CLARIFICATION — On Desire, Submission, and Aesthetic Reinterpretation

This entry clarifies a recurring methodological pattern observed in contemporary discourse on Islamic visual practice. It addresses how arguments are formed, not the private intentions of those who advance them.

Controversy surrounding image-making in Islam does not arise from ambiguity in the revealed texts. It arises from resistance to their implications.

Where submission governs, desire is disciplined.

Where desire governs, submission is reinterpreted.

In discussions that seek to minimize the authority of law and aḥādīth, a consistent inversion appears. Preferences are stablished first—often in the name of creativity, beauty, or cultural relevance—and evidences are then reframed to accommodate those preferences. Legal boundaries are recast as historical, symbolic, or reactive. Severity is softened. Obligation is aestheticized.

This inversion is procedural. It is not textual.

The aḥādīth concerning image-making are not obscure. Their language is direct, their threat explicit, and their treatment in the scholarly tradition sustained. The discomfort they generate is therefore not a function of uncertainty, but of cost. They require abandonment. They require restraint. They require refusal where autonomy would prefer continuation.

Rather than accept that cost, some frameworks relocate authority from revelation to experience. Beauty is elevated from description to justification. Cosmology is pressed into service as proof. Nature is treated as license. Law is reduced to context.

This move does not resolve the texts. It circumvents them.

Submission does not negotiate outcomes. It conforms to limits. Where the limits are clear, the response is not reinterpretation but compliance. Where compliance is rejected, reinterpretation becomes necessary—and controversy follows.

The issue, then, is not art.
It is order.

Either revelation governs practice, or practice governs interpretation. There is no neutral middle position. One precedes the other.

This clarification records that distinction.