(New York Times) Vimal Patel - Last semester in her global art history class, Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., showed a 14th-century painting of Islam's founder. She knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad so she warned students in class ahead of time, in case anyone wanted to leave. Then she showed the image - and lost her teaching job. The painting, shown regularly in art history classes, is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, A Compendium of Chronicles, written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318). The image is "a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting," said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers. "How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?"
2023-01-09 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive