Hegira from Manhattan

One of the deepest polarizations of the human intellect caught up with Frederick H. Zurmuhlen, New York City Commissioner of Public Works. As a result, a half-ton statue of the Prophet Mohammed last week was lying flat on its back in a Newark storehouse.

The statue was carved 50 years ago by a Mexican sculptor as one of ten giant figures of lawmakers to adorn the new home of the first Appellate Department of the New York court system, overlooking Manhattan's Madison Square. The other nine were Moses, Hindustan's Manu, Persia's Zoroaster, Sparta's Lycurgus, Athens' Solon, China's Confucius, Byzantium's Justinian, Wessex' Alfred and France's Louis IX. An odd list, but it is easy to see what those who drew it up had in mind. They wanted to express the universality of the idea of law. Lycurgus and Confucius, Zoroaster and Alfred stand for very disparate systems of conduct--and the Appellate Division was not necessarily buying any of them. All it wanted to say in marble was that all the systems partake of the notion that man's nature calls for rules of behavior.

The universality that the courthouse designers reached for in the statues is expressed in an abhorrence of statues by other peoples. Among these are the Mohammedans, whose earliest success in Arabia came by overthrowing local idols and thereby calling attention to the universal God. Eastern Christianity was ripped by two great waves of iconoclasm scarcely less thorough than Mohammed's, and resting on the belief that images of God or of holy persons begot idolatry by distracting attention from the essence of the Godhead to the superficialities of concrete appearance. Today, the issue is only a minor one among Christians, but the vast majority of Moslems still take very seriously the Mosaic rule against graven images; they are especially incensed by statues of religious leaders, and, among these, a statue of Mohammed would be especially offensive.

All this got back to Commissioner Zurmuhlen when his engineers reported a few years ago that time was eating away at the statues atop the Appellate Division Courthouse. Newspapers ran a story that the ten lawgivers would be lifted from their pedestals on the building's roof and repaired. When Mohammed's name appeared among the rest, the ambassadors of Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan told the U.S. State Department, on behalf of their Moslem peoples, that the Prophet's image should not go up again.

The State Department sent two emissaries to explain the matter to Commissioner Zurmuhlen. The question was laid before the justices of the Appellate Division. All agreed that Mohammed would not go up again--even though the danger that any large number of New Yorkers would take to worshiping the statue was, admittedly, minimal. As a result of diplomatic iconoclasm, the Newark stonecutter who repaired the statues was asked to take Mohammed quietly away. The other statues were closed up to conceal the gap, and now Zoroaster has Mohammed's old place on the southwest corner, facing toward Staten Island.

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