Thank you! :o
Kecia Ali is one of my favorite scholars. Every single one of her books is brilliant, and she’s well worth following on Twitter, too.
Hell, I’m no scholar on Islam by any stretch of the imagination and even I can field that one : “strict” and “hadith” is pretty much an oxymoron.
What the Quran says is one thing, and cannot be touched (…to some extent. I know there are some Muslim scholars at least who made the case that Uthman fucked with the text for political reasons) ; but the hadiths seem like they’re more of a free-for-all.
Which hadith is dubious, which is fo’ sho’ wholly made up, what this or that bit of a hadith really entails if you squint just right, whether hadiths should even be a thing to begin with (Muhammad himself was dead set against them… according to some hadiths 
; and there have been a number of sola scriptura Muslim sects over the centuries)… From what precious little I know that’s **all **subject to lots and lots and *lots *of debate, arguing and pulling of beards.
From the linked article:
But I’m sure that’s just taqiya or some junk, right, Haberdash?
Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia may be one of the only English-language books available that delves into the history and ideology of that group, but even if it weren’t it’d still be one of the best. It clearly lays out the origins of the group, where they derived their twisted version of Islam from, and how they achieved political power in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviets. This expanded 2nd Edition covers Osama Bin Laden’s rocky relationship with them and events after the US invasion, explaining why the group still plagues the country today even after being toppled from power. Afghanistan doesn’t get much attention these days, but it’s still a vital battleground in the fight against Islamic extremism, and this book does a phenomenal job of explaining the whos and whys of it.
Oh, and speaking of Afghanistan, this just happened yesterday: Afghan court sentences 4 to death for killing woman accused of burning Quran.
Going for suicide by Mod, is my take on it.
And yeah, kudos to A’isha for the links.
Mentally ill woman battered to death by angry mob for burning the Koran
It was later revealed that she was neither mentally ill nor burning the Koran, and was in fact a teacher of the Koran.
Extortion by threats of Koran-libel is common in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Pay me every week or I’ll tell the local lynch mob that you burned a Koran,” basically. It usually targets religious minorities, but as we see here, not always.
The lynch mob is always available at a moment’s notice, of course.
And yet you stand by and continue to do nothing. Shameful.
BTW, that’s the same case already mentioned by A’isha in post 763. You’re not even reading your own links, are you?
It is of little practical value to make such a distinction: if a large group of followers believe a Hadith must be strictly adhered to, whether or not it is considered universally-accepted is rather irrelevant.
For example, the concept of the 7 deadly sins is only taken with great sincerity among Catholics. If one of those sins was, for example, homosexuality, it would be foolish to dismiss that because it wasn’t universally accepted; a large number drawing from historical text is a large number drawing from historical text. Such text deserves scrutiny and cannot casually be dismissed.
Not to mention that there are still dry counties, cities, and towns in quite a few parts of the United States.
Okay, there’s a lot to catch up on so I’ll try to keep this brief. All [bracketed] clarifying edits are mine
Aisha, if you don’t mind I’m going to address your points out of sequence, starting with this one:
I may have to do some back-peddling here. What I’ve read up until now seemed to indicate that there were hadith which explicitly forbade depictions of Muhammed. For instance, this BBC article states:
*"Islamic tradition or Hadith, the stories of the words and actions of Muhammad and his Companions, explicitly prohibits images of Allah, Muhammad and all the major prophets of the Christian and Jewish traditions.
More widely, Islamic tradition has discouraged the figurative depiction of living creatures, especially human beings. Islamic art has therefore tended to be abstract or decorative."*
There are other sources which say very similar things, and I fear now that I may have placed too much trust in them. When I searched for hadith which explicitly stated that depictions of Muhammed specifically were forbidden I couldn’t find any. The only hadith I could find were ones which forbade any form of figurative depiction at all. Obviously, this includes Muhammed, but I couldn’t find anything which said, essentially, that pictures of him were especially forbidden.
Nonetheless, there is, obviously, a strong cultural taboo against such depictions. While only a handful of muslims have killed cartoonists over them, tens of thousands rioted when the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were published, and opinion polls show that, even in secular countries like the UK, a clear majority of muslims oppose depictions of Muhammed. If, as I feel I must now concede, this taboo doesn’t arise from scripture, where does it come from?
True. Then again, it seems like the Saudis and other Sunni Islam states do. If their objections aren’t based on scripture, what are they based on?
Well…I did say “no-one in their right mind”. I’m pretty sure that guy doesn’t qualify 
Besides, there are other incidents which go the other way. When, in 2005, it was merely rumoured that guards at Guantanamo Bay had defaced a Koran there were violent anti-American protests all over the middle east.
I know. I never stated that the majority of muslims want to kill people who satirise Muhammed. I merely said (perhaps erroneously) that the scriptural justification existed for those who do.
Firstly, you’re right. That satire article went completely over my head. However, that’s not the kind of satire/comedy I’m talking about. I’m talking about satirising Muhammed directly. That, undeniably, carries significant risk. And, contrary to what you and Gyrate are saying, it doesn’t require intimate knowledge of Islam or Muhammed to carry off.
Let me give you an example. Have you ever seen ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’? It’s actually quite a funny show, but there’s a particular scene where the character of Jesus (who, if memory serves, is wearing a diaper for some reason) is singing a duet with Satan that goes a little bit like this:
Jesus: “I am Jesus and I love all mankind.”
Chorus: “Jesus is gay! Jesus is gay!”
Jesus: “Actually, I am a little bit gay…”
Now, I submit the following:
- You don’t need to know anything whatsoever about Christianity to get that joke.
- That joke would work equally well if, instead of Jesus, it was Muhammed saying “Actually, I’m a little bit gay”.
- Anyone who actually put on a show with Muhammed saying that (in a diaper, no less!) would run a serious risk of being gutted in the street like Theo Van Gogh.
Most religious satire is dumb and unsophisticated. This idea that, in order to be successful, or, at the very least, crowd-pleasing, a satire of Muhammed would need to be witty and nuanced is complete balderdash. It can be broad, ugly, unsophisticated, and downright dumb as hell and it would still work. And I retract my previous claim that such comedy wouldn’t be financially viable. The controversy alone would likely guarantee that any such satire would turn a prophet. The main reason it hasn’t been done is that it simply isn’t worth the risk.
Of the links Gyrate provided the only one which I would count as satire of Muhammed is Jesus and Mo, and even that isn’t without risk. When, in defiance of the censorious impulses of some of his co-religionists, UK politician Maajid Nawaz tweeted a Jesus and Mo cartoon, he immediately started getting death threats. So that example really proves my point, not yours.
Oh, fuck me! I swear that was unintentional :smack:
I’m not qualified to speak to the scriptural element, but I think the reasons for the rioting and other violence around these sorts of cartoons doesn’t stem from violating a taboo against depicting Mohammed (as has been pointed out, something that’s common in many Muslim cultures) but are because these cartoons are intensely and deliberately insulting. They’re not rioting over a picture, per se, but over the fact that a bunch of Westerners, while taking a break from bombing their countries, have gone out of their way to say, “Fuck you, Muslims!”
Not, obviously, that rioting (or worse) is an acceptable response to that, but I’m not aware of any riots over respectful or even neutral portrayals of Mohammed. Which you would expect, if the issue were only, “Don’t draw the Prophet.”
Westerners routinely send death threats to people for not liking a video game. True, none of them have ever carried through, which definitely gives them a leg up over radical Islam, but “Gets a lot of death threats on Twitter,” is pretty much what happens if you start a Twitter account.
You’re really not even reading these any more, are you?
Pretty much run out of the good stuff, eh?
It is when people assert that “a group of followers believe a hadith must be strictly adhered to” and “Muslims believe this hadith must be strictly adhered to” are equivalent statements.
To give you a relatable example : a nonzero subset of American Protestants are dead set against homosexuality and point to a few specific lines of Leviticus to support their phobia (the fact that it’s the only bits of Leviticus they feel are relevant or worth strictly observing is left unspoken. GOD HATES SHELLFISH !).
But there’s quite a large gap to bridge between this assertion of fact and the statement “Christians hate gays because Leviticus contains strict prohibitions against homosexuality”, dig ?
Popular misconception. There’s a lot more than seven mortal sins in catholic theology. What is popularly known as “the seven deadly sins” are not sins per se, they’re the cardinal vices that *lead to *sinning or sinful behaviour in general.
I’m not saying hadith should be casually and universally dismissed. I’m saying that “this hadith says that” is a poor predictor of the behaviour of Muslims as a whole, or even just the larger denominations (sunni/shi’a). You have to zoom in a lot closer than that before specific hadith can become relevant. And that is especially true in the specific context of drawing Muhammad… because there actually **are **no such proscriptions, in the Quran *or *the hadith.
A handful of hadith proscribe *all *figurative art (without stating what should be done about the makers of such art or the art itself, mind you), others say it’s OK but not to be encouraged, others specify that it’s not OK in the religious context but fine outside of it. From those, and among sunnis in particular, has been derived a whole art style and general prohibitions from drawing important guys (not just Muhammad), just to be on the safe side with the Big Man. Even so, Muslims (sunni and shia alike) have kept drawing Muhammad from time to time throughout the centuries.
The more intransigent strain proscribing even non-Muslims from representing the prophet, for any reason, under pain of death, is a whole lot more recent, fringe, and not backed by any specific bit of scripture or hadith.
A broader subset of Muslims protests not the mere drawing of the prophet, but insulting him or making light of him because he’s kind of an important dude to them, and blasphemy has more going for it in the way of islamic jurisprudence and scripture both. But there again, lots of variance between communities and legalistic traditions.