religions Article Muhammad at the Museum: Or, Why the Prophet Is Not Present Klas Grinell Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, SE405 30 Göteborg, Sweden;
[email protected] Received: 30 October 2019; Accepted: 5 December 2019; Published: 10 December 2019 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. Keywords: museums; Islam; Muhammad; Islamicate cultural heritage; images; exhibitions; Islamic art; collection management 1. Introduction 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. Critical frame analysis will be used to analyze empirical material consisting of the displays in museums with major exhibits of Islamicate material culture in the US, Germany, France, the UK, Turkey and Iran in 2015–2018. 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.1 To understand different possible Islamic framings of representations of the Prophet, Islamic theological and devotional traditions will be consulted.