RELIGIONS AND FIGURATVE REPRESENTATION

During the 2005-2006 Cartoons Controversy, Qaradawi averred that the representation of the Prophet of Islam had been forbidden by the Ijma^[1] of the early centuries jurisconsults of Islam. Singling the ijma, only the third source of Sharia^[2] law in Sunni Islam for reference, points to a dearth of Quranic text or explicit statements to the point in the hadith. Though the texts have little to say, it must be pointed out that known representations of Prophet Muhammad appeared late, the earliest one appearing in a manuscript painted in Konya, in Anatolia circa 1250. This does not exclude the possibility of earlier images, unlikely though it be. Representations of scenes of the life of the Prophet of Islam, for instance the Battle of Badr  in Rashid al-Din^[3]'s Compendium of Chronicles (1315) went on appearing until the 18th century. However, these images illustrated historical, literary, sometimes mystical works but they had no bearings on the ritual practice of Islam.

The popular art that flourished in the 19th century and spread via lithography had at first no qualms about reproducing those scenes. While Muhammad may on occasion have been bodily represented, he was mostly shown allusively, notably through calligraphy, often inserting an Arabic script of his name in a frame, his family tree, his shoe print or his tomb. Swiss ethnologists Pierre and Micheline Centlivres refer to an “absent presence”.

With the advent of moving pictures, the representation conundrum arose with vexing regularity. In 1926, a first project proposed to cast Yusuf Wahbi^[4] in the role of Muhammad. However, a media campaign saw to it that the film never got off the ground: Al-Azhar's ulama asserted in a fatwa that the representation of all holy figures is forbidden and Fuad^[5], the king of Egypt threatened to strip the actor from his Egyptian nationality. As from 1947, a law forbade Egyptian filmmakers to represent Prophet Muhammad, his family, the four first caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali), or his closest companions, be it in a symbolic manner, say filming a shadow. Thirty years later, the film Al-Risâla (The Message, 1976-77), by Syro-American director Moustapha Akkad^[6], part-funded by Libya, observed to the letter the principles stated in the Egyptian law: none of the leading characters is shown, and neither is their voice heard. The destruction of idols in the Kaaba^[7] after the conquest of Mecca in 630 is perpetrated in the film by Muhammad's unmanned stick, seen darting above his camel's neck. This was not the director's original conception but the answer he found to the negative reaction the project elicited from many predominantly Muslim countries – so troubling for the whole Muslim community is the portrayal by an actor of he who is the example of perfection. In 2009 and again in 2013 the media group Alnoor Holding announced the production of a “Hollywood style” film about Muhammad's life aimed at countering Islamophobic productions such as Innocence of Muslims. This project has not materialised to date though a series on Hassan and Hussain, the Prophet's grandsons came out in 2011.

Our present age of image constantly raises the issue, not least where children are concerned, hence the necessity felt here and there to offset “Western imagery” with values held in the predominantly Muslim world and to retell, among other things, the birth of Islam and the life of its Prophet: in Muhammad: The Last Prophet (2002) – an animation realised by Richard Rich^[8], who directed for Disney – a fictional character retells the high deeds of the Prophet Muhammad with not one member of his retinue to be seen. The life of the Prophet released by Zeinab Zamzam^[9] for the Egyptian television network is part of a series treating all the prophets of the Quran in which clay figurines are used to represent ordinary people. Muhammad and his companions, however, are represented by ellipsoidal light halos; their speech consists in quotes from Quranic verses or passages from the hadith applicable to the situation. Both these productions present no technical or visual differences with run of the mill productions aimed at a young audience were it not for the peculiar processes aimed at “representation without representing”.

These examples bespeak a course of image avoidance rather than destruction. It is not that images of Prophet Muhammad were suppressed; rather the standard bearers of the Muslim faith simply did not produce any, giving precedence to the text, al-Kitab^[10]. “The Christian revolution is the first and only monotheist doctrine to have made the image the symbol of its power and the instrument of all its conquests” (Marie-José Mondzain). It is therefore more appropriate to define the Islamic faith as aniconic, “imageless” – at least in its cultural praxis.

Remains the question of images produced by non-Muslims. In 1997, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) protested the representation of Muhammad in low-relief in the main chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the United States in Washington where the American sculptor Adolph A. Weinman^[11] had included the Prophet among the eighteen major lawmakers of humankind in his 1935 work. A fatwa was accordingly requested from Taha Jabir Al-Alwani^[12], the president of the Fiqh Council of North America and an Al Azhar scholar who specialised in jurisprudence for Muslim minorities. For Al-Alwani, Islam is a civilisation of the word, as opposed to our Western civilisation of the image. He noted that the Quran does not address the question and explained that it was necessary to understand the deeper meaning of the hadith, replacing them in a chronological context when great was the fear of finding Muslims relapsing into “idolatry”. He dwelt on the famous episode according to which the Prophet had allegedly got cross upon sighting figurative patterns on curtains hung by Aïsha, his favourite wife. In most versions of this text, Muhammad ends up accepting the cushions his wife later turned them into for what one sits on or treads upon could not be the object of veneration. Only in one instance is it stated that he loathed all kinds of images, regardless of the place or support where they could be seen.

In Al-Alwani's view, this had to do with the fear of idolatry, not with a fundamental opposition to figural representation. Therefore, according to him, there is no indiscriminate aversion towards images. Before issuing his final finding, he calls to attention the fact that the frieze also shows two other prophets of Islam, Moses (Musa) and Solomon (Sulayman). He refers to the many very precise verbal descriptions of Muhammad's countenance found in the hadith, as well as the figurative imagery produced by the Turks and the Persians. Granted that in the frieze, Muhammad is not conform to the descriptions given in Islamic texts, his presence in this shrine of American democracy represents an acknowledgment of his importance in the history of humanity contrary to the often negative image constued in the West. Thus this low relief is an honour granted Muslims by a non-Muslim country and should accordingly be proudly accepted.

The attitude towards representations of Prophet Muhammad is historical and long-standing. Among Sunni, there is undoubted resistance, founded in four salient points; to start with, the Prophet was not represented in the earliest days of Islam; second, he is not represented in the Muslim world as a whole; third, he is represented in manuscripts, not on walls or in the public realm; finally, though some of the books where he is represented are of a mystical nature, he does not figure in books recognized as religiously orthodox by the Sunni authorities. The modern era has proved rather more intransigent: way beyond the Wahhabi creed, the reformism that blossomed in the 19th century advocates a return to the practice of the founding fathers (salaf) who knew no representation of holy figures. This said, even in the period going from the 8th to the 18th century, Muslims never prayed beholding pictures of Muhammad.

The cartoon controversies of the early 21st century fall in a substantially different category, namely the manner of representation rather than the representation per se. It seems hard to concur with Malek Chebel^[13] that “there will some day be wholly uncontroversial figural representations of the Prophet [...] In the long term, neither institutions such as Al-Azhar University nor the religious leaders will be able to stand for ever against the “civilisation of the image” in a global world where everything done in the West is instantly echoed in the East.” (quoted by F. Bœspflug). The liberal positions adopted by some Muslim born intellectuals who seek to show that the texts do not prohibit the representation of Prophet Muhammad or the crafting of images are as easily condoned or dismissed in those texts as those of the extremists. There is not one but several ways the hadith texts relating to images can be understood; total and absolute prohibition may well be disputed, but so is the total freedom of representation too: each position results from an interpretation; the resonance either may find at a given time in a given place owes more to prevailing circumstances than to a single truth in the texts.