ABSTRACT
The thesis put forward in this chapter is that such an inherent hostility is a construction rather than a necessary result of what the Islamic tradition in text and practice has produced. It gives an overview of Islamic positions developed in classical times and presents modern reformulations by Muslim ulamas of such positions. Oleg Grabar underlines that in spite of the mention of images of Muhammad in texts, there is no way to prove that they really existed. The narratives are mostly about conversions to Islam that such images should have induced outside the realm of Islam, in China or in Byzantium; it is not clear why such narratives appeared. In the first part of her 1988 article on the illustrated lives of the Prophet, Priscilla Soucek also mentions textual sources reporting the existence of such representations.
