preface
With the formation of local Sufi brotherhoods such as Muridia in the 1880s, the prominent status of religious leaders led to an unprecedented demand for their portraits.
Glass painting became a privileged medium for reproducing images that appeared on other media such as lithographs or photographs. Inspired by the respect for Muslim saints inherent in Sufi practice, the universal desire to display portraits in homes and personal devotional practices makes this genre indispensable.
In the past, Barry Vlad and other scholars have often opposed the "essentialist paradigm," in which Islamic culture across time and space is perceived as having a "quasi-pathological aversion to images."
To counter this dominant paradigm, Vlad called for empirical research into the relationship between Islam and imagery and a re-evaluation of its conceptual framework.
The study of the image of Islam should take into account the particular socio-political environment, regional and historical peculiarities, and the most important attitude towards the image in the "middle ground of compromise and negotiation".
Islam was introduced as early as the eleventh century and did not become the dominant religion in Senegal until the end of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Sufi order.
In Sufi Islam, each brotherhood is led by a master whose spiritual leadership and genealogy are central to any disciple's ability to practice devotion and pursue enlightenment.
The Master is not only a teacher, but like any Sufi saint, a powerful conduit of divine grace to support his disciples or brotherhoods in their mystical paths.
In Senegal, the popularity of charismatic leaders like this led to an unprecedented demand for images, and glass painting became a privileged medium for reproducing images that appeared in other media, such as lithography.
As early as the 1910s, the custom of possessing and using devotional portraits in personal spiritual practice as part of the Sufi reverence for its current and past teachers made the genre indispensable.
The influence of Islam on art production and consumption in sub-Saharan Africa has hardly been studied by art historians, whether African scholars or Islamic scholars.
In the early seventies, René Bravmann was certainly not the first scholar to consider the influence of Islam on West African art. However, he was one of the first art historians to suggest that the influence of Islam on local art production was not a negative impact.
For example, in discussing Islam in the western Sudanese empire, the British African scholar William Fager argued that under these conditions, no known tribal or primitive sculpture could exist, either physically or philosophically.
Surprisingly, more than forty years later, Brafman's work still provides the most comprehensive description of the subject. Although he encouraged art historians to study these connections, only a small group explored these "contact zones", offering nuanced explanations of figurative attitudes and addressing the "middle ground of compromise and negotiation" of the flood.
The arrival of color lithography: the opponent of French rule
In 1910, William Ponty, governor of French West Africa, began to notice that images were spreading throughout the region on an unprecedented scale, and they were neither made in France nor produced locally; Instead, they are imported from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
This visual material includes black-and-white and color lithographs with content that is both political and religious. They feature portraits of Turkish sultans and ministers; Prints of the Ottoman fleet outside Constantinople.
The episode of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, where the Prophet Muhammad is buried in Medina. Views of Mecca and Medina depicted in the Quran, royals in Germany and Italy, and satirical images from magazines such as Egypt's Cairo Punch Magazine. In his letter, Ponty instructed colonial administrators to monitor these materials closely and destroy any prints hostile to French imperialist plans.
The National Archives of Senegal preserves a series of related correspondence concerning exchanges between colonial administrators, including the Governor-General, Deputy Governor A, and the Minister from 1910 to the French colonies. As part of surveillance of Islamic media, authorities confiscated portraits of sultan and Turkish ministers in Dakar in 1910.
In 1911, the Egyptian satirical magazine Cairo Punch protested because his magazine was suppressed in Dakar. 1912 The Governor writes to the Colonial Minister explaining the Zaki case, arguing that the images are not neutral but dangerous.
1911 The Governor sends a circular to all of French West Africa condemning this dangerous spread of images. In 1914, the French confiscated 850 chromosomes in Conakry, and by 1917 the French were still discussing the details of the circulation of lithographs.
Ponty's emphasis on the need for systematic censorship is not surprising, but rather represents a universal, albeit desperate, attempt to control colonial subjects. It is not surprising that Ponty broke the attitude of icons, and he ordered the destruction of all images hostile to France.
As a shrewd politician, he understands the power of image all too well. For Ponty, these seemingly "outwardly harmless" prints were actually "irresolvable enemies of our domination."
In his opinion, they celebrated the spread of Islam and contributed to the "final triumph" of Islam on "African soil".
Ponty's specific attempts to isolate French West Africa from the wider Muslim population are understood in the context of France's political attitudes towards Islam, which took shape as early as the 1860s. France's stance on Islam was far from cohesive or consistent, and positions varied widely throughout the empire.
In Africa, Islam was sometimes seen as a threat to imperial expansion, especially when leaders and Islamic scholars launched a jihad against the French occupation in 1852. At other times, colonial authorities favored Islam over what the local faith considered to be a "primitive" system.
In those cases, religions such as Islam were seen as a "progressive" that could encourage the social and political development of Africans. However, between 1898 and 1912, the authorities' fear of Islam grew, and the colonial government established the Bureau of Muslim Affairs to closely monitor the circulation of Arabic-language media throughout French West Africa.
With the stated intention of upholding "Senegalese ancestral customs", the government monitors not only Islamic media but also circulating images.
The colonial government's primary concern was to keep French West Africa free from contamination by "foreign" Islamic influences, such as those of the Ottoman Caliphate or the Moroccan Sultanate. This concern is closely linked to suspicion of immigrants and businessmen from the Arab world.
By 1915, Rafael Valentin Marius Antonetti, deputy governor of Senegal, realized that the lithographs sold "fit the needs" and encouraged Ponty to replace them with lithographs that would enhance France's image and mission abroad.
The authors argued: The understanding of pop culture and its consumers was worrying, and colonial administrators described the patrons of these images as "naïve" and "vulnerable," using the words Ponty chose in his letter to explain the efficacy of these images, and ultimately justify the ones they would introduce.
Depicting the global image world of Islam
Senegal's collection of objects and archival documents gives an idea of the scope of this visual economy, spanning Italy, Germany, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and West Africa.
Between the 1910s and 50s, Senegal alone imported hundreds of colored lithographs. The lithographs arrived through a variety of channels, including Lebanese and Syrian traders and local pilgrims returning from Mecca.
In Senegal, the first waves of migration from Lebanon and Syria date back to the 1880s; By the 1930s, about 6,000 citizens from the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon lived opposite the AOF.
According to the author, these immigrants were originally intended to reach the Americas, but the colonial authorities persuaded them to stay in West Africa and act as mediators between the government and its colonial subjects. Eventually, Syrians and Lebanese residents opened businesses, including bookstores, facilitating the circulation of periodicals, books and lithographs in the region.
Beginning in the 1840s, lithography became popular in Islamic countries in North Africa. André Demeerseman, one of the first scholars to study printing practices in the Arab world, described lithography as "the ideal invention of the Muslim state."
The reasons, he explains, are manifold (technical, artistic, cultural, social, economic), but mainly revolve around the importance of calligraphy and writing in Islamic culture, and the fact that lithography, rather than letterpress printing, perfectly reproduces such writing.
While printing techniques in Islamic countries such as Iran, Turkey and Tunisia were built on pre-existing pictorial traditions of portable icons and devotional images, in Senegal these traditions were not widespread.
More specifically, the introduction of religious colored lithographs had a huge impact on the way devotion was understood and practiced. The mass production of multi-color prints led to the unprecedented spread of images, which were no longer appendages of the elite.
Sufi Muslims receive their blessings by purchasing cheap portraits of spiritual teachers that can also guide their meditation, and portraits are both carriers of grace and tools for contemplation.
Other examples from Senegal's private collection include portraits of the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law and their sons, as well as portraits of Ahmad al.
Although the subject matter is different, the portraits have a similar composition and aesthetic, with one central figure in the foreground and an architectural landscape often embellished by the mosque's towering minarets in the background.
Stylized dignitaries are identified by Arabic characters on the upper part of the plane of the framed picture, further illustrating their importance by including symbolic objects and animals. For both Shiites and Sunnis, he is politically and spiritually important, and for Sufis he is especially important, in part because through him, their lineage can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad.
According to the authors: These are just a few examples of the hundreds of colored lithographs and dozens of motifs collected and documented in Senegal that give the impression of a global visual economy, in which Senegalese Sufis and Africans participate more generally.
Reproduction : painting glass
The beginning of the Senegalese glass painting tradition has always been attributed to censorship measures imposed by the French colonial government in the early 1910s.
Scholars such as Michel Stebo, Mamadou Diouf, Ibrahima Tiob, and Abdou Syrah believe that French surveillance and iconoclasity were the main trigger for the birth of Senegalese glass painting as a privileged medium.
They argue that the implementation of the Ponty Directive created a gap in the Senegalese art market, which was then filled by local glass painters, reproducing images that were no longer found as imported works.
Diouf described the emergence of glass painting as an important form of resistance to colonial censorship, since the images copied and disseminated by this technique were censored and the circulation of glass painting in the country was almost impossible to monitor.
The author argues that while censorship in France is undeniable, the actual historical development of glass painting is much more complex, and the relationship between censorship and the spread of this art form is less obvious.
While censorship in France applied to the AOF as a whole, glass painting flourished in Senegal, especially in Senegal, where the medium was not originally used to reproduce any images, for example, the royal family of Italy, or the heroes and factories of France, but religion especially those.
Although the colonial authorities confiscated various colored lithographs that seemed "inflammatory" in their eyes, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Senegalese clients were mainly interested in reproducing religious themes on glass, which made up the bulk of the existing corpus.
The author argues that glass painting as a cheap and versatile technique allowed pious images to spread in Senegal, while lithography came out only a few decades later.
While devotional portraits are the most common subject in existing corpus, architectural compositions representing abstraction and battle scenes such as Badr have also been found, indicating a rich response to different genres.
Aesthetically, these glass paintings include Christian, Sunni, Shia, and Ottoman Empires, among others, showing how Senegal accommodated and adapted a variety of images and sources that continued to surface in the following decades as secular portraiture became the dominant genre through photography.
New icon: Sufi saints representing Senegal
The appearance of the votive image in the form of color lithographs coincided with the establishment of the Islamic Brotherhood in Senegal in the late 1880s.
By the 1910s, these Sufi brotherhoods were taking root in the region and their followers were growing. Over time, Senegalese Muslims invested less and less in portraits of the caliphate or Islamic historical events than in portraits of their own sheikhs.
Visitors to Senegal immediately recall portraits of religious leaders seen in nearly every taxi and home, as well as on every street and screensaver, creating the "bold visual city" that Allen and Marinut Roberts have devoted themselves to research for decades.
Returning to the glass painting, Souwer reflects the pose and dress in the original black-and-white photograph. However, instead of being depicted as his disciples flocking to the scene, Malaboo is depicted near the sacred space of a towering mosque in the background.
The mosque was not the headquarters of Tijāniyya at that time, it was a wooden structure, but a stone building with a circular dome and a square minaret, comparable to the mosques built in Dakar and St. Louis in the twentieth century.
Through this process of mediation or re-mediation, glass painting allows for improvements where the original photograph is inadequate. For example, in anchoring Malick Sy's physical presence in the courtyard of a mosque, the glassmaker deliberately included a series of powerful symbols.
Glass paintings created in the contact zone, such as Malick Sy's portraits, challenge classics and expectations. As "objects of translation", they do not easily fall into categories such as "African" or "Islamic", "art" or "craft", and do expose the limitations of all of them.
If sometimes it is precisely the repetitive nature of their subject that disqualifies these objects from innocence and unoriginality, here it is precisely their ability to reproduce and translate images across media.
The author argues that in Malick Sy's portrait, the crescent-shaped red flag flying high on the minaret is a symbol of the Ottoman Empire, reminding the attentive viewer that these images are far from without reflection, or even harmless, but rather complex objects that challenge the empire's borders, logic, and system of scope.
conclusion
By the 1910s, as recorded by Governor William Ponty in his letters, French West Africa witnessed an unprecedented spread of images on its territory.
This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in countries like Senegal, where a tradition of portraiture did not previously exist. While Islam is often criticized for developing art that is essentially non-iconography, the opposite is true in Senegal.
At the turn of the century, the introduction of devotional images of Muslims from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to the French colonies not only made portraiture popular, but also cultivated and cultivated a local taste for images. Through Islam, Senegalese used media such as glass painting, lithography, and photography.
Art historians such as Stephen Bane have written extensively about the interplay between nineteenth-century painting, printmaking, and photography, revealing the dialectical relationship between technologies that coexist with each other rather than replace each other.
These practices are no longer seen as mutually exclusive, but rather parallel and overlapping. This flexibility allows us to track the transfer of images from one medium to another.
The authors believe that the act of repeating, transforming, and reinserting previous themes and visual references across media becomes a key strategy for nurturing and expanding the world of Sufi images.
In addition to recognizing the precarious significance of images that lack any predictable path, this trajectory allows us to fully understand the emergence of a new demand for portraiture and the beginning of Senegal's prolific modern visual culture.
Resources:
Every Crazy Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2001"
Saints in the City: Sufi Art in Senegalese Cities, Los Angeles. 2003
In the Shadow of Senghors: Art, Politics and the Avant-garde in Senegal. 2004
From Direct Sculpture to Restoration: The Art of Moustapha Dimé after Senegal's Independence 1974-1997. 2013
Sufism: A Global History, Malden, MA. 2012
"The Concept of Islamic Art: Discourses and New Methods of Inheritance," Journal of Art History. 2012
"Painting Like Prayer": The Hidden Side of Senegalese Reverse Glass "Image/Text", African Literary Studies. 2000
Competing for Visibility: Photographic Practice on the East African Coast. 2014