Islam and the Image

* As of November 1, 2026, BC will no longer observe Daylight Savings Time. The start time for this event will be 6:30pm PCT after November 1. *

Everything in creation is available as image — except the image of the creator himself. In this lecture, Palestinian filmmaker and scholar Sobhi al-Zobaidi takes that single withheld image as the starting point for a century of Arab cinema. Drawing on a chapter from his forthcoming book, he argues that Islam's prohibition on the image was never really about pictures. It was about something an image does that a word cannot: it reaches the body before any authority can interpret it. Words can be governed. Sight cannot.

From there the lecture follows the concealed image outward — into the arabesque and the theology of a world re-created at every instant; into a 1966 essay by the Lebanese critic Salah Stétié, who called Last Year at Marienbad the Islamic film par excellence twenty years before Deleuze named the crystal-image; into Moustapha Akkad's The Message, which put the camera where the Prophet stood, and whose maker was killed thirty years later by a suicide bomber in an Amman hotel lobby. Along the way: a refugee camp, a university campus in the 1980s, a bottle of wine smuggled across Gaza, and three Egyptian films about appetite, desire and thought. With film clips throughout.