The Importance Of Wahhabism In Islam

It is an absolute prohibition in Islam to picture Muhammad, or any of the other prophets of Islam as pictures are thought to encourage the worship of idols. To illustrate the point behind their argument, Muslims point to the following verse in the Qu’ran, "[Abraham] said to his father and his people: 'What are these images to whose worship you cleave?' They said: 'We found our fathers worshipping them.' He said: 'Certainly you have been, you and your fathers, in manifest error.'" Yet there's no ruling in the Qu’ran explicitly forbidding the depiction of the Prophet, according to Prof Mona Siddiqui from Edinburgh University. Instead, the idea arose from the hadiths - stories about the life and sayings of Muhammad gathered in the years after his death.

Siddiqui points to depictions of Muhammad - drawn by Muslim artists - dating from the Mongol and Ottoman

"There isn't unanimity in either of the foundational sources - the Koran and the Hadiths. The later Muslim community has tended to have different views on this question as on others."

The Arab scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose teachings paved the way for Wahhabism, the dominant form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, was a key figure. "The debate has become much more vigorous - particularly associated with the movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. You had suspicion of veneration of anything other than God. That included the Prophet. "There has been a significant change over certainly the last 200 years, but probably 300 years." The situation is different with sculpture or any other kind of three-dimensional representation, notes Goddard, where the prohibition has always been clearer. For some Muslims, says Siddiqui, the aversion to pictures has even extended to a refusal to have pictures of any live being - human or animal - in their