Islam’s iconoclastic. It tends to avoid portraying images of people and animals in general, as part of a general opposition to idolatry, and this is even more so when it comes to pictures of Muslim prophets in general; the idea being that if you portray them, people will start worshiping them. So actual art of Muhammed is kind of scarce. This isn’t universal. You find depictions of Muhammed in medieval Persian and Mongol art, for instance. But such portrayals are rare.
There’s not such a taboo on naming people after Muhammed, which is a form of honor, but not of worship.
Also, just for the record, Mr. Dibble, Abdul’s not a name. It’s a prefix that means “slave of” or “servant of”. You find it, like you said, always as part of a name, like “Abdullah” (servant of God), “Abdulrahman” (Servant of the merciful one), Abdul Salam (Servant of the peaceful one), etc.
You’ve gotten several good answers in this thread. … So what if it’s not totally logical within your perception of the world? Religion isn’t based on reducing the world to a bare-bones type of logic that the whole world will agree on - it’s about faith, belief, tradition, and following the teachings of whatever book/prophet/word of god you think is the true one. It doesn’t HAVE to have “actual reasoning” behind it, in particular “actual reasoning” that works for you, a non-believer.
I don’t think this of concern to anyone who is actually Muslim, but how is this for a “reasonable” answer: we do know the Prophet’s true name, since it came down to us through a writing system that predates his birth. Similarly, the name existed before Muhammed did, and we know the name for sure because it it was written down.
Therefore, we KNOW for sure-sure-sure what his name was. That being the case, no one is misrepresenting him by calling him (or namesakes) Muhammed. However, no one knows for sure-sure-sure what Muhammed looked like, as there were no cameras around when he lived. Ergo, any drawing of Muhammed would fall short of an accurate depiction.
There you go. Personally I think it is silly to demand that religion be reason-based, but I can be inventive if asked.
Not that overlaps with everyday language, no. “Peter” may mean “rock,” but we don’t say “I’m going to take that big peter out of my yard today.” Whereas common Arabic names tend to be common Arabic words. “Wahid” means one and is a common name for first born sons. If I count to 3 in Arabic, I said “wahid, etneen, talata.”
Yes the most common names in arabic have very recognizable meanings even in modern dialects (as cairo carol gives her numbers in dialect of egypt :^) ) - not all but most of them do. Some do not of course.
so the clear answer is there is and never has been a sense of worship for the name muhammed or other ordinary names and so it is not and was never seen as a problem of polytheism. if the culture does not attach a sense of worship to the name then it is not illogical at all.
The use of the specific names of God (like Kabir versus Abdelkabir [Captain has correctly said the Abdul / abdel etc is not a name in arabic itself, it is the word Abd and the word the (el/al) together) without modification has been sometimes considered incorrect, but in ordinary modern language it is not uncommon in some dialects to shorten.
it is worth noting that a current sacralisation of mohammed I think is more modern under the christian world cultural impact, like having the birthday of mohammed as a holiday. It was never before, but not in copying christmas it is instituted (although few people bother to observe this at all).
I presume from reading the OPs other posts this is a way of finding another path to criticize and complain about islam.
Is it necessarily copying Christmas? Wouldn’t a better equivalent be Washington’s Birthday or Victoria Day? These are remembrances of people who are highly regarded but not venerated as religious figures. Muslims could have a holiday honoring Muhammad’s memory without worshiping him.
That’s just because Peter’s not an English name, though. It’s a Greek name that’s come into English. But, compare, “I just bought the autobiography of Dane Cook” with, “I just bought a cookbook by the Dane cook.”
So are you saying that “Peter” is an exception, while first names like Steve, Jennifer, Susan, Elizabeth, Margaret, Lynn, Brandon, Jason, Nicole, Jessica and Robert are all used as both names AND everyday words? I don’t think so. (Note that I’m not talking about last names - that’s a completely different matter.)
Sure, you can find the occasional well-known name in the US or similar countries that is also a word in everyday use with the same meaning. Sometimes it even a very deliberate choice - like Chastity, or Lily.
But it is not comparable to the extent to which Arabic names overlap with everyday words. Unless you think that a contorted sentence like, “To be Frank, I wish you’d Mark your Dick so I don’t Bob it by mistake after I go to the John” shows that we’re using common words as names all the time, with the same meaning.
You may be forgetting that “everyday language” in Greece is Greek. I don’t say “I’ll take that peter out of my yard” because, of course, I speak English. Similarly, a common name in Japan (at least, it used to be common when I lived there) for first-born sons was Ichiro. Take a guess what that means in Japan in Japanese.
No. Only amongst certain fiqh. The Jafari Fiqh (the largest Shia fiqh) does not have any prohibition and indeed images of the Prophet are common amongst them. Even so called “Sunni” fiqh in the Subcontinemt only restricted religious figures, there Mughals had a large tradition of portraits painting for instance.
I never said I was talking about Japan or Greece. I said I was talking about English, and I’ll even further narrow that down to American English as used in modern times (especially since names like Faith, Hope, Purity, Justice, etc. were probably much more common in the past).
I’m not sure why people feel so compelled to argue this point without prior experience living in an Arabic-speaking culture.
ETA - just looked at my first post on this topic and I see that I did not specify English. I should have, since that’s what I was thinking about.
I’m saying that all those names are words. Stephen is a Greek word meaning crown. Jennifer is a Cornish phrase meaning “white spirit”, Susan is an old Persian name meaning lily, Elizabeth is a Hebrew phrase meaning “God is abundant”, Margaret is a French name meaning pearl, Lynn is a Celtic word meaning lake, etc. They’re just not, for the most part, English words. So Arabic names aren’t unique in that respect.
Gah - I must be incapable of writing what I mean. I never claimed that (a) Arabic is unique; or (b) names common in English did not have a meaning. Of course names common in English (usually) do have a meaning. What I meant was that names in Arabic, at least as spoken in some countries (Egypt in particular, which I know because I lived there for over 5 years) and everyday words used in speaking tend to be THE SAME WORDS, far more frequently than you see in English (and yes, I will limit myself to modern-day English in America - I’ve already said that names like Faith, Hope, and Chastity are out there).
According to some random website I just checked, the most common names male and female given names in America are:
Not one of those names is commonly in use in English as an everyday word with the same meaning as what lies behind the name (yes, we do talk about “going to the john” or “the prostitute’s john” but someone I doubt that’s what parents had in mind when they bestowed that moniker.)
One thing to consider is the English language’s propensity for borrowing whatever from other languages, and America’s similar propensity for doing the same in regards to other cultures. I can easily see a name from a foreign language entering American usage without dragging the rest of the word’s denotations with it.
A lot of it is because, in a lot of cases, those are Biblical names, and the English and Americans and so on got them from the Bible. It’s, back to the topic, why Muhammed is such a popular name in, say, Indonesia, even though it’s not an Indonesian name.