Thursday, November 29, 2007

Images of Mohammed

Silly mess with Gillian Gibbons getting jailed for letting her class vote to call the teddy bear Mohammed. The whole thing raises far too many questions...

  • Was this the same Gillian Gibbons who was my form tutor when I was 11?
  • How does Islam cope with the huge inconsistency in not allowing images of people but allowing a) TV and b) retinas?
  • What would they do if we all named our teddy bears / dogs / pigs Mohammed? Not after the "prophet", of course, but after the child who suggested they name the teddy after him?
  • Is this finally going to make the Islamists look too stupid for words?
  • Do they have photo ID in Muslim countries?
  • How many teddies or equiv called Mohammed are there in Muslim countries? I'm guessing at least hundreds, if those kids were happy to call theirs Mohammed.
  • Isn't this the sort of thing that the army is for? Aren't British passports meant to help in this?

(NB - the picture on the right is a picture of Mohammed (the famous one), but it was made by a (Persian) Muslim in the 16th century, so it's probably ok). From Wikipedia.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some Muslims may have painted images of Muhammed, but that doesn't necessarily prove anything more than some of the utterances of Don Cupitt, Anthony Freeman etc prove anything about Christianity or Anglicanism.

I say 'necessarily'. The paintings may be more widespread and orthodox that the Sea of Faith, but I don't have any idea about it. Perhaps you do? Were a lot of the images painted by Sufis, possibly?

John said...

Mostly Shias, I think, who historically have taken a different attitude to the whole images thing. The strict prohibition is traditionally a Sunni thing.

I'm happy to accept that some Muslims don't believe that images should be made of living things and others don't, for roughly the reasons that you give. Doesn't answer the question about TV though.