Lejla Kurić points out that Mughal art has plenty of faces.
Oh so it does. I have a big ol’ stack of postcards of Mughal art, from the V&A and the British Library and the Fitzwilliam and wherever else I found them. Faces. There are faces.
Faces faces everywhere.
Persian art too.
Religion is clearly a subset of culture. European Christianity has a period where realistic depictions of humans was considered taboo, too. It’s coo coo.
Even now, you will rarely see representational art in Protestant churches. Sure, there may be colored glass windows, but it’s abstract. No depictions of human beings.
That’s because the Protestants split #1 into two and lumped wives in with property for #10 to make it come out even.
Anglican churches, at least the older ones, have plenty of human figures in the stained glass windows.
The Wahhabis have had control of Mecca and Medina for around 200 years. Its easy to forget that they were originally an heretical fringe sect. They and the Saud clan might have faded into obscurity if not for the oil money.