An art treasure long cherished by Muslims is deemed offensive. But to whom?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this
1. Some of these people are made extremely uncomfortable by other cultures and genuinely don’t know how to act. A lot of these activists tend to be high income whites. It is unsurprising they genuinely don’t know what other cultures are thinking/feeling?
2. They want to DO good but they end up using other people/cultures/groups as a tool to make themselves LOOK good.
But anyone who argues that these illustrations are in fact offensive argues that the artists and those who commissioned those artworks were apostates and renegades, and there is no evidence whatsoever of that.
The image is apparently from a period predating the time when the current consensus that disallows depiction of the Prophet originated. Back then it was ok; now it isn’t. Were The Guardian to print the image, it could be construed by some interested party (of various possible affiliations) as a willful act intended to cause offense.
For precedent predating our current excessively charged social environment, the film The Message (1976), starring Anthony Quinn, does not show his person at all.