The link above is to the Washington Post. More from the NPR's Here and Now here, Newsweek here, and a Muslim picture archive here.The Koran, in fact, does not directly forbid the portrayal of Muhammad. And the second most important Islamic text, the Hadith, “presents us with an ambiguous picture at best,” wrote Christine Gruber of the University of Michigan. “At turns we read of artists who dared to breathe life into their figures and, at others, of pillows ornamented with figural imagery.” The most explicit fatwa banning the portrayal of Muhammad, she notes, isn’t tucked into some ancient text. It arrived in 2001. And its creator was the Taliban. The ban is a very modern construct.
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Hmmmm...
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The complaints about images are excuses for violence that will happen even if the murderous minds must seize upon hundreds of other excuses. In other words, the ends (murders) are justified (in their minds) regardless of the means (and excuses). You as a lawyer -- I feel like I'm preaching to choir -- understand that an issue must be broken down to its basics. The image argument is not really the issue.
ReplyDeleteI know R.T. On the other hand people may think in some way the prohibition is some kind of basic tenet of Islam.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, but hardly conclusive. Didn't most Muslim art, Persian excepted, avoid depicting humans? And the history of religion is full of doctrinal statements considered by their makers to have simply rendered explicit what was implied all along in the body of the tradition.
ReplyDeleteInestering back atcha George. But a fatwa -- sentence of death -- never having been issued before 2001 and then by the Taliban, who I think is no one's idea of mainstream Islam, certainly indicates that a death penalty for these images is of recent origin.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea at all about the punishments handed out or not to persons making such images. However, strictly speaking a "fatwa" is a legal opinion and need not have anything to do with the death of a person or class of person--or so I have understood, and so Wikipedia seems to say.
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