worship and the one making them is not doing so as a way to challenge God's unique role as creator. There is also some argument about whether photographs and video count as images for these purposes, the debate stemming from whether taking a photograph constitutes creating an image or simply showing a representation of what God has already created. But I don't know anything about art history, so I can't speak to how all this has been applied over the centuries.

I wrote (and received an A on) a paper about this very topic during my years in college. My thesis was that in Iran, the presence of buddhist traders along the silk road moderated Islam's influence on art along the way. You probably WON'T find much representational art outside of the areas of the muslim world that used to be part of the persian empire. Persians, situated at the crux of the european, arab, indian, and asian civilizations, tended towards cosmopolitanism very early on.

Even http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/isla/hob_57.51.9.htm seem to have been authorised in Persia. I once saw in an exhibition of Muslim art a series of Persian manuscripts detailing Muhammad's supernatural aventures, with his face perfectly visible, as in the picture above. Jesus appeared as a sidekick in some of the images. I guess that to have a proper understanding of what was authorised, at a certain period and in a certain region, would require a large amount of knowledge. The difficulty of Islam for outsiders (and even for insiders) is that almost everything is open to religious debate and interpretation by religious scholars whose opinions vary across time and traditions. It's different from, say, Catholicism, where there's a central authority for this.

Wow! Another shining example of why AskMeFi is so amazing. Thanks to everyone for their insightful and well reasoned answers. You have done me a great service.

A bit more info: Shia muslims were/are generally fine with art representative of animate objects. The sunni schools of law are generally against it, save for the Maliki school, which permits them if there is no intent of idolatory or no reasonable indication such will occur. Photography is generally considered ok by the orthodoxy, save for some of the subcontinental Hanafis (such as Mufti Desai above) and some Saudi scholars (who don't really belong to the orthodoxy). With respect to sculpture, there is very little leeway in this regard as it comes a bit too close to making idols. It's quite interesting as the fatwa given by Deobandi Hanafis indicate that if one has lifelike dolls, one should remove the head or similar to make it permissible. The traditional injunctions against both art of animated objects and sculpture are interesting as they led to a greater emphasis on geometry/calligraphy/architecture as the primary source of expression for the sunni muslims in particular. Even in this, you'll find nods toward religion as in every geometric pattern, there is always one flaw, to indicate that the artist/designer did not consider that his creation was anything like that of Allah (swt). Hence there's a bit of a difference of art dependent on what interpretive methodology has traditionally been predominant in a given area. This is a good site for anyone who wants to learn more about Islamic art etc: http://www.muslimheritage.com