Pictures That Divide: The Prophet Muhammad in the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, museum curators and academics actively deconstructed a view of Islam as being essentially iconoclastic. Part of this endeavor was the collecting, researching, and reframing of Iranian images of the Prophet Muhammad to demonstrate the diversity of Islamic visual culture. Simultaneous efforts to reach local Muslim audiences, however, sometimes led curators and other exhibition makers in a different direction: namely, to deselect, veil, and remove Islamic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. One such image—a calligraphic composition of the Prophet Muhammad made in Iran in 1959—was removed in 2019 from the permanent exhibition Things That Matter in Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. In this talk, I reveal the internal processes and heated debates that led to this act of erasure in order to offer a broader reflection on the politics of displaying Islamic art today.