The above image, portraying Muhammad as a boy, circulated widely in Iran throughout the later twentieth century and can read as a hadith in its own way. Hadiths signify the sayings and actions of Muhammad or things said and done in his presence to which he did not object. Though debates over images of Muhammad refer to various sources, the Koran itself is silent on the matter of art. A number of hadiths portray Muhammad condemning visual representation of living things, but the diversity of Muslim interpretive traditions produces a multiplicity of views.
In Iran, iterations of the image became widely available at stores and in numerous products, including postcards, full-size posters, wall hangings, and key chains. This portrait authenticates itself with a hadith-style transmission history that traces its path to us: some prints of the image include a caption claiming that the artist had copied a painting by Bahira, a Christian monk who had seen Muhammad as a youth and recognized him as a future prophet.
The original seventh-century piece is said to remain in an unnamed European museum. Muslims point to a verse in the Koran which features Abraham, whom they regard as a prophet:. Yet there's no ruling in the Koran explicitly forbidding the depiction of the Prophet, according to Prof Mona Siddiqui from Edinburgh University. Instead, the idea arose from the Hadiths - stories about the life and sayings of Muhammad gathered in the years after his death. Siddiqui points to depictions of Muhammad - drawn by Muslim artists - dating from the Mongol and Ottoman empires.
In some of them, Muhammad's facial features are hidden - but it's clear it is him. She says the images were inspired by devotion: "The majority of people drew these pictures out of love and veneration, not intending idolatry. At what point then, did depictions of Muhammad become haram, or forbidden?
Many of the images of Muhammad which date from the s were intended only to be viewed privately, to avoid idolatry, says Christiane Gruber, associate professor of Islamic Art at Michigan University.
Such items included miniatures which showed characters from Islam. Gruber says the advent of mass-circulation print media in the 18th Century posed a challenge. The colonisation of some Muslim lands by European forces and ideas was also significant, she says.
The Islamic response was to emphasise how different their religion was to Christianity, with its history of public iconography, Gruber argues. Pictures of Muhammad started to disappear, and a new rhetoric against depictions emerged. He maintains that the effect of the Hadiths, with their injunctions against any images of living things, is automatically a prohibition on depictions of Muhammad.
He says the medieval images have to be understood in context. These meticulous textual descriptions have functioned for Muslims throughout centuries as an alternative for visual representations. Most Muslims pictured Muhammad as described by his cousin and son-in-law Ali in a famous passage contained in the Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya: a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with black, wavy hair and a rosy complexion, walking with a slight downward lean.
The second half of the description focused on his character: a humble man that inspired awe and respect in everyone that met him. That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
There was an artistic tradition that was particularly popular among Turkish- and Persian-speaking Muslims. Some hilyas were strictly without any figural representation , while others contained a drawing of the Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca, or a rose that symbolized the beauty of the prophet. Framed hilyas graced mosques and private houses well into the 20th century. Hilyas kept the memory of Muhammad fresh for those who wanted to imagine him from mere words.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran.
Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
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