WHAT'S BEHIND MUSLIM CARTOON OUTRAGE Muhammad's image: Revered prophet of Islam has been depicted in art for hundreds of years
Ayesha Akram, Special to The Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/11/MNGRCH6UQK1.DTL

As enraged Muslims take to the streets to protest cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, few seem to be aware that representations of Islam's last messenger have existed throughout history without causing alarm.
"There is nothing in the Quran that forbids imagery the way it is condemned in the Hebrew Bible," said John L. Esposito, university professor of religion and international studies at Georgetown University.
Although rare in the 1,400 years of Islamic art, visual representations of Muhammad were acceptable in certain periods. Today, his likenesses grace collections around the world, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Edinburgh University Library, the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris.
"To say that Islam is anti-imagery is to have a very limited understanding of the religion," said Linda Komaroff, curator of Islamic art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Islam isn't just one flavor or one interpretation"
The museum has an unusual depiction of him -- a verbal portrait. Called a hilyeler, meaning adornment, the verbal portrait was common during the Ottoman period and often could be found hanging in Muslim homes.
"They were the equivalent of the paintings of Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary one finds in Christian homes today," Komaroff said.
The hilyeler in Los Angeles is a description of Muhammad by his son-in-law, Ali. It has been translated as follows: "He was not too tall or too short. He was medium-size. His hair was not short and curly, nor was it lank, but in between. His face was not narrow, nor was it fully round, but there was a roundness to it. ... Between his shoulders was the seal of prophecy, the sign that he was the last of the prophets."
Esposito said the current belief by many Muslims that images of the prophet are sacrilegious probably stems from the Quran's strong denunciation of idolatry. "Worshiping an idol is the greatest sin in Islam," he said. "There is great emphasis in the Quran on not associating anything with God."
One of the most repeated stories about Muhammad in Islamic history narrates an incident in which he entered the Holy Kaaba, a Muslim shrine, and destroyed all the idols standing inside.
But Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary, said Muslims aren't upset just because the Danish cartoons disregard their religious beliefs. "These are racist depictions," she said. "They are along the lines of anti-Semitic depictions once seen in Europe. They are deliberately offensive and aimed at a minority which is already feeling marginalized."
Other Muslim activists said the images misrepresented the prophet by showing him as a terrorist, whereas he was a peace-loving man.
The modern-day blanket prohibition of portraying Islam's sixth century messenger can probably be credited to the strict teachings of Wahabi Islam, said Jonathan Bloom, an Islamic art historian at Boston University. Wahabi is the Saudi Islamic sect founded in the 18th century that is the official ideology of Saudi Arabia and supposedly practiced by Osama bin Laden.
"There were definitely times, especially in Iran in the 14th century and during the Ottoman empire, when manuscripts contained illustrations of him," Bloom said.
Probably the most well-known illustration of the prophet is contained in the "Book of the Assumption of Muhammad," dated around 1425 and thought to be painted in Herat, Afghanistan. Called the meraj-nama, it shows Muhammad mounted on a horse and being guided on a tour of Paradise. The original can be found at the National Library in Paris.
Renowned Western artists such as Salvador Dali, Auguste Rodin, William Blake and Gustav Dore have made paintings of Muhammad in their illustrations of the Inferno chapter of Dante's trilogy "The Divine Comedy."
Muslim activists in the United States say examining the violent response to the Danish cartoons in isolation is a mistake.
"None of this can be explained as a response to one offensive cartoon," said Rabiah Ahmed, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. "In the last few years, rhetoric of Western politicians and the war on terror have both fed into suspicions of Muslims that the West harbors hostility toward them and mocks their values. These cartoons added to the insult."
Ahmed said previous disrespectful representations of the prophet did not provoke such a response, which is why attributing Muslim outrage solely to the Danish cartoon would be erroneous.
In 2001, the television cartoon "South Park" aired an episode in which Muhammad teams up for superhero action and, a year later, the French publication Charlie Hebdo ran a cartoon showing the prophet drinking and smoking.
A comic book titled "Mohammed's Believe It or Else!" contains hundreds of satirical cartoons. The book's Web site says it is being translated into six languages, including Arabic and Dutch.
Although each of these depictions provoked anger from Muslims -- the comic's Web site claims to have received 14,000 death threats -- none of them culminated in a global protest.
In the past century, the prohibition against showing Muhammad's face has hardened due to teachings of conservative Muslim leaders.
"In contemporary times, prophet Muhammad has become the most visible symbol of integrity of Islam," said John Voll, author of "Islam, Continuity, and Change in the Modern World." "Muslims have become extremely sensitive to any attack on the prophet's person."
This is particularly so of the Sunni sect of Islam, in which imagery is frowned upon. Shiite Muslims indulge heavily in visual representations, and in Iran depictions of the prophet's son-in-law are common.
Voll believes that had the cartoons attacked any Islamic figure other than Muhammad, the response might have been different.
"I don't think the reaction would have been this strong at all," he said. "Even in 'The Satanic Verses,' Muslims were upset at the defaming of Muhammad, and few seemed bothered that Muhammad's companions were also defamed in the book."
The problem with the Danish cartoon seems to be that it insults Islam's most revered figure at a time when Muslims are particularly sensitive to Western perceptions.
"Muslims love the prophet Muhammad," said Mattson. "An attack on him is perceived as an attack on Islam."

Check out http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/fiore/
I just think everybody is overreacting. Anyway , this link will bring you to a satire. not my cup of tea.

Wayward Christian Soldiers

January 20, 2006
Op-Ed ContributorWayward Christian Soldiers
By CHARLES MARSH
Charlottesville, Va.
IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?
Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.
Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.
The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.
Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.
Such sentiments are a far cry from those expressed in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. More than 2,300 evangelical leaders from 150 countries signed that statement, the most significant milestone in the movement's history. Convened by Billy Graham and led by John Stott, the revered Anglican evangelical priest and writer, the signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology."
On this page, David Brooks correctly noted that if evangelicals elected a pope, it would most likely be Mr. Stott, who is the author of more than 40 books on evangelical theology and Christian devotion. Unlike the Pope John Paul II, who said that invading Iraq would violate Catholic moral teaching and threaten "the fate of humanity," or even Pope Benedict XVI, who has said there were "not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq," Mr. Stott did not speak publicly on the war. But in a recent interview, he shared with me his abiding concerns.
"Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization," he told me. "I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval." Reverend Stott referred me to "War and Rumors of War, " a chapter from his 1999 book, "New Issues Facing Christians Today," as the best account of his position. In that essay he wrote that the Christian community's primary mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross."
What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.
Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, is the author of "The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company