1.
The young boy is screaming. He is being held down. A knife is brought to his neck. Another hand seizes the arm with the knife.
2.
The image, from a large fresque murale on the side of a building less than a block away from Porte de Flandre in Brussels, was reported on the morning of Sunday, 22 January 2017. It faced the canal that separates the Belgian capital from the neighbouring commune of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, recreating a detail from Caravaggio’s second version of the Sacrifice of Isaac. The tableau, an oil painting on canvas of 104 cm x 135 cm, is housed in the permanent collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It dramatizes a scene in Genesis in which God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In the painting, the central figure, Abraham, has bound his son and is bringing a knife to the screaming boy’s neck. In the top left-hand corner, we see an angel. With one hand, the celestial being has seized Abraham’s knife-wielding arm; with another he points to a ram whose figure appears just above the bound head of the screaming child.
3.
Abraham took Isaac with wood for an altar along with a knife to the mountaintop.
“Where is the lamb for a burnt offering”?
“My son, God will provide himself a lamb.”
He built an altar, and laid the wood, and bound his son, and laid him upon the altar, upon the wood.
An angel called his name.
“Don’t put your hand on your child, or do anything to harm him: now I know you fear God, you won’t even spare your son.”
He looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its own horns.
4.
On the brick wall, the boy’s scream is simplified and exaggerated. The lines are starker, bolder.
But one detail was missing: there is no ram. Only the boy across the canal.
Some credit the work to Bonom, a Brussels-based French street artist whose legal name is Vincent Glowinski. Bonom has been called “the Arsène Lupin of street art” for the way he seems to traverse the city’s rooftops, like the fictional thief, and produce massive murals overnight. He denies authorship. It resembles the style of other works of his throughout the city: the unclothed elderly person on the side of a building near Porte de Hal; the image of a woman, with legs spread touching herself, above Place Stephanie; or the flaccid penis near the barrière de Saint-Gilles nicknamed “Zizi” by locals. And then, Isaac at Porte de Flandre.
5.
After the Paris attacks of 13 November, 2015, when suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people in a coordinated assault on a variety of locations across the French capital, it was discovered that they were planned and carried out by a cell of ISIL based in Molenbeek. Two days later, an article in The Guardian by Ian Traynor described the Belgian municipality as “jihadi central,” because of its reputation as a breeding ground for radicalization among its Muslim-majority population: “From the post 9/11 assassination in Afghanistan of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban leader and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, to last year’s killings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and this summer’s foiled shooting spree on a high-speed Amsterdam-Paris train,” Traynor wrote, “investigators’ lines of inquiry lead to Molenbeek.”
Even the interior minister Jan Jambon claimed that, “We don’t have control of the situation in Molenbeek at present.”
6.
In its streets, children played soccer in the squares. Old women walked to markets. Men loitered by drab buildings. Cars sped by. We bought a duvet in a warehouse.
7.
By the year the mural appeared, 521 Belgian nationals of various ethnic backgrounds had left for Syria to fight with Islamic State. In the same year, Flanders News, an English-language website of the Flemish public broadcast company VRT, put the figure at 422, claiming that, of those, 142 have died, 130 have returned, around ten more of whom have since died in Europe, including during the attacks of Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016. Many had also been radicalized at home.
8.
Salah Abdeslam was one of them. After the Paris attacks, a discarded bomb-belt linked to him was discovered by streetcleaners in the Paris suburb of Montrouge.
Of Moroccan-Berber origin, Abdeslam had grown up in Molenbeek, though his family held French citizenship. In both 2011 and 2014, he was convicted of theft. After working as a mechanic for the local French-language mass transit company, STIB, he was fired, while having also been receiving unemployment insurance from the Belgian state. He and his brother, Brahim, ran a bar called Les Beguines. Authorities shuttered it for drug-related reasons.
Six weeks before the attacks, he and his brother sold the bar.
On 18 March 2016, after months in search of Abdeslam, the police descended on an abandoned flat off Molenbeek’s townhall. After a firefight, Abdeslam, a petty drug dealer who had radicalized by reading nothing but online commentaries of the Quran, was arrested.
His last free meal was pizza.
9.
On 22 March 2016, a few days after Abdeslam's arrest, Ibrahim El Bakraoul and Najim Laachraoui detonated bombs inside the Arrivals terminal at the Brussels-Zaventem International Airport. Mohamed Abrini, whose bomb apparently failed to explode, also accompanied them. Simultaneously, at the Maalbeek Metro Station, in the commune of Etterbeck, in the heart of Brussels, only one stop from the European Commission, Khalid El Bakraoul and Osama Krayem blew themselves up inside a crowded metro car during the morning rush hour.
10.
Laachraoui, one of the suicide bombers at Zaventem and at the time one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives, is thought to have helped Abdeslam avoid capture.
A month after his arrest, Abdeslam was extradited to France. Sven Mary, his Belgian attorney, called the accused terrorist
“c’est le petit con de Molenbeek…
“il a l’intelligence d’un cendrier vide,
“il est d’un abyssale vacuité
who believes he lives
in a video game.”
11.
The children of Abraham descend from either Ishmael or Isaac. Abraham was the descendent of Shem, who was a son of Noah, along with Ham and Japheth. When Ham accidentally sees his father Noah naked and drunk, he tells his brothers who then cover their father. When Noah awakes, he curses Ham’s son, Canaan, who then becomes a slave. Arabs and Jews each believe themselves to be descendants of Abraham—Arabs believe they are from Ishmael, whereas Jews claim lineage from Isaac. “Thus,” writes Eliot Weinberger, “Jews and Arabs are cousins.” There are also the descendants from Noah’s other offspring. “In the first centuries of Islam,” Weinberger continues, “the Arabic term Banu Ham, ‘Sons of Ham,’ is applied to the Egyptians, Persians, and Berbers, until their conversion,” later referring to sub-Saharan Africans. The various populations that would be defined loosely in our time as the “Muslim world” began as a genealogical category—that is, the descendants of Ishmael—and then transformed into a larger grouping including converts who are “former” Canaanites.
12.
“They said, ‘Burn him, and support your gods, if you are to act.’ Allah said, ‘Oh fire, be coolness and safety upon Abraham.’ And they intended for him harm, but We made them the great losers.”
Abraham’s steadfastness to God is so firm that he would even sacrifice his own son, but his story differs in the Quran in another important aspect: He is thrown in a fire by Nimrod and survives. This detail is retold immediately before Abraham’s sacrifice is recounted: “They said, ‘Construct for him a furnace, and throw him into the burning fire.’ And they intended for him a plan, but We made them the most debased.” Abraham is someone who, by the grace of God, performs a miracle. The story originates in an obscure medieval Midrash, the Bereshit Rabbah, c. 300-500.
Unlike the story in Genesis—with descriptions of the walk to the mountain, the sacrifice itself, the salvation of Isaac—in the Quran, the details of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice is shortened:
And then he said, ‘Indeed, I will go to my Lord; He will guide me. My Lord, grant me a child from among the righteous.’ So We gave him good tidings of a forebearing boy. And when he reached with him the age of exertion, he said, ‘Oh my son, indeed I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice you, so see what you think.’ He said, ‘O my father, do as you are commanded. You will find me, if Allah wills, with the steadfast.’ And when they had both submitted and he put him down upon his forehead, we called to him, ‘O Abraham, you have fulfilled the vision.’ Indeed, we thus reward the doers of good. Indeed, this was the clear trial. And we ransomed with him a great sacrifice. And we left for him favorable mention among later generations: ‘Peace be upon Abraham’.
Details from the passage stick out. Nowhere does it say which son was blessed. Moreover, the child is asked what he thinks about a dream that Abraham had. He tells his father to “do as you are commanded.”
This active role in the sacrifice radically changes the story. It is a much more positive tale of fatherhood, one in which a father interacts with his son. The Old Testament version instead presents an anguished patriarch who tricks his offspring into thinking that they together will sacrifice a lamb. After being bound to a pyre, the child is saved only at the last moment by the voice of an angel and the appearance of a sacrificial ram.
Islamic tradition avers that it is Ishmael, not Isaac, who was taken to the altar. And it is in Islamic tradition that Arabs claim lineage from Ishmael. Nowhere in the Quran does it state which son God asked Abraham to sacrifice—only in later hadith do Muslim theologians claim that Ishmael was the sacrificial son. In the Quranic version, the son becomes a praiseworthy and steadfast believer, agreeing to give his life for the will of God—Ishmael is a model son. In the Biblical telling, the boy is a victim of God—Isaac is tricked by his conflicted but pious father.
The theological rupture between these two interpretations of the story of Abraham is a significant impasse. It is, like many familial arguments, about inheritance. Who gets to inherit the blessings of God upon a son who was nearly sacrificed by his own father?
That blessing suppresses the trauma of the son.
13.
Today, the Dome of the Rock, the mosque at the center of Old Jerusalem, constructed in 691-692, fifty-five years after the invading Muslim army took Jerusalem from Byzantine control, with a then majority Christian population, is considered by Muslims to be the second most holy site after Mecca. It is believed to be the altar where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son.
To further the significance of this site for Muslims—and, in general, for the role that Abraham plays in Islamic theology—where the Prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven, in a journey called the Isra. In the middle of the night of his death, the Prophet flew from Mecca on the wings of a creature called Buraq to Jerusalem. Completely purified of all evil, he then ascended on a golden ladder to the celestial realm accompanied by the angel Jibril.
14.
Across the canal, the boy on the building
Isaac screams.
15.
I first saw Caravaggio’s painting on 12 September 2018 when I travelled to Florence. We had been strolling through the galleries of the Uffizi. Although I had been searching for it, when I found it, it somehow surprised me. Its scale was not what I expected. Used to the size of the mural in Brussels, I had imagined the original would be larger. As is the custom of Old Master paintings, it is framed in thick gilding. Its baroque frame adds a stateliness the picture’s brutality otherwise lacks.
In reproductions, which mostly do not include the frame, it’s more difficult to see the dark band of space in the bottom right hand of the image that makes up the altar on which the boy’s head lies. His hand seems to float above a darkness below. The three faces—that of the angel, Abraham, and Isaac—form a triangle, with the prophet’s in the center. Abraham, the father, who is pictured as a grey bearded bald man, looks toward the angel, who, in turn, is pointing toward the ram, encouraging Abraham to discover the sacrificial replacement. The knife is still in his hand, although the angel is restraining Abraham’s arm. Still, the patriarch has not yet turned his head to see the beast, or lessened his grip on his son’s head. The picture seems to take place in the instant before Abraham believes he can avoid committing this most terrible act. So much of the painting rests on Abraham’s face, on the thought passing through him, at the decisive moment. The angel, encouraging Abraham to see the ram, seems to look past what the title tells us is the subject of the painting: the boy. The boy’s terror appears thus somehow more of a detail than the focus of the composition.
At least, at first. Isaac’s terror, constrained into the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, might seem incidental, except for one significant fact: the boy is looking directly at us. It is, in a way, a brilliant break with convention. While the painting’s compositional triangle absorbs us into the space of the picture, in which Abraham deliberates on how to proceed and the angel gestures toward the ram, the gaze of the son, whose suffering is considered secondary to that of the steadfast faith of the father, captures ours.
16.
It is the son, not the father, on which so much rests. And this is what the artist understood: it was through Caravaggio’s compositional masterstroke that led our anonymous Lupin to the idea.
It is the son on whom blessings are bestowed, and yet it is the son whose suffering has not been fully addressed. It is the son who wakes up from nightmares from what he has suffered.
It is the son who has survived.
Yet it is the father who is praised, the father who withstood the fire, the father who rejected the idols, the father who turned his faith to the one true God, the father who was so steadfast that he would kill his own son. It is his story, regardless of which son is identified. It is his faith, his dilemma, his burden—not the scars or sacrifice of the son.
17.
Caravaggio’s painting shifts the narrative. In its compositional structure, while it is the father who has yet to turn his face to see what God was offering him and seems to be the painting’s subject, it is the son who implores us to stop the infanticide—or at least, passive spectators that we are, to bear witness to the horrific and inhumane act. The painting flips the interpretive history of the story: Here, it is the face of the son who breaks the third wall. By doing so, he becomes the subject. It is the trauma of the son, which, when unaddressed, replicates the horrors he has suffered.
It is the son who will repeat the violence of the father.
This is what the street artist gleaned from Caravaggio.
18.
Abdeslam—a petty thief turned radical, with barely a grasp on the faith in whose name he abetted atrocities; whose escape from Paris to Brussels, the opposite of a holy Isra, left in his wake 130 dead; who was then, with the shame of failing to detonate his own suicide belt, a liability to an international network of criminals-turned-jihadists; whose own upbringing was no doubt anything but easy, no blessings inherited; whose intelligence was reportedly vacuous—carried out somebody else’s legacy.
First sentenced to twenty years for a gunfight, he was also charged for his involvement in the Paris attacks in 2020. At his first sentencing, his attorney claimed that he laughed. In pictures of him circulating online, he looks like a momma’s boy.
19.
The daughter of a friend said that a schoolmate of hers, who survived the Zaventem attacks, watched the leg of a young boy melt from the heat of the blast.
20.
In May 2019, I visited Brussels for the first time after moving away in 2017, the mural of Isaac had been whitewashed.
Aaron Peck is a Canadian author and critic. His books include Jeff Wall: North & West, Letters to the Pacific, and The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis. His criticism has previously appeared in Artforum, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books. He currently contributes to the TLS and Aperture magazine.