Just curious.
I believe just his face. Mohammed’s image is included in a frieze above the US Supreme Court depicting famous law makers. Years ago, a Muslim-American group approached the Court requesting that his face be covered with a veil. They did not do that, but they did cover his face on a scale replica in the Court’s visitor center and include and explination of the reason why.
Cool. So a giant model of his penis would be totally kosher. I know what my ice sculpture this year is going to be!
If Mohammed’s image was never rendered during his lifetime, then HOW can anyone render it now? Or, in other words…
How do we even know what he looks like?
The same way we know what Jesus looks like, of course.
No, it would probably not be kosher. It may, however, be halal.
From what I can glean, even depiction of Mohammed’s face is not necessarily prohibited in Islam. The prohibition does not appear in the Koran, but (perhaps) in the hadiths.
See here
See also this Mohammed Image Archive.
Some of them depict Mohammed in full; others leave his face blank
Depends on who you’re asking. The 1976 film Mohammad, Messenger of God is about Mohammad, but the viewer never sees the man or hears his voice. Instead, when Mohammad was essential to a scene, the camera would show events from his point of view, and the other actors would directly address the camera and then nod or respond to unheard dialogue. Even this practice turned out to be controversial; the film was banned in many jurisdictions and was the target of several threats and terrorist incidents.
It really does depend on who you’re asking. For many muslims at many periods of history, it was forbidden to depict anything at all, taking the Commandment againsty depicting anything (which to most folks is simply a prohibition against making idols) to its most extreme case, lest those things become idols. That’s why there are so many examples of excellent Muslim Calligraphy and tesselation – these were two of the very few artistic venues open to them.
There’s an entire spectrum from there to depicting the Prophet. Many believed that you could do “schematic” diagrams and depictions. I’ve seen Muslim engineering texts from many centuriesd ago that at first look like crude cartoonish attempts at depicting gears and the like, suggesting that they couldn’t draw. But I later trealized that it was probably deliberate, and that these were the equivalent of the stylized images in some of my own engineering texts – they show How Things Work without being realistic enough to offend the Law. I have a recent book on Islam for non-Muslims, but written anmd illustrated by Muslims with the same philosophy.
At other periods, such as medieval Persia, artists had a lot more leeway, and realistically depicted animals, and even people. I was surprised to see depictions of Mohammed himself, but with a veiled face, which seemed to me to be really pushing the envelope.
But before Colibri’s post, I’ve never seen a Muslim depiction of Mohammed. It certainly isn’t an expected thing in my (admittedly limited) exposure to Muslim art. Even if there’s not a Koranic injunction against it, there certainly seems to be a general feeling that this ought not to be done. When Richard Burton made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina back in the 1830s, disguised as an Egyptian doctor, he made his sketches surreptitiously, and hid them. This was true of sketches he made long before reaching those holy cities.
As psychonaut says, in the film Mohammed: Messenger of God (AKA The Message) , the Prophet is never shown. He is known by his attributes – his cane or staff or other possession. I don’t even think thwey show his shadow.