The religious rule against depicting Muhammad

The religious rule against depicting Muhammad forbids describing the Prophet’s features or treating him as someone seen, and it extends to images in drawings, paintings, and statues. In Abdel Khader Khan’s account, the prohibition protects the direction of devotion: the Prophet himself wished that no one would adore him or divert worship from God. A dream Khader shares with Lin gives the rule a personal dimension, joining restraint in representation with reverence and humility.

Scope and Purpose

Abdel Khader Khan explains that Muslims are forbidden both to describe the Prophet’s features and to speak of him as a visible person. He traces the rule to the Prophet’s own wish: no man or woman should adore him or take any devotion away from God. The restriction therefore concerns more than artistic likeness. It also governs verbal description and the devotional attention that a visible image might attract.

Khader names drawings, paintings, and statues as forms that do not depict the Prophet. His explanation presents the absence of such images as an observance with a theological purpose, rather than a lack of interest in representation: devotion is to remain directed toward God.

Khader’s Dream

Khader tells Lin that he has dreamed of the Prophet, while acknowledging that Muslims are not supposed to tell others what they have dreamed about him. He calls the dream a very good and wonderful thing, but recognizes that relating it puts him at odds with the prohibition on speaking of the Prophet as someone seen. The telling is thus marked by his own awareness of a religious boundary, not offered as an exemption from it.

In the dream, the Prophet is walking. Khader rides up behind him on a beautiful white horse, dismounts, and gives him the horse. He keeps his face lowered out of respect and says he never sees the Prophet’s face, though he knows who the figure is. At last he raises his eyes and sees the Prophet riding away into the light of the setting sun. The dream makes recognition possible without facial description: the horse, the act of giving, and Khader’s lowered gaze convey reverence while the face remains unseen.

Narrative Significance

Khader’s account holds observance and disclosure in tension. He says he is not a very good Muslim for telling Lin about the dream, yet the details he chooses preserve the central restraint: he identifies the Prophet without describing his features. The scene distinguishes private religious experience from the forms of representation the rule prohibits, while showing how the prohibition shapes even the way a dream can be narrated.

The dream also reveals a vulnerable aspect of Khader. After sharing it, he appears dejected, and Lin recognizes fear in him—an unfamiliar sight that unsettles Lin. The conversation then turns toward Lin’s question about whether the light Khader associates with the Big Bang is God. In this transition, the account of an unseen Prophet and the question of divine light meet at the boundary between what can be experienced, what can be described, and what remains directed toward God.