Happy Birthday, Mr. Prophet
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES
I cannot imagine what it must be like for twenty-three-year-old Hamza Kashgari right now. It’s one thing to be Salman Rushdie, already a Booker Prize-winning novelist when the fatwa was issued against him by the ayatollahs in Iran after he willfully went against everyone’s advice and published The Satanic Verses, but quite another to tweet a series of messages addressed to Mohammed on his birthday that the Prophet himself might have approved of.
One man's devil is another man's god.
There is no existing iconography of Mohammed—or there shouldn’t be— because he explicitly forbade it. He didn’t want to be worshipped and deplored any form of idolatry. As we in the West often imagine what Christ would think if he came back and saw the sorry state of what his teachings have wrought over two thousand years, the same would apply to Mohammed.