Politics, cultures: How cartoons of prophet turned into "a volcano"

COPENHAGEN — The global furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad started one day last September, when newspaper editor Flemming Rose smelled a good story.

He said he'd read that museums in Sweden and London recently had removed artworks their staff deemed offensive to Muslims. A Danish comedian told him he felt free to desecrate the Bible, but he'd be afraid to do the same to the Quran. Rose read that a Danish children's-book author couldn't find illustrators who dared draw Muhammad for a new book on Islam.

Rose, culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, suspected the art world was self-censoring out of fear of Islamic radicals. So he contacted 25 Danish newspaper cartoonists with a challenge: Draw Muhammad as you see him. Twelve responded, and the newspaper printed their submissions, including one that depicted Islam's holiest figure with a bomb in his turban.

The cartoons, which were first published in Denmark in September and recently reprinted across Europe, have led to angry demonstrations in the Middle East and Asia and a commercial boycott of Danish products in several Middle Eastern countries.

Three Afghan protesters were killed Tuesday when a crowd attacked a NATO military base on the second day of violent demonstrations in Afghanistan, where four had died Monday. Also Tuesday, demonstrators stormed the Danish embassy in Tehran, where a prominent Iranian newspaper said it was going to hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust in response to the prophet drawings.

The protests were among the many Tuesday by Muslims who say the caricatures violate Muslim prohibitions against creating images of Muhammad.

Last weekend, protesters set fire to the Danish embassies in Damascus, Syria, and Beirut, Lebanon.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the controversy "a growing global crisis that has the potential to escalate beyond the control of governments."

When the cartoons first appeared in September, Ahmed Abu Laban, at the Islamic Cultural Center in Copenhagen, said he was "astonished and extremely shocked."

Laban, one of Denmark's most prominent Muslim clerics, saw the crude drawings as the latest smear against Muslims in Denmark, a nation whose long history of tolerance has been tested in recent years by rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

Laban, 60, immediately called together 11 other Muslim leaders to plan a response. Eliciting no regrets from the newspaper or the Danish government, they sent envoys to the Middle East to seek support there. The chain of events illustrates how, in the current climate of tension between Islam and the West, a small spark, printed on an inside page of a mid-sized newspaper in a small country, can escalate into an international conflagration.

Haven

This country of 5.4 million people, including about 200,000 Muslims, has long viewed itself as a haven for all views and faiths. But skyrocketing immigration in the 1990s spurred a backlash that culminated in the November 2001 election of Rasmussen.

Rasmussen's government immediately passed some of Europe's toughest immigration laws and changed speech laws to make it illegal to instigate terrorism or offer advice to terrorists. The prime minister has relied on the support of the fiercely anti-immigration Danish People's Party, which holds nearly 13 percent of the seats in Parliament.

Morten Messerschmidt, a People's Party member of Parliament, said the clash between Muslims and ethnic Danes, who are largely Christian, was inevitable because the two cultures have vastly different traditions about issues such as free speech.

He blamed Laban and other Muslim immigrant clerics for escalating the conflict and refusing to integrate and accept "freedoms that have created our highly developed societies in the West."

Thomas Larsen, an author and political analyst in Copenhagen, said the hardened views on both sides, along with images of demonstrators burning Danish embassies from Iran to Indonesia and demanding "Danish blood," have shocked Danes.

Many Muslims in Denmark have disavowed the vehemence of the protests.

"The majority of Muslims don't care about this," said Naser Khader, a Syrian-born member of Parliament.

"This is an Islamist agenda," he said, using a word describing the philosophy of Islamic radicals. "We don't want those imams to talk for us."

Laban, who leads a mosque in Copenhagen's Muslim neighborhood, said that Danish officials brought the crisis on themselves by not responding to initial protests and that he didn't feel responsible for the way the dispute had developed.

"People credit me with far more power than I have," Laban said. "The people rioting are not rioting in my name. They've never heard of me. They are furious because of the insult to Muhammad."

Within a week of their publication, Laban said, he and the 11 other Muslim leaders wrote letters to the newspaper and the Danish culture minister. He said the only response was a letter from the culture ministry last week that referred the matter to Rasmussen.

Next, ambassadors from 11 Muslim countries asked Rasmussen for a meeting, which he declined. Rasmussen on Tuesday said the envoys were demanding that he punish the newspaper, a step the prime minister has no power to take.

Laban said that response is typical of discrimination against Muslims in Denmark, which he said has risen sharply since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

The cartoons, he said, are "the drop that made the cup overflow."

Laban said his group decided to send delegations to Egypt and Lebanon in early December to raise the matter with Islamic scholars and officials. The delegation in Egypt, he said, met with Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, head of the al-Azhar University, a major influence in Muslim doctrine, and Ali Juma, mufti (a priest and lawgiver) of Egypt.

The cartoons were "a volcano in Egyptian media," Laban said. "... And as we expected, the wave moved to the masses."

Government officials and other critics here said Laban's delegations intentionally inflamed Islamic leaders in Egypt and Lebanon by passing off several obscene cartoons of Muhammad as among those published in the newspaper. Laban said those were shown to the Islamic officials as examples of anti-Muslim feeling in the country and no one suggested they had been in the newspaper.

By last week, the cartoon controversy was major news on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the two most influential Arabic-language television news networks.

Bomb threats

Here in Copenhagen, Rose, a tall and soft-spoken man, said his newspaper has received two bomb threats, and he got an anonymous e-mail telling him there was a contract on his life. He is guarded by police whenever he appears in public.

Rose bristled when asked if he had any regrets about publishing the cartoons.

On Sunday, Rose said, the newspaper will publish a full page of cartoons satirizing Jesus and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He said all of the 12 or so cartoons have appeared in the paper previously.

One, he said, is by Kurt Westergaard, who drew the picture of Muhammad with the bomb in his turban. The cartoon that will be reprinted shows a Star of David attached to the same kind of bomb.

"Some people are accusing us of being one-sided," Rose said. "We are trying to show that we are not giving anybody a free ride."

Additional information from The Associated Press