Nourane Ben Azzouna

Biography

Nourane Ben Azzouna is associate professor in art history at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the research unit Archaeology and Ancient History: Mediterranean-Europe (ArcHiMèdE). Her research focuses on the history of the arts of the medieval Islamic world.

She is a specialist in the “Middle East” (Iraq-Iran), but also works on transculturality, in particular on the relations between the Islamic world and China, and between the Islamic world and Europe in the medieval period. Her main areas of interest are the arts of the book, calligraphy and the image.

After completing a doctorate in art history at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE – PSL) in Paris in 2009, Dr. Ben Azzouna became interested in transculturality during her work at the Agence France Muséums as member of the team that was responsible for designing the scientific and cultural project of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (2009-2013). She then worked as lecturer at the University of Vienna in Austria (2013-2016), before joining the University of Strasbourg in 2016. In 2023-2024, she was on secondment to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). The different perspectives gained from university research and museum culture have had a profound impact on her career, and have continued to nourish her vision of her research field.

She has published several books and edited volumes on the arts of the Islamic world, in particular Aux origines du classicisme : calligraphes et bibliophiles au temps des dynasties mongoles (Les Ilkhanides et les Djalayirides, 656-814 H./1258-1411) (Brill, 2018), which was recognised with an honorary mention from the Middle East Librarians Association in 2021. She was also awarded a 2019 Guy Ourisson Prize by the Cercle Gutenberg for her research project on Islamic material cultures in Strasbourg and Alsace that culminated in an exhibition, and is currently part of the project “CallFront” (funded by the French National Agency for Research – ANR) where she leads the research axis on calligraphy in Arabic script in China. She is also a member of the scientific committee of several editorial series, journals and research, museum and exhibition projects.

Fellowship 2024

Dates - 01/09/2024-31/08/2026

Project summary

THE IMAGE IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD: TOWARDS A DIGITAL APPROACH

The image in the Islamic world is a research subject and, at the same time, a hot topic in the media. As a research subject, it has a long history dating back to a first “Dissertation critique” (Critical dissertation) published in 1789 and devoted to “this question, whether figurative images of humans and animals are forbidden in the Alcoran.” This “question” was subsequently given a name, the “Bilderverbot”, and was approached from several different points of view: that of the Qur’an, but also of the Hadith (the Traditions of Prophet Muhammad), of law, numismatics, art history, etc. However, this subject still gives rise to confusion, incomprehension and sometimes outright violence. The twenty-first century began with the destruction of colossal Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban regime, and is regularly rocked by terrorist attacks that particularly target journalists and teachers who show images of Islamic holy figures, whether caricatured or not.

The aim of this project is to respond to this scientific and societal challenge. If we look at the historiography of the so called “question of image” or the “Bilderverbot” in Islam, the corpus that has been studied the least is precisely that of Islamic images. Textual sources (religious, legal, historiographic, etc.) have been analysed in a more or less systematic way, while visual sources - in other words, images produced in the Islamic world - have only been published selectively in the framework of these studies. The primary reason for this is the format of traditional publications. The printed format, by definition, allows only a selection of illustrations to be published. But this approach can also be explained by a paradigm that sees the image in the Islamic world as an anomaly, or an exception to the so-called Bilderverbot rule. It is precisely for this reason that this project aims to address the issue of the image in the Islamic world using digital technologies.

The project supported by USIAS consists of carrying out a preliminary study with a view to a larger-scale project. The aim is to create a consortium of researchers working on images in the Islamic world and institutions holding Islamic representational works, to reflect upon the legal, philological, technical and ethical conditions for a digital tool on the image in the Islamic world. There will be three main areas of reflection: 1- the creation of a computer vision research tool; 2- spatialisation; 3- the creation of a digital library. The aim of these tools is to move on from the paradigm of the exception to an analysis of the image as a language in its own right in Islamic societies.