Just like Yale University Press’ disgraceful censorship of Jytte Klausen’s book on the Muhammed cartoons, it seems the august Metropolitan Museum in New York is set to muddy the waters of history by pulling from their display ancient images of the prophet, made by Muslims and considering not putting them back on display once the renovation of the gallery is completed in 2011. Apparently they are also changing the designation of the Islamic Art galleries from the accurately descriptive ‘Islamic’ to a prolix geographical designation.
As I’ve written before, occluding the fact that Muslims have in the past, in fact, depicted their prophet is highly problematic in that it feeds attempts by certain parties to write out of history this fact, in order to bolster an often destructive agenda. As for the change in designation, it strikes me as silly, but also quite disturbing — is ‘Islamic’ now an inflammatory term? Emblematic, perhaps, of how seriously unsettled from our common history we have become by the sad events of the last decade.
Of course, this is all based on a story in the anything but unbiased New York Post, so let’s take it all with a grain of salt for the time being.
