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About UPF > Articles > Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet > Finding the Prophet in his People
Finding the Prophet in his PeopleBy Ingrid Mattson
Ingrid Mattson is a professor of Islamic
Studies at Hartford Seminary and President of the Islamic
Society of North America.
I spent a lot of time looking at art the year before I became a Muslim.
Completing a degree in Philosophy and Fine Arts, I sat for hours in
darkened classrooms where my professors projected pictures of great
works of Western art on the wall. I worked in the archives for the Fine
Arts department, preparing and cataloging slides. I gathered stacks of
thick art history books every time I studied in the university library.
I went to art museums in Toronto, Montreal and Chicago. That summer in
Paris, "the summer I met Muslims" as I always think of it, I spent a
whole day (the free day) each week in the Louvre.
What was I seeking in such an intense engagement with visual art?
Perhaps some of the transcendence I felt as a child in the cool
darkness of the Catholic Church I loved. In high school, I had lost my
natural faith in God, and rarely thought about religion after that. In
college, philosophy had brought me from Plato, through Descartes only
to end at Existentialism-a barren outcome. At least art was
productive-there was a tangible result at the end of the process. But
in the end, I found even the strongest reaction to a work of art
isolating. Of course I felt some connection to the artist, appreciation
for another human perspective. But each time the aesthetic response
flared up, then died down. It left no basis for action.
Then I met people who did not construct statues or sensual paintings of
gods, great men and beautiful women. Yet they knew about God, they
honored their leaders, and they praised the productive work of women.
They did not try to depict the causes; they traced the effects.
Soon after I met my husband, he told me about a woman he greatly
admired. He spoke of her intelligence, her eloquence and her
generosity. This woman, he told me, tutored her many children in
traditional and modern learning. With warm approval, he spoke of her
frequent arduous trips to refugee camps and orphanages to help relief
efforts. With profound respect, he told me of her religious knowledge,
which she imparted to other women in regular lectures. And he told me
of the meals she had sent to him, when she knew he was too engaged in
his work with the refugees to see to his own needs. When I finally met
this woman I found that she was covered, head to toe, in traditional
Islamic dress. I realized with some amazement that my husband had never
seen her. He had never seen her face. Yet he knew her. He knew her by
her actions, by the effects she left on other people.
Western civilization has a long tradition of visual representation. No
longer needing more from such art than a moment of shared vision with
an artist alive or dead, I can appreciate it once more. But popular
culture has made representation simultaneously omnipresent and
anonymous. We seem to make the mistake of thinking that seeing means
knowing, and that the more exposed a person is, the more important they
are.
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Islamic civilization chose not to embrace visual representation as a
significant means of remembering and honoring God and people. Allah is The Hidden,
veiled in glorious light from the eyes of any living person. But people
of true vision can know God by contemplating the effects of his
creative power, Do they not look to the birds above them,
Spreading their wings and folding them back?
None can uphold them except for The Merciful.
Truly He is watchful over all things (Qur'an, 67:19)
If God transcends his creation, it is beyond the capacity of any human
to depict him. Indeed, in Islamic tradition, any attempt to depict God
with pictures is an act of blasphemy. Rather, a Muslim evokes
God, employing only those words that God has used to describe himself
in his revelation. Among these descriptive titles are the so-called "99
Names of God," attributes that are recited melodiously throughout the
Muslim world: The Merciful, the Compassionate, the Forbearing, the Forgiving, the Living, the Holy, the Near, the Tender, the Wise....
Written in beautiful script on lamps, walls, and pendants, each of
these linguistic signs provokes a profoundly personal, intellectual and
spiritual response with each new reading.
Deeply wary of idolatry, early Muslims with few exceptions declined to
glorify not only God, but even human beings through visual
representation. Historians, accustomed to illustrating accounts of
great leaders with their images captured in painting, sculpture and
coin have no reliable visual representations of the Prophet Muhammad.
What we find, instead, is the Prophet's name, Muhammad,
written in curving Arabic letters on those architectural and
illustrative spaces where the sacred is invoked. Along with the names
of God and verses of the Qur'an, the name Muhammad, read
audibly or silently, leads the believer into a reflective state about
the divine message and the legacy of this extraordinary, yet profoundly
human messenger of God.
Words, written and oral, are the primary medium by which the life of
the Prophet and his example have been transmitted across the
generations. His biography, the seerah,
has been told in verse and prose in many languages. Even more important
than this chronological account of the Prophet's life are the thousands
of individual reports of his utterances and actions, collected in the hadith
literature. These reports were transmitted by early Muslims wishing to
pass on Muhammad's tradition and mindful of the Qur'an's words: "Indeed in the Messenger of God you have a good example to follow for one who desires God and the Last Day"
(Qur'an, 33:21). Eager to follow his divinely inspired actions, his
close companions paid attention not only to his style of worship, but
also to all aspects of his comportment-everything from his personal
hygiene to his interaction with children and neighbors. The Prophet's
way of doing things, his sunnah, has formed the basis for
Muslim piety in all societies where Islam spread. The result was that
as Muslims young and old, male and female, rich and poor, adopted the
Prophet's sunnah as a model for their lives, they became the best visual representations of the Prophet's character and life. In other words, the Muslim who implements the sunnah
is an actor on the human stage who internalizes and, without artifice,
reenacts the behavior of the Prophet. This performance of the sunnah by living Muslims is the archive of the Prophet's life and a truly sacred art of Muslim culture.
I first realized the profound physical impact of the Prophet's sunnah
on generations of Muslims as I sat in the mosque one day, watching my
nine year old son pray beside his Qur'an teacher. Ubayda sat straight,
still and erect beside the young teacher from Saudi Arabia who, with
his gentle manners and beautiful recitation, had earned my son's deep
respect and affection. Like the teacher, Ubayda was wearing a
loose-fitting white robe that modestly covered his body. Before coming
to the mosque, he had taken a shower and rubbed fragrant musk across
his head and chin. With each movement of prayer, he glanced over at his
teacher, to ensure that his hands and feet were positioned in precisely
the same manner. Reflecting on this transformation of my son, who had
abandoned as his normal grubbiness and impulsivity for cleanliness and
composure, I thought to myself, "thank God he found a good role model
to imitate."
In my son's imitation of his teacher, however, it occurred to me that there was a greater significance, for his teacher was also imitating someone. Indeed, this young man was keen in every aspect of his life to follow the sunnah
of the Prophet Muhammad. His modest dress was in imitation of the
Prophet's physical modesty. His scrupulous cleanliness and love of
fragrant oils was modeled after the Prophet's example. At each stage of
the ritual prayer he adopted the positions he was convinced originated
with the Prophet. He could trace the way he recited the Qur'an back
through generations of teachers to the Prophet himself. My son, by
imitating his teacher, had now become part of the living legacy of the
Prophet Muhammad.
Among Muslims throughout the world, there are many sincere pious men
and women; there are also criminals and hypocrites. Some people are
deeply affected by religious norms, others are influenced more by
culture-whether traditional or popular culture. Some aspects of the
Prophet's behavior: his slowness to anger, his abhorrence of oath
taking, his gentleness with women, sadly seem to have little affected
the dominant culture in some Muslim societies. Other aspects of his
behavior, his generosity, his hospitality, his physical modesty, seem
to have taken firm root in many Muslim lands. But everywhere that
Muslims are found, more often than not they will trace the best aspects
of their culture to the example of the Prophet Muhammad. He was, in the
words of one of his companions, "the best of all people in behavior."
Living in America, my son's role model might have been an actor, a rap
singer or an athlete. We say that children are "impressionable,"
meaning that it is easy for strong personalities to influence the
formation of their identity. We all look for good influences on our
children.
It was their excellent behavior that attracted me to the first Muslims
I met, poor West African students living on the margins of Paris. They
embodied many aspects of the Prophet's sunnah,
although I did not know it at the time. What I recognized was that,
among their other wonderful qualities, they were the most naturally
generous people I had ever known. There was always room for one more
person around the platter of rice and beans they shared each day. Over
the years, in my travels across the Muslim world, I have witnessed the
same eagerness to share, the same deep belief that it is not
self-denial, but a blessing to give away a little more to others. The
Prophet Muhammad said, "The food of two is enough for three, and the food of three is enough for four."
During the recent attacks on Kosovo, there were reports of Albanian
Muslims filling their houses with refugees; one man cooked daily for
twenty people domiciled in his modest home.
The Prophet Muhammad said, "When you see one who has more, look to one who has less."
When I was married in Pakistan, my husband and I, as refugee workers,
did not have much money. Returning to the refugee camp a few days after
our wedding, the Afghan women eagerly asked to see the many dresses and
gold bracelets, rings and necklaces my husband must have presented to
me, as is customary throughout the Muslim world. I showed them my
simple gold ring and told them we had borrowed a dress for the wedding.
The women's faces fell and they looked at me with profound sadness and
sympathy. The next week, sitting in a tent in that dusty hot camp, the
same women-women who had been driven out of their homes and country,
women who had lost their husbands and children, women who had sold
their own personal belongings to buy food for their families-presented
me with a wedding outfit. Bright blue satin pants stitched with gold
embroidery, a red velveteen dress decorated with colorful pom-poms and
a matching blue scarf trimmed with what I could only think of as a
lampshade fringe. It was the most extraordinary gift I have ever
received-not just the outfit, but the lesson in pure empathy that is
one of the sweetest fruits of real faith.
An accurate representation of the Prophet is to be found, first and
foremost, on the faces and bodies of his sincere followers: in the
smile that he called "an act of charity," in the slim build of one who
fasts regularly, in the solitary prostrations of the one who prays when
all others are asleep. The Prophet's most profound legacy is found in
the best behavior of his followers. Look to his people, and you will
find the Prophet. Dr. Ingrid Mattson, is
a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary. In 1995, she was
an adviser to the Afghan delegation to the United Nations Commission on
the Status of Women. The President of the Islamic Society of North
America, Professor Mattson is a contributor to The Muslim World Journal.
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