Ghost of a flea: Graven images

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February 09, 2006

Graven images

Some of my Protestant ancestors set up a religious dictatorship and set about smashing the art of churches across England. They believed they were doing God's work. They banned dancing, theatre and Christmas (I am still a bit antsy about that last one) yet somehow most Christians today manage to enjoy all three without detriment to their faith and devotion. You do not have to click far across "the internet" to find latter-day variations on the same puritan themes both within Christianity and elsewhere.

For people with difficulty mastering joined up writing: there is no absolute prohibition of images of Mohammed, let alone humour, in Islam. If for no other reason than that the chap telling you so is waving a stick, it would be wise to take what he is saying with a grain of salt; and with an eye to the people round him he has already managed to intimidate. Amir Taheri explains a contemporary manifestation of a problem that besets not only Islam but all creeds when they are abbreviated by a fundamentalist mindset (via Secular Blasphemy).

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments--which include a ban on depicting God--as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 9, 2006 08:31 AM

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