Muhammad on museum walls

While lethal riots persist in the Middle East and American cartoonists and editors wring their hands over what it means to publish pictures of Muhammad, the Western world’s curators of Islamic art whisper and wonder.

As they understand it, the Koran does not forbid representations of Muhammad, though other revered texts have led millions of Muslims to scorn the idea. They know that many Islamic artists have taken on the subject. And they know that pictures of Muhammad -- not caricatures, but respectful representations, executed by and for Muslims, sometimes with the prophet’s face shrouded by a veil, sometimes not -- can be found in museums throughout Europe and North America.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection includes two portrayals of Muhammad and one “verbal portrait” full of ornate calligraphy and rich colors. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has three. The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art has four. The largest collection of such images, experts say, is probably that of the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul.

By happenstance, curators say, none of the artworks at LACMA, the Freer or the Met were on public display when protests erupted late last year following publication in Denmark of a dozen newspaper cartoons lampooning Muhammad. But most of the museum-held portrayals of Muhammad can be accessed through the museums’ Internet sites, along with some explanatory text.

This, curators acknowledge, could be a “teachable moment,” a chance for museums to help visitors better understand the history and variety of Islamic culture and Muhammad’s role in it. But as the toll of dead and wounded in the Middle East, Asia and Africa continues to mount, who wants to stand before the blackboard? And how will this lesson go?

First, said Massumeh Farhad, chief curator and curator of Islamic art for the Freer Gallery, “everybody needs to calm down a bit.”

At LACMA, Islamic art curator Linda Komaroff said: “We’ve always known about these images, and no one’s ever had a problem, because they are respectful.... I wish this whole issue would go away because it’s so incendiary.”

Farhad said she has considered putting together a lecture series, as she did in the aftermath of 9/11, but scoffs at the idea of a museum display.

Nevermind that exhibitions usually take six months or more to organize, Farhad said; the larger problem would be delivering information thoughtfully and respectfully in such a politically charged environment.

The Freer had two images of Muhammad on display as part of an exhibition on another subject two years ago and drew no criticism, Farhad said, but “I don’t want to just put up an image of the prophet just to say, ‘Here.’ There has to be a reason.”

In other words, maybe this just isn’t a teachable moment.

“It’s definitely a tricky situation,” said Edina Lekovic, communications director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Los Angeles.

Although “there’s no monolithic perspective on this depictions issue” and some American Muslims are comfortable with respectful depictions of Muhammad, Lekovic said, any added emphasis on the subject in a non-Muslim venue “could very well backfire” and bring complaints.

Once the current tensions ease, she said, “I actually look forward to museums and other institutions using this as a teachable moment, because that mirrors the efforts being made by the Muslim American community. Many mosques and other organizations are forging new educational programs around the prophet Muhammad and his life and his contributions to civilizations.”

At LACMA -- which was honored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council three years ago for its portrayals of Islam -- Komaroff said she plans neither lectures nor other changes. But next week she’ll fly to Boston to join a museum professionals’ roundtable discussion on exhibiting Islamic art in a post-9/11 world.

The best that museums can do, she plans to say, is give visitors a chance to “appreciate the inherent and perhaps at times extravagant beauty of Islamic art” and hope that leads them to “pick up a book, enroll in a class or buy a plane ticket.”

Even before the cartoons were published, she said, the handling of Islamic art has been a hot topic in the museum world. LACMA, the Met and the Louvre in Paris will be reorganizing their Islamic holdings in the next few years, which means curators will be deciding not only what works to show but also what to say about the 1,500-year-old religion that has shaped a culture yet comes in as many flavors as Christianity and Judaism do.

Just as the Old Testament’s Second Commandment scorns graven images because they could lead to worship of false idols, Muslims have long rejected most public portrayals of Muhammad.

But, Islamic art experts say, portrayals of Muhammad have often been made to illustrate larger narratives in literary works or “to teach Muslims about the life of the prophet” -- and they have usually been made in manuscripts for elite patrons, not in public settings.

“For the majority of Muslims, their personal experience of their religion has nothing to do with these texts,” said LACMA’s Komaroff. “The vast majority of Muslims, then and now, would never have seen them.”

Look closely through the history of Islamic manuscript illustration, said Komaroff, and you will find books such as “The Life and Miracles of the Prophet Mohammad,” a Turkish work from 1594 that includes 814 illustrations -- and in each one, the prophet’s face is somehow obscured, usually by a white veil, with a flaming halo nearby. Just as most Christians have no access to the Vatican’s storerooms, Komaroff said, “the average person, whether in Istanbul or Damascus or Baghdad, would never have had access to this book.”

For a further example of artistic inventiveness and delicacy in depicting Muhammad, Komaroff said, look at LACMA’s holdings. One is “The Mi’raj of Muhammad,” an ink-andwatercolor manuscript painting made by an unknown artist in Shiraz, Iran, in 1517 AD and intended for private use. It shows the prophet, his face mostly obscured, on his night journey to heaven with the angel Gabriel, a central event in the collection of Islamic texts known as the Hadith.

Then there’s the “Hilye (Verbal Portrait of the Prophet Muhammad),” an intricate work of ink calligraphy, watercolor and gold, made by Turkish artist Niyazi Efendi in 1853-1854 and intended for display on a wall in private or public.

Acquired by the museum in 1985 and visible on its website (www.lacma.org), the work hasn’t been on public display at LACMA for about two years. But it includes the ornate calligraphy and geometric designs that distinguish much of Islamic architecture, textiles, metalwork, pottery and other creations.

As for the message of that calligraphy, it explains that Muhammad “was not too tall or short. He was medium-size. His hair was not short and curly, nor was it lank, but in between. His face was not narrow, nor was it fully round, but there was a roundness to it. His skin was white. His eyes were black. He had long eyelashes. He was big-boned and had wide shoulders. He had no body hair except in the middle of his chest .... Between his shoulders was the seal of prophecy, the sign that he was last of the prophets. He was the most generous-hearted of men, the most truthful of them in speech, the most mild-tempered of them, and the noblest of them in lineage. Whoever saw him unexpectedly was in awe of him.”

Because most images of Muhammad are manuscript illustrations, and because such illustrations are vulnerable to light damage, they’re usually rotated out of view more frequently than more robust artworks. A spokeswoman said none of the Met’s depictions of Muhammad -- one from 15th century Afghanistan, one from 16th century Uzbekistan, one from 16th century Turkey -- had been displayed for years. The Met’s Islamic galleries are closed for renovation until 2009.

Not every Western museum and library, however, had its Muhammad images in storage when the current controversy hit.

Since before the cartoon protests began, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, which holds one of Europe’s foremost collections of Islamic manuscripts, has had on long-term display many miniatures depicting Muhammad. The works are important as historical documents, the library’s director, Michael Ryan, has said, but he acknowledged that many contemporary Muslims would object to the images.

“When they are on display we don’t shout about it. We try to be discreet,” Ryan told the Irish Times in early February. His tone was matched by the imam of the Islamic Foundation of Ireland, Sheikh Yayha Al Hussein, who told the same newspaper that “we don’t want to protest ... but [the images] wouldn’t be shown in a museum in a Muslim country.”