At the blog Legal Insurrection, Joel Engel brings up the use of the honorific term Prophet Muhammad instead of the previous, plain-old Muhammad.
Remember after 9/11 (the original, not the Benghazi update), when Reuters decided its stylebook would require putting the word terrorist in scare quotes on the grounds that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”?
Well, now the Associated Press stylebook apparently insists that Mohammed be preceded by the word Prophet:
“An Egyptian court convicted in absentia Wednesday seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world….
The low-budget “Innocence of Muslims,” parts of which were made available online, portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, womanizer and buffoon.”
Hmmm. What if you think one man’s prophet is another man’s deviant? What if you’re a Christian who prefers to see Son of God or Prince of Peace precede “Jesus Christ”?
All of this is in light of the AP’s decision to remove terms like “homophobia” and “Islamophobia” from their style book – the discussion of which is rounded up by Andrew Sullivan. Most people, including myself, don’t realize how important a part the book plays in the information communicated through the articles we read. Our perceptions of news events are shaped by the terms being used. And term usage is important, as political functionaries like Frank Luntz or feminist activists who insist on using the term “anti-choice” rather than “pro-life” will tell you.
You might remember my previous posts on the use of Prophet Muhammad. It all stemmed from Tony Woodlief’s observation that the use of the term had spiked in news articles and reports from a group of high profile media outlets. They spiked in the year 2009. My assumption was that one of the big style books had changed its recommendations for the term.
Free copies of old AP Style Books are hard to find as are copies of the New York Times’ recommendations. Other style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Yahoo Style Guide (used for internet publication) are worth looking at too, but the AP Book is the most influential of the bunch. The 2005 AP book is available for free online and in it, there is no suggestion for Prophet to be used when mentioning Muhammad.
I purchased used copies of the 2007 and 2009 Style Books from Amazon. My initial hunch was correct, but the year does not match up with Woodlief’s timeline though this could be due to some time lag in the mass use of updated terms. The Style Book from the 2009 book reads:
Muhammad The chief prophet and central figure of the Islamist religion, Prophet Muhammad. Use other spellings only if preferred by a specific person for his own name or in a title or the name of an organization.
The ’07 book provides the same suggestion with only a slightly different suggestion of Muhammad’s historical relevance.
So the AP’s editors changed the book in either 2006 or 2007. Again, that doesn’t match up with Woodlief’s observed spike, but the addition of the honorific title is strange and interesting. Almost nobody noticed the term being slipped into news stories which speaks to the seamlessness with which our perceptions can be nudged. It’s not the end of the world that Muhammad is now described with the honorific title, but it suggests that the gatekeepers’ gatekeepers (he who controls our language controls us, including the journalists who actually write the stories) had a problem with the old way of describing Muhammad. It would be interesting to find out why. If the removal of homophobia is a news story then the addition of Prophet to Muhammad should have been one too.
I emailed some of the editors of the Style Books – Darrell Christian, Sally Jacobsen, David Minthorn, and Norm Goldstein – but none of them replied.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t “Christ” mean anointed one or messiah? It’s also a title.
I like to use “The Vile Pig Muhammad,” but that’s just me.
What does AP say about exclamation marks?
Here’s a 2000 WP story (reprinted in a forum) about Ezola Foster where the reporter AMOGs her by punctuating many of her quotes with exclamation marks, something you could do with just about any politician if you wanted to.
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/shuffleboard/message/312
If a bunch of Catholics went around insisting everyone call Jesus “The Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” so no one got him confused with some Mexican guy named Jesus, everyone would declare them crazy. It’s pathetic how scared the press is of Muslims.
Spelling “Koran” any way other than how I just did is retarded. There are no apostrophes in the English language other than to mark a contraction or possessive case.
must point out that “Christ” is actually a title, much like “prophet”. It means “the Annointed One”, or “messiah
Yes, insisting on the use of “The Prophet Muhammed” is like insisting on the use of “Jesus Christ”. I suppose there is no rule for the latter though. I think this one could backfire…changing the language is not as effective as people think. “The Prophet Muhammed” is already used sarcastically and that will only increase if people are more irritated by seeing the honorific. Using terms like “anti-choice” is really just signaling to the tribe that you are One Of Them, it has no effect on anyone else.
Perhaps the solution like “terrorist” it to put “Prophet” in scare quotes?
Soon it will be “the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)”.
The question of Muhammad’s alleged prophethood is specifically what divides Muslims from non-Muslims. Using language which presupposes the rightness of the Muslim opinion and the wrongness of non-Muslim opinion is obviously not neutral. It’s also bound to lead to stylistically awkward prose.
Imagine a journalist attempting to explain a debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. “Hirsi Ali insisted that the Prophet Muhammad was not a prophet but a man suffering from a delusion; Rauf insisted that, on the contrary, the Prophet Muhammad really was a prophet.”
I don’t really have a problem with people referring to Muhammad as the Prophet if they so choose, just as long as “Prophet” isn’t mandatory. We call Hitler “der Führer” and Mussolini “il Duce” even though they’re not our “leaders”.
What I’m starting to have a big problem with is the increasing number of publications that have taken away “BC” and “AD” n favor of other abbreviations denoting “Before Common Era” and “Common Era”. These barbarisms seem to be a passive-aggressive way of both denying Christianity and also making it look supremacist (the Christian calendar is so pervasive now that it’s the “common era” for everyone; look how powerful this oppressor is!) at the same time.
Saying “the year of Our Lord” might be a problem because Christ may or may not be the readers’ “Lord”. But the abbreviation AD just means “year of the/a Lord”, not necessarily “our” Lord; it’s not ADN (for Anno Domini Nostri).
I’m happy to call people what they wish to be called (or what their adherents wish them to be called), but I won’t *stop* referring to someone by what his followers call him just because the PC police say so.
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Those media style books really go a long way to controlling the agenda. Remember when the New York Times used to refer to Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq as “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, which has some foreign members.”
Yes, that was what they really called them. They couldn’t admit Al Qaeda terrorists were operating in Iraq,
So are we going to say “Our Lord Jesus Christ?” right. I didn’t think so.