Cartoons in European newspapers depicting Muhammad as a terrorist have met with fury from the Muslim world, writes Lara Marlowe
In Jakarta in Indonesia, 300 men ransacked the Danish embassy. In Pakistan, they burned the Danish prime minister in effigy, along with Danish and French flags, to cries of "Death to Denmark". Palestinian gunmen twice seized the European Union office in the Gaza Strip, and warned citizens of Denmark, Norway and France to leave their territory or die. Demonstrators marched in Yemen and Mauritania. In Europe, newspaper offices received repeated bomb threats.
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen, where satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammad were first published last September. Residents of the Iraqi city of Falluja burned Danish goods. The Danish-Swedish dairy group Arla, which sells €402 mn-worth of products in the Middle East annually, watched helplessly as its sales collapsed. Swiss company Nestlé was so eager to dissociate itself from Denmark's "sin" it published a front-page advertisement in the Saudi newspaper Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat noting that its Nido powdered milk is "neither produced in nor imported from Denmark".
In Copenhagen, the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met Muslim ambassadors yesterday in the hope of defusing the crisis, but his gesture was too little too late. Last October, when the Muslim ambassadors wanted to see him, Rasmussen refused. Denmark has a free press, he said. If the ambassadors were unhappy about the newspaper cartoons, they could file a lawsuit. They took Rasmussen's refusal as an affront.
Ironically, "the Muhammad affair", as it is known in Denmark, started with a plea against self-censorship by the author Kåre Bluitgen. He wrote to Jyllands-Posten newspaper complaining that he could not find an illustrator for his book about Muhammad following the assassination of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. Twelve artists responded to the newspaper's challenge. Their drawings were published on September 30th under the title "The Faces of Muhammad".
Muslims find two of the 12 drawings particularly offensive: the Prophet wearing a turban with a Koranic inscription, wrapped around a bomb; and a blind-folded, snarling Prophet, flanked by two women in Islamic dress, clutching a sword.
In Copenhagen, local Muslim leaders demanded an apology, which was not forthcoming. On October 12th, Carsten Juste, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, received death threats. Two days later, 5,000 Muslims marched in protest.
In late December, 20 Danish-Muslim groups sent a delegation to Lebanon and Egypt. Danish officials believe the delegation carried out a disinformation campaign which caused the issue to blow up again in January. Arab newspapers alleged that Danes had burned the Koran, and falsely claimed that Jyllands-Posten was a government newspaper.
On December 29th, Arab League foreign ministers condemned the drawings. In early January, a prosecutor in Copenhagen ruled against 11 Muslim groups who tried to sue Jyllands-Posten for blasphemy and racial discrimination.
Then Magazinet, a small Protestant publication in Norway, re-published the 12 drawings on January 10th. The International Union of Muslim Ulemas called on all Muslims in the world to boycott Danish and Norwegian products.
Last Monday, Jyllands-Posten issued a feeble apology on its website. "We are sorry the matter has reached these proportions and repeat that we had no intention to offend anyone, and that we . . . respect freedom of religion," Carsten Juste said in an editorial.
Magazinet followed suit, expressing its "regrets" on Tuesday. But the genie was out of the bottle. Arab interior ministers meeting in Tunis demanded that the authors of the cartoons be punished. The Arab League secretary general Amr Musa, by no means a radical, accused the European press of employing double standards. "They are afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism, but when they caricature Islam they invoke freedom of expression," Musa said.
PUBLICATION OF THE cartoons offended Muslims for three reasons: Muslim tradition forbids images of the Prophet; the founder of Islam was portrayed as a terrorist; like George W Bush's "war on terror", the drawings were viewed as deliberate incitement of hatred against Muslims. The Koran does not mention images, but strict Muslims sometimes equate human likenesses with idols. "Wine, games of chance and idols are abominations invented by Satan. Abstain from them," the Koran says.
On the other hand, the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, gleaned from his followers after his death, forbid human images. "Angels do not enter a house which shelters a dog or an effigy," goes one Hadith. Those who produce images of God purport to be his "equals" and "will be punished on the day of the last Judgment", goes another.
DURING THE MIDDLE Ages, Persian miniaturists nonetheless painted the Prophet's face. By contrast, under the Sunni Ottomans, the Prophet was portrayed with his face blanked out, or a flame over it, often with sleeves covering his hands entirely.
The nuance continues to this day, with Sunni Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia seeking out and destroying images, while portraits of the Prophet are tolerated among poor, uneducated Shias in Iran.
The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nonetheless joined the outcry over the drawings, demanding an explanation from the Danish ambassador to Tehran for "insults which have hurt more than a billion Muslims" and calling King Abadallah of Saudi Arabia on the telephone. On Thursday, the Iranian foreign ministry summoned the Austrian ambassador (who represents the EU) to protest against the publication of the cartoons by newspapers across Europe.
For centuries, Europeans have portrayed the Prophet in paintings, engravings and more recently on magazine and book covers - without complaints by Muslims. The Muslim intellectual Ghaleb Bencheikh says the problem with the Danish cartoons is elsewhere, "in the base insinuation that the message of the Koran is fundamentally violent".
Malek Chebel, the author of Islam and Reason, agrees. "The problem with the Danish caricatures is that they intentionally represent the Prophet as a terrorist or as someone who professes terrorist violence," he told the Catholic newspaper La Croix. "For Muslims, the Prophet is someone who works for peace, in the service of all mankind. Would Christians accept Mary, mother of Christ, being drawn as a prostitute? Or Jesus with a knife between his teeth, or as a homosexual?"
MUSLIM RULERS, EVEN those with close ties to the West, such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai, were unanimous in condemning what the French newspaper Libération calls "the Satanic drawings". "Any insult to the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) is an insult to more than one billion Muslims and an act like this must never be allowed to be repeated," said a statement issued by Karzai. Leaders in pro-Western Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt made similar statements. In the Palestinian territories, armed groups associated with Fatah vented their rage at having lost parliamentary elections to Hamas by threatening Europeans.
By week's end, a slew of European newspapers had published some or all of the cartoons: France-Soir and Libération in France; Die Welt in Germany; ABC, El Periodico and El Mundo in Spain; La Stampa and Il Corriere della Sera in Italy; Blick and La Tribune de Genève in Switzlerand; De Volkskrant, De Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad in Holland. Freedom of expression and a high news value were the arguments given. Most British newspapers refrained from printing the drawings, on the grounds it would create unnecessary offence.
Only one Arab newspaper, Shihan in Jordan, published three of the caricatures of Muhammad, under the title "Muslims of the World, Be Reasonable". "What hurts Islam more?" the editor-in-chief Jihad Momani wrote: "These drawings, or images of a kidnapper slashing his victim's throat in front of the camera, or a suicide-bomber blowing himself up in the midst of a wedding in Amman?" Like his counterpart at France-Soir in Paris, Momani was sacked for publishing the drawings. Shihan was taken off news-stands.
Jyllands-Posten editor-in-chief Carsten Juste, when asked would he do it again, knowing that Danish soldiers in Iraq and civilians elsewhere in the Middle East would be threatened, told the New York Times: "As my finger hovered one centimetre above the send button for publishing the drawings, would I have hit it? No. No responsible editor-in-chief would have."