Considering they are some of the few non-modern graphic representations of Muhammad, representative of how he was viewed by 13th-16th century artists, I find it hard to doubt the academic/ scholarly importance. We would have no problem including any image an author made of jesus, or the apostles. Ragib, you highlight an excellent point: Absent the protests of muslims claiming that this image offends them, there is no legitimate reason to delete the images. As far as the article is concerned they belong there because, well, Muhammad died hundreds of years before the invention of the camera, so the only method of illustrating him is pictures. I think it is highly academically useful to show how prominent muslim scholars viewed him, or how depictions of him have changed over the years. And ANY depiction of him by a muslim painter/artist is inherently notable because such a depiction runs afoul of the sunni muslim rule against depicting him. Pictures doing so have great scholarly value in illustrating HOW the rule and the controversy surrounding it exist, and what kinds of representations of him have been considered unacceptable over the years.
-Dan On Feb 22, 2008, at 3:18 PM, Ragib Hasan wrote:
It seems to me that the images in question are considered/claimed to be important *only because* there are protests against them. This is a circular logic ... the more people protest, the more the "keeper"s of the image insist they must be retained in the article.
I think we need to disregard both the "protesters" and "keepers" and rather look at the scholarly importance/notability of the images. That should be the only criterion for inclusion or exclusion, rather than what any Muslim or Westerner thinks about the pictures. Retaining the images just because "Muslims want to censor it, so let's keep them" is wrong, and equally wrong would be removing them because "(some) Muslims don't like the images". If the images have been considered important/relevant in academic circles, only then they should be included. In other words, let's apply something similar to [[WP:N]] in this issue, rather than [[WP:IDONTLIKEIT]] or [[WP:ILIKEIT]].
--
Ragib
-- Ragib Hasan Admin, En-wiki Bureaucrat, Bn-wiki
PhD Candidate Dept of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 201 N Goodwin Avenue Urbana IL 61801
Website: http://www.ragibhasan.com http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/www
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