“Anyone who says that the Prophet is black should be killed”: The ...

pen-boxes, necklaces, and posters. 248 Not surprisingly, in this very popular iconography the
Prophet is “depicted not as an Arab but with distinctly Persian features.” 249
VII.3. Medieval Portraits of a De-arabized Prophet
The earliest extant Muslim pictorial depictions of MuÈammd date to the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. 250 A number of manuscripts produced in this period, like the J§mi# al-
Taw§rÊkh produced by RashÊd al-DÊn (d. 1318), contain illustrated cycles of the Prophet’s life
drawn from accounts found in the standard sÊra sources: W§qidÊ, Ibn Sa#d, Ibn IsÈaq/Ibn
Hish§m, •abarÊ. 251 In these visual depictions the Prophet and his Companions are fully depicted;
the veiling of the prophetic visage doesn’t seem to have begun until around the sixteenth
century. 252 Characteristic of all of these depictions is the fair skin and rather Asian look of the
Prophet and his Companions. 253 This is not hard to comprehend.
RashÊd al-DÊn, who lived in the Persian city of Tabriz, was vizier to two successive
Mongol rulers of the Ilkh§nid dynasty which ruled parts of Persia at the time. After the Mongols
terminated the #Abb§sid caliphate in 1258, the first ruler to convert to Islam was Chingiz Khan
in 1295, becoming Mahmud Ghazan Khan. Hulagu (r. 1256-65) founded the Ilkh§nid dynasty
which encompassed Persia, Iraq, the Caucasus and Anatolia. Wanting to establish their
legitimacy as successors to great historical dynasties and as heirs to a religious tradition that goes
back to the Prophet and beyond him to the biblical prophets, the Ilkh§nid Khans created
manuscripts that were meant to bestow legitimacy on them and act as a form of state
propaganda. 254 Mahmud Ghazan Khan commissioned RashÊd al-DÊn to prepare a work on the
history of the Mongol tribes. This work was expanded to a general world history: the J§mi# al-
Taw§rÊkh or “A Compendium of Chronicles”. Considering the purpose of the work, it is not at all
surprising that the Prophet and his Companions would have a Mongol-look. In this manner the
dynasty is legitimized and its Central Asian former nomads acquire an important place within
the Heilsgeschicht of Islam. What is important to point out here is that we have another example of
the portrait of MuÈammad changing with a major demographic change in the umma and its
administration.
VIII. Conclusion
The earliest documented Arabs were likely a Kushite or dark-skinned group. The
Classical Arabic/Islamic literary sources confirm the same, that a noble Arab was a blackskinned
Arab. This makes it most unlikely that MuÈammad, reputedly a noble Arab, was fairskinned
as in the popular imagination and in official and un-official representations, literary as
well as visual. We have every reason to believe that the Arab prophet was a dark-skinned Arab,
248 Grabar and Naif, “Story of Portraits of the Prophet,” 34; Omid Safi, Ph.D, Memories of Muhammad: Why
the Prophet Matters (New York: HarpersCollins, 2009) 34-37.
249 Safi, Memories of Muhammad, 35 and portrait on 34; Grabar and Naif, “Story of Portraits of the Prophet,”
Pl. VIII.
250 Soucek, “Life of the Prophet,” 193-194; Ali, “Literal to the Spiritual,” 3; Arnold, Painting in Islam, 93.
251 Soucek, “Life of the Prophet,” 199.
252 Ali, “Literal to the Spiritual,” 10; Arnold, Painting in Islam, 98.
253 See Soucek, “Life of the Prophet,” figs. 1-9; Ali, “Literal to the Spiritual,” figs. 1-8; Arnold, Painting in Islam,
Pls. XIX-XX, XXII-XXIII.
254 Ali, “Literal to the Spiritual,” 2, 6.
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