Kaare Bluitgen is a Danish writer. His children go to a school where most of the other pupils are Muslim. "These children must learn about Danish heroes," he said, "and Danish children should learn about Muslim heroes."

So he wrote a children's life of the Prophet Muhammad. In the end, he found an illustrator, but only after three others turned him down, to avoid violating Islamic law. When an editor at a Danish newspaper found about this, he decided to publish cartoon images of Muhammad as a form of literary protest.

We all know how that ended.

But what was it in Islamic law that deterred those first three illustrators?

Muhammad is reported to have said to Omar (who later became his second successor, or caliph), "Do not glorify me as the Christians glorify Jesus, the son of Mary, for I am only a slave. So, call me the slave of Allah and His messenger." (Another translation is: "Do not exaggerate in praising me.")

Christians hold that Jesus is not only God's servant, that he is also the Son of God. And they -- or rather "we," though I'm no artist -- have made countless images of him.

Muhammad, by contrast, made clear that he did not want to become an object of idolatry, and he foresaw the risk of that among his followers. The restrictions on representing him -- resulting in varying artistic practice from region to region and century to century -- is a special application of the prohibition of idolatry. In other words, treating as God something that is not God is forbidden.

The greater the hero, the Islamic reasoning goes, the greater the danger that an image of that person will lead to paganism. If Canada were to become an Islamist country, the statues of Sir John A. Macdonald would come down.

Contrary to the belief of some, Islam does not say, "No images of anything." Rather, it recognizes that works of art can be ravishing. Looking at them can verge on adoration. Indeed, there is some tendency to idolatry in the experience of all effective artwork.

When does image-making come too close to idolatry? Muslim jurists have differed on the matter, drawing different lines of distinction. In any case, because image-making is questionable, visual art among Muslims has channelled itself into architecture, calligraphy, semi-abstract flower-and-foliage decoration and -- most interestingly, given the origins of the current controversy -- book illustration, whereby miniatures paintings are safely subordinate to a written text.

Iran is the centre of this tradition of miniature painting, which spread to other regions into Central Asia, to Egypt, and what are now India and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The books in which these illustrations appeared were luxury products, made for great Islamic rulers such as the Shahs of Iran. These painters were not bohemians in garrets trying to violate prevailing norms; they were tied into the Islamic power structure, working at the great royal courts of their day. It was natural to produce books to be enjoyed in palaces on sacred subjects such as the life of the Prophet, as in the illustration above, in the Ottoman court style, from a biography written for the Sultan of Egypt by a Turkish poet. Now, their works live peacefully in museums.

Maybe because of Iranian artists' inclination to non-realistic scenes, when Muhammad appeared in such paintings, the depicted subject is most often an event called the Night Journey -- an event not mentioned in the Koran, or in Muhammad's sayings -- in which he is said to have ridden a winged horse with a woman's face through the heavens, including a visit to Jerusalem.

Often, Muhammad's face is left as a white blank. In some instances, his face may have been erased by someone other than the illustrator; anyhow, that shows that it was all right to depict him -- within limits, which have tended to get stricter. Starting a bit before the middle of the 1500s, some artists adopted the practice of veiling Muhammad's face, perhaps because of a belief that it acted as a mirror for the dazzling divine light -- but emphatically not as the source of that light. In the 1700s or so, most Sunnis turned against depicting him in any way, but many Shiites still don't object to pictures of him. Moreover, miniature painting in the Muslim world has waned with the rise of printed books, so the occasions for painted illustrations of the Prophet or other human beings have withered away.

Statues of Muhammad, on the other hand, have always been forbidden in Islamic law, but then again, so are all three-dimensional images of living beings. The argument is that statues are too close to reality, so that making them is too much like an aping of God's creativity; also, polytheists adored -- and still adore -- statues.

One exception is children's toys -- two sayings of Muhammad in conversation with his wife Aisha permit dolls -- because these are not taken seriously; he himself is said to have laughed at a toy winged horse. In other words, there is no risk that a teddy-bear or a Barbie doll will become an idol. Chocolate animals are all right, too; after all, they get eaten.

Muslim jurists have debated photography and its technological antecedents -- which makes two-dimensional images -- for the last couple of centuries. But of course this is not relevant to people long dead, such as the Prophet Muhammad. Suffice it to say that all Muslim jurists at least accept the necessity of such things as passport photos -- and, as everyone knows, even the ultra-Wahhabi Osama bin Laden shows himself in videos.

Two passages in the Koran on image-making are about Jesus, whom Islam honours as a prophet. The Koran reports a miracle performed by Jesus, one not included in the New Testament: By God's permission, Jesus made a clay bird and it became alive; on Judgment Day, God will recount this and other miracles of Jesus.

Strikingly, the sayings of Muhammad include a prophecy that, on Judgment Day, the image-makers will be challenged to make their images into living beings; they will fail to do so and will be condemned accordingly. In other words, visual artists will not manage to do what Jesus was allegedly allowed to do. Another story relates that Muhammad protected an image of Jesus and Mary on a pillar in Mecca; he said it should not be erased, but merely veiled.

All this seems to underline a Muslim view that the images issue is key to the differences between Christianity and Islam (notwithstanding Christian image-breakers such as Oliver Cromwell, the 17th-century British tyrant who did his best to wreck the artistic heritage of Britain and Ireland.)

On these matters, Judaism is closer to Islam; the trouble with images is put front-and-centre, in the second of the Ten Commandments.

It's hardly for a pro-image Catholic who can't read Arabic to pronounce on the state of Muslim opinion in regard to the current controversy. But I think it was the ridicule of Muhammad conveyed by the Danish cartoons that aroused so vast a reaction, much more than the visual depiction of him in itself. In any case, the caution of those three Scandinavian illustrators is telling about the state of Western opinion.

© National Post 2006