an ahistory of aniconism

here's a pretty good example of the pc approach to history, where whatever would serve your argument or have (according to you) positive social results is asserted as true, no matter how obviously false it may be. the piece asserts that images of muhammad were not banned until 2001, when the taliban banned them. then it describes various islamic regions and moments in which the prophet was depicted. but then he really does have to deal with the fact that there are few if any known images from the arabian peninsula, certainly the origin and center of the islamic world. his explanation is that they had the arabic language. now i think actually you have to grapple with the whole history of restrictions and prohibitions on images in the monotheistic religions: start with the golden calf story in hebrew bible. the general association of images of divine or saintly figures with idolatry runs very strongly - though of course not uniformly - through judaism, islam, and protestant christianity. really it sounds like there has been no or little censorship or destruction of images in the history of islam. um. and the language thing is the worst argument i ever heard: just the sort of thing you try not to examine because if true it would help your case. let's see: americans and french people and chinese people and hindu people and ancient greek people have had both extremely rich languages and a non-stop barrage of images. often these work in concert, and so on.