Ha Ha Very Funny

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.)


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