An Illuminating Moment

Many of those of us in religions that hold the Hebrew Bible as God’s word can understand that adherents to Islam would be angry at newspaper cartoons depicting or mocking the Prophet Mohammed. Exodus Chapter 20 verse four, after all, right there in the middle of the Ten Commandments, says, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above…” So visitors to the great mosques of Islam see complex and beautiful geometric patterns in tiles and even rugs – but no images of Mohammed. The Web site of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its introduction to Islamic Art, says, “Islam’s supposed prohibition against figural art is confined to the religious sphere.” The matter of mocking religious figures in art is particularly raw here in New York, where tax dollars were wrested from the public on the order of a federal judge who said that New Yorkers had a responsibility under the First Amendment to subsidize a display at the Brooklyn Museum that consisted of taking an image of Mary, festooning it with pornographical images from magazines and then smearing elephant dung on it.