On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 1:44 PM, The Mangoe <the.mangoe(a)gmail.com> wrote: Even in the "Christian West", Muhammad still makes the short list of "most influential people". It may be worth noting that apart from being a prophet, he was also the founder of one of the most influential empires in western history, a major lawgiver and the like. If nobody had ever converted to Islam, Muhammad might fall from his current position in the top ... five, say ... most important people in history to a position like 30th or something, but his contributions to Islam are not nearly the sum total of his historical importance. Muhammad is not fictional, he's not a fairy tale Muslims parents tell their kids. He doesn't belong to Islam the way that Loki belongs to Norse Traditional Religion. Cheers WilyD

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 3:41 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Err, please familiarise yourself with the situation before commenting - it's very common to claim that we need to present Muhammad in an essentially Islamic context, because he's somehow a solely Islamic thing. While the phrase "belongs to" doesn't turn up much on Talk:Muhammad, say, the phrase captures the attitude very well. This attitude is critical to the "display no images" argument, which relies on the "Islam doesn't depict him, and we should present things the way Muslims would present them." Beyond that, I'm not sure whether you're trying to argue that Muhammad is fictional, or that he belongs to Islam. But either is wrong - he was a real guy, and his words and deeds form part of our common cultural heritage, whether we're Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists or Discordians - whether we're religious or irreligious. He's not a person of simply Islamic importance. We do present things in a cultural context - Japanese pop star articles have their blood types, because that's a normal thing to wonder about in Japanese culture, but American pop star articles don't have their blood types, because that's not a normal thing to wonder about in American culture. The principle of no undue weight demands this of us - we can't give equal weighting to the representation of Haile Selassie Iby Rasta and Druze in the article on Selassie because that's not balancing his life and importance, and we can't represent Muhammad solely as Muslims represent him because that's not correctly representing his influence - it vastly underestimates him (actually we do this now, and it remains one of the image problems). So - uh - to answer your question in short: "no". Cheers WilyD

On 21/02/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. 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. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.