The critical analysis of "İslamic iconoclasm thesis" as a construct of Eurocentrism

This dissertation is a critique of the approaches explaining Muslims' reactions to images via the concept of iconoclasm. These approaches, which single out Muslims' reactions to images from other ethnic, religious or political groups' reactions, conceptualized as the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis. These approaches are discussed in the case of two provocative contemporary events: Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the Danish Cartoons. Providing the genealogy of the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis as a Eurocentric power discourse, this dissertation argues that the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis is neither about Islam nor about Islam's approach to images, rather, it is about the construction of the European identity. Therefore, the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis emerges as a recurrent theme in the discussions surrounding the construction of the Western Subject in the writings of the founding fathers of the European thought from Leibniz to Kant and from Hegel to Riegl. The Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis distanciates Islam from the West temporally and spatially formulating Islam as the radical exteriority to the West; thus what is Islamic turns out to be the unprivileged part of the binary oppositions constructing what is being European: Art-Iconoclasm; Democracy-Fundamentalism; Religion-Secularism. This is why the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis emerges whenever the Europeannes of Europe is in question from the emergence of the Art and Aesthetics to image normativity, from the History of Islamic Art to the place of Muslims in Europe. Internalization of this discourse by Muslims through the process of self-orientalization makes the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis a useful tool. This dissertation rejects reading Muslims' reactions to images in the framework of the Islamic Iconoclasm Thesis; instead, offers to critically engage with the Eurocentric construction of the image to better appreciate the ontology of images for Muslims. Keywords: Iconoclasm, Eurocentrism, Discourse