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| Hearsay: |
Christopher Hitchens examines the implications of Yale’s ban on Mohammad images in its upcoming book on the cartoon incident.
Now, the original intention of limiting the representation of Mohammed by Muslims (and Islamic fatwas, before we forget, have no force whatever when applied to people outside the faith) was the rather admirable one of preventing idolatry. It was feared that people might start to worship the man and not the god of whom he was believed to be the messenger. This is why it is crass to refer to Muslims as Mohammedans. Nonetheless, Islamic art contains many examples—especially in Iran—of paintings of the Prophet, and even though the Dante example is really quite an upsetting one, exemplifying a sort of Christian sadism and sectarianism, there has never been any Muslim protest about its pictorial representation in Western art.
If that ever changes, which one can easily imagine it doing, then Yale has already made the argument that gallery directors may use to justify taking down the pictures and locking them away. According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images—and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence.
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August 18th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Oh, someone’s going to dismiss this topic by calling Hitchens a racist neocon in three, two…
August 18th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Not me. But I do find agreeing with him irritating. What with him being an etc.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
That helps explain why so many people jump into the Hitchens/atheism discussions with “I’m not religious, but…”
August 18th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Hitchens is being too kind. “Limiting the representations of Mohammed”
may ostensibly have been decreed to prevent idolatry, but it may also have been
used as a way of preventing the spotlight shining on Mohammed’s life, rather
than the Koran and the positioned image of the faith.
Donatich is using the high-minded
excuse as a pathetic cover for his cowardice.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Brian’s on to something. In Arabia, sites associated with Muhammad’s life are rountinely destroyed based on the same anti-idolatry logic (see link). Of course, the bonus is that it becomes less and less possible to scrutinize Muhammad as a historical figure, and he slides conveniently into the same murky territory as the other prophets of the Abrahamosphere.
As for the scene in The Divine Comedy in which Muhammad (condemned as a schismatic) is depicted tearing himself in two, I have seen a Farsi edition of Inferno–with Gustave Dore illustration–in which this scene has been removed. Obviously the book has crossed an Iranian censor’s desk, but luckily no anti-Italian pogrom has come of it.