Images and the Prophet Muhammad: What Do the Koran and Islam Say?

Question: Images and the Prophet Muhammad: What Do the Koran and Islam Say?

Controversies have exploded over images depicting the Prophet Muhammad, namely his depiction as a turbaned terrorist in one of a dozen cartoons by Danish artists. Muslims explicitly prohibit images of God, Muhammad, and other prophets—Christians and Jews included. Muslim tradition generally prohibits the representation of the human figure in art. But does the Koran actually ban representations of Muhammad or others?

Answer: The immediate answer is no. There isn’t a single verse in the Koran that explicitly prohibits images of Muhammad—or of Allah, or God, for that matter. And the Prophet Muhammad has been depicted in art frequently in Islamic art, without reprisals. As About’s Austin Cline notes, “We can also find many visual images of Muhammad in European history, all without Muslims rioting and threatening to destroy civil liberties.” (Cline’s image gallery illustrating both points is instructive.)

Images of the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran

Here’s what the Koran does say about images and God:

Chapter 21, verses 52-57: “We formerly bestowed guidance on Abraham, for we knew him well. He said to his father and to his people: ‘what are these images to which you are so devoted?’ They replied: ‘They are the gods our fathers worshipped.’ He said: ‘Then you and your fathers have surely been in evident error.’ ‘Is it the truth that you are preaching,’ they asked, ‘or is this but a jest?’ ‘Indeed,’ he answered,’ your lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth. It was He that made them: to this I bear witness. By the Lord, I will overthrow your idols as soon as you have turned your backs.’ He broke them in pieces, except their supreme god, so that they might return to him.’”

Chapter 42, verse 11: “Creator of the heavens and the earth, he has given you spouses from among yourselves, and cattle male and female; by this means He multiplies His creatures. Nothing can be compared with Him. He alone hears all and sees all.”

The prohibition on idolatry isn’t original to the Koran so much as a restatement of Old and New Testament teachings. But prohibition on idolatry isn’t an outright prohibition on images, whether of God, Muhammad or others. It merely opens the door to interpretation as prohibition.

Prohibitions by Way of Hadith

That’s the door Islamic tradition took by way of the Hadith—the reports of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad and other early Muslims. The Hadith don’t explicitly prohibit images of the Prophet anymore than the Koran does, but the Hadith do forbid the depiction of any living beings, human or animal. The prohibition is related to idolatry. Images of living things would tempt idolatry, which would be blasphemous. The pragmatic, if drastic, short-cut to purity is an outright ban on all such depictions. The Hadith have, in effect, almost as much doctrinal authority as do verses of the Koran, so the implicit edict against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad is, in Islamic dogma, final.

What Muhammad Looked Like

Ironically, it is through the Hadith and the Sunnah (the exemplary habits and ways of the Prophet that are often synonymous with Hadith) that verbal images of Muhammad have been passed down through the ages. According to Karen Armstrong in Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, Muhammad by age 25 “had grown up to be good-looking, with a compact, solid body of average height. His hair and beard were thick and curly and he had a luminous expression which was particularly striking and is mentioned in all the sources. He had a decisive and wholehearted character, which made him give his full attention to whatever he was doing, and this was also expressed in his physical bearing.”