Mohammed — in pictures

Two months ago I was sitting beside the tomb of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, telling a story about the last week of the Prophet’s life. It was detailed enough to paint an imaginary portrait of him and included a mildly ribald joke from one of his wives, told to him on his deathbed when he was racked with fever. This kind of story often perplexes my rationalist friends back home. ‘Why can you describe the Prophet but not draw him?’ ‘Why can you make jokes but not draw cartoons?’ Where does this idea that it is forbidden to represent the Prophet come from?

There is no line in the Koran that forbids it. The whole tradition rests in the Hadith, the collected sayings of the Prophet — in essence what one of his wives or early converts remembered the Prophet Mohammed saying. Number 5963 in al-Bukhari’s multi-volume Hadith recalls him decrying that ‘Whoever makes a picture in this world will be asked to put life into it on the Day of Resurrection, but he will not be able to do so.’

What exactly did he mean? Now you must take a deep breath and dive into the murky waters of Islamic scholarship. On the one hand there are commentators who think this condemns every sketch and photograph ever made and their makers to eternal hellfire (including the snap used in your passport). On the other there are commentators who explain that this prohibition refers only to diabolical artists who attempt to create something with a soul — such as Dr Frankenstein. Still other scholars have pieced together all the relevant Hadith and argue that Mohammed was simply telling a parable to illustrate that mankind — for all its pretensions to creativity — will never make anything as useful or as beautifully compact as even a seed of barley.