A lovely legend.
I grew up on a farm in the country and our neighbours were a family
with the surname of Morris.  There were three Morris kids and the
youngest told all the kids in the community that the M above tabbys'
eyes was "M for Morris".  Naturally, they had a barn full of tabby
cats (I think they only had three or four cats, but it seemed like a
lot more at the time). tee hee

Tish  

My husband made the argument over the Arabic M-letter. I told him I figured that the legend arose from an
earlier story of Mohammed cutting off his sleeve so as not to disturb the kitten, and had the "Mark of
Mohammed" part added by European traders.

Blessed be,

Baha

That one is new to me as well.  But I like them both.

Jo

I heard it ages ago - I don't remember when or from whom, but it has stuck
with me because I've always had a tabby cat and every time I see the "M" on
the forehead I think of the story.

Hugs,

CatNipped

Not so much the representing of people. Having pictures of your loved ones
in your wallet or on your dresser is one thing. What's forbidden is
representing holy men or angels for icons or idols to worship, or trying to
make an image of God--Streng Verboten in the Quran as much as in the Bible.

I'm afraid that we Westerners have become jaded in one such area: we have
become conditioned to believe that God sounds like Charlton Heston.

Blessed be,
Baha

Oh, right.  I should be careful not to get a fatwa declared against me
or anything. :)

I don't know about Islam, but I do know why Christianity broke from that
tradition.  I have learned all kinds of interesting things in joining
the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Early in Christianity, we knew what the
major players looked like.  We had painted pictures of the Apostles, and
probably Jesus, although none survive to this day.  People would put
them up in the Churches.  When saints were declared, so were pictures
painted of them and also put up in homes and in Churches.  And because
of the beliefs of early Christians (and Orthodox Christians still) they
believed that those who had reposed (no one dies in the Orthodox Church
- you repose and go somewhere else - don't ask me too many questions on
this as I don't have it down yet) still had the power to pray for those
who are living.  So they pray to them - as do the Catholics.  They also
venerate them - not worship them - it is an important distinction
because you only worship God.  But you hold in high esteem these Saints
and Apostles and Martyrs.  There was a special Ecumenical Council
because some believed it was idolotry and others didn't and the outcome
of the council (like back before 1000 AD) was that venerating a picture
by kissing it and making the sign of a cross in front of it was showing
great respect for the saint but it was not worshipping the way we would
God.  So it was okay and not idolatry.

And it became okay to make images of Jesus (even though we haven't a
clue as to what he looked like) because mankind actually got to see
Jesus.  That wasn't true before Jesus.  Before the Christians had Jesus
we had burning bushes and large voices and symbols.  So we weren't
allowed to make an image for God - until He made one for Himself.

I hope all this makes sense

BRIDGET

All legends have a basis in fact; and, like all stories that have been passed orally for a few
generations, it probably did get either embellished, or thrown into a stewpot with the Virgin Mary and a
Chinese lover. My opinion is that the Islamic/Arabic variant originated in North Africa, probably
Morocco, and came through Spain. My husband does agree with it coming into contact with the Mary variant,
and says that, owing to the form of the Latin M, was further Christianized.

But it's neither here nor there. It's a nice, charming story. I think of it as reading King Arthur or
Robin Hood stories. I think those have non-Christain roots too, and were changed much from generations of
oral storytelling and sanitizing by the monks who finally wrote them. But that fact does not deny me the
pleasure of the story.

Blessed be,
Baha

It might have some basis that evolved. Many years back, when I was the
network architect for the Library of Congress, one of my projects was an
attempt to build a terminal for all the languages (around 800) and
alphabets (about 140) we cataloged. Given this was mid- to
late-seventies, the technology just wasn't there.

While I can't read content in any nonroman alphabets, I did learn the
visual appearance/display characteristics of many. Most people assumed
our biggest problem would be Chinese, with about 100,000 ideographs in
scholarly use. It wasn't, because Chinese characters are built up from a
much more manageable set of graphic elements called radicals.

The big problem was with cursive languages, in which you don't know what
form of a letter to display until its successor is typed. When you write
in cursive script, you don't consciously think of the rules for writing
an "r" connected to an "e", rather than an "r" at the end of a sentence.  
Most languages have a printed form that makes this a non-issue, but,
among others, the written forms of Semitic languages including Hebrew
and Arabic [1] are completely cursive.

Anyway, I've forgotten most of the alphabets, but there is an
interesting amount of commonality among completely different alphabets.
The "L" sound is written as an "L" in English, as the Lamedh character
in Hebrew, and a similarly named character in Arabic. It doesn't look
quite like an L, but it does have similarity in being angular. ISTR
there are also some similarities in M and N like characters.

So, it's possible the legend started with an Arabic character, and the
closest Roman letter is M.  Perhaps someone here is literate in Arabic,
Hebrew, Farsi, Pashtu, or some other script of this family, and can
comment.

Atabi is in Baghdad, Iraq, where they made striped cloth.  Tabby
probably is the natural coloration of house cats in the wild.  Lots of
species of cat have stripes.