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Showing Original Post only (View all)The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of the Prophet - Newsweek [View all]
The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of the ProphetBy Christiane Gruber - Newsweek
1/9/15 at 4:43 PM
<snip>
In the wake of the massacre that took place in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, I have been called upon as a scholar specializing in Islamic paintings of the Prophet to explain whether images of Muhammad are banned in Islam.
The short and simple answer is no. The Koran does not prohibit figural imagery. Rather, it castigates the worship of idols, which are understood as concrete embodiments of the polytheistic beliefs that Islam supplanted when it emerged as a purely monotheistic faith in the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century.
Moreover, the Hadith, or Sayings of the Prophet, present us with an ambiguous picture at best: At turns we read of artists dared to breathe life into their figures and, at others, of pillows ornamented with figural imagery.
If we turn to Islamic law, there does not exist a single legal decree, or fatwa, in the historical corpus that explicitly and decisively prohibits figural imagery, including images of the Prophet. While more recent online fatwas can surely be found, the decree that comes closest to articulating this type of ban was published online in 2001 by the Taliban, as they set out to destroy the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
In their fatwa, the Taliban decreed that all non-Islamic statues and shrines in Afghanistan be destroyed. However, this very modern decree remains entirely silent on the issue of figural images and sculptures within Islam, which, conversely, had been praised as beneficial and educational by Muhammad 'Abduh, a prominent jurist in 19th century Egypt.
In sum, a search for a ban on images of Muhammad in pre-modern Islamic textual sources will yield no clear and firm results whatsoever.
<snip>
More: http://www.newsweek.com/koran-does-not-forbid-images-prophet-298298
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Kind of like the Fundy Christians blowing up clinics and killing people because
LiberalArkie
Jan 2015
#3
Kind of like whites killing blacks hoping it will start the proverbial "race riots"
LiberalArkie
Jan 2015
#5
Were you thinking that the attacks were really representative of the faith? Were you?
NYC_SKP
Jan 2015
#36
Might it be that the purpose of castizing the worship of idols, while not prohibitng their imagrey
Fred Sanders
Jan 2015
#4
Even people that don't believe that Christmas had anything to do with the birth
rhett o rick
Jan 2015
#23
Are you comparing the day people celebrate a birth to murdering people over a picture?
joeglow3
Jan 2015
#18
No of course not. The OP is about how some read something into the Quran that isn't there.
rhett o rick
Jan 2015
#25
Here is how I interpret the broad religious warnings against "graven images" and why
Warren DeMontague
Jan 2015
#17