Images provoke! This volume explores the role of images in contemporary Islam by turning to the act of provocation. Moving beyond a common focus within the study of religious visuality on art, aesthetic value, and perceptions of beauty or coherence, it shows how, when, and why images dare, shock, terrorize, confront, challenge, mock, shame, taunt, and offend, either intentionally or unintentionally, and as such lead to both confrontation and affective religious engagement. Exploring and experimenting with the relationship between text and image, the chapters draw attention simultaneously to the messiness of everyday life and to highly targeted, disruptive interventions that mark religious contestation in an era of escalating mobility and digital multiplicity. Ranging broadly from visual jihad to nudity, from public scandal to ‘multicultural clumsiness’, they ultimately converge to illuminate a phenomenon that has received little attention so far: intense provocation as being among religion’s most significant mediations.

David Kloos is a Senior Researcher and member of the Management Team (portfolio Research) of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).

Leonie Schmidt is Associate Professor in the Media Studies department of the University of Amsterdam.

Mark R. Westmoreland is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Visual Ethnography Program at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University.

Bart Barendregt is Professor by special appointment and Scientific Director at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Provocative Images in Contemporary Islam
Leonie Schmidt and Mark Westmoreland

2. Provoking Affect: Islamic State’s Projectilic Images
Marwan M. Kraidy

3. Angry Muslim Mobs on Dutch Television: The Reappropriation of the Rushdie Affair
Andrea Meuzelaar

4. Multicultural Clumsiness: Provocative Anti-Provocations in the Aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks
Margaretha A. van Es

5. Islamoscaping Medina by the Bay: The Background of Muslim Life in the San Francisco Bay Area
Maryam Kashani

6. Pictures that Divide: Worldly Justic, Erotic Nationalism, and the Globalization of the Kiss
Pooyan Tamimi Arab

7. Over the Shoulder: Looking at Islamic Visuality, Projected Scandals, and Muslim Visibility
Kirsten L. Scheid

8. Making and Appearance: Images, Frailty, and the Potency of Beauty in the Indonesian Modest Fashion Scene
Carla Jones

9. Television is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival
Yasmin Moll

10. Haunting the Islamists: Visualizing Piety, Satire, and Shame in Contemporary Indonesia
James Bourk Hoesterey

11. Epilogue: What do Provocative Images Provoke?
Karen Strassler

About the Authors
Index