Published: September 20, 2008
In artist Shahada Sharelle Abdul Haqq’s new children’s book, Moses’ staff turns into a scary cobra, confronting the cobras from the Pharaoh’s magicians.
A puzzled camel peers over the edge of a well, looking down to where Joseph had just been thrown by his brothers. And David, his face hidden in the shadow of his headscarf, hurls the fatal rock at a towering Goliath.
But nowhere in the 120-page Stories of the Prophets in the Holy Qur’an is there a portrait of Moses, Joseph or any of the 25 prophets recognized as special messengers of God, a prophetic line that Muslims believe ended with Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D.
No Charlton Heston Moses. No blue-eyed Jesus.
“We take the prohibition against making graven images literally,” Haqq said last week as she looked through a proof copy of the new book. “We can’t portray the faces of the prophets.”
Haqq, who converted to Islam 30 years ago, appreciates the tradition. “I’m American,” she said. “I was raised with Walt Disney. There were cultural understandings we had to sift through.”
As a child, she found it odd that the pictures of God she saw showed an old, white-skinned man, a cultural habit that reveals more about the assumptions of Western culture than it does about the Creator of the Universe.
The prohibition against images means that Islamic artists have excelled at calligraphy, geometric art and mosaics, but not portraits. Some ancient Islamic texts do, in fact, include faces of the prophets, but for the past several hundred years, Muslims have, for the most part, avoided realistic art in general and portraits of these holy people in particular.
That’s partly why Muslims the world over took such offense at the satirical cartoons — one of which portrayed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban — that were printed in European newspapers in 2005.
Scholars associated with Tughra Books, Haqq’s U.S. publisher, and their Turkish associates had to evaluate Haqq’s work to make sure it was appropriate, she said. A few pictures had to be adjusted — Joseph’s brothers should not be portrayed as bowing to him, for instance, because one human should not bow to another.
“We must be careful how we portray the prophets,” said Haqq, of Huntsville, Ala. “Quite frankly, I’ll be held responsible for this on the Day of Judgment.”
Haqq hopes that her book helps with other cultural understandings among Muslims, Jews and Christians.
After all, most of the 25 prophets in the book are also found in the Hebrew scriptures of the Jews and the Christian Old Testament. Muslims recognize Adam, Abraham, King David, Solomon, Jesus and other biblical characters as prophets.
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