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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