QUOTE(Kato @ Sun 3rd February 2008, 12:52am)
There is quite a thoughtful blog post about this here
http://www.knowprose.com/node/18427The key point is that the goal of achieving a what's called the "neutral point of view" (if followed) is completely incompatible with the goal of cultural sensitivity. Put another way, the most valuable scholarly resource (if achieved) is not the same as the most "culture safe" global mass media.
A neutral treatment of Muhammad and Islam is not normal for Islamic countries. Neutrality towards Islam, Muhammad, Allah, the Qur'an, etc., is, by definition, apostasy. I'm not aware of any secular biographies of Muhammad in the Islamic world. What would they be for, when the answers are known already?
The cause of conflict here isn't Wikipedia, but the internet. If all media is digitized, instead of being trapped in books, and online - and shouldn't that be the goal? - the unintended consequence is that it's asked to run a new gauntlet of censorship regimes (and not just Islamic, but Chinese, etc.), particularly because it's in English. To refuse is to upset foreign people and governments; to accept is to uniquely cede the character of our own media.
I say uniquely, because no one disputes the right of Islamic media to reflect Islamic standards, for Chinese media to reflect Chinese standards…many of these are disagreeable to us in the Anglophone West, but that this media doesn't belong to us is uncontroversial. All we have to do to avoid it is not consume that media. For most of us, that's not much of a sacrifice.
The growth of the internet, the rise of English as a global language and the predominance of English media make our words louder than we want them to be. Ideally, complainers would just visit some other site…but that expectation is also culture bound, that's what
we do if we find a publication's editorial policy distasteful, because we're used to and acknowledge freedom of the press. They don't, which would be fine, except that now they see our media as belonging equally to them. Our house is our house, they say, and your house is everybody's house (rather like the attitude towards conversions, and religious freedom in general, actually.)
This is a real problem, and tough choices need to be made. There's a reason why the Islamic world isn't producing encyclopedias - or any significant contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities, much less secular treatments of Muhammad and Islamic history - and it behooves us to ask if we want to move - even a little bit - in that direction.
Because the way things are going (and referring to an earlier discussion in this thread,) there won't be any libraries where things can hide from the Western public, and there won't be any English-language media which can hide from the English-speaking international public. It's all going online.
This post has been edited by Proabivouac: