On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Recently I
had a conversation with a fawiki friend and asked if fawiki
have any problem about hosting those images on their article. First he
seemed to be very surprised to know fawiki hosted "Muhammad's images".
After giving a glance, he got his calmness again and said they were
not "depicting Muhammad" and Muslims know that. There are rather
products of imagination by each artists. So they are okay. And
interestingly I haven't heard anyone complaints about fawiki hostings.
What other kinds of images of Muhammad are there? There are no
contemporary portraits, so they're all products of imaginations of
artists...
There are almost same images on English Wikipedia. I am not qualified
to speak on the behalf of my friend, but I assume the matter is rather
how it is taken. For muslims it would be trivial, but perhaps for the
other audience, it may be not. So while I don't support for removal, I
can understand (or can reconstruct their logic) it should/would be
preferable to be removed since it is in a danger to mistaken as
"portraits".
I think it is a similar case of icons (Christian icons I mean). Some
Westerners prefer to duplicate Eastern Orthodox Icons and sell it as
sacred images. As long as they sell it their sacred images, I haven't
seen any orthodox faithful oppose strongly but when they claim they
are making "icons", since it can never be icons according to orthodox
teachings, I have seen many orthodox claiming those icon-duplicating
images are not icons. etc. In general, religious notions are very
complicated and not fully perceived without knowledge about doctrine
and cultural background to some extent.
--
KIZU Naoko
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
Quote of the Day (English):
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD