Wolfgang,

The following excerpts from Andrew Wheatcroft's study of misconceptions and conflicts between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures,Infidels...

"...unlike the Christian realm, in the Muslim world recognizable human images (and those of animals) played no part in religious art. If, exceptionally, the Prophet Mohammed or one of his successors were depicted for any reason, their faces were almost always veiled and 'invisible'".

"...nowhere in the Ottoman domains was there anything similar to the slow percolation of the printed image into a largely pre-literate society that took place in the West. In the 'well-protected domain'of the Ottomans, until the mid-nineteenth century, in the cities and towns there were no religious pictures, few portaits or cartoons, and in fact a paucity of secular images of any sort. In the countryside, among the poor and illiterate, there were none at all."

"For many Muslims, a visual image made by a human hand was something completely abstract and unknown. A picture was simply a category of evil like the devil himself. It was irreligious, an innovation, to be shunned and avoided."

"Some Sultans from Mehmed the Conqueror onward both commissioned books full of images and amassed other illustrated books from a variety of sources. They were all stored with other treasures for the private use of the Sultan in the Inner Treasury.."

"Images with a human face or an animal form played, at most, a marginal part in the formation of Muslim culture. To the majority of Muslims, beyond the small groups of urban sophisticates, images were imcomprehensible."

"It was not until after the development of photography in the nineteenth century that human and animal images entered the Muslim domain more generally..it was argued that creating a photograph was not a human act, but God's light acting upon an emulsion."

It is my contention that the Muslim world's distrust and discomfort with the nature of pictorial images has deep roots within the culture. The essence of communication in that culture is embodied in the spoken word, with the written word the second most reliable form, particularly as it concerns religious matters. I also believe that this distrusting tendency, when joined with a sense of the conjunction of law and belief, encourages behavior that is repressive and contrary to the concepts of free speech and free press and freedom from religion that is fundamental to Danish, Austrian, and American society.