wiki at war

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/removal-of-the-pics-of-muhammad-from-wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Muhammad

I'm confused. How does the artwork of Muslim scholars from the 12th or 15th century offend Muslims at all? Wiki did not post the Muslim cartoons from Denmark that riled up the Death to America chants again (even though the cartoons were from Europe). They posted art that was undoubtedly either influenced by or was an influence on the artwork of Christendom at the time, where depictions of Jesus are common and generally harmless (those "miracles" are hardly ever depicted in art that I can see).

I'm not sure what the purpose of Muslim censorship is, but it is obvious that during the height of the Ottoman empire, nobody cared much for the rule. While Judaism and Islam have strong aversions to idolatry and thus the physical depiction of holy figures or prophets, I think the point was to ensure that followers of those faiths gave worship to god and not to some physical, tangible, substance (which is obviously a ridiculous idea to worship something people can actually see and touch). That and to distinguish the new faiths from the worship of idols that preceded them in the sands of the Middle East. Either way, both faiths are both well-intentioned (not ascribing divinity to random objects sounds reasonable to a religious person) and horribly misguided (assuming that depictions of a figure important to that faith are in some way a misleading attribute to the faithful which doesn't sound reasonable to anyone but morons). In any case, as Wiki points out the provision is not a universal position in Islam (go look at Indonesia and their festivals for previous so called pagan rituals) and expresses only a vigorous minority view of Muslims. Which means they will use it because most of the world isn't a vigorous Muslim and those that are can turn off photos while browsing the site, avoiding whatever complications they might encounter with their religion.

Where this went on Wikipedia was the open source nature of editing pages allowed thousands of people to create accounts and attempt to remove the blasphemous pictures through editing. Wiki responded by locking down the page and slowing the editing process, leaving the pictures up. Apparently this is offensive, despite the pictures being 1) artistic concepts from the Muslim world 2) not in any way offensive in content beyond the accepted provision that Mohammed not be depicted and 3) not central to the article itself.

In addition the flame war has persisted over the title of "The prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him". Which has been abbreviated (I find this hilarious) as "pbuh". I can see where this is a useful thing to limit use of his name in speech and writing (imagine a world where Jesus' name was similarly limited, what a world!, ahh but I digress). But we're dealing with a general source in research (not a final source, much in the way a brush stroke does not necessarily create art so it is with wiki not being a definitive place of reason). It would be considerably tedious to retype or even to copy-paste this honorific title (at least in English, Arabic is a different story) every time his name was used during an article specifically dealing with his own history, words, and deeds, so practically every other sentence.

This is an unfortunate reality that the open source encyclopedia is likely to be destroyed by the most vigorous of people, the religious zealots. Much like everything else they touch. "Agents of intolerance". If I were John McCain, I'd be proud to have said that of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, or in this case the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which hasn't been addressed as such, but isn't impressing me with it's inspiration towards tolerance what with the expressed intention of making America a "Muslim" nation. No thanks the phony "Christian" one we have is bad enough). McCain apparently isn't happy he called them that. Sad really.