When two holy men meet in a picture from Afghanistan

VISITING CHRISTIE’S AUCTION house near London’s Piccadilly is never disappointing. There are usually items on display, waiting to be auctioned, which are of great interest. Today (25 April 2025), we viewed the items awaiting a sale that will be held on the first of May. The sale is called “Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Including Rugs and Carpets”. Standing alone in one room is a folio (page) with coloured paintings on its front and back. This item has been called “The Prophet Muhammad Meets Jesus in the Beit Al-Ma’mur and the Arrival at the The Fourth Heaven”. It was created in Afghanistan in about 1466, and is in remarkably good condition.

The images show two episodes in the Mi’raj, which as the Christie’s website explained is:

“… one of the most important moments in the life of the Prophet Mohammed. In the Qur’an, sura al-‘Isra alludes to the fact that Allah transported ‘his servant Muhammad by night from the Masjid al-Haram to the Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings we have blessed, so that We may show him some of Our signs’. Though traditions vary, most take this to be a reference to the Prophet being miraculously taken from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence to Heaven.”

Muhammad is depicted as riding on Buraq, his quadruped mount. In the picture at Christie’s, Buraq has been shown as having a human head. In one picture, the Prophet Muhammad is dressed in green and can be seen riding on Buraq and meeting a man dressed in brown robes, who is Jesus (Isa) Christ. In between Jesus and the Prophet, there is a figure with wings, the angel Jibra’il (Gabriel). These holy men are shown meeting in the Beit Al-Ma’mur, which is a celestial form of the Holy Kaaba at Mecca. The picture on the reverse of the folio, we find the Angel Gabriel depicted again. He seems to be heading for a group of angels, followed by the Prophet dressed in green and riding on Buraq.  The angels in the picture are shown greeting the Prophet and Gabriel as they make their way through the tiers of heaven.

Apart from being amazingly beautiful, there were some details that caught my eye. Jesus is depicted with a face that could be Arabic. All the other faces, including that of Muhammad, have oriental eyes typical of Central Asia or further east. The faces of others in the pictures, including that of Buraq, are typically Far Eastern in type. I suppose that in 15th century Afghanistan, Central Asian faces were a familiar sight.  In the picture that depicts Muhammad moving towards the angels, much of the space surrounding the figures is filled with swirling golden clouds which makes the picture look like a Chinese creation at first sight. Another detail that interested me, and which I spotted in some other pictures on display at Christies, was that although the artist had drawn a frame around the image, one angel seemed to be standing partly outside the frame.

One of the delightful features about Christie’s is that if one asks a member of staff a question about an exhibit, he or she will go out of their way to answer it accurately. In the case of the pictures described above, a gallery assistant asked one of the specialists who dealt with it to come from her office to discuss it with us. This lady answered our questions and explained that what we were looking at is extremely rare. The folio at Christie’s was from a book, whose pages have been dispersed to many different places over time.  In Paris there is another very similar but slightly older example of that book, but the page with the episodes I have just described has been lost from it.  

The auction whose lots we saw on display contains many fine Mughal and other Indian pictures and objects, as well as items, such as the folio, which originated in Islamic countries such as Persia, Turkey, and places in Central Asia. Once again, a visit to Christie’s has proved most rewarding.