In Art Museums, Portraits Illuminate A Religious Taboo

The robe the prophet wears usually is green, his turban clean and white. Often, out of piety, his youthful face is veiled. When it isn't, we are shown that his brow is clear, his manner calm, his dark beard neatly trimmed. Angels swarm around him. Because sunlight hasn't dimmed them, the colors of his garments still glow like those of gems. In many of these pictures his halo is aflame.

"The Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey" (1556-1562), a Persian painting touched with gold, has been for 60 years among the prized possessions of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art.

The volume that contains it is called the "Haft Awrang," or "Seven Thrones." Its full-page illustrations are exquisite, opulent, anonymous. Its poems are by Jami (1414-1492), an associate of kings.

The book's illuminations are not only of Muhammad. They show King Solomon as well, and the Queen of Sheba, and the conqueror known in the West as Alexander the Great. The Persian equivalents of Romeo and Juliet also are depicted. For the past 200 years histories so poetic have not been much in vogue.

Jami was renowned for more than poetry. He also was a diplomat and a Sufi master. The Freer's book was commissioned in 1556 by Sultan Ibrahim Mirza, a Safavid prince who commissioned its rich pages to five court calligraphers, artists in their own right, who spent nine years at their task. Imagine the cost.

The Freer book is not a secret. One reason that it's familiar to all students of Persian miniatures is that the Freer in 1997 published a 481-page study of its lavish gold-touched pages. "The renown of the Freer Jami," says the introduction, "has ensured its appearance in all surveys of Iranian painting and a central place in all surveys of Safavid art."

We see the prophet in the sky. Winged angels skim about him, as do many curly and vaguely Chinese clouds. Muhammad isn't floating. He is mounted on Buraq, the wondrous supernatural human-headed horse who bore him in a single night to Mecca and Jerusalem and to the Seven Heavens. Buraq's coat is spotted, his hat is trimmed in fur. The prophet face is hidden, but the golden aura that surrounds him shows just who he is.

The prophet was no god; Muhammad was a man. If his face is often veiled it is because, as the Metropolitan Museum notes, his "countenance mirrored the dazzling light of the divine."

"The planets gathered around him," Jami sings, "and scattered coins in his path."

Three other paintings of Muhammad are owned by the museum. "Ascension of the Prophet" is an Indian image circa 1800. "The Prophet Enthroned and the Four Orthodox Caliphs" is 14th-century Iranian. "Ascent of the Prophet to Heaven," also Iranian, is from the 1550s.

For reasons that include "cultural sensitivity," and today's bloody news, none of these old paintings is currently on view.