by Jon Lackman | 9 November 2009 | Islamic
Oleg Grabar writes in The New Republic:
Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though of course the argument can be made that a possible danger to people may compel restrictions in the expression of opinions and of facts. I am not persuaded by this argument about this book. And the deletion of the images is also–a far more important criticism in this instance–a gratuitous betrayal of scholarship, since many other books (including at least four published by Yale, two of them by me) do show images of the Prophet … In the past, and still today, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad have been produced, and are still produced, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons … there can be no doubt that, especially from the thirteenth century onward, the Muslim world accepted the existence of representations of the Prophet. This iconography was not common, and was usually restricted to the accompaniment of a narrative text, or to serve as pious reminders of an exemplary life … To the extent that the argument against the so-called cartoons has centered on the legal propriety or impropriety of representing the Prophet Muhammad, it has been a pointless argument. Of course it is possible to question the Danish caricatures on grounds of taste, or social or political intent; but the lack of taste is not a legal category, and mischievous or even evil intent is difficult to discern in the absence of clearly stated moral and philosophical principles. The only certain lesson to draw from the sad story of the Danish cartoons is the almost universal prevalence of ignorance and incompetence–and that everyone, from writers and pundits to the leaders of mobs, should learn more before making a judgment or starting a riot.
What the myopic masses seem to observe in the case of Yale’s alleged “gratuitous betrayal of scholarship” and “free speech” is that the choice not to print the images means that this book will likely find a much more receptive audience in the Muslim world. The images are obviously easily available via the internet for those who wish to see them, and now this scholar’s work will also be available to thinkers who exist outside our Eurocentric scope of vision.