“The Image Debate:” Photography and the Human Figure in the Modern Islamic World

In the fall of 2022, Hamline University canceled an instructor’s contract after she showed her art history survey class a medieval Iranian painting of the Prophet Muhammad. This controversy reinvigorated concerns about the age-old “image debate,” especially concerning the connectivity of the digital age and mass dissemination of lens-based media. Our paper will address photography’s relationship to religion, Qur’anic law, and social and cultural customs across Islamic geographies and instead make visible a range of local and indigenous interpretations of the human figure and photography. While, for example, photography has been used to produce devotional imagery in Shi’i Iran, it has been prohibited in some Sunni contexts. A recent example of the latter, a fatwa by the Syrian-born Shaykh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid from 2016 declared that “any photo that is intended to be kept for memories is haraam [forbidden].”