Shah Mahmud Nishapuri ( d. 1556-7), Folio 195r (“Mi’raj” or “Muhammad’s ascent into heaven”) from the Khamsa (Five Poems) of Nizami (d. 1209), 1539–43. Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper. Tabriz, Iran, now in the British Library. Commissioned by Shah Tahmasp, Safavid period.

This image is important for its depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, specifically, how it deals with the prohibition against figural imagery in Islam. Islamic teaching strongly discouraged figuration of any kind, in particular of religious personae, which is why human and animal motifs were largely confined to secular art (i.e. courtly commissions and decorative cycles). During the Golden Age of Islam, artists worked around this restriction by depicting Mohammed as a veiled figure with elongated sleeves or leaving his face and hands unpainted save for a neutral ground. This way, they could say that they had drawn not the man himself, but merely his clothes, exploiting a logical loophole in Islamic jurisprudence. Another practice was scratching out the face and other body parts after the fact, though this was largely done in retrospect and by a person other than the artist himself.

The image shows Muhammed riding the Buraq, the fabled human-headed steed that transported the prophets to paradise, in an act called the Mir’aj. He is being guided by none other than the archangel Gabriel (Jibra’il), who years earlier had appeared to him during his retreat on Mount Hira near Mecca and bade him to recite. This scene has precedents in both the Qur’an (“Sura Al-‘Isra”) and the Hadith, but the artists have been particularly inventive in their representation of the subject matter. The rolling “dragon” clouds, in particular, reveal a debt to Chinese painting, which had been a major source of influence since the Mongol Conquest of the 13th century. The orientalized Turco-Mongol phenotypes, meanwhile, point to an even earlier encounter with the nomadic tribes of Central Asia (9th-10th centuries).