“God and God's angels bless the Prophet. Oh you who have faith, invoke God's peace and blessing upon him.” - Qur'ān 33:56 / We live in a world where, as a 1990 advertisement for a camera famously stated, “image is everything.” This is certainly true of the study of Islam, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States. Prior to that, I would begin my introductory course on Islam with a book about the life of the Prophet Muḥammad. I did this because my students, whether or not they were Muslim, knew very little about the Prophet and the beginnings of Islam. After September 11, my students thought that they knew everything about Islam because of what they had learned through the media, particularly from television news. So I had to begin by teaching them how to understand images, especially images of the Prophet. This focus on images raises a paradox, as Muslims for the most part have been aniconic with respect to visual images of the Prophet Muḥammad. When Muslim artists seek to represent the Prophet in an image, they face a unique set of issues. Mohamed Zakariya, the most famous American Muslim calligrapher, expresses the paradox in this way on his Web site: “How does one describe the indescribable? How does one form an image of that which cannot be portrayed?” In part, Zakariya is referring to a legal ruling against portrayal of the Prophet, but there is also the larger philosophical problem of encompassing the meaning of Muḥammad in a single image.