Review of The Veil of Depiction: Painting in Sufism & Phenomenology, Evrim Emir-Sayers, Paris: PICT, 2024. 200 pp. ISBN 9782494635036.

Issue: Leeds Medieval Studies, 4 (2024)
Date: Wednesday 6 August 2025

George Beckett

ORCID iD: 0009-0005-8117-2326
ISSN: Print 2754-4575
ISSN: Online 2754-4583
DOI: 10.57686/256204/34

A cursory glance over the outer cover of Evrim Emir-Sayers’s book promises a text that will trace the linear transmission of late medieval Middle Eastern miniature art into the early twentieth-century West, while its inside blurb teases ‘an astonishing line of creative inspiration’ that the author perceives between twelfth-century Sufist philosophy, Middle Eastern miniature painting, the work of Henri Matisse, and the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹ The Veil of Depiction: Painting in Sufism & Phenomenology, then, participates in a current art historical trend that sees mid-twentieth-century Western phenomenological thought resurging in critical interest; one recalls, for example, Elaine Treharne’s Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (2021), Graham Harman’s Art and Objects (2019), or even the latter’s recent collaborative monograph with Christopher Witmore, Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy & Archaeology (2023). By drawing on Michael Barry’s seminal Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bihzad of Herat (1465–1535) (2004), The Veil of Depiction contributes a welcome seven-chapter analysis of non-Western art to this vibrant field through deft readings of paintings and philosophical treatises spanning Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (c. 1165–1240) to Merleau-Ponty.

Mirroring the linear movement of miniature painting from East to West, chapters one through four consider the ambivalent status of the art form in the sixteenth-century Middle Eastern court and its reception in contemporary Islam, while the final three chapters chart its appropriation in early twentieth-century Europe and Sufism’s surprising concord with Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the artwork. Despite acknowledging that ‘this journey to the West was a violent — and violating — process which the artworks rarely survived intact’ (p. 77), the book’s tone is not one of righteous bitterness. Rather, Emir-Sayers endeavours to show that Sufism and phenomenology are compatible interpretative approaches to miniature painting ‘and that, in combination, they bring us within touching distance of an exceptional form of art often assumed to be historically, philosophically, and culturally out of reach’ (pp. 7–8). The Veil of Depiction thus aims nobly toward the synthesis of two seemingly disparate strands of thought for a more nuanced understanding of the miniature painting.

Despite promising to plot a linear trajectory from medieval East to modern West, this text rather questions whether the structure of the line is an adequate model for understanding the artwork as a worldly entity existing through time. After all, ‘the contour of an object, considered as a line enclosing the object, is more relevant to geometry than to the visible world, where there are no outlines’ (p. 136). Chapter one establishes the precarious position of miniature painting and its close association with calligraphy in Middle Eastern courts of the sixteenth century through reference to three tadhkira writings by Dust Mohammad of Gashawan (c. 1531–64), by Qadi Ahmad of Qum (dates unknown; last recorded date 1606), and by Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli (c. 1541–1600). Painting and calligraphy, Emir-Sayers recognises, did not develop as art forms along a steady course, but rather waxed and waned as controversial commodities in accordance with the whims of successive rulers. Chapter two picks up on the similarly turbulent relationship between writing and painting against this courtly backdrop, and particularly on the moral ambiguity of depicting the absolute in medieval Islam. Sufi philosophy, it is argued, was seen as a necessary hermeneutic recourse in this context. Chapter three therefore takes us back in time to Ibn Arabi’s The Bezels of Wisdom (1230) to expound upon the relationship between creator and created, between the absolute and the particular, and between painter and artwork in Sufism. This chapter, though brief, is an excellent introductory exposition of Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics, which ultimately ‘rejects the distinction between the thing in itself (the essence) and the phenomena’ (p. 54), and which Emir-Sayers convincingly illustrates by reference to the image of the mirror. Indeed, mirror metaphors are of central importance throughout the remainder of the book, and especially in the following chapter which sheds light on the texts of chapter one in accordance with this new grasp of Sufi thought.

With chapter five, we travel west. First, Emir-Sayers critiques the present state of Western reception of medieval Islamic miniature painting, which she accuses of perpetuating a heavy-handed ‘“iconophobic fallacy” [that] imprisons scholarship in a set of vicious circles’ (p. 79). A brief history of the twentieth-century adoption of miniature tropes (colour and pattern) by Western painters follows, with the author astutely perceiving that Matisse grasped the “spirit” but not the “letter” of his medieval sources (p. 89). ‘All the more remarkable, then, that in the Middle East and the West alike, these techniques were employed to enable a form of perception not given by the contemplation of mere things’ (p. 5). This comparison anticipates a lateral move from Western art to Western philosophy, which chapter six handles through a consideration of Honoré de Balzac, Edmund Husserl and, most extensively, Martin Heidegger. Although Emir Sayers’s reading of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ produces some compelling anti-Cartesian parallels between Heidegger and Ibn Arabi, her exegesis of the former’s concepts of ‘equipment,’ ‘earth,’ and ‘world’ is convoluted whilst also lacking the analytical depth found, for example, in the first chapter of Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002). Likewise, Harman’s Art and Objects offers a more comprehensive post-Heideggerian critical theory of art than The Veil of Depiction, despite its dearth of medieval sources. Emir-Sayers thus deserves praise for putting Heideggerian metaphysics into dialogue with Sufi thought and the medieval Middle East, but her presentation of Heidegger, in contrast to her insightful engagement with Ibn Arabi, is likely to be confusing for the reader unfamiliar with the German philosopher and yet not elaborate enough for the Heideggerian scholar.

By contrast, chapter seven expertly handles Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Cézanne and recognises how both the French phenomenologist and Ibn Arabi entice us to ask, ‘when the inner is the outer and the outer is the inner, what belongs to me and what to the world?’ (p. 150). Here, The Veil of Depiction might fruitfully be read in conjunction with Treharne’s Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts; take, for example, its conclusion that ‘the creation of an illuminated manuscript does not only make a world reveal itself, it actually brings a world into being’ (p. 153). It is unfortunate, then, that Emir-Sayers seems unaware of Harman’s and Treharne’s aforementioned works. Still, The Veil of Depiction is commendable in its conclusory analyses of two paintings by the master Kamal al-din Bihzad (c.1455/60–1535), which develop Michael Barry’s own analyses of these works by drawing on the affinities between phenomenology and Sufism. Emir-Sayers’s latest book, in spite of its awkward treatment of Heidegger and its nonengagement with contemporary writings in the field, is an innovative and exciting publication that addresses a clear gap in phenomenological scholarship on the medieval Middle East.

1 I would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for funding received during my doctoral research.