A Picture of Islam

Today was the day to make fun of Mohammed. It was the day to draw or create pictures depicting him as an animal, insect, plant or worse.  Pakistan apparently shut down access to Facebook and YouTube because of those pictures, and some of the pictures were probably broadcast.  I say probably because I haven’t seen any so far and while I’m not looking FOR them I am pretty open to most stuff that crosses the net.

At any rate the entire thing has become a huge mess.  Islam has a religious requirement that certain images not be created.   This accounts for some of the amazing art found in Muslim mosques.  There were to be no representations of any thing that was created by God.  That included people, animals, plants, even earth and clouds.  Significant modification to that  tradition is now apparent with photographs, video and movies moving through the Islamic world on newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, computers and internet.  But the requirement is basically still there, particularly with respect to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed.  Any picture representing to present his likeness, even if intended to present a handsome, intelligent, pious and glorious image is still considered a vulgar and insulting sacrilege to roughly a billion Muslims on the planet  

This issue resurfaced recently when a writer was innocently trying to put together a children’s book series about the various religions.  She had words and pictures of Rama, Buddha, Moses, Jesus and many other religious leaders and then found out that she couldn’t put even her obviously and intentionally not-realistic pictures of Mohammed in her series-to-be.  That was a minor problem that affected her project.  Then Danish newspapers picked up the story and ran a series of cartoons about  Mohammed to show that there was no problem, the main issue was not Islamic religious legal technicalities but the western values of Free Speech.  The cartoons went hypersonic when death threats supposedly by Islamic “martyrs” were directed toward some of the Danish cartoonists.  Some of those cartoonists are apparently still living in fear of their lives for that act.  

Now enter a stupid American TV program called “South Park”.  They spoof and make fun of everything and everybody they can find.  They decided to run a series or a show which depicted  Mohammed as a bear.  MORE death threats came from more Islamic “martyrs”, and South Park dropped the segment the day it was to be shown.

So now comes someone on Facebook.  Apparently this episode is seen as the  catyclsmic collision between the great western world’s right to free speech with an Islamic religious taboo. The Muslim response has been to threaten to assassinate more of the perpetrators, now even a treat to kill innocent people as retaliation.

The western right to free speech is not a gift given by any god, it is a right that was denied by an almost endless series of kings, popes and other creatures of nobility and it was won in an almost endless series of wars.  It is based on the understanding that most governments and most religions want to control all that is printed about them and their activities.  Any westerner (European or American) would  therefore “know”  that if they were restricted from writing about or photographing  some event or thing that it was probably illegal to begin with and SHOULD be written about or photographed and published.

Muslims have had a problem with the religious requirement against depiction anything in the natural world.  Any showing of Mohammed cannot possibly be based on historical drawings so they would all have to be bogus.  But to threaten the western people who attempt to present Mohammed, including innocent people who happen to be near the target is repulsive to all mankind and all religions.  

It is my feeling that Islam should be less concerned about images of Mohammed, and more concerned about the image of Islam.