[Foundation-l] Wikimania and the Muhammad pix

[Wily D]

On Feb 19, 2008 3:40 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 19, 2008 3:23 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I believe it's the latter, and I too wonder what repercussions there might
> > be for our Iranian Wikipedians.
>
> Perhaps I'm a little naive here, but it would seem to me that the
> percentage of Farsi speakers who are also Muslim would be
> significantly higher then the percentage of English speakers who are.
> It would seem then (and again, this might be little more then naive
> speculation) that speakers of Farsi would be more motivated to
> restrict these images then members of the English project would be.
> The fact that the images are not blocked on the Farsi project leads me
> to one of two conclusions:
>
> 1) Not enough people in the Islamic world are even aware of the Farsi
> WP project's existence, or
> 2) The ban on images of Muhammad is not so wide spread in Islam as
> some people claim.
>
> I would be very interested to learn what is the status of images in
> other regional languages, such as Arabic. I would also be interested
> to hear whether some form of compromise could be reached, such as
> removing images from the Muhammad page itself, but allowing them to be
> included in a subpage, or in an alternate page. In short, is it wrong
> to depict him at all, or is it only offensive when a Muslim views
> those images?
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
>
Farsi speakers are predominately Shiite Muslims living in Iran,
Afghanistan or Tajikistan.  The editors are Farsi Wikipedia are
probably mostly Shia Muslims, though issues like internet access may
bias it somewhat.

But ... uh ... while complicated, in short, Sunnis consider depicted
Muhammad much less acceptable than Shiites, yes.  The Arabic
Wikipedia, which would probably be predominately Sunni Muslim editors
has no images of Muhammad of which I'm aware.

WilyD