Christiane Gruber, “The Prophet as a ‘Sacred Spring’: Late Ottoman hilye bottle”

Christiane Gruber
Professor of Islamic Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan and Founding Director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her scholarly work explores mediaeval to contemporary Islamic art, especially figural representation, manuscripts, devotional arts, architecture, and modern visual and material cultures. Recent publications include “The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images”. She has published over fifty scholarly articles and her public-facing essays have appeared in Newsweek, and Jadaliyya, among others.

The Prophet as a ‘Sacred Spring’: Late Ottoman Hilye Bottle
Along with the Prophet’s relics, verbal icons of Muhammad (ﷺ)  known as Hilyes count among the most popular forms of religious art during the late Ottoman period. While Hilye paintings have been the subject of scholarly inquiry, an otherwise little-known type of Hilye production involves the insertion of verbal icons into transparent glass bottles. This talk explores a selection of such Hilye Bottles as well as their connections to Christian sacred springs and sacred water bottles in the city of Constantinople/Istanbul. Within Muslim devotional settings and hydrotherapeutic traditions, however, Hilye Bottles crafted a new kind of prophetic pharmacon, in which Muhammad was artfully concretized as the ultimate elixir vitae.