Recently, I had a debate with someone regarding the topic of whether it is "Haram" to have pictures of "people" in your home or on the walls. This topic and similar ones have come up more than once so I thought I would solicit people's opinions on it. In fact, since it came up on another journal (whether or not it was okay to paint pictures of animate objects) to which I responded to I am going to paraphrase my very humble yet long-winded opinion on it here as well.

I believe when considering any topic in Islam one must look at intent, interpretation as well as magnitude.

Re Intent: Allah knows what is in our hearts and I believe this should help guide us in our actions. Can you truly call it ?Zakat? when a person gives charity solely for the purposes of public acknowledgement and tax write-offs? When considering an artist, is it ?haram? for him/her to draw a bird on a beautiful landscape if that person has no ulterior motive and their only intent is to appreciate the beauty of Allah?s work? Or when a person has a picture of their parents up only to remember them fondly and not to idolize or worship them?

Re Interpretation: Again in my opinion, one must consider the high level of difficulty in translating the Arabic language into English- one word in Arabic has several meanings and variations depending on the inflection, pronunciation, dialect as well as the context in which it is being used. Many of us are aware that scholars today are still debating the definition of ?halal?. Could the word ?picture? in the hadiths be defined as narrowly as ?idols? or could it be as broadly defined to include photographs, etc.? Corrollary question to this is: how far do we take the literal interpretations since most of us do not give a second thought about watching movies or taking pictures? Is having a TV in the home considered a ?picture? and therefore ?haram??

Re Magnitude: The Prophet (PBUH) was as close to a perfect Muslim as humanly possible and even then he was not without flaw. In my personal opinion it seems that sometimes Muslims and our respective cultures focus on the issues that are relatively small in nature because they are sometimes the easiest to follow. For example, many cultures concentrate on drinking yet don?t give back-biting a second thought. If one turns to the Quran, I only found the reference of drinking twice while backbiting is mentioned several times as a sin. Most of us are able to follow the former but very few of us can say that we have never done the latter. Is it more important to have Islamic societies focus on modesty and sunnah (such as hijab or beards) or poverty of our fellow muslims?

Before stepping off the podium, my personal philosophy is this: after the five pillars of Islam, one should try and concentrate on the larger more important issues (e.g. being good to your fellow man, being honest, respecting others, not losing your temper with or judging others, abolishing any form of discrimination in each of our hearts, etc.- you get the idea). In short, I think there are bigger ?fish to fry? than ?having a picture? and that list (at least for me) is exhaustive and will probably be spending a good part of my life trying to improve myself in these areas.

Of course, we should all try and obey all of Allah?s commands, but given that he has provided us with intelligence should it not be our duty to use our sensibilities to prioritize the areas we should focus on knowing that we will never be perfect? I am not nearly as well versed in religion as I should be. I don?t have the answers but thought the questions were worth sharing.