Writing about how this state of affairs has come about can be likened to embarking upon a hermeneutic archaeology of narratives and images. Layer upon layer of distortion must be removed before a real appreciation of the history of pictorial portrayal of Muhammad emerges. What follows is a study of how the world at-large arrived at the erroneous conclusions that ‘Muslims do not allow depictions of their Prophet’, or variations of the do-not-publish-pictures-of-Muhammad dictum..... |