The stupidity of a small minded
person is dangerous, and a small minded person being also a "no
brainer" make his conscientious stupidity a crime beyond
comparison.
Did you seriously believe the search engine in google and altavista
cannot fulfill any subject on earth ?
It depends very much on the choice of 'key words' that is entered
for the search engines to find the required information.
Surely we can only see garbage coming from a "no brainer" and what
else can we expect him to feed the search engines with in his
search for more filth and garbage to heap onto a religion that he
has no respect nor understanding.
Can we believe that a person who is a "no brainer" can appreciate
the Arabic Language to read through the entire Quran ?
Can we believe that a "no brainer" is able to 'STUDY' the tenets of
the Quran ?
CULTURE CLASH
Bonfire of the
Pieties
Islam prohibits neither images of Muhammad nor jokes about
religion.
BY
AMIR TAHERI
Wednesday, February 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
"The Muslim Fury," one newspaper headline screamed. "The Rage of
Islam Sweeps Europe," said another. "The clash of civilizations is
coming," warned one commentator. All this refers to the row
provoked by the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in
a Danish newspaper four months ago. Since then a number of
demonstrations have been held, mostly--though not exclusively--in
the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates have been
besieged.
But how representative of Islam
are all those demonstrators? The "rage machine" was
set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood--a political, not a
religious, organization--called on sympathizers in the Middle East
and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf
al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on
al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood's rivals, Hizb
al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of
the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might
be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders
abandoned their party's 60-year-old secular pretensions and
organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus
and Beirut.
The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of
its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan--who is, strangely enough,
also an adviser to the British home secretary--can be
summed up as follows: It is
against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only
Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not
used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are
false.
There is no Quranic
injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone
else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into
contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly
iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when
Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any
depiction of the Godhead. That position was further
buttressed by the fact that Islam
acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments--which include a ban on
depicting God--as part of its heritage. The issue
has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute
principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has
only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God.
Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view
of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the
Many of the attributes of the One.
The claim that the ban on
depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of
Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have
been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim
rulers. There is no space here to provide an
exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous:
A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur
Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq, a horse with the face of a
beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M'eraj or
nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting showing
Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet's
capital after he fled from Mecca (16th century); a portrait of
Muhammad, his face covered with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th
century); an Isfahan miniature depicting the prophet with his
favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th century); Kamaleddin Behzad's
miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced by a drop
of sweat that fell from his face (19th century); a painting,
"Massacre of the Family of the Prophet," showing Muhammad watching
as his grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala
(19th century); a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first
followers (18th century); and Kamal ul-Mulk's portrait of Muhammad
showing the prophet holding the Quran in one hand while with the
index finger of the other hand he points to the Oneness of God
(19th century).
Some of these can be seen in museums within the Muslim world,
including the Topkapi in Istanbul, and in Bokhara and Samarkand,
Uzbekistan, and Haroun-Walat, Iran (a suburb of Isfahan). Visitors
to other museums, including some in Europe, would find miniatures
and book illuminations depicting Muhammad, at times wearing his
Meccan burqa (cover) or his Medinan niqab (mask). There have been
few statues of Muhammad, although several Iranian and Arab
contemporary sculptors have produced busts of the prophet.
One statue of Muhammad can be
seen at the building of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the prophet
is honored as one of the great "lawgivers" of
mankind.
There has been other imagery: the Janissaries--the elite of the
Ottoman army--carried a medallion stamped with the prophet's head
(sabz qaba). Their Persian Qizilbash rivals had their own icon,
depicting the head of Ali, the prophet's son-in-law and the first
Imam of Shiism. As for images of other prophets, they run into
millions. Perhaps the most popular is Joseph, who is presented by
the Quran as the most beautiful human being created by God.
continue below
