Explainer: Depicting the Prophet

For a figure whose image cannot be depicted according to most Muslim customs, a great deal is known about what the prophet Muhammad is said to have looked like and what his tastes were - much more than Christians, for all their iconography, know about the appearance of Jesus Christ.

That is because the prophet’s life and thoughts, as revealed through the Hadith, or Traditions, is central to Islam and a model for Muslims to emulate. We know Muhammad was middle-sized, had a white, circular face, black eyes, long eyelashes, thick curly hair and a beard. We even know that he had the seal of prophecy, a dark mole the size of a pigeon’s egg, between his shoulder blades.

But what we cannot have, according to tradition, is a graven image. There is no explicit ban in the Qur’an, but to picture him would be to annex God’s creative power and to attempt to depict the sublime. No human being, one correspondent told the writer Malise Ruthven, can ever depict the beauty and grandeur of his countenance.

That is not to say that there are no Islamic images of Muhammad, or traditions in which his picture is allowed. Examples exist from earlier centuries - most notably the 14th century manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Universal History in Edinburgh University Library - but they usually show the prophet’s face veiled or featureless.

In his Short Introduction to Islam, Ruthven writes: "The image of the prophet, literary rather than visual, radiates throughout the Muslim world. Perhaps the very restriction on pictorial representation aids cultural diffusion, allowing peoples of different races and ethnicities to internalize its essential features."