On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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.