A Clash of Fanaticisms

A Clash of Fanaticisms

As I begin writing it is Sunday, 5 February 2006. The Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus have been torched by mobs, and so also the Danish embassy in Beirut. Demonstrations and mob actions by Muslim populations are reported from numerous countries. A boycott of goods from Denmark and other countries is fiercely going on in Arab countries—a hugely important market for the Scandinavians. (One Danish company alone—Arla Foods—used to sell $1.5 million worth of dairy products a day in the region.) No loss of life has yet been reported. But who knows what the immediate future holds? Enraged passions are not abating. Any number of people, for any number of unspoken reasons, are now taking advantage of a recent incident in an ongoing clash of fanaticisms—to vent anger at any number of things both abroad and at home.

According to the rather rightist Brussels Journal,¹ whose Web site has been my main source to view the cartoons and obtain other details, it all started in the summer of 2005 when a Danish writer complained about not finding anyone willing to illustrate his book on the prophet Muhammad. Here is a more detailed account from a similar Web site:

Last September, Danish author Kåre Bluitgen was set to publish a book on the Muslim prophet Muhammad, but there was just one catch: he couldn't find an illustrator. Artistic representations of the human form are forbidden in Islam, and pictures of Muhammad are especially taboo—so three artists turned down Bluitgen's offer to illustrate the book for fear that they would pay with their lives for doing so. Frants Iver Gundelach, president of the Danish Writers Union, decried this as a threat to free speech—and the largest newspaper in Denmark, Jyllands-Posten, responded. They approached forty artists asking for depictions of Muhammad and received in response twelve cartoons of the Prophet—several playing on the violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam around the world today.²

These reports leave several questions unanswered. Were the illustrations absolutely necessary? How was it that the author was knowledgeable enough to write a book on the Prophet but did not know, or care for, the feelings of common Muslims concerning images of the Prophet? If it were an artistic problem, then Bluitgen could have easily resolved it by showing only an Arabian landscape and anonymous people around the Prophet, but not the Prophet himself, as was done by the maker of the film The Message. Doing that with an explanation would have also communicated to the book's readers another bit of useful information about Muslims—if that was indeed the author's intention.

Other questions bother me: Why did Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten, see in the situation a threat to the Danes' freedom of expression? And why did he, instead of commissioning some suitable illustrations for a children's book, ask forty Danish artists to draw a picture of the Prophet to illustrate an article on the subject of freedom of speech in a multicultural society? (Did he not specifically ask for political cartoons?) Only twelve artists—yes, twelve—agreed to take the chance. Some, to their credit, saw in Juste's request a publicity stunt and expressed that opinion in the images they sent in. Jyllands-Posten, to its credit, published all twelve cartoons on 30 September 2005. Two of them are indeed critical of the editor of the newspaper—including one that says in Persian, "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs"—a few are nastily racist, and one or two are blatantly anti-Islam. Altogether, however, they are quite mild compared with political cartoons in European and American newspapers or, for that matter, the anti-Israel cartoons in Muslim newspapers.

Here another fascinating question comes up. It is...