Dogs and Statuary in Islam

Hugh Fitzgerald explains Muslim reaction to dogs on the Jihad Watch website:

A recent story in the Reading Evening Mail describes a 71-year-old blind Englishman and cancer sufferer who was asked to get off a bus because of the hysterical reaction to his seeing-eye dog by some Muslims on the bus....

The hatred of dogs is not rational.  It is simply based on the slavish acceptance of Muhammad’s strictures, in a well-known Hadith, in which he is reported to have said:  I will not enter a house in which there are statues and dogs.

This is a strange, and even mysterious coupling of two items deemed haram:  Statues and dogs.  Why, one may ask?  I think I know the reason.  Statues, of course, were to be found in homes of Christians, and if those statues are clearly declared to be haram, and if Muslims are told that Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) will not enter a house with statues, then no Muslim would do so either.  That would be one bright line to distinguish Muslims from the Christians whose lands they conquered, and it would be one way to impose on those Muslims the duty not to become too friendly with Christians, not to enter their houses where there might still be statuary.  And if Christians, in order to allow the members of the ruling Muslim class, to enter their houses, which might for those Christians be a desirable thing (they would need to curry favor with the Muslims who now ruled over them) they might find themselves more willing to themselves do away with statues and icons of every kind.

But why the warning against dogs?  It is likely...that because dogs were prized by Zoroastrians, and treated with great affection and reverence, Muslims would want especially to distance themselves from the same practice, even to hold up dogs as objects of hysterical hatred.  In so doing, they would again, as with Christians and statuary, clearly distinguish the superior Muslims and their practices from those of the inferior non-Muslims, in this case represented by Zoroastrians.

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