What Is a Picture of Muhammad, Anyway?
As you may have heard, a great many people in various countries around the world are upset by the publication of some pictures of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. They are sufficiently upset as to riot, set fire to national embassies, and call for summary executions. There have been incidental deaths. It is, in short, a serious matter. I offer two small reflections on this, beginning with the simple question: What is “a picture of Muhammad”? “A picture of Robert McHenry” we understand pretty clearly, even though the term “Robert McHenry” is not entirely unambiguous. We mean a photograph or a hand-made likeness of that particular person. If we are shown a drawing said to be of Robert McHenry and find that it doesn’t look at all like him, we say “No, that’s not him.” But Muhammad lived long before the invention of photography, and there are no likenesses of him by contemporaries. In other words, no one knows what he looked like. If you were to assemble a set of mugshots of dark, bearded m
