Abstract
This article analyses museum responses to the contemporary tensions and violence in response to images of Muhammad, from The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. How does this socio-political frame effect the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, the V&A and British Museum in London, and the Louvre in Paris? Different genres of museums and histories of collections in part explain differences in approaches to representations of Muhammad. The theological groundings for a possible ban on prophetic depictions is charted, as well as the widespread Islamic practices of making visual representations of the Prophet. It is argued that museological framings of the religiosity of Muslims become skewed when the veneration of the Prophet is not represented.
Highlights
One seldom comes across the Prophet Muhammad in museum exhibitions of Islamicate heritage.The aim of this article is to analyze the framings of this absence, and to discuss how it affects the representations of Islam given in museums
It is argued that the absence of Muhammad in exhibitions of Islamicate collections leads to skewed representations of Islam
A result of these public framings of Islam as potentially violent is that the Islamic depictions of Muhammad present in most Islamicate museum collections are rarely chosen for display in the galleries
Summary
One seldom comes across the Prophet Muhammad in museum exhibitions of Islamicate heritage. The aim of this article is to analyze the framings of this absence, and to discuss how it affects the representations of Islam given in museums. The contemporary socio-political frame will be uncovered from media coverage of conflicts around non-Muslim representations of Muhammad from the Rushdie affair to the present.. To understand different possible Islamic framings of representations of the Prophet, Islamic theological and devotional traditions will be consulted. This will show that the prevalent framing of images of the Prophet as controversial and dangerous fails to distinguish between Islamic and non-Muslim representations of the Prophet.
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