When the Selfie Turns Sacrilegious

Even the world's most stunning holy places are overrun with selfie-takers. Has Instagram officially made us all solipsists?
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A man takes a photograph at the Hassan II Mosque. It is the 7th largest mosque, and tallest minaret in the world.Uygar Geographic/Getty Images

As the largest mosque in Morocco, and one of the largest in the world, the import of the Hassan II Mosque is hard to overstate. Since its completion in 1993, it has provided shelter, religious counsel, and fellowship to Casablanca’s Muslim population. Just outside the throbbing city center, on the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean, it is also one of the most beautiful monuments I have ever had the fortune of seeing up close. Its minaret reaches some 60 stories high; a mix of exquisite Zellige tilework and traditional Moroccan design cover the building’s exterior. Night or day, a harmony of hushed greens, understated blues, and soft beiges glimmer under the port city’s restless skies.

Earlier this summer, I journeyed to Casablanca as part of a solo trip, and visited Hassan II upon the suggestion of a friend. To say it is a sight to behold cannot fully capture the magnitude of its stature; in person, it feels beyond human calculation. Still, standing in one of the holiest places on earth, I felt uneasy. Most of my fellow visitors, I realized with a brief bloom of nausea, were taking selfies.

Where does one belong? Or perhaps it is more precise to ask: how should one belong—to a person, a city, a belief? How should one hold herself up in the reflection of others; how should one cast himself in the grandeur of a place like Hassan II, infused with cultural substance that is not always so easily visible? How do we negotiate this relationship when we are a stranger in a foreign terrain; does it really necessitate a filter?

A symptom of modern living, but a no less inevitable one, require we live in a state of constant negotiation: between the pull of the world and one’s own conditioned desires. The writer Jenna Wortham, in 2013, described selfies as part of “a timeless delight in our ability to document our lives and leave behind a trace for others to discover.” If social media first intended to connect us, its promise has taken a sharp, inauspicious turn inward: the self has become paramount, the correspondence second.

Part of the power of social media, and thus the power we are in some measure bestowed with, comes from its unpreventable propagation: it spreads and spreads and spreads, like a pathogen, and so do we with it. Our memes, our pictures of pristinely plated food, our motivational quotes, our selfies (in the gym, at the park, on the dancefloor at the club, in the neon glow of a hotel mirror), are at once all around us, fertile for public consumption on a given social platform. It is a process that unfailingly roots back to the idea that the I—or what the I is viewing—is central. (Selfies are valuable, too, as tools for self and collective empowerment; it’s the need to prioritize individual identity over all else that has given the gesture a negative connotation)

Though the visual vernacular of selfies was first cultivated on Tumblr in the early aughts, Instagram, a modern atlas of digital expression, has accelerated contemporary culture’s obsession with identity making (and, subsequently, the varied ways we learn to wear selfhood). In its infancy, the photo-sharing app took on a utopian sheen: a for-everybody platform where the projection of who one was lived in a shared, communal social space. Now, after nearly seven years of #NoFilter and Kardashian-Jenner self-absorption , it can be hard to tell what is real and what is merely show. In late winter, standing in my bathroom, I snapped a photo and uploaded it to Instagram Stories with the caption: “What if a selfie is just another way to will yourself into a world that has done its very best to destroy you?” It was a bit of performance, but underneath subsisted a brutal truth: following a year of what felt like unending black death—from Philando Castile and Alton Sterling to Terence Crutcher and others—it became another mode to assert my existence, one which sways with such fragility between life and swift death.

In Casablanca, all of these feelings compounded together. Amid the multitude of people snapping selfies, there were locals attending the mosque for prayer, men and women taking solace in the shade under giant pillars, and a swarm of elders holding court just outside the hall’s entrance—all pointing and commenting on the growing pageantry of solipsism. Call it cultural myopia or just a product of how we live in the modern world, but it is all informed by a linked disregard. Image culture has evolved out of social nerve centers like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in such a way that photos are no longer about preserving an event, so much as they are about the act of presentation. “This is what I do,” an image bellows. We no longer set out to let a place inject us with meaning so much as we want to impose more meaning into who we are, and who we want others to believe we are. The image is “mythical,” essayist Nicholas Carr hypothesized: “what’s reflected never matches what’s projected.” In doing so, as at the mosque, the self-photographer renders a place nothing more than an object—by dismissing its context, its legacy, or the significance it holds for others—mere background, mise en scene to complete a single frame of one’s digital identity.

In what ways should we occupy a given space? Today, the ideas we hold about ourselves eclipse the grandness of the world—the “Hassan II Mosque” geo-tag on Instagram can at times feel like a reservoir of selfies that border on sacrilegious. We want dominion over it, rather than coexistence, rather than empathy. (That blasphemy need not be literal: Artist Kara Walker’s 2014 public installation “A Subtlety,” conjured similar feelings as I viewed the massive Sphinx figure among a throng of white patrons, many of whom snapped away, oblivious to the piece’s emotional weight). But the world is a profound place. Loud and vast and quenchable. I can’t imagine how much more profound it might seem it we didn’t try to always place ourselves at the center of it.