Stepping Outside Myself

This color pencil piece was inspired by the tradition of poetry and stories praising the prophet, particularly The Mevlidi Sherif. I took one scene and tried to draw the beauty and religious significance. I included the pregnant Amina with the prophetic light shining from the prophet babe in her belly, the blaze of light from her home, the three heavenly women attending her, three angels represented by wings, the white bird and the cup of white nectar.

One part of my decision to take this course was my hope to be better able to step outside of my own culture and experience another major religion’s understanding of the world. The birth narrative of Muhammad, with its parallels and differences from the Christian nativity, fascinated me. From a secular viewpoint, I’m also intrigued by the importance of marking the prophet from birth. It seems plausible as a method to reinforce retrospectively the divine role Muhammad filled. Religiously, it ties Muhammad into the tradition of prophets that people would have known from other Abrahamic religions. It also explicitly ties him into God’s favor from birth, establishing the importance of Muhammad and his divinely given role as guide for life. I can also imagine the succession of prophets and the inheritance from birth playing into the Shiah view of succession.

I debated how to depict the women, and settled on drawing them with facial features vaguely present but unclear. This piece straddles the uncertainty within Islam over figural representations. On the one hand, there is a long religious tradition of forgoing figural representation to honor a monotheistic god. On the other hand, Islamic art has a long history of beautiful figural art. However, I doubt my attempts at portraying these beautiful women count as accurate figural representations, and hence probably are okay.