Petition fails to lobby Wikipedia to remove images of Muhammad

international | history and heritage | opinion/analysis

Saturday February 16, 2008 17:52

by ribbid - ( iosaf mac diarmada )

180,000 signatures on a petition have failed to lobby the Wikipedia foundation to remove images of the founder of Islam from entries in multiple languages available on the online encyclopedia. However, the illustrations are not nor are likely to be included in the arabic version or other lingustic portals associated with muslim sensibility.

It might thus appear languages are sensitive.
I have always suspected so, to be frank - perhaps more sensitive than the eye..,

& the veiled friend had to be seen to go to war

We live in an iconclastic age where hagiography & pornography, snuff & bluff provide omniprescent evidence for any meme we choose to interprete the tensions inherent in the crystalisation of superstate societies.

Don't we?

The first time round when a Danish newspaper of inconsequence published cartoons with the intent of provoking offence, I focussed on Iranian/Irish relations & the price of dairy exports in the article " Iran : knowing which side thy bread be buttered". I observed that our collection of iconoclastic representative art appeared safe at that time. I've used one example as the illustration, the artwork exhibited at the Chester Beatty Library entitled "Muhammad and His Army March Against the Meccans".

Representation of people in art as much as sacred characters of religious or metaphysic character marked a watershed in human cultural expression in the last two thousand years. The true issue at heart of every debate; crises, clash, provocation, exploration etc.., &c., relating to visual or dramatic depiction of same has not changed since the shift in anthropomorphic or anthropocentric thought. Long before the prophet of Islam is believed to have been born, the Jewish & general semitic taboo had been suplanted to the Hellenic concepts of divinity essential to the propagation of Christianity in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire under the caesars.

It was quite exceptionally how quick God grew his beard, sat on his throne & muscular Jesus hung on a cross for our sins. Not until Martin De Porres became the first saint of black skin & high melanin as well as grace content was it really possible to tell one Christian saint from another without recourse to a symbolic or semiotic vocabulary at times more obtuse than comparitive distinctions seen in Hindu religious art, & one could muse with less arms. Apart from a brief bit of exhuberance in 5th century Coptic art or mid medieval western European romanesque frieze work, can I think of any example of Christian art with more than one pair of arms or eyes attached to one body or set of wings. (we didn't do cherubs for centuries later)

Thus the emphasis placed in Judaism on the letters of the torah which naturally followed into the mono-lingual transmission of the scripture of Islam which necessitated a literate class for its historical survival became altogether easier to teach. It was sort of an advertising breakthrough.

:know which side your bread is buttered on:
:here endeth the lesson - pass the plate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Muhammad/images
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/removal-of-the-pics-of...-wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad