[Foundation-l] Wikimania and the Muhammad pix

[Aphaia]

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