Rotten judgment in the state of Denmark

The Danish government has protested that Danish Muslims and the Islamic countries have conspired in a misinformation campaign regarding both the paper's motives and the law of the land. Among the examples of preposterous misinformation are that the paper is run by the government, and that the government can do anything to regulate what is said or not said. While radical Islamists have exaggerated and exploited these themes to incite violent protest, the painful reality is that there is some truth to them. The paper is related to the government, not by ownership but by political affinity and history. And Denmark is no paragon of free speech. Article 140 of the Criminal Code allows for a fine and up to four months of imprisonment for demeaning a "recognized religious community."

Mogens Glistrup, a tax protester turned xenophobe, was imprisoned for 20 days last year for a racist speech. He compared Turks to rabbits. Back in 1975, Jens Jorgen Thorsen, a multimedia artist belonging to the "situationist school," had a government grant provided to make a film about Jesus taken away. Five thousand young Christians had demonstrated in the street of Copenhagen against Thorsen and his movie and tumultuous scenes broke out. (Coincidentally, a police estimate held that about 5,000 people participated in one of the first demonstrations against the cartoons held in Copenhagen in October 2005.) Respected politicians spoke up and said that Thorsen had free speech, but if the blasphemy law had not been violated then certainly good taste and the feelings of religious Danes had the case dragged on in court forever with no conviction. Fourteen years later Thorsen had his government grant restored, adjusted for inflation.

The Danish right has only recently been converted to the free speech principle, and has its own idea of how to use it. In the past two years, the Danish People's Party has twice proposed to eliminate the blasphemy paragraph. Two of the party's members, Jesper Langballe and Soren Krarup, both pastors in the Lutheran National Church, have described Muslims as "a cancer on Danish society" in speeches in parliament. They want to be free to say it outside parliament too. The paragraph was not removed in part because of opposition from Lutheran clergy, who do not all share the two pastors' views.

But is blasphemy what the cartoons are about? The problem with the cartoons isn't that they violate Islam's rules about depiction of the Prophet, according to Fatih Alev, a young Danish imam and a prominent advocate for integration with whom I've spoken many times on the issue of integration. Rather, it is their political content, he told the Danish press this week. He objects that the cartoons stereotype who Muslims are, and misrepresent the religion entirely as the propaganda program of militant Islamists.

Meanwhile, most U.S. media outlets have not shown the cartoons, citing respect for Islamic prohibitions on depictions of the Prophet. On Saturday, Feb. 4, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the one with the bomb in Mohammed's turban, with an explanatory note that suggested that all Muslims do not regard depicting the Prophet as sacrilegious in the same way. But a number of European papers reprinted the cartoons in part or in full, proclaiming their intention not to be censored, nor guided by Islamic religious law. The conservative German paper Die Welt and the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung both printed the cartoons citing European values -- though they disagreed on what those values are. Die Welt thought Islam should not be allowed to trample free speech, while the Berliner Zeitung cited the importance of safeguarding modern freedoms wrested from the Catholic Church.

The prohibition in the Koran is clear: The Prophet is so beautiful that no human hand can render him with justice. And you will never see a depiction of Mohammed in a mosque or in illustrated versions of the Quran. But the reality is that illustrations of Mohammed are readily found in Persian icons and woven into rugs. Usually, the Prophet is depicted from the back, on a horse, or with a blotch in place of his face. Posters and pictures in the iconic style of Christian religious paintings and reproductions can be found in bazaars, Muslim homes, and on Muslim graves in French municipal cemeteries. Christians have long printed and painted Mohammed, from renaissance art, to a frieze on a wall of a government institution in Washington D.C., to religious children's books. The Danish children's book author, Kare Bluitgen, who ostensibly was unable to find an illustrator willing to draw Mohammed, has published his book with a picture of Mohammed on a winged horse on the front cover. The book is respectful and schmaltzy. The abstract in one book catalog reads: "The minute Amina conceived Muhammad, she felt as if in another world. In the unusually sharp light she saw the castles in Busra in Syria many days travel away. And all the camels in and around Mecca whispered to each other that a future leader had been conceived." You get the picture.

Self-evidently, Islamic religious law does not apply in secular societies and there can be no legal prohibition on the publication of drawings of the Prophet. The effort to impose a global ban on depictions of Mohammed is part of the religious restoration projects of the Wahhabis and the Taliban. Therefore the question is, if the Western press has a moral obligation -- and in countries with blasphemy laws, also a legal one -- to be equally respectful to Muslims and Christians? Some conservatives in this country are saying, as did the British ultra-conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who thinks respect is a basic building bloc of society, "If we mock the religious taboos of Muslims we pour scorn on the icons of Christianity." Meanwhile, writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens screamed, "Offend them!"

Freedom of speech vs. respect for the feelings of devout religious followers -- Christian, Muslim or otherwise -- is an important issue. When I did my interviews with European Muslims, many religious leaders told me that in their view the central problem was a general lack of respect for religions. They reported that in day-to-day politics they found it easier to work with the local rabbis, pastors or priests than with the politicians.

But neither Europe's growing domestic problems with religious pluralism nor a Danish newspaper's clumsy provocation of local Muslims explain the unwanted international crisis we are suddenly faced with. Rather, the cartoons apparently provided a grand opportunity to extremists: for radical elements in Islamic countries rife with internal dissent, and for right-wing extremists in Denmark and Europe, to mobilize supporters from the disaffected. Among the victims are the moderate Muslims in Europe and worldwide, who now find themselves increasingly wounded in the crossfire between xenophobes and Islamists.

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