Thread by @ChrisMasterjohn

This actually makes some surprising theological sense, in that Christianity embraced images of people due to its perception of the unification of God and man, whereas Islam saw this as idolatrous due to its view of the separation of God and man.

https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1417488586073575434

However, Murray has no idea what she’s talking about. Christian women covered their heads through most of history just like Muslim women and this is obvious if you just look at icons of women saints in Orthodox or Roman Catholic Christianity.

Also, the theological underpinnings of man as being made in the image of God pre-date Islam by thousands of years and that of Jesus unifying God and man pre-date it by hundreds of years.

Where they collide is that Islam emerged around the same time as the iconoclast controversy in Christianity. In 695, Justinian II put the full face of Christ on newly issued coins, which prompted the Caliph to stop using Byzantine-form coins and adopt purely lettered coins.

Leo the Isaurian ruled from 717-741. His main military role was to defend the Empire from repeated raids of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Caliph Yasid II had banned icons among Christians within the Caliphate in 721.

Leo banned them in the Empire in 726.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council or Second Council of Nicaea settled iconoclasm permanently in Christianity in 787.

While iconoclasm within Christianity may have been influenced by Islam and ultimately rejected as not Christian, it’s absolutely bizarre to characterize the underlying theology of icons as Islamophobic.