Depictions of Muhammad

The permissibility of depictions of Muhammad in Islam has been a contentious issue. Oral and written descriptions of Muhammad are readily accepted by all traditions of Islam, but there is disagreement about visual depictions.^[1][2] The Quran does not explicitly or implicitly forbid images of Muhammad. The ahadith (supplemental teachings) present an ambiguous picture,^[3][4] but there are a few that have explicitly prohibited Muslims from creating visual depictions of human figures.^[5] It is agreed on all sides that there is no authentic visual tradition (pictures created during Muhammad's lifetime) as to the appearance of Muhammad, although there are early legends of portraits of him, and written physical descriptions whose authenticity is often accepted.

The question of whether images in Islamic art, including those depicting Muhammad, can be considered as religious art remains a matter of contention among scholars.^[6] They appear in illustrated books that are normally works of history or poetry, including those with religious subjects; the Quran is never illustrated: "context and intent are essential to understanding Islamic pictorial art. The Muslim artists creating images of Muhammad, and the public who beheld them, understood that the images were not objects of worship. Nor were the objects so decorated used as part of religious worship".^[7]

However, scholars concede that such images have "a spiritual element", and were also sometimes used in informal religious devotions celebrating the day of the

In Islam, although nothing in the Quran explicitly bans images, some supplemental hadith explicitly ban the drawing of images of any living creature; other hadith tolerate images, but never encourage them. Hence, most Muslims avoid visual depictions of any prophet or messenger such as Muhammad, Moses, and Abraham.^[1][17][18]

Most Sunni Muslims believe that visual depictions of all the prophets and messengers should be prohibited^[19] and are particularly averse to visual representations of Muhammad.^[20] The key concern is that the use of images can encourage shirk or "idolatry".^[21] In Shia Islam, however, images of Muhammad are quite common nowadays even though historically, Shia scholars opposed such depictions.^[20][a] Still, many Muslims who take a stricter view of the supplemental traditions will sometimes challenge any depiction of Muhammad, including those created and published by non-Muslims.^[22]

Many major religions have experienced times during their history when

Several ahadith and other writings of the early Islamic period include stories in which portraits of Muhammad appear. Abu Hanifa Dinawari, ibn al-Faqih, Ibn Wahshiyya, and Abu Nu'aym al-Isfahani tell versions of a story in which the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius is visited by two Meccans. He shows them a cabinet, handed down to him from Alexander the Great and created by God for Adam, each of whose drawers contains a portrait of a prophet. They are astonished to see a portrait of Muhammad in the final drawer. Sadid al-Din al-Kazaruni tells a similar story in which the Meccans are visiting the king of China. Al-Kisa'i tells that God did indeed give portraits of the prophets to Adam.^[24]

Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu Nuʿaym al-Isfahani tell a second story in which a Meccan merchant visiting Syria is invited to a Christian monastery where several sculptures and paintings depict prophets and saints. There he sees the images of Muhammad and Abu Bakr, as yet unidentified by the Christians.^[25] In an 11th-century story, Muhammad is said to have sat for a portrait by an artist retained by Sasanian emperor Kavad II. The emperor liked the portrait so much that he placed it on his pillow.^[24]

Later, al-Maqrizi tells a story in which al-Muqawqis, the ruler of Egypt, met with Muhammad's envoy. He asked the envoy to describe Muhammad and checked the description against a portrait of an unknown prophet which he had on a piece of cloth. The description matches the portrait.^[24]

In a 17th-century

In one of the earliest sources, ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, there are numerous verbal descriptions of Muhammad. One description sourced to Ali is as follows:

[H]e was neither too tall nor too short, rather he was of medium height among people. His hair was neither short and curly, nor was it long and straight, it hung in waves. His face was neither fleshy nor plump, but it had a roundness; rosy white, with very dark eyes and long eyelashes. He was large-boned as well as broad shouldered, hairless except for a thin line that stretched down his chest to his navel. His hand and feet were coarse. When he walked he would lean forward as if descending a hill [...] Between his two shoulders was the Seal of Prophethood, and he was the Seal of the Prophets.^[27][28]

From the

• 
  Hilye by Hâfiz Osman
• 
  Hilye by Hâfiz Osman
• 
  Hilye by Hâfiz Osman
• 
  Hilye by Mehmed Tahir Efendi (d. 1848)
• 
  Hilye by Kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi (1801–1876)
• 
  Hilye by Kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi
• 
  Hilye inscribed on the petals of a pink rose symbolising Muhammad (18th century)

Calligraphic representations

The most common visual representation of the Muhammad in Islamic art, especially in Arabic-speaking areas, is by a calligraphic representation of his name, a sort of monogram in roughly circular form, often given a decorated frame. Such inscriptions are normally in Arabic, and may rearrange or repeat forms, or add a blessing or honorific, or for example the word "messenger" or a contraction of it. The range of ways of representing Muhammad's name is considerable, including ambigrams; he is also frequently symbolised by a rose.

The more elaborate versions relate to other Islamic traditions of special forms of calligraphy such as those writing the names of God, and the secular tughra or elaborate monogram of Ottoman rulers.

• 
  Muhammad's name in Thuluth, an Arabic calligraphic script; the smaller writing in the top left means "Peace be upon him".
• 
  Calligraphic representation of Muhammad's name, painted on the wall of a mosque in Edirne in Turkey
• 
  Calligraphy tile from Turkey (18th century), containing the names of God, Muhammad, and his first four successors, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali
• 
  Late 18th- or early 19th-century calligraphic panel by Mustafa Rakim
• 
  Mirror calligraphy of Muhammad's name
• 
  Decoupage calligraphy (18th or 19th century) with Muhammad's name in mirror script, top centre; the area below represents a mihrab, or prayer niche.
• 
  Palestinian pottery calligraphy featuring the names of God (الله) and Muhammad (محمد)
• 
  Ambigram – Muhammad (محمد) upside down is read as Ali (علي), and vice versa.
• 
  Fourfold Muhammad in square (or geometric) Kufic script, often used as a tilework pattern in Islamic architecture
• 
  Geometric Kufic from the Bou Inania Madrasa (Meknes); the text reads بركة محمد or baraka muḥammad, i.e. be blessed Muhammad.
• 
  Tile from a 14th-century mausoleum in Uzbekistan, inscribed with Muhammad's name (محمد) in square Kufic; one of a set used to frame a doorway
• 
  Mosque cupola, with Quranic inscriptions and Kufic representations of Allah's and Muhammad's names worked into the tiling
• 
  Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi, Kazakhstan
• 
  Banna'i on the Royal Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, with square Kufic repeats of Muhammad's and Ali's names

Figurative visual depictions

Throughout Islamic history, depictions of Muhammad in Islamic art were rare.

Topkapi Palace Library H. 841, attributed to Konya 1200–1250) contains the two earliest known Islamic depictions of Muhammad.^[35]

This book dates to before or just around the time of the

Mongol invasion of Anatolia in the 1240s, and before the campaigns against Persia and Iraq of the 1250s, which destroyed great numbers of books in libraries. Recent scholarship has noted that, although surviving early examples are now uncommon, generally human figurative art was a continuous tradition in Islamic lands (such as in literature, science, and history); as early as the 8th century, such art flourished during the Abbasid Caliphate (c. 749 - 1258, across Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and Persia).^[36]

Christiane Gruber traces a development from "veristic" images showing the whole body and face, in the 13th to 15th centuries, to more "abstract" representations in the 16th to 19th centuries, the latter including the representation of Muhammad by a special type of

Sufi thought. In some cases the inscription appears to have been an underpainting that would later be covered by a face or veil, so a pious act by the painter, for his eyes alone, but in others it was intended to be seen.^[34] According to Gruber, a good number of these paintings later underwent iconoclastic mutilations, in which the facial features of Muhammad were scratched or smeared, as Muslim views on the acceptability of veristic images changed.^[38]

A number of extant Persian manuscripts representing Muhammad date from the

Jalayrid period of Shia rulers.^[41]

Mount Hira (16th-century Ottoman illustration of the Siyer-i Nebi

)

Depictions of Muhammad are also found in Persian manuscripts in the following

Murat III for his son, the future Mehmed III, containing over 800 illustrations.^[42]

Probably the commonest narrative scene represented is the

Mi'raj; according to Gruber, "There exist countless single-page paintings of the meʿrāj included in the beginnings of Persian and Turkish romances and epic stories produced from the beginning of the 15th century to the 20th century".^[43] These images were also used in celebrations of the anniversary of the Mi'raj on 27 Rajab, when the accounts were recited aloud to male groups: "Didactic and engaging, oral stories of the ascension seem to have had the religious goal of inducing attitudes of praise among their audiences". Such practices are most easily documented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but manuscripts from much earlier appear to have fulfilled the same function.^[44] Otherwise a large number of different scenes may be represented at times, from Muhammad's birth to the end of his life, and his existence in Paradise.^[45]

Halo

In the earliest depictions Muhammad may be shown with or without a

prophets of Islam

, and Muhammad's wives and relations, may be treated in similar ways if they also appear.

T. W. Arnold (1864–1930), an early historian of Islamic art, stated that "Islam has never welcomed painting as a handmaid of religion as both Buddhism and Christianity have done. Mosques have never been decorated with religious pictures, nor has a pictorial art been employed for the instruction of the heathen or for the edification of the faithful."^[13] Comparing Islam to Christianity, he also writes: "Accordingly, there has never been any historical tradition in the religious painting of Islam – no artistic development in the representation of accepted types – no schools of painters of religious subjects; least of all has there been any guidance on the part of leaders of religious thought corresponding to that of ecclesiastical authorities in the Christian Church."^[13]

Images of Muhammad remain controversial to the present day, and are not considered acceptable in many countries in the Middle East. For example, in 1963 an account by a Turkish author of a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca was banned in Pakistan because it contained reproductions of miniatures showing Muhammad unveiled.^[49]

• 
  Mohammed receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Illustration on vellum in Jami' al-tawarikh by Rashid al-Din Hamadani, Tabriz, Persia, 1307.
• 
  The Investiture of

  Ilkhanid

  manuscript illustration, 1308-1309.
• 
  Mohammad (riding the horse) receiving the submission of the

  Jami Al-Tawarikh

  . 1314 - 1315.
• 
  Muhammad meets the monk

  Rashid Al-Din), a manuscript in the Library of the University of Edinburgh; illustrated in Tabriz, Muzaffarid

  period, c. 1315.
• 
  Miniature of Muhammad rededicating the

  Jami Al-Tawarikh

  , c. 1315
• 
  Muhammad at the Battle of Badr. From the Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1388.
• 
  Muhammad and his wife Aisha freeing the daughter of a tribal chief. From the Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1388.
• 
  Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation; in the

  Majmac al-tawarikh (Compendium of Histories), Timurid, Herat, Afghanistan

  , Muhammad is shown with veiled face. c. 1425.
• 
  Journey of the Prophet Muhammad in the Majmac al-tawarikh (Compendium of Histories), Timurid. Herat, Afghanistan, c. 1425.
• 
  Musa va 'Uj, a painting showing Muhammad veiled, surrounded by his successors, and enclosed in a flaming nimbus, 1460s
• 
  Muhammad's ascent into the Heavens, a journey known as the

  Saadi

  , 1514
• 
  An image from the Houghton Shahnameh (Metropolitan Museum of Art), dated 1530 - 1535
• 
  A miraj image, reflecting the new,

  Safavid

  convention of depicting Muhammad veiled, dated 1539 - 1543
• 
  Muhammad and Khadija performing the first wudu, as illustrated in the Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1594
• 
  companions. From the Siyer-i Nebi

  , 1594.
• 
  Birth of Muhammad, from Siyer-i Nebi, an Ottoman manuscript, probably by Nakkaş Osman, 1595
• 
  Muhammad advancing on Mecca, with the angels

  Azrail

  , 1595
• 
  Muhammad removes a dragon from the Kaaba. From the Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1595.
• 
  The death of Muhammad. From the Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1595.
• 
  "Muhammad at the Ka'ba" from the Siyer-i Nebi.^[50] Muhammad is shown with veiled face, c. 1595.
• 
  The destruction of idols at the

  aureole. From Hamla-i haydarî ("Haydar's Battle"), Kashmir

  , 1808.
• 
  "Mohammed's Paradise", Persian miniature from The History of Mohammed,

  BnF, Kashmir

  , 1808

Contemporary Iran

Despite the avoidance of the representation of Muhammad in Sunni Islam, images of Muhammad are not uncommon in Iran. The Iranian Shi'ism seems more tolerant on this point than Sunnite orthodoxy.[51] In Iran, depictions have considerable acceptance to the present day, and may be found in the modern forms of the poster and postcard.^[12][52]

Since the late 1990s, experts in Islamic iconography discovered images, printed on paper in Iran, portraying Muhammad as a teenager wearing a turban.^[51] There are several variants, all show the same juvenile face, identified by an inscription such as "Muhammad, the Messenger of God", or a more detailed legend referring to an episode in the life of Muhammad and the supposed origin of the image.^[51] Some Iranian versions of these posters attributed the original depiction to a Bahira, a Christian monk who met the young Muhammad in Syria. By crediting the image to a Christian and predating it to the time before Muhammad became a prophet, the manufacturers of the image exonerate themselves from any wrongdoing.^[53]

The motif was taken from a photograph of a young Tunisian taken by the Germans Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock in 1905 or 1906, which had been printed in high editions on picture post cards till 1921.^[51] This depiction has been popular in Iran as a form of curiosity.^[53]

In Tehran, a mural depicting the prophet – his face veiled – riding Buraq was installed at a public road intersection in 2008, the only mural of its kind in a Muslim-majority country.^[12]

Cinema

Main article: Muhammad in film

Very few films have been made about Muhammad. The 1976 film

Abu Sufyan

as on-screen protagonists to advance the story.

A devotional cartoon called

Muhammad

. It is the first part of the trilogy film series on Muhammad by Majid Majidi.

While

Shi'a scholars have taken a more relaxed attitude, stating that it is permissible to depict Muhammad, even in television or movies, if done with respect.^[56]

Depiction by non-Muslims

The earliest depiction of Muhammad in the West is found in a 12th-century manuscript of the

Hermann of Carinthia's introduction to his translation of the Kitab al-Anwar of Abu al-Hasan Bakri.^[57] The image is intentionally defamatory, portraying Muhammad with a bearded human face and a fish-like body. It is perhaps inspired by Horace's Ars poetica, wherein the poet imagines "a woman, lovely above, foully ended in an ugly fish below" and asks if you would "restrain your laughter, my friends, if admitted to this private view?", a passage alluded to by Peter the Venerable in his account of Islam in the Corpus. This depiction, however, did not set the paradigm for later depictions.^[58]

Western representations of Muhammad were very rare until the explosion of images following the invention of the

Dante's Divine Comedy

. Dante placed Muhammad in Hell, with his entrails hanging out (Canto 28):

No barrel, not even one where the hoops and staves go every which way, was ever split open like one frayed Sinner I saw, ripped from chin to where we fart below.
His guts hung between his legs and displayed His vital organs, including that wretched sack Which converts to shit whatever gets conveyed down the gullet.
As I stared at him he looked back And with his hands pulled his chest open, Saying, "See how I split open the crack in myself! See how twisted and broken Muhammad is! Before me walks Ali, his face Cleft from chin to crown, grief–stricken."^[59]

This scene was sometimes shown in illustrations of the

Bologna, Italy^[60] and artwork by Salvador Dalí, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, and Gustave Doré.^[61]

Muhammad sometimes figures in Western depictions of groups of influential people in world history. Such depictions tend to be favourable or neutral in intent; one example can be found at the

United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Created in 1935, the frieze includes major historical lawgivers, and places Muhammad alongside Hammurabi, Moses, Confucius, and others. In 1997, a controversy erupted surrounding the frieze, and tourist materials have since been edited to describe the depiction as "a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor Muhammad" that "bears no resemblance to Muhammad."^[62]

In 1955, a statue of Muhammad was removed from a courthouse in New York City after the ambassadors of Indonesia, Pakistan, and Egypt requested its removal.^[63] The extremely rare representations of Muhammad in monumental sculpture are especially likely to be offensive to Muslims, as the statue is the classic form for idols, and a fear of any hint of idolatry is the basis of Islamic prohibitions. Islamic art has almost always avoided large sculptures of any subject, especially free-standing ones; only a few animals are known, mostly fountain-heads, like those in the Lion Court of the Alhambra; the Pisa Griffin is perhaps the largest.

In 1992, Muhammad was depicted in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic entitled The Black Stone in which the turtles visit Mecca and are accused of stealing the Black Stone.^[64]

In 1997, the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group in the United States, wrote to United States Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist requesting that the sculpted representation of Muhammad on the north frieze inside the Supreme Court building be removed or sanded down. The court rejected CAIR's request.^[65]

In 2015, a

djinn in a mosque who is drawn to the sound of Qur'an recitation and wishes to learn more about Islam. The two then embark on a journey through time and space as the story of the Qur'an unfolds. The nameless protagonist, not Muhammad, is the man on the book's cover. Muhammad does appear and even speaks to the two main characters, but he is depicted as a cloaked figure without a face.^[67]

No major controversy followed the publication of this book.

• 
  Muhammad, seated on the left, possibly reading from the Quran, as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle^[68]
• 
  Early Renaissance

  Inferno

  . Muhammad is depicted being dragged down to Hell.
• 
  Muhammed and the Monk Sergius (Bahira). This 1508 engraving by the Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden shows a legend that circulated in Europe.
• 
  Portrait of Muhammad as a generic "Easterner", from the PANSEBEIA, or A View of all Religions in the World by Alexander Ross (1683)
• 
  Illustration from La vie de Mahomet, by M. Prideaux, published in 1699. It shows Muhammad holding a sword and a crescent while trampling on a globe, a cross, and the Ten Commandments.
• 
  An engraving of Muhammad in The Life of Mahomet (1719)
• 
  Inferno

  (1827)
• 
  Muhammad suffering punishment in Hell. From Gustave Doré's illustrations of the Divine Comedy (1861)
• 
  Muhammad as depicted by sculptor

  Washington, DC carrying a sword and the Quran
• 
  Пророк Магомет (Mohammed the Prophet) by Nicholas Roerich, 1925

Controversies in the 20th and 21st centuries

The 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by controversies over depictions of Muhammad, not only for recent caricatures or cartoons, but also regarding the display of historical artwork.

In a story on morals at the end of the millennium in December 1999, the German news magazine Der Spiegel printed on the same page pictures of “moral apostles” Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius, and Immanuel Kant. In the subsequent weeks, the magazine received protests, petitions and threats against publishing the picture of Muhammad. The Turkish TV-station Show TV broadcast the telephone number of an editor who then received daily calls.^[69]

Nadeem Elyas, leader of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany said that the picture should not be printed again in order to avoid hurting the feelings of Muslims intentionally. Elyas recommended to whiten the face of Muhammad instead.^[70]

In June 2001, the Spiegel with consideration of Islamic laws published a picture of Muhammed with a whitened face on its title page.^[71] The same picture of Muhammad by Hosemann had been published by the magazine once before in 1998 in a special edition on Islam, but then without evoking similar protests.^[72]

In 2002, Italian police reported that they had disrupted a terrorist plot to destroy the

Church of San Petronio in Bologna, which contains a 15th-century fresco depicting an image of Muhammad being dragged to hell by a demon (see above).^[60][73]

Examples of depictions of Muhammad being altered include a 1940 mural at the University of Utah having the name of Muhammad removed from beneath the painting in 2000 at the request of Muslim students.^[74]

Sketch in Senang magazine

In 1990, the Indonesian magazine Senang published a letter to the editor by a reader who claimed to have dreamed of Muhammad. The letter was accompanied by a sketch by the magazine's resident artist featuring a "turbaned, faceless figure." No major repercussions immediately followed. However, soon afterwards, there was a separate controversy in which a Christian-owned Indonesian magazine named Monitor published the results of a readers' poll about "most-admired leaders" that put Suharto at number 1 and Muhammad at number 11. The wake of this scandal led to a crackdown on "insulting Muhammad" in general, and so police announced they were investigating Senang and would attempt to track down the author of the letter. Before anything further could happen, Senang voluntarily offered to cease publication.^[75][76]

Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy

In 2005, Danish newspaper

editorial cartoons, many of which depicted Muhammad. In late 2005 and early 2006, Danish Muslim organizations ignited the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy through public protests and by spreading knowledge of the publication of the cartoons.^[23] According to John Woods, Islamic history professor at the University of Chicago, it was not simply the depiction of Muhammad that was offensive, but the implication that Muhammad was somehow a supporter of terrorism.^[18] In Sweden, an online caricature competition was announced in support of Jyllands-Posten, but Foreign Affairs Minister Laila Freivalds and the Swedish Security Service pressured the internet service provider to shut the page down. In 2006, when her involvement was revealed to the public, she had to resign.^[77] On 12 February 2008 the Danish police arrested three men alleged to be involved in a plot to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists.^[78]

South Park

In 2006, the controversial American

Islamic world. The creators of South Park reacted by instead satirizing Comedy Central's double standard for broadcast acceptability by including a segment of "Cartoon Wars Part II" in which American president George W. Bush and Jesus defecate on the flag of the United States

.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was a protest against those who threatened violence against artists who drew representations of Muhammad. It began as a protest against the action of Comedy Central in forbidding the broadcast of the South Park episode "201" in response to death threats against some of those responsible for the segment. Observance of the day began with a drawing posted on the Internet on April 20, 2010, accompanied by text suggesting that "everybody" create a drawing representing Muhammad, on May 20, 2010, as a protest against efforts to limit freedom of speech.^{[citation needed]}

Lars Vilks Muhammad drawings controversy

The Lars Vilks Muhammad drawings controversy began in July 2007 with a series of drawings by Swedish artist Lars Vilks which depicted Muhammad as a roundabout dog. Several art galleries in Sweden declined to show the drawings, citing security concerns and fear of violence. The controversy gained international attention after the Örebro-based regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published one of the drawings on August 18 to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion.^[81]

While several other leading Swedish newspapers had published the drawings already, this particular publication led to protests from

Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC).^[87] The controversy occurred about one and a half years after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy

in Denmark in early 2006.

Another controversy emerged in September 2007 when Bangladeshi cartoonist Arifur Rahman was detained on suspicion of showing disrespect to Muhammad. The interim government confiscated copies of the Bengali-language Prothom Alo in which the drawings appeared. The cartoon consisted of a boy holding a cat conversing with an elderly man. The man asks the boy his name, and he replies "Babu". The older man chides him for not mentioning the name of Muhammad before his name. He then points to the cat and asks the boy what it is called, and the boy replies "Muhammad the cat".

The cartoon caused a firestorm in Bangladesh, with militant

Islamists demanding that Rahman be executed for blasphemy. A group of people torched copies of the paper and several Islamic groups protested, saying the drawings ridiculed Muhammad and his companions. They demanded "exemplary punishment" for the paper's editor and the cartoonist. Bangladesh does not have a blasphemy law

, although one had been demanded by the same fundamentalist Islamic groups.

Wikipedia article

In 2008, around 180,000 people, many of them Muslims, signed a petition protesting against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in the English Wikipedia's Muhammad article.^[88][89][90]

Nasīʾ

.

The petition opposed a reproduction of a 17th-century Ottoman copy of a 14th-century

Nasīʾ.^[91] Jeremy Henzell-Thomas of The American Muslim deplored the petition as one of "these mechanical knee-jerk reactions [which] are gifts to those who seek every opportunity to decry Islam and ridicule Muslims and can only exacerbate a situation in which Muslims and the Western media seem to be locked in an ever-descending spiral of ignorance and mutual loathing."^[92]

Wikipedia considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images.

not censor itself for the benefit of any one group.^[93]

Charlie Hebdo

See also: Charlie Hebdo shooting

Je Suis Charlie and the title "All is forgiven."^[94]

On 2 November 2010, the office of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo at Paris was attacked with a firebomb and its website hacked, after it had announced plans to publish a special edition with Muhammad as its “chief editor”, and the title page with a cartoon of Muhammad had been pre-issued on social media.^{[citation needed]}

In September 2012, the newspaper published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammad, some of which feature nude caricatures of him. In January 2013, Charlie Hebdo announced that they would make a comic book on the life of Muhammad.^[95] In March 2013, Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, commonly known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), released a hit list in an edition of their English-language magazine Inspire. The list included Stéphane Charbonnier, Lars Vilks, three Jyllands-Posten employees involved in the Muhammad cartoon controversy, Molly Norris from the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day and others whom AQAP accused of insulting Islam.^[96]

On 7 January 2015, the office was

Robert Spencer, was the scene of a shooting by two individuals who were later themselves shot and killed outside the event.^[97] Police officers assisting in security at the event returned fire and killed the two gunmen. The event offered a $10,000 prize and was said to be in response to the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo. One of the gunmen was identified as a former terror suspect, known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.^[98]

On 16 October 2020, middle-school teacher Samuel Paty was killed and beheaded after showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Muhammad during a class discussion on freedom of speech.^[99]

In March 2021 a teacher at

Communities Secretary, Robert Jenrick, said teachers should be able to "appropriately show images of the prophet" in class and the protests are "deeply unsettling" due to the UK being a "free society". He added teachers should "not be threatened" by religious extremists.^[101]

Other incidents

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2010 confirmed to the New York Post that it had quietly removed all historic paintings which contained depictions of Muhammad from public exhibition. The Museum quoted objections on the part of conservative Muslims which were "under review". The museum's action was criticized as excessive political correctness, as were other decisions taken close to the same time, including the renaming of the "Primitive Art Galleries" to the "Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas" and the projected "Islamic Galleries" to "Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia".^[102]

In December 2022, Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota did not renew the contract of an adjunct professor over an October 2022 global art history class showing Medieval-era paintings of Muhammad, despite the professor providing a content warning and allowing students to opt-out of the viewing. In response to criticism from the university's Muslim Students Association chapter, Hamline's Vice President for Inclusive Excellence criticized the incident as Islamophobic.^[103] The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, PEN America, Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Council on American–Islamic Relations all issued statements supporting the professor's academic freedom.^[104] In January 2023, the professor sued for religious discrimination and defamation, prompting Hamline University officials to retract their accusations of Islamophobia.^[105]

See also

• Qadam Rasul
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• 2006 Idomeneo controversy

General:

• Censorship in Islamic societies
• Criticism of Muhammad

Notes

Footnotes

1. ^ Thomas Walker Arnold says "It was not merely Sunni schools of law but Shia jurists also who fulminated against this figured art. Because the Persians are Shiites, many Europeans writers have assumed that the Shia sect had not the same objection to representing living being as the rival set of the Sunni; but such an opinion ignores the fact that Shiisum did not become the state church in Persia until the rise of the Safivid dynasty at the beginning of the 16th century."^{[citation needed]}

Citations

1. ^
   JSTOR 860736
   .
2. ISBN 9780714831763
   .
3. ^ The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of the Prophet, 9 January 2015, Christiane Gruber, University of Michigan]
4. ^ Professor Christiane Gruber Beyond Belief
5. ^ What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, John L. Esposito - 2011 p. 14; for hadith see Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith: 7.834, 7.838, 7.840, 7.844, 7.846.
6. ^ Gruber (2010), p. 27.
7. ISBN 978-0-8160-4887-8
8. ^ Gruber (2010), p.27 (quote) and 43.
9. ^ Gruber (2005), pp. 239, 247–253.
10. ISBN 978-0-8225-8744-6
    . Retrieved 14 November 2011.
11. ISBN 978-0-06-123135-3
    . Retrieved 14 November 2011.
12. ^
    ISBN 978-0-253-00894-7. See also [1] and [2]
    .
13. ^
    ISBN 978-1-931956-91-8
    .
14. ^
    ISBN 978-90-04-08655-5
    . Retrieved 14 November 2011.
15. ^
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28. ISBN 978-0-87365-840-9
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32. ^ Quran 21:107
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38. ^ Gruber (2005), 229
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45. ^ The birth is rare, but appears in an early manuscript in Edinburgh
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58. ^ Avinoam Shalem, "Introduction", in Constructing the Image of Muhammad in Europe (De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 4–7 (fn5 attributes this discussion to Heather Coffey).
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References

• ISBN 978-1-931956-91-8
  .
• Ali, Wijdan, M. Kiel; N. Landman; H. Theunissen (eds.), "From the Literal to the Spiritual: The Development of Prophet Muhammad's Portrayal from 13th Century Ilkhanid Miniatures to 17th Century Ottoman Art" (PDF), Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Turkish Art, vol. 7, no. 1–24, The Netherlands: Utrecht, p. 7, archived from the original (PDF) on 2004-12-03
• Grabar, Oleg, The Story of Portraits of the Prophet Muhammad, in Studia Islamica, 2004, p. 19 onwards.
• "Gruber (2005)", Gruber, Christiane, Representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic painting, in Gülru Necipoğlu, Karen Leal eds.,
  ISBN 90-04-17589-X, 9789004175891, google books
• "Gruber (2010)", Gruber, Christiane J., The Prophet's ascension: cross-cultural encounters with the Islamic mi'rāj tales, Christiane J. Gruber, Frederick Stephen Colby (eds), Indiana University Press, 2010,
  ISBN 978-0-253-35361-0, google books
• "Gruber (Iranica)", Gruber, Christiane, "MEʿRĀJ ii. Illustrations", in
  Encyclopedia Iranica, 2009, online

Further reading

• Gruber, Christiane J.; Shalem, Avinoam (eds), The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, De Gruyter, 2014,
  ISBN 9783110312386, google books, Introduction
• Gruber, Christiane J., "Images", in: Fitzpatrick, Coeli; Walker, Adam Hani (eds), Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014,
  ISBN 9781610691772, google books

External links

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• Devotion in pictures: Muslim popular iconography, University of Bergen
• "Religious" Paintings in Islamic Art
• Mohammed Image Archive: Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History
• Muhammad in Dante's Inferno 28