Marble Frieze at U.S. Supreme Court Depicts Muhammed

Among ancient lawmakers including Moses, Solomon and Charlemagne featured in a marble frieze on the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. stands the Prophet Muhammed, dressed in long robes and carrying a sword.

His inclusion caused a controversy in 1997, six decades after the panel was carved, when Muslim groups called for the likeness to be sanded down, arguing the portrayal was sacrilegious and defined their faith as one of violence. In response, a top Islamic law scholar instead declared the sculpture an honor bestowed by non-Muslims.

The dispute shows how Islam’s opinions on images of the prophet have rarely been monolithic. The view that all representations of Muhammed are banned, not just those deemed blasphemous, obscures a more nuanced past, before the rise of the militant strains of Islam that ultimately influenced the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Simply depicting Muhammed “has become such a sensitive issue because of the political context and as part of the perceived conflict between Islam and the western world,” said Silvia Naef, a professor of Arab studies at the University of Geneva. “Earlier, it wouldn’t have been such a problem.”

There’s no explicit ban on making or possessing images of Muhammed in the Koran. Attitudes have varied according to time, place and interpretation, said Naef, author of the 2004 book “Is There a Question of Imagery in Islam?”

First Image

Intent is important, too. In searching for a solution to the Supreme Court tussle, Taha Jabir al-Alwani, founder of the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslims that considers issues of Shariah law, examined various religious texts and issued a 28-page formal legal ruling, or fatwa.

It was a great honor, al-Alwani concluded, for the prophet to be represented by non-Muslims among humanity’s greatest legislators. “The essence of what the prophet symbolized, namely law with justice” had been brought to the attention of the American people, he said.

From early in Islam’s history, its art has been dominated by calligraphy and geometric patterns, instead of images of living beings.

“This characteristic of Islam goes back to the fear of returning to paganism, the fear of venerating and worshiping anybody else than God, which goes against the monotheistic nature of Islam,” Naef said in a telephone interview.

That doesn’t mean portrayals of the prophet or other people were entirely absent. Some of the first known illustrations of Muhammad date to about 1307 and are in the library of the University of Edinburgh. They are from the Chronology of Ancient Nations by Persian historian Al-Biruni, which was written in Arabic.

White Veil

Anything produced much earlier would have probably been lost when Mongol warriors sacked Baghdad in 1258 and destroyed the House of Wisdom, said to have been the world’s largest library at the time, according to Christiane Gruber, a professor who specializes in representations of Muhammad at the University of Michigan.

Other images come from the Ottoman empire and illustrated books about the life of Muhammad and his family. They were luxury items, never intended as religious texts.

From the 13th to 15th centuries, artists tended to show Muhammad’s whole face and body. Over the following 300 years, images became more abstract. Sometimes the prophet’s face was obscured by a white veil, other times he’d be represented by a special type of calligraphy or a rose.

Austere Influence

Despite debates over what kinds of images were permissible and in what context, early Islamic theologians -- even the most conservative -- didn’t expressly forbid imagery, including of the prophet, according to Gruber. Their fatwas instead warned believers not to use them to get closer to God, seek his intercession or request a favor.

As art forms began to be consumed by a wider audience, the need to lay down rules was seen as more urgent by some authorities.

In 1926, a local campaign in Egypt sprang up against the planned portrayal of Muhammad in a Turkish film. That led Al- Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world’s leading religious institution based in Cairo, to issue a ruling banning all such depictions, as well as those of the prophet’s close relatives and companions.

More recently, after cartoons of Muhammad were published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, Saudi imams declared that Islam considers caricatures blasphemous and any image of the prophet disrespectful, according to Gruber.

“What today to many Muslims seems the normative view of Islam is in fact a very modern phenomenon that dates back to the 19th century, an Arab Sunni view influenced” by austere forms of the faith such as Wahhabism and Salafism, she said by phone.

“Most Sunni authorities would say there is a ban on images of the prophet but this ban is very recent,” said Vanessa Van Renterghem, a researcher at the Institut Francais du Proche Orient in Beirut, by phone. “Islam is an object of history, it evolves, including the interdictions.”