The Image Debate: Critiquing Gruber’s Secular Erasure of Islamic Authority

The following text is the beginning of a series of posts on my Academia.edu page as a systematic, point by point critique of Christiane Gruber’s introduction to her book The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World. This piece begins with a quote from an Essay I am writing titled The Strange Place of Islam in Islamic Art History.

The thumbnail image attached to this post (which I designed a while back before this writing) is a direct reference to Surah Al-Mumtahanah (60:4), where Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and his followers declare: 'We have disavowed you, and there has arisen between us and you, animosity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone.'

In Islamic theology, this 'hatred' is not an emotional outburst of personal malice; it is a divine mandate of disavowal (Bara'ah) against Shirk (the association of partners with Allah). To reject this command is to reject the foundation of the faith.

The secular academy calls this '“extremism.” Abraham applied it as obedience. Gruber’s attempt to sanitize and secularize Islamic art by erasing this theological reality is not “progress”; it is a denial of the very command that defines the tradition she claims to study (especially in her insistence on the “Solomonic model.”

I hesitate to use the term ‘Islamic art’ because it is a bastard misnomer of the Orientalist wet dream. [...] Before I speak about art in Islam or propose a redefining concept of what Islamic art can be, we have to establish what Islam is. Without this crucial understanding, the covert-Orientalists (Western so-called-scholars of "Islamic" art) will continue chasing their tales (pun intended) trying to define “Islamic art” and its "theology" in a circle jerk of squandered words and time. — Abdushakur, On the Strange Place of Islam in Islamic Art History

This upcoming essay will be somewhat irreverent to what the past and present Orientalist institutions continue to hold to be “sacred.” Oh, and this is a serious work, just so there’s no confusion.

This project's title is inspired by James Elkins’ seminal work, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and [the title of] Jonathan A Anderson direct response, On the Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art and on the premise of the hadith:

The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said, “Verily, the religion began as something strange and it will return to being strange, so blessed are the strangers who restore my Sunnah which the people after me had distorted.” (Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2630)

On the Strange Place of Islam in Islamic Art History attempts to bridge the gap by exposing the underlying fear of the contemporary art world with "religion," or more precisely with Islam: accountability.

And (remember) when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their seed and made them testify as to themselves (saying): "Am I not your Lord?" They said: "Yes! We testify," lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection: "Verily, we have been unaware of this." (Surah al-A'raf 7:172)

What follows is specifically directed to Christiane Gruber’s introduction of her book, The Image Debate:

The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said, “Let me not find one of you reclining on his couch, when a command or prohibition of mine comes to him and he says: I do not know, we only follow what we find in the Book of Allah.” (Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2663)

Gruber stresses that the Qur'an itself contains no explicit prohibition against figural image-making, but rather condemns asnam (idols/statues worshipped as gods). She argues that the strict prohibitions against image-making (taswir) emerged later within Hadith literature.

"O you who believe! If a rebellious evil person comes to you with a news, verify it, lest you harm people in ignorance, and afterwards you become regretful to what you have done." (Surah al-Hujurat 49:6)

Gruber treats the Hadith corpus not as a timeless normative authority or bound legal framework, but as historical products reflecting political, social, and cultural anxieties of the early Islamic centuries (e.g., competing with Byzantine/Sasanian visual culture).

"They want to extinguish Allah's Light with their mouths, but Allah will not allow except that His Light should be perfected even though the disbelievers hate (it)." (Surah at-Taubah 9:32)

Gruber’s stated goal is to dismantle the Western notion that Islam is inherently iconoclastic. Yet to achieve this, her actual project becomes far more destructive: dismantling the widespread, normative consensus of Muslims that Islam—through Prophetic Hadith and legal jurisprudence—has warned against and prohibited image-making. In her attempt to "defend" Islam from an Orientalist trope, she employs an Orientalist methodology to strip revelation of its legal authority. She relies on semantic division—separating Qur'anic terms like asnam (idols) from tamathil (likenesses)—to assert that practices of figural representation were "guided by cultural and political expediency rather than religious or legal principle." She then highlights the rich history of figural art, royal portraiture, and manuscript illumination in Islamic history (Persian, Ottoman, Mughal, etc.) to prove that image-making was widely practiced, sponsored, and tolerated by Muslim rulers and elites.

The response essay, titled Reclining on Their Couches: Obliterating The Image Debate, responds directly to Gruber’s flawed methodology regarding Hadith scholarship. By treating historical exceptions as theological norms and marginalizing prophetic authority, her framework misconstrues how Hadith functions within Islamic jurisprudence and the ontology of image-making.

The secular attempt to enact a 'Regime Change' (Gruber, Esener) within Islamic art history relies on reducing divine revelation to mere political history. By treating Hadith scholarship as an obstacle rather than the foundational lens through which Muslims understood reality, modern historiography replaces genuine historical rigor with an Orientalist agenda—one that seeks to redefine Islam without confronting its authority.

The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said, “Whoever innovates into this matter of ours that which does not belong to it, it will be rejected.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2697, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1718)