one thing i don't understand is that we don't have a picture of what mohammed looked like. how then can an image that claims to be him be offensive? if all future images of the prophet contain a black square where his face should be, doesn't that become a representation of him and therefore also becomes offensive? i also understand that the prohibition against pictures is a modern thing. did mohammed say "don't use my pictures" any time in history?
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Visions of Mohammed
Feb. 26, 2006. 01:13 AM
LYNDA HURST
TORONTO STAR
The exquisite painting shown in part on this page is a 15th-century "illumination." It shows the Prophet Mohammed in the course of his visionary night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, then guided by the angel Gabriel through the seven spheres of heaven to the throne of God, or Allah.
The journey is known as the ascension, or mirâj.
It is one of 61 paintings, each featuring a depiction of Mohammed, created by unknown Islamic artists in the workshops of Herat, in what is now western Afghanistan, in the early 1400s.
They were made for Shah Rokh, a son of the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane, whose brilliant court attracted the greatest thinkers and poets, artists and bookbinders of the region and of the day.
In 1673 in Constantinople, now Istanbul, the French ambassador purchased the images and took them home to Paris. But not until the early 1800s was the manuscript of the mirâj story, calligraphed in the Central Asian Uighur script, finally translated.
The priceless originals are now safely stored in the Bibliothèque Nationale in France. But the vibrantly coloured, gold-leafed masterworks, from which this image is taken, were published, without complaint then or since, by New York fine-arts publisher George Braziller in a 1977 book, The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet.
The paintings, like multiple others produced during the Middle Ages, are as little known today to many Muslims as they were at the time of their creation. Albeit for different reasons.
When first executed, these works were bound for the well-educated court elite, not ordinary people, says Linda Northrup, professor of early and medieval Islamic history at the University of Toronto. "They would not have been aware of them," she says. "These depictions were intended for a select audience."
By the 9th century, 200 years after Mohammed's death, there was a dichotomy between cosmopolitan Muslim culture and "street" Islam, says Northrup.
"There has always been a dichotomy, differences of opinion. It is tragic, because learning and the search for knowledge has always been at the forefront of Islam."
Between then and now, but particularly in the past two centuries, a prohibition against depicting the Prophet in painting or sculpture without, at the very least, veiling his face, spread through the Muslim world.
Though depictions are not expressly forbidden by the Koran, Mohammed himself is recorded as saying, "And who is more unjust than those who try to create the likeness of my creation?"
Over time, a dogma emerged that, as he was but a man, a messenger pointing toward God, his portrayal (or indeed that of any living thing) would distract the faithful away from the worship of God — and "there is no God but Allah."
But are these iconographic images also a form of art in and of themselves? One which should be accessible to all?
To Western eyes, they are creations of the highest artistic order, not merely "relics of history," as some Muslim critics have dismissed them.
By any standard, this painted depiction of Mohammed is hugely different in context from the controversial Danish cartoons. Yet could it still be deemed offensive — when no offence is intended?
`It is good for non-Muslims to see such art, and good for Muslims in Canada to get their education from other than fundamentalists'
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
University of Toronto
Some would say yes, others a vehement no, among them Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, an Iranian-born U of T professor of Islam and modern Middle East history.
"It is good for non-Muslims to see such art, and good for Muslims in Canada to get their education from other than fundamentalists," he says.
A former librarian, he mourns the fact that so many Muslims are unaware of the "fantastic archive of images" that trace their Islamic heritage, specifically citing the "ascension genre" of paintings.
Many are in museums and libraries in the West, but they're also plentiful in the Muslim world, with the largest collection held by Istanbul's Topkapi Museum, in Turkey, an Islamic country with a secular government.
"Many Muslims don't know that while some paintings show the Prophet covered, plenty show him uncovered," says Tavakoli-Targhi. "People have different understandings of art history and different kinds of access to it."
As anyone who has travelled to the Mideast knows, the taboo against Mohammed's portrayal is far from universal.
The prohibition is stricter among Sunni Muslims than Shiites, and is therefore adhered to in varying degrees in various regions.
In Shia Iran, it is common for posters of Mohammed, with his face clear and uncovered, to hang on the walls of houses, Tavakoli-Targhi says.
Iranian Shiites often wear a pendant bearing a picture of Mohammed as a quiet symbol of their devotion to Allah, rather than the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. Depictions appear on street vendors' tables, on cigarette kiosks, on the outside of buildings.
In the Iranian village of Yazlan, says Tavakoli-Targhi, one building is entirely covered with a fresco of Mohammed on his buraq, a fantastical horse-like creature with the head of a human female, shown in the image on this page.
Earlier this month, at the start of the cartoon controversy, U.S. Muslim leaders requested that the marble sculpture of the Prophet holding the Koran be removed from a frieze on the east front of Washington's Supreme Court building.
Along with 17 other great lawgivers over the ages, including Moses, Confucius and Charlemagne, the Prophet has stood there since the building's construction in 1935. Above is the motto, "Justice the Guardian of Liberty."
The court denied the request. The good of retaining Mohammed within the pantheon outweighs the bad, it said. Though the Muslim leaders disagreed, a spokesman said, "they appreciated the thought and the intention behind the sculpture." Whenever dispute arises over a depiction of the Prophet, "intent is a big factor."
Perhaps Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, of London's Lokahi Foundation, which studies religious diversity, should have the last word.
"We are at a crossroads," he recently wrote in The Guardian.
"The time has come for (people) to reject this dangerous division of people into two worlds, to start building bridges based on common values. They must assert the inalienable right to freedom of expression and, at the same time, demand measured exercise of it."
Hence our offering of the painting, but with the face of Mohammed blocked out.
A measured exercise. A bridge, of sorts.