Issue 120, March 2006

A sense of awe
by Tim Winter

Portrayals of the Prophet underestimate his grandeur, but they are not "banned"

Tim Winter is a lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University

One of Marc Chagall's bitterest memories was of an encounter with a devout great-uncle. On learning that there was an
image-maker in the family, the old man had refused to shake his hand. To secular sensibilities this seems bizarre, another
proof of the irrational bloody-mindedness of religion; yet in Jewish terms, the event signals an interesting clash of
humanisms. Neither Chagall nor his elderly relative were fanatics. They were both concerned to honour the mystery of the
human face, but in utterly irreconcilable ways.

The second commandment is clear enough. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that
is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Many orthodox Jews and
Muslims, and some Christians, have taken this literally. When asked to explain, they will sometimes justify the ban on the
grounds of the human tendency to fall into idolatry. But more often, such iconoclasm reflects a sense of awe and humility in
the face of God's creative power. The founder of Islam taught that at the last judgement, God will summon the makers of
images and command them to bring their productions to life. To make images, then, is to compete with God, and to
underestimate the glory of his creation, particularly of human beings.

For this kind of reason, images of Jesus did not exist in Christianity until the 4th century. When Islam appeared on the scene,
it objected in the same spirit to portraying the Prophet, opposing the temptation to define the sacred through material means,
and for fear of banishing the sense of awe with which, Islam believes, the miracle of humanity, and particularly the human
face, should be approached. This was the theory. But it is also true that images of the Prophet were not unknown, and, in some
Ottoman and central Asian traditions of miniature painting, were actually rather popular. More recently, depictions of the
Prophet have mostly been passed over in silence. The 1994 publication by a Muslim magazine, The Wayfarer, of a portrait of
the Prophet generated a brief frisson, but nothing like the current uproar. Last year, a French weekly published a similar
portrait, which was met with indifference by the Muslim community.

There is, in fact, no consistent tradition in classical Islamic law which specifies a penalty for Muslims or non-Muslims who
portray the Prophet. In practice, it has been widely accepted that such images--while tragically underestimating the grandeur
of their subject--can be endured as long as the intent is not clearly insulting.

Blasphemy, however, is a different matter, and whether it takes the form of a book or an image, is deeply wounding to
Muslim sensibilities. Even here, however, the classical Sharia contains grey areas. Medieval Islamic law, while forbidding
blasphemy against the Prophet by Muslims, could make exceptions in the case of non-Muslims. For instance, Ibn Abi Zayd,
one of the founders of classical Muslim law, wrote that it is not a criminal offence for a Christian or a Jew to blaspheme
against the Prophet in a way that is mandated by his or her own beliefs. Whether the Jyllands-Posten editors were acting in
accordance with such beliefs is a matter of debate.
The fundamentalists, of course, refuse to conform to classical Islamic law, and read the scriptures on the basis of their own
turbulent emotions. Yet mainstream and fundamentalist Muslims alike have the right to point to the inconsistency of the large
western claims made on behalf of freedom of expression, when measured against the reality of legal practice in Europe and
America. In the Netherlands, for instance, "scornful" abuse of the Christian deity is an offence. German law prohibits
disturbing the peace through the ridicule of religion. In Canada, "blasphemous libel" carries a maximum prison sentence of
two years. In the US, the first amendment coexists uncertainly with the many state laws which defend Christianity. Finland,
Italy, Spain and Britain all restrict blasphemy in one way or another, and when defendants appeal to the European court of
human rights, the original judgement is often upheld.

The law books typically defend specifically Christian sensibilities. There are exceptions: last year, for instance, an Australian
court found against a Christian fundamentalist group which had misrepresented Muslim beliefs, and ordered it to place
apologies in national newspapers. Yet there is an overall inequality which is felt as a desperate injustice in the ghettos, where
the honour of the Prophet is the source of so much self-worth.

Of course, the legitimate Muslim demands for equal treatment urgently need to combine with introspection. Saudi sermons
that mock Hindu or Jewish beliefs are no less offensive than the Danish cartoons, a problem which the middle east has hardly
begun to address. The turn that many Muslim countries have taken over the past two decades, reversing the 20th-century
moves to aggiornamento, is towards the most religiously faithful approach to modernity--and imposing the narrowest possible
interpretation of the Koran. This has energised a furious xenophobia, and matters have not been helped by Palestine and Iraq.
Both sides to the current dispute are at fault: Europe, for its manifest double standards, and many Muslims, for having rejected
the higher aspects of their heritage in favour of an emotive and often brutal hatred of difference.

A full reconciliation between Islam and the west, however, is not going to happen; neither is it in the interests of either that it
should. The west, imposing its own sensibilities on the world through a totalising globalisation, can only be impoverished if
there are no radically different voices, grounded in other certainties, to call it into question. And Muslims, like other
religionists, will never be quite comfortable in a civilisation which is materialistic and profane. Their unpopularity is probably
inevitable.

A sense of awe
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