Today is "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"!

Muslim devotional pictures

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Islam's prophet Muhammad ibn Abd Allah. Representations of the Prophet are well known from early on, but are not very common. While some Muslims hold beliefs that it is against Islam to make images of the Prophet, others have more relaxed attitudes, and among Shia Muslims, such pictures are common, and much liked.

According to Iranian informants interviewed by Ingvild Flaskerud, such portraits should not be considered "real" portraits of the prophet Muhammad. The artists make these images on the basis of conventional ideas of the character of those personages depicted, in the same way it has been done with Biblical figures in European art.

The text below the image is the shahada or Profession of faith: "There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is His messenger."

Original: Purchased in Qum 1999 by Ingvild Flaskerud.
 
And The Winner of The Everybody Draw Mohammad Contest is... - Reason Magazine

To remind readers of the stakes: In recent months, a Swedish cartoonist that sketched Mohammed as a "roundabout dog" as part of a planned street installation was assaulted during a lecture and, the following week, two extremists attempted to burn his house down. In January, the elderly Danish illustrator Kurt Westergaard, who contributed the most memorable image (of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) among the dozen cartoons printed in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, narrowly escaped being murdered by retreating to a panic room in his apartment while an axe-wielding maniac hacked through his door. Just over the past few weeks, Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, redacted a South Park episode featuring a possible representation of the Prophet after a website "warned" of violence and ordered The Daily Show's Islamic correspondent, Aasif Mandvi, not to comment on Islamic extremism (a self-described moderate Muslim, Mandvi is against it) in the wake of a failed terrorist bombing in Times Square.

These egregious events gave immediate and spontaneous rise to "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," the brainchild - or brain fart, depending on your point of view - of a Seattle cartoonist who almost immediately distanced herself from the concept ("I wanted to counter fear, and then I got afraid," she said). The concept of depicting the Prophet in both protest of violence and support of free speech remains controversial even among professional cartoonists and commentators whose contempt for political correctness, speech codes (whether imposed by states as in Europe or by state universities as in the U.S.) is unimpeachable.

Yada yadda yadda

Which is to say that Draw Mohammed day is a sign of pushback, not by the groups you would expect to be at the forefront - the organized press and the elected guardians of the Constitution - but by a sea of individuals who will not stand by silently while forces of both hostility and accomodation collude in narrowing the space for acceptable speech.

Yadda yadda yadda

... our grand prize winner, the image below, which pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

There is a deeper lesson here: Connect the dots and discover that we all must be Spartacus on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day. And that in a free society, every day is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

mohammaddots.jpg


Great stuff from Reason once again.

Now, is there any meaning for, or is it just my copy just missing #31 and #31? :eusa_whistle:
 

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