Not sure where I fall on this issue of comics featuring the likeness of Muhammed, but I was gratified to see that Edina native, St. Olaf Grad, and local-kid-done-good Ward Sutton weighs in on the subject over'ta San Francisco Chronicle. I also admire the Strib's Anders Gyllenhaal (isn't that, um, a Danish name?) for his own sound logic, when he said something along the Goldbloomian lines of "Just because we CAN print offensive and sacreligious cartoons, doesn't mean we should." Hear, hear. There are weeks when many American newspapers won't print "Boondocks," for crying out loud.
I think the answer is probably somewhere on the middle road: He who would exercise free speech, and he who would eliminate it can both learn the divine practice of restraint. (If God knows how to do anything, it is to restrain Himself from intervening in human affairs, especially when He is most requested.)
But there is a larger, and more troubling question: If Islam forbids the reproduction of any human likeness, how does anyone know what Muhammed looked like? That's a bit like printing the tetragrammaton--the cryptic Hebrew word for God, transliterated as YHWH--which no one actually knows how to pronounce, since it has never been pronounced. ("Yahweh" is strictly a Gentile assumption.)
in any case, the ancient Hebrew and.or Aramaic does not include vowel markings--in words other than the tetragrammaton, the vowels were normally interpreted by context--so the pronunciation of the word, as modern seculars would like to do, is strictly speculative. i kind of like it that way, actually. it captures the original "magic" of writing and the printed word, the idea that words themselves were amulets against evil. ("apotropaic" is the technical word, hey--I remembered something from Hebrew class!)
yes, the inherited myth is (i think) that the word was spoken once, during Yom Kippur (I think), in the "holy of holies," the inner tabernacle of the temple into which only the High Priest could enter.
Hey, this is fun!
Boondocks is just bad, generally... but the fact that it is occasionally withheld from the wire is probably less a feature of being critical of the administration, and more about "offending the sensibility of readers." Which is precisely the reason why a responsible newspaper editor would reasonably refuse to publish the muhammed comics, IMO. on the other hand, one can make the reasonable argument that it is partly the ROLE of comics (and other op-ed material) to provoke public dialogue and/or controversy. this mohammed thing has done it nicely... look, Islamic world, get used to the idea of free speech. Go ahead and hold holocaust comics contests... how many secular westerners are going to react by rushing to the saudi arabian embassy and fire bombing it? (None.) How many orthodox jews will issue formal protests? (All of them.) That's modern civilization. Get used to it! (End of secularist/modern lesson.)
P!
i'd hazard to guess that any theorizing about the pronunciation of YHWH has been limited to academic circles in the last 50 years. well, maybe going back to the earliest secular textual analyses of the hewbrew scriptures (in germany in the 1860s).
you won't find any practicing jews of any league pronouncing the word (so deeply ingrained is the conversion "adonai elohenu," much as you won't find any depictions of muhammed by other than secularists.
aha! i knew that divinity degree would one day come in handy.
Hansie:
Yahweh is not strictly a Gentile pronunciation: according to decidedly non-Gentile Leo Rosten, author of the delightful "The Joys of Yiddish", writes "In English, YHVH is rendered vocally as 'Yahweh' or 'Yahveh'." He goes on to add that "Jehovah" is the Christian bungling of YHVH... perhaps that's what you mean.
Mr. Rosten also states that YHVH was allowed to be spoken only in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, thus suggesting that it was, in fact, pronounced by someone.
And this question: Isn't it a problem when a paper won't print "Boondocks", which isn't so much sacrelgious as critical of the current administration?