On 21/02/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I think "belong" is the wrong word. Muhammad has meaning outside the context of Islam.
Perhaps it isn't the wrong word though; perhaps, primarily Muhammad does belong to Islam? That would be largely consistent with the wikipedia article, and if you google him.
Loki doesn't have meaning outside the context of Norse religion (apparently - for all I know, Loki could be based on a historical person, most of my knowledge of Norse tradition comes from Stargate!).
OK, consider L.Ron Hubbard- does he belong to Scientology?
I would argue a highly qualified yes, or it's arguable. How do you decide?
Since scientology talk about him quite a bit, he's theirs to a fair degree. But highly qualified, because there's a lot of quite high quality sources on him that say completely the opposite to what Scientology says; so he doesn't completely belong to them.
But for Jesus and Muhammad, very much the biggest sources by far that we have on them are from their respective religions, and thus the term 'belonging', probably is very appropriate.
That these are iconic subjects, failing to realise that causes *huge* problems.