But not the same. English has a lot of that - words that have similar but distinct meanings

Synonyms Expand
1. concord, understanding, rapport, affinity. Sympathy, compassion, pity, empathy all denote the tendency, practice, or capacity to share in the feelings of others, especially their distress, sorrow, or unfulfilled desires. Sympathy is the broadest of these terms, signifying a general kinship with another's feelings, no matter of what kind: in sympathy with her yearning for peace and freedom; to extend sympathy to the bereaved. Compassion implies a deep sympathy for the sorrows or troubles of another coupled to a powerful urge to alleviate the pain or distress or to remove its source: to show compassion for homeless refugees. Pity usually suggests a kindly, but sometimes condescending, sorrow aroused by the suffering or ill fortune of others, often leading to a show of mercy: tears of pity for war casualties; to have pity on a thief driven by hunger. Empathy most often refers to a vicarious participation in the emotions, ideas, or opinions of others, the ability to imagine oneself in the condition or predicament of another: empathy with those striving to improve their lives; to feel empathy with Hamlet as one watches the play.

I have neither sympathy nor empathy with those who get all butthurt about a cartoon. It's high time we stopped pretending that these complaints are legitimate

Also, is it a right to offend religion?

A number of hadith and other writings of the early Islamic period include stories in which portraits of Muhammad appear. Abu Hanifa Dinawari, Ibn al-Faqih, Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu Nu`aym tell versions of a story in which the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius is visited by two Meccans. He shows them a cabinet, handed down to him from Alexander the Great and originally created by God for Adam, each of whose drawers contains a portrait of a prophet. They are astonished to see a portrait of Muhammad in the final drawer. Sadid al-Din al-Kazaruni tells a similar story in which the Meccans are visiting the king of China. Kisa'i tells that God did indeed give portraits of the prophets to Adam.[22]

Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu Nu'ayn tell a second story in which a Meccan merchant visiting Syria is invited to a Christian monastery where a number of sculptures and paintings depict prophets and saints. There he sees the images of Muhammad and Abu Bakr, as yet unidentified by the Christians.[23] In an 11th-century story, Muhammad is said so have sat for a portrait by an artist retained by Sassanid king Kavadh II. The king liked the portrait so much that he placed it on his pillow.[22]

Later, Al-Maqrizi tells a story in which Muqawqis, ruler of Egypt, meets with Muhammad's envoy. He asks the envoy to describe Muhammad and checks the description against a portrait of an unknown prophet which he has on a piece of cloth. The description matches the portrait.[22]

In a 17th-century Chinese story, the king of China asks to see Muhammad, but Muhammad instead sends his portrait. The king is so enamoured of the portrait that he is converted to Islam, at which point the portrait, having done its job, disappears.[
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Throughout Islamic history, depictions of Muhammad in Islamic art were rare.[10] Even so, there exists a "notable corpus of images of Muhammad produced, mostly in the form of manuscript illustrations, in various regions of the Islamic world from the thirteenth century through modern times".[29] Depictions of Muhammad date back to the start of the tradition of Persian miniatures as illustrations in books. The illustrated book from the Persianate world (Warka and Gulshah, Topkapi Palace Library H. 841, attributed to Konya 1200–1250) contains the two earliest known Islamic depictions of Muhammad.[30]

This book dates to before or just around the time of the Mongol invasion of Anatolia in the 1240s, and before the campaigns against Persia and Iraq of the 1250s, which destroyed great numbers of books in libraries. Recent scholarship has noted that, although surviving early examples are now uncommon, generally human figurative art was a continuous tradition in Islamic lands (such as in literature, science, and history); as early as the 8th century, such art flourished during the Abbasid Caliphate (c. 749 - 1258, across Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and Persia).[31]

Christiane Gruber traces a development from "veristic" images showing the whole body and face, in the 13th to 15th centuries, to more "abstract" representations in the 16th to 19th centuries, the latter including the representation of Muhammad by a special type of calligraphic representation, with the older types also remaining in use.[32] An intermediate type, first found from about 1400, is the "inscribed portrait" where the face of Muhammad is blank, with "Ya Muhammad" ("O Muhammad") or a similar phrase written in the space instead; these may be related to Sufi thought. In some cases the inscription appears to have been an underpainting that would later be covered by a face or veil, so a pious act by the painter, for his eyes alone, but in others it was intended to be seen.[29] According to Gruber, a good number of these paintings later underwent iconoclastic mutilations, in which the facial features of Muhammad were scratched or smeared, as Muslim views on the acceptability of veristic images changed.[33]

A number of extant Persian manuscripts representing Muhammad date from the Ilkhanid period under the new Mongol rulers, including a Marzubannama dating to 1299. The Ilkhanid MS Arab 161 of 1307/8 contains 25 illustrations found in an illustrated version of Al-Biruni's The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries, of which five include depictions Muhammad, including the two concluding images, the largest and most accomplished in the manuscript, which emphasize the relation of Muhammad and `Ali according to Shi`ite doctrine.[34] According to Christiane Gruber, other works use images to promote Sunni Islam, such as a set of Mi'raj illustrations (MS H 2154) in the early 14th century,[35] although other historians have dated the same illustrations to the Jalayrid period of Shia rulers.[36]

The destruction of idols at the Kaaba. Muhammad (top left and mounted at right)[citation needed] is represented as a flaming aureole. From Hamla-i haydarî ("Haydar's Battle"), Kashmir, 1808.
Depictions of Muhammad are also found in Persian manuscripts in the following Timurid and Safavid dynasties, and Turkish Ottoman art in the 14th to 17th centuries, and beyond. Perhaps the most elaborate cycle of illustrations of Muhammad's life is the copy, completed in 1595, of the 14th-century biography Siyer-i Nebi commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Murat III for his son, the future Mehmed III, containing over 800 illustrations.[37]
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Contemporary Iran

A colourised version of the original photograph by Lehnert & Landrock, which later became the base of an Iranian depiction of a young Muhammad.
Despite the ban on the representation of Muhammad, images of Mohammed are not uncommon in Iran. The Iranian Shi'ism seems more tolerant on this point than Sunnite orthodoxy.[47] In Iran, depictions have considerable acceptance to the present day, and may be found in the modern forms of the poster and postcard.[48][9]