The Imam’s Aniconic Rule

The Imam’s Aniconic Rule is his prohibitionist hostility to images, but the London apartment where it takes effect also exposes its limits. Pictures vanish from the walls, while postcards of Desh and a portrait of Ayesha remain. The rule thus appears not as an absolute rejection of representation but as a discipline that distinguishes forbidden images from those the Imam allows himself to keep—and from the image of his enemy that he cannot relinquish.

The Rule in the Imam’s Home

The Imam’s olive-striped wallpaper has faded around brighter rectangles and ovals, traces of pictures that once hung there. When he moves in, the images slide from the walls and leave the room, as though withdrawing from his unspoken disapproval. The quietness of their disappearance gives the rule an almost supernatural presence: the Imam need not issue a public order for his hostility to images to shape the space around him.

The flat is also an exile’s waiting room, sealed against the country that has given him sanctuary. Its thick golden curtains stay shut against the foreignness beyond them. On rare walks in Kensington, surrounded by eight young guards, the Imam fixes his gaze ahead so that no particle of the hated city can lodge in his eyes. This refusal of visual contact is not identical to the prohibition on pictures, but it extends the same impulse toward controlling what may enter his field of vision.

Permitted Images and the Image of Ayesha

The Imam does retain a small group of postcards showing conventional scenes of Desh: a mountain above a city, a village beneath a great tree, and a mosque. These images offer a compressed, familiar homeland, in contrast to the foreign city outside his curtains. Their survival shows that his opposition is selective; representation can remain when it serves a sanctioned idea of home.

More troublingly, a portrait of Ayesha hangs in his bedroom, facing the hard cot where he lies. The image is described as a potent icon of a formidable woman, whom he regards as his enemy and his other. The woman he keeps close is also the object of his antagonism. Far away in her palaces, Ayesha in turn holds his portrait beneath her cloak or hides it in a locket. Their mutual preservation of each other’s images makes the prohibition intimate and self-contradictory: the Imam rejects images, yet maintains the one that keeps his rival present.

Selective Prohibition and Narrative Significance

The Imam’s rule therefore works through distinction rather than simple erasure. Pictures that do not belong in his chosen order disappear; postcard views of Desh remain; and Ayesha’s portrait occupies the private space where his hostility and fascination converge. The contrast reveals that aniconism in this episode does not leave the Imam without images. Instead, it makes the permitted image more charged, because the portrait he keeps is precisely the one associated with the enemy whose death he and Ayesha plot.

The apartment turns an abstract ban into a material arrangement of absence and exception: pale marks where pictures hung, curtains closed against the surrounding city, and a single adversarial portrait facing the bed. The rule’s significance lies in that tension. The Imam seeks to govern representation, but the image he cannot discard exposes how completely his private world remains organized around the person he opposes.