20 REJECTING THE IMAGE, REVERING THE WORD

The emptied spiritual space: after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, only rubble remains. Afghanistan, March 2001

In March 2001, the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas. Two monumental images made in the sixth century, one fifty-three, the other thirty-five metres tall, the largest representations of a standing Buddha anywhere in the world, were systematically reduced to rubble. Their destruction was a gesture designed to proclaim a particular notion of religious purity, attract attention to Afghanistan and provoke political enemies. It was entirely successful on every count. Photographs of the empty niches were reproduced around the globe, eliciting outraged condemnation. Iconoclasm had once again returned to world politics. It is still very much present. In the years since 2001, other pre-Islamic images have been deliberately destroyed in Syria and Iraq by the so-called Islamic State to similar effect. In all these cases, religion and politics have been inextricably mixed, but they nonetheless afford the most violent demonstration possible that there have always been many who believe that images are effectively idolatry, and that only the word can lead to God.

You do not of course have to look to Islam, or go to Afghanistan, to witness the destruction of religious sculptures. There have been casualties even in the Cotswolds, as can be seen in two severed heads discovered in Gloucestershire. The first, magnificently carved in coarse Cotswold limestone during the second century CE, shows Mercury, the Roman god of commerce and communication – life-size, curly-haired, alert, youthful. What was once a full-scale standing statue of Mercury, housed in the Roman temple at Uley, was destroyed around 400, almost certainly by early Christians, in this respect like the Islamic fundamentalists, determined to smash pagan idols. But the head survived. It was reverently buried by people who must have retained an affectionate allegiance to their familiar, handsome Mercury, and may have been apprehensive about the continuing power of a slighted god.

The heads of two gods, Mercury (*left*) and Christ (*right*), severed in Gloucestershire more than a millennium apart

Over a thousand years later, a strikingly similar story of destruction – and preservation – was repeated, this time by Christians against other Christians, only a few miles away. The second head, much smaller in scale, once belonged to a painted wooden crucifix, made in England around 1100, which hung in the church of All Hallows, South Cerney. It is a study of suffering serenely endured. Christ’s hair and moustache are heavily stylized, the elongated face thin and drawn. The eyes are closed, either in pain or in death. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant reformers, in an attempt to return to the ‘purity’ of the early Christians, smashed sculptures like this, which to them were as idolatrous as the gods of pagan Rome. All across Northern Europe, paintings, stained glass and statues were destroyed. But in South Cerney this little statue seems to have been taken down, carefully hidden in a cavity in the church wall, and preserved. It looks like a moving reprise of what probably happened to the severed head of Mercury. Presumably some parishioners of the old tradition, who had worshipped in front of it, wanted to save it from desecration, and perhaps one day restore it to its original place. In the damp of the church wall most of the sculpture eventually rotted, but the head and a few fragments survived.

These two heads, from a single English county, speak of a universal phenomenon. They are poignant evidence of the devotion and affection which images can inspire, and how difficult it is for those who have grown used to them to worship without them. It was a question which led to bloody division and battles over iconoclasm in the Byzantine Orthodox Church for nearly a century. Yet worshipping without images appears to be exactly what is ordered by the second commandment, which God gave to Moses in the Book of Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’ In spite of such unequivocal words, most branches of Christianity make great use of images in worship and prayer. The other two Abrahamic faiths, however, have rarely wavered. The Hebrew scriptures have many virulent condemnations of those who worship statues: Muhammad himself is recorded as removing all idols in Mecca. In Judaism and Islam it is the word alone which is to be revered as the path to God: that reverence has produced supreme works of art in Islam, and had profound social consequences in both faiths.

The British Museum has only a small collection of Judaica, as books and manuscripts are now held in the British Library. But it does have a little hand, a right hand with a pointing index finger, crafted in silver and mounted on a round silver shaft about thirty centimetres long. This is a yad (which in Hebrew simply means ‘hand’) and, although small, it plays an important role at the centre of Jewish religious life. It helps you read the scriptures in the synagogue.

As Rabbi Julia Neuberger explains, after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE (cf. Chapter 27), the focus of devotion and religious practice moved away from ritual and sacrifice to concentrate instead on the scriptures, and on a rabbinic tradition of reading and listening, pondering and interpreting the meaning of the Jewish law:

Different ways of worshipping had already predated the destruction of the Temple, because Judaism was already a worldwide religion – or at least a Roman Empire-wide religion. We know that at various times the Roman Empire might have been around 10 per cent Jewish. But with the destruction of the Temple the particular rituals focused on Jerusalem ended and people became synagogue-goers or house-of-study goers: synagogue is simply the Greek word for ‘coming together’. The extent to which this was about worship as opposed to study is very hard to know at this distance, but certainly people would have read from the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, with the commentaries on them.

It is said that this is why there are so many Jewish lawyers, because they’re very good at arguing over texts. The old joke about two Jews having three opinions is not really a joke at all. It’s bound up with the way that we bat words around and talk about meaning. And we focus on words because of the prohibition on using images. We approach God through the word.

The central concern, of course, is with idolatry, the worship of idols, rather than the worship of the one true God. I come from a family that on one side is very Orthodox. My grandfather or great-grandfather was supposedly given a bust of the composer Rossini, and in the Orthodox spirit of not keeping images of the human body he knocked off his nose. I don’t know if that quite counts as iconoclasm.

The synagogue in Plymouth, built in the 1760s, gives a powerful impression of the particular kind of sacred space that can be created by a religion that values words over images. The Jews had been allowed to return to England only a century earlier, following their persecution and expulsion at the end of the thirteenth century. Like Catholics, they were tolerated rather than welcome, so newly built synagogues like this one were designed to be discreet and unobtrusive. It is a simple rectangular building that looks from the outside like a Nonconformist chapel or a Quaker meeting house, and it is thought to be the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world in continuous use. It comes as a surprise, when you go inside, that the first thing you see, under the east window, is a magnificent two-storey carved and columned classical structure, with elaborate urns and gilded capitals. Anyone from a Christian tradition might think it was a baroque altarpiece, strayed into Devon from a continental Catholic church, but where you would expect to find an image is a red curtain instead, and crowning the whole edifice are words written in Hebrew script. It was made in the Netherlands, through which many Ashkenazi Jews had passed on their way from Germany and Eastern Europe to England; to use an anachronistic term, it was then flat-packed, shipped to Plymouth and reassembled. In contrast to the exterior, this focal point of the synagogue is anything but unobtrusive. And that is as it should be: for this is the storage place of the Torah – the ark, where the word itself is housed. Julia Neuberger describes its significance:

The ark is ‘Aron Kodesh’ or ‘holy cupboard’, the cupboard in which you keep the scrolls of the law. All arks would be located in such a way that as you face the ark you are facing towards Jerusalem. It’s very common to have the Ten Commandments written either on the ark itself, on the sides, or, as in Plymouth, above. Interestingly, the ark in Plymouth was probably made by Christian craftsmen in the Netherlands, which is why it looks very much like a high altar.

The Baroque splendour of the Plymouth Synagogue: between the windows facing Jerusalem, the Torah scrolls are housed in a gilded ark made in the Netherlands.

Unlike a Catholic church, where seeing the celebration of Mass at the altar is central, the main purpose of a synagogue, as of most Protestant churches, is to let the congregation hear the word of God read and expounded (see Chapter 28). In Plymouth, as in all synagogues, an elaborate ritual accompanies the removal of the scrolls of the law from the ark for their ceremonial reading. Julia Neuberger explains:

In our synagogue, we read the Torah only on Sabbath morning, and it is the central part of the service. The Torah is first processed around the synagogue, giving people a chance to touch its velvet mantel with their prayerbooks. And then it gets ‘undressed’ by the children, or somebody else who has been given that honour. Its bells and breastplate are taken off, then the silk tie that holds it together is removed. It is unrolled on the reading desk, and people are called up to read; usually one of the rabbis, but barmitzvah or batmitzvah youngsters will read the Torah too, or we will ask a member of the congregation.

It is at this point that the yad comes in:

When we read from the Torah scroll, we don’t touch it. Some people think that this is because it is holy, but actually it’s in order not to damage it. It is written on parchment, animal skin, and is coated – powdered, almost – and then inked, so it is extremely delicate. That makes the Hebrew script even more difficult to read: it is beautifully written by a scribe, but it does not show any vowels, so you have to be reasonably knowledgeable in the language to be able to read it aloud. Using this little silver hand, with the index finger pointing out, you can keep track of where you are. I don’t think I would be very comfortable reading the Torah without a yad.

This is why a yad is known as a hidur mitzvah, an ‘embellishment of the commandment’ to read the Torah; and, as this is such a central part of Jewish life, many people have their own. The yad in the British Museum comes from the earliest years of the Plymouth Jewish community. It has a silver chain and a square handle, with the inscription: ‘this yad belongs to Joseph, son of Yahuda Yakov from Schermbeck, here in Plymouth in the year 1745’. Schermbeck is a town just north of Düsseldorf in western Germany, and Yakov had clearly been living in Plymouth for over fifteen years before the synagogue was built. Another yad, also in the British Museum, lists on its octagonal handle the names, German or Polish, of eight of the synagogue’s founders – a gift proclaiming that in their new country, as in the old, they were going to do what Jews everywhere had always done: read and reverence the word. Jerusalem was out of reach and the Temple destroyed, but the Torah was in Plymouth.

Julia Neuberger points out that in all synagogues, in front of the ark:

you have the eternal light, which is kept burning all the time, usually an oil lamp. It is to remind you of God’s eternal presence in and around you. We put the light in front of the ark, because the word of God in the shape of the Torah is that abiding presence.

The *yad* given by Joseph Yakov to the Plymouth Synagogue in 1745 (*right*) and Rabbi Julia Neuberger, with her *yad*, reading the Torah (*left*)

Exactly the same idea lies behind the Islamic practice of decorating lamps with verses from the Qur’an: hanging in the mosque, they remind everybody that they are in the presence of God, not mediated through an image, but approachable and perceptible as both light and word.

One of the most beautiful mosque lamps in the British Museum dates to 1570–75, during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Made not far from Istanbul, its ceramic waisted body is coloured a striking cobalt blue, enlivened here and there with dashes of turquoise and red. Its three looped handles were used to suspend it from the ceiling, so that everybody in the mosque would be able to admire its inscription, bold white against the deep blue, and many would be able to read it: on the lower part is a verse from the Qur’an, ‘Praise and thanks be to God; there is no might or power except in God’, and around the neck the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith: ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet’.

The word of God lighting the world. Sixteenth-century mosque lamp from Iznik

Reading Hebrew is regarded as essential for a full understanding of the Jewish law. In Islam to read the Qur’an in Arabic is to draw close, perhaps as close as possible, to the divine: you are hearing the very words that, in a number of revelations over more than twenty years, Allah used to address the Prophet Muhammad through the mediation of the angel Gabriel. The Prophet then recited what he had heard to his followers, and they were later written down and collected as the ‘Qur’an’ – which itself translates as ‘read’ or ‘recitation’. Not surprisingly therefore the Qur’an is very clear about the importance of recording and reciting words: ‘Recite in the name of thy Lord, who created all things…He has taught the use of the pen. He has taught man that which he knew not’ (Qur’an, XCVI, 1–5). The word, written and spoken – the very words of God – is at the heart of Islam.

This makes the Qur’an an essentially different kind of text from Christian scripture. The Gospels, as they have come down to us, report in ancient demotic Greek what Jesus had said a generation earlier in Aramaic. They are translations of recollections, and most people now read them in a second translation, from the Greek – and thus at an even further remove from the words originally spoken. Christians do of course reverence the Bible. But because Jews and Muslims believe that in their sacred texts are words directly communicated by God, physical copies of the Torah and the Qur’an are treated with extreme respect. The Torah, as we have seen, is housed and transported and read with the utmost care. According to Dr Afifi al-Akiti, of the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies:

One of the striking things to the non-Muslim world is the extraordinary reverence of the printed word of God, of the book itself. This runs so deep that people have sometimes been attacked because they are thought to have been disrespectful to the Qur’an. There is an irony here, because in the Muslim legal tradition one of the ways in which it is permitted to dispose of a copy of the Qur’an, for example if it is infested or damaged, is to burn it. But of course if someone burns the Qur’an with a different intention, Muslims feel deeply slighted, perhaps in the same way that Christians who venerate the Cross would feel if it were trampled underfoot.

This comparison gains further power when we think about the Japanese authorities’ decision in the seventeenth century to force suspect Christians to do just that, as incontrovertible proof that they had abandoned their faith (Chapter 28). And it explains the care Muslims take, and expect others to take, to ensure that the Qur’an is never placed on the floor, or otherwise subjected to casual indignity. In the home, it is a book to be treated as an honoured guest. Some Muslims will not sit with their back to it.

Our lamp shows one particular, and particularly Islamic, way of doing honour to the text: calligraphy. The letters have been shaped and placed not just to fill completely the space they occupy, as the word of God fills the created world, but to dance in pleasing rhythmic patterns over the round forms of the lamp. The Prophet Muhammad is recorded as saying that ‘Good writing makes the truth stand out.’ This is why, over time, calligraphy became by far the most important means of visual expression in Islam: a sacramental art, the creation of beauty and in time the defining visual language of Islamic civilization. Afifi al-Akiti describes this impulse:

Around the eighth and ninth Christian centuries (the second Muslim century), there is a flowering of the calligraphic tradition in Islam, initially in mosques but increasingly outside mosques, too – on domestic objects of all sorts. Since originally these words were held to reflect the divine, it was very natural, very human, to try to reflect it – in something that would be a delight to the eyes. It is not something that was planned. It just came as a result of that convergence between the divine and the finite.

But, as so often, beauty came at a cost:

It’s often quite difficult to read very beautiful calligraphy. When I was much younger, I helped to catalogue some of the Arabic manuscripts in the Bodleian Library here at the University of Oxford. It took quite some time to learn the trade, and I spent a while in Morocco learning from various masters how to read the different scripts. Still today, lots of Arabic manuscripts are not decipherable until you find a master who can read them.

In many mosques calligraphy goes far beyond objects like our lamp, or decorations on wood, metal or tile. In the Sheikh Lutfallah mosque in Isfahan, for example, it decorates pillars, walls and dome, sustaining and filling the entire building with the lively word of the Qur’an and other holy texts. Even if unable to read the writing, when you pray in a mosque like this, you can feel yourself being surrounded by – immersed in, embraced by – the presence of God, through God’s word made manifest to ears and eyes alike, at the same time. It is the equivalent in words to the immersion in images which Rowan Williams describes in an Orthodox church (Chapter 17).

Julia Neuberger tells how this focus on the word in both faiths has necessarily encouraged learning and literacy:

Literacy amongst Jewish women developed comparatively early. Children, particularly boys, were also taught to read at a very early age – and often just taught to read holy texts. There are wonderful stories about children gathered round a Torah scroll because there were not enough copies for everyone. Some of them only learned to read upside down.

The Sheikh Lutfallah Mosque, in Isfahan, Iran, built around 1610: the word of God surrounds believers, sustaining both them and the building

Afifi al-Akiti talks of a comparable yearning for literacy in parts of the Islamic world:

In the pre-modern period, we find cases of farmers who perhaps in another cultural setting might not be able to read, in fact being literate. They buy books, manuscripts, starting with the Qur’an and then other sorts of devotional literature.

In a world where there were no printed books, and manuscripts were rare and expensive, for many communities there was only one way to share and study the sacred text, as Afifi al-Akiti explains:

That is why there are strong traditions of memorizing and reciting the Qur’an. In a typical madrasa, you would probably take about six to nine years to complete learning it, but some have virtually memorized it in as little as three. Even today, when printed books are cheap, an astonishing number of people can recite the entire Qur’an by heart.

The seventeenth day of Ramadan is marked by Muslims as the day when the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. So Muslims all over the world today try, during the month of Ramadan, to recite the Qur’an in full, and to complete it by the seventeenth if they can. In various Muslim seminaries and Islamic schools, for example in Malaysia and Singapore, there are competitions for reciting the Qur’an. There are international competitions, too – a World Cup for Qur’an recitation.

But this deep personal appropriation of the text brings with it many challenges. Afifi al-Akiti details how, like the ancient Hebrew of the Torah, the seventh-century Arabic of the Qur’an is open to many different interpretations:

Whereas in the Christian tradition the word of God is made flesh in the person of Christ, for Muslims God came into the world as word. And just as Christians have to grapple with the problem of incarnation, Muslims have to grapple with the problem of ‘inverbation’ – God becoming word. It is difficult, because although Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the sublime literal word of God, that doesn’t mean that they can read the Qur’an literally. These are two different things. You need qualified scholarship, proper guidance, to make sure that you do not misunderstand the Qur’an. Scholars, jurists, theologians, Sufis: you need such people to interpret this sublime divine word of God for earthly understanding.

But even Muslim scholars acknowledge that no one can fathom completely the word of God. There has to be humility and we have to acknowledge our fallibility. Nobody has a monopoly on knowing fully, except of course, as Muslims believe, the prophets. This is where we run into challenges today, as young Muslims grow up not realizing this, and approach the word of God without those filters of informed debate. It can be poisonous if one is not careful.

Boys compete to learn and recite the Qur’an in a madrasa in Malaysia

Afifi al-Akiti is of course referring to bitter disagreements within modern Islam about the proper interpretation of holy texts, especially those concerning images – back to the Bamiyan Buddhas – and to the justifications for violence produced by extreme Islamist movements. Judaism is also sharply divided by different schools of interpreting the Torah, some of them with far-reaching political repercussions for the Middle East too. One can see why both faiths have always handled the text with such care and apprehension. It was one of the saddest ironies of the Reformation that the word for which the reformers claimed such authority turned out to be as ambiguous and divisive as the images they destroyed. The proper interpretation of Christian texts has been just as acrimonious and at least as bloody as any disagreements in Islam and Judaism.