While we're talking about cartoons ...

[robinturner]

Just to show there's nothing new under the sun ...

But of course, no Catholics reacted violently to this kind of insult to the Pope. Not at all.

Comments

[circumambulate.livejournal.com]

I would hope we might have learned something, as a race, in the last few centuries. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

[cf.livejournal.com]

Heh heh heh

and this one [a href="http://www.firstcoastnews.com/assetpool/images/062315175_ns-cartoon.jpg"] here[/a] didn't make a fuss either.

Nope. No sir.

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1403945519/sr=1-1/qid=1139072117/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-5044590-3055838?%5Fencoding=UTF8

yip, the pendulum of stupidity keeps a-swingin'

[vret.livejournal.com]

That looks very interesting. Perhaps explains why England wanted to garrison Tangiers in the mid 17th Century.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Of course, it now turns out that the cartoons that are being objected to weren't the ones published but were actually made by Danish muslims who were stirring it up deliberately.
They are near the bottom of this page.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'd heard that this was the case, but hadn't seen the pictures before - thanks for the link. Surely distributing insulting images of the prophet and claiming someone else did it counts as insulting the prophet? Isn't there some way we can get a fatwa slapped on this guy?

I rather liked the "Mohammed answers your e-mails" cartoon shown on the same site, especially the Koranic quotation: "And when thou seest those who meddle with Our revelations, withdraw from them until they meddle with another topic." I really wish pundits on both sides of the fence would go to the trouble of actually reading the Koran. After all, it's a slim paperback - nowhere near as long as the Old Testament, Atlas Shrugged, Battlefield Earth or many of those other books people keep telling us to read.

Incidentally, while looking to see if there were any more cartoons like that, I encountered the best 404 ever (http://isfullofcrap.com/oldcrap/2005/12/lets_ask_mohamm_47.html).

[vret.livejournal.com]

I found that reading it was a waste of time. Whatever you try to say you just get told the translation is wrong. I remember sitting in the Newlands one night trying to persuade Jamshid that his love of the occasional half of Guiness didn't make him a bad muslim, because the Koran doesn't ban the drinking of alcohol at all. He wouldn't have it.

At least he can read Arabic. Most people who try to tell you that they understand it but it can't be translated have become experts by learning it off by heart phonetically in Arabic, a language they don't actually know.

[solri.livejournal.com]

And there's also the fact that Classical Arabic is almost as far removed from Modern Arabic as Classical Greek is from Modern Greek. An imam I know who speaks both languages (although his native tongue in Turkish) says that if you read the Koran as though it were Modern Arabic, you can get some realy screwy interpretations - you're actually better off reading a decent English translation, such as the Penguin one (which most scholars reckon is as accurate as you're likely to get, though it's still pretty uninspiring as literature).

As for drinking, you are of course right. Anyone who's read a bit of the early history of Islam will know that Mohammed banned wine because too many people were getting into drunken brawls (which are particularly nasty in a country where everyone carries swords). Before that, he used to like a tipple himself: I know at least one hadith that refers to his drinking wine.