The Extremely Strange History of Artistic Depictions of Muhammad

It is widely known that Islam strongly discourages Muslims from creating anthropomorphic representations of the prophet Muhammad. This tendency towards aniconism isn’t entirely unique to Islam. As I talk about in this article from March 2020, early Christians seem to have been rather hesitant to depict Jesus in art and, as I discuss in this article from May 2020, early Buddhists were similarly hesitant to depict Siddhārtha Gautama.

Nevertheless, in modern times, most Christians generally don’t have a problem with creating images of Jesus and most Buddhists don’t have a problem with creating images of the Gautama Buddha. Most Muslims, however, are strongly opposed to the creation of images of the prophet Muhammad.

There are a number of reasons why Muslims generally oppose images of Muhammad. Nevertheless, not all Muslims are as strict about not making depictions of Muhammad as others and many Muslims artists throughout history have actually created images of him. Let’s take a look at the extremely strange, somewhat disturbing history of representations of the prophet Muhammad.

Why Muslims are generally prohibited from making images of Muhammad

The Quran actually never explicitly says anything about whether or not it is acceptable to create images of Muhammad. There are several reasons, though, why Islam generally discourages Muslims from creating images of Muhammad:

1. In Islam, it is believed that creating images of religious figures is the first step toward idolatry. Islam therefore generally discourages the creation of images of religious figures of any kind.
2. There are no surviving depictions of Muhammad made during his lifetime. Although there are surviving descriptions of Muhammad’s appearance, these are not detailed enough to create a perfectly accurate image of him. Because of this, no image of Muhammad can be perfectly accurate, meaning that any image that purports to represent him is, in some way or another, deceptive.
3. When non-Muslims create images of Muhammad, they usually create ones that portray him in a negative or disrespectful manner.

Sunni Islam, the dominant form of Islam throughout most of the Middle East and the most commonly practiced form of Islam worldwide, tends to be very strict about the rule of not creating images of Muhammad. Shia Islam, on the other hand, tends to be significantly more relaxed when it comes to this particular subject.

Historically, many Shia Muslims have believed that it is permissible to make images of Muhammad in certain contexts as long as those images are respectful and they not used in any manner that could be construed as idolatrous. Many Shia Muslims still produce representations of Muhammad today, although contemporary Shia depictions of Muhammad rarely ever show his face.

Medieval Iranian manuscript illustrations of Muhammad

For roughly the first thousand years of Islam, there was a broad agreement among Muslims that images of Muhammad were forbidden in most contexts. Muslims agreed that Muhammad couldn’t be represented in the form of a statue, since statues were generally associated with idolatry, and they agreed that the Quran could never be illustrated. Nonetheless, they don’t seem to have entirely agreed whether it was categorically wrong to create an image of Muhammad in any context.

Iranian Shia Muslims tended to be the most lenient with regard to depictions of the prophet Muhammad. Notably, Muhammad is often shown in a large number of Iranian manuscript illustrations produced during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. These illustrations usually accompanied works about Islamic history.

ABOVE: Iranian manuscript illustration of Muhammad proclaiming Ali as his successor at Ghadir Khumm, dating to 1307 or 1308, from a manuscript copy of Al-Biruni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations

ABOVE: Medieval Iranian manuscript illustration showing Muhammad (far right) leading the other prophets, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in prayer

ABOVE: Illustration from an Iranian manuscript copy of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh dated to c. 1315, depicting the young Muhammad being recognized by the Christian monk Bahira as a prophet

ABOVE: Illustration from an Iranian manuscript copy of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh dated to c. 1315, depicting Muhammad rededicating the Black Stone at the Kaaba in Mecca

ABOVE: Illustration from an Iranian manuscript copy of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh dated to c. 1315, depicting Muhammad riding on a horse, receiving the surrender of the Banu Nadir

ABOVE: Seventeenth-century Ottoman copy of an illustration from a fourteenth-century Iranian manuscript of Al-Biruni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, depicting Muhammad prohibiting Nasīʾ

Early modern Ottoman manuscript illustrations of Muhammad

The tradition of portraying Muhammad in manuscript illustrations continued into later times as well. For instance, Muhammad is shown in many Ottoman manuscript illustrations as well.

Unlike in the earlier medieval Iranian illustrations, in the Ottoman illustrations, Muhammad’s face is nearly always covered by a white veil. The manuscript illustrators evidently did this deliberately so that they could portray Muhammad in the scenes, doing things, without actually showing what he looked like.

ABOVE: Ottoman manuscript illustration dated to c. 1595 showing Muhammad on Mount Hira with his face completely obscured by a white veil

ABOVE: Ottoman manuscript illustration dated to c. 1594 showing Ali beheading Nadr ibn al-Harith in the presence of Muhammad, whose face is obscured by a white veil

Images of Muhammad in Iran today

Shia Islam has been prominent in Iran since very early in Islamic history, but it became especially dominant in Iran during the Early Modern Period. From 1501 to 1736, Iran was ruled by the Safavid Empire, which promoted Shia Islam as the official state religion. As a result of this history, roughly 90% of people in Iran today are Shia Muslims. The dominance of Shia Islam in Iran has been accompanied by a relative tolerance for images of Muhammad.

Throughout the late twentieth century, images representing Muhammad as a teenager before he became a prophet were widely circulated in Iran. These images, showing Muhammad as a smiling boy wearing a turban, were mass-produced on postcards, posters, banners, stickers, and carpets. It was popularly believed that they were based on a lost painting of Muhammad that had been produced by a Christian artist while the prophet himself was alive.

An analysis published in 2006, however, revealed that these images were actually all ultimately based on a single photograph of a Tunisian boy that was taken sometime between 1904 and 1906 by the Austro-Hungarian photographer Rudolf Franz Lehnert (lived 1878 – 1948). Lehnert also took many nude and semi-nude photographs of young Tunisian women and girls that are frankly at least borderline pornographic. (Such images will not be reproduced here, but you can find some examples of them on Wikimedia Commons.)

Partly in response to the discovery of the embarrassing source of the images of the young Muhammad, in 2008, the Iranian government began trying to suppress them. Many of these images of the young Muhammad have now been destroyed, but you can still find some of them online.

ABOVE: The original Orientalist photograph of the Tunisian boy published in 1905 by Lehnert & Landrock that later became the model for countless Iranian depictions of the young Muhammad

ABOVE: Poster made in Iran in the 1990s representing Muhammad as a young man before he became a prophet, ultimately based on the 1905 photograph of the Tunisian boy

Nevertheless, even as the Iranian government has attempted to crack down on one kind of image of Muhammad, they have been actively promoting other kinds of images of Muhammad. For instance, there are a whole bunch of children’s books produced in Iran within the past two decades that contain depictions of Muhammad.

In nearly all these depictions, however, Muhammad’s face is not clearly shown. For instance, in the illustration below, taken from a contemporary Iranian children’s book, Muhammad is portrayed as a glowing figure with a halo; his face is completely hidden by the light emanating from his body.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Iranian children’s book Greetings, Rose of Muhammad, published in 2006, showing Muhammad receiving revelation from God atop Mount Hira

In the Iranian capital city of Tehran, there is a five-story-tall mural of Muhammad’s ascent into Heaven on the back of the Buraq. The mural was painted in 2008 with the approval of the Iranian government. It is based on an illustration in a manuscript copy of the Khamsa of Niẓāmī Ganjavī (lived c. 1141 – 1209 AD) that was produced sometime between c. 1539 and c. 1543.

In the original sixteenth-century manuscript illustration, Muhammad’s face is completely obscured by a white veil. In the modern mural in Tehran, Muhammad’s face is exposed, but it is left blank and his facial features are not shown.

ABOVE: Illustration of the ascent of Muhammad into Heaven on the back of Buraq from an illustrated manuscript copy of the Khamsa of Niẓāmī Ganjavī dated to between c. 1539 and c. 1543

ABOVE: Five-story-high mural in Tehran painted in 2008 depicting Muhammad’s ascent into Heaven

In 2015, the big-budget Iranian film Muhammad: Messenger of God was released. The film was directed by the Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi and co-written with Kambuzia Partovi. The film is about Muhammad’s childhood and contains numerous scenes in which Muhammad himself appears on scene—although his face is never clearly shown.

The film uses various lighting and camera tricks to avoid showing Muhammad’s actual face. Probably the closest it comes to actually showing his face is a scene near the end in which Muhammad enters a Christian monastery, where he meets the monk Bahira, who recognizes him as a prophet.

ABOVE: Still from the 2015 Iranian film Muhammad: The Messenger of God of the young Muhammad walking into a Christian monastery, where he is recognized by the monk Bahira as a prophet

Addendum: depictions of Muhammad by Christians

It is worth noting that, in addition to being depicted by Muslims, there is a very long, somewhat disturbing history of Muhammad being depicted by Christians. Indeed, Muhammad has had a well-established place in Christian art ever since the Middle Ages. Christians have traditionally viewed Muhammad as a false prophet and a heretic, so, ever since the Middle Ages, they have been creating images of him being brutally tortured in Hell for his sins.

For instance, a fresco of the Last Judgement in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, painted by the Italian artist Giovanni da Modena in 1410, shows Muhammad as an elderly naked man with a long white beard, tied to a rock in Hell, being tortured by a demon. He is identifiable from the other sinners in Hell only by the name “Machomet” written beside him.

ABOVE: The Last Judgment, painted in 1410 by the Italian artist Giovanni da Modena. Muhammad can be seen being tortured by a demon just to the right above Satan’s head

ABOVE: Black-and-white photograph showing Muhammad from Giovanni da Modena’s fresco up close

Although medieval Christian depictions of the punishment of Muhammad don’t all portray him being punished in the same way, eventually, the punishment described in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320) became standard.

In the poem, Dante sees Muhammad being punished as a “schismatic” in the ninth bolgia of the Eighth Circle of Hell. According to Dante, because Muhammad tore apart what God had meant to be whole, he is punished in Hell by being forced to continually tear open his own torso, which has been cut open all the way from his chin to his anus, so that all his guts are always spilling out, dangling between his legs.

Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy produced by Christian artists such as Stradanus (lived 1523 – 1605), William Blake (lived 1757 – 1827), and Gustave Doré (lived 1832 – 1883) depict this punishment in horrifying detail.

I think it goes without saying that Muslims certainly do not approve of these sorts of depictions. Nonetheless, the oldest of them are nearly as old as the oldest Muslim depictions of Muhammad and they are an important, if rather gruesome, part of the history of portrayals of Muhammad in art.

ABOVE: Illustration from 1587 by the Italian Renaissance artist Stradanus, showing Muhammad and other heretics being tortured in Hell. Muhammad can be seen tearing open his own chest with his guts spilling out between his legs.

ABOVE: Illustration made in 1827 by the English artist William Blake, depicting Muhammad being tortured in Hell, tearing open his own torso so his guts can spill out

ABOVE: Illustration made by the French artist Gustave Doré in 1861, showing Muhammad being tortured in Hell, tearing open his own torso