All cartoon politics are local

Muslim outrage reflects specific national conflicts -- most of them exacerbated by Bush's policies.

By Juan Cole

Read more: Cartoons, Egypt, Islam, Opinion, Juan Cole, Danish cartoons

Feb. 9, 2006 | The global controversy over the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed continued to spin out of control this week, as Iraqis demonstrated for the withdrawal of Danish troops, and Afghans attacked NATO soldiers, leaving four dead and dozens wounded. The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere. Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration's blundering interventions in the region. Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

After the cartoons were published on Sept. 30, right-wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reacted to the angry response by refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries and sternly lecturing Muslims on their need to put up with the caricatures. He finally sounded a more conciliatory note this week, complaining of a global crisis. He was clearly worried, like another Dane, Prince Hamlet, about what would happen "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me."

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."

Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the Holocaust against the Jews also often colored the language of colonial administrators in places like Algeria about their subjects. A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammed with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes of a century and a half ago, wherein Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good.

(It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country's rapists.)

Muslim sensitivity about insults to Islam in Europe has a strong postcolonial context. But the decades since independence have also seen increased conflict between the often Westernized elites in Muslim societies and the traditional Muslim middle and working classes. (See Mark MacNamara's report from Morocco.) In several countries, most notably Egypt, the ruling elites took a hard line on the cartoons in an attempt to cover their flanks from the religious right.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit has been doggedly fanning the flames of the controversy since last fall, when he thundered that the drawings were an anti-Islamic "scandal" that must not be repeated. As recently as Feb. 5 he said, "The publication of cartoons by a Danish newspaper affronting Islam's Prophet Mohammed had triggered massive anger among Muslims worldwide," without acknowledging his own role in keeping the issue on the front pages.

Abul-Gheit's aggressive intervention has little to do with piety and a lot to do with Egyptian politics. The cartoons gave the relatively secular military Egyptian government a free -- and much needed -- opportunity to burnish its Muslim credentials. Egypt jailed 30,000 Muslim fundamentalists in the 1990s and killed some 1,500 in running street battles. Since 2000, the Egyptian government has continued to arrest members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and to repress the movement, perhaps the largest and most important dissident organization in Egypt. Despite extensive government intervention against it, the Brotherhood managed to win 88 seats in Parliament in the recent elections, and it would surely have won more if the elections had been truly free and fair. The Brotherhood's good showing was an indirect consequence of pressure from the Bush administration, which demanded fairer elections, thus helping polarize Egyptian politics. In response, Abul-Gheit and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak sought to increase their popularity and outflank the Brotherhood by posing as champions of Islam against a disrespectful West. The move was made all the more attractive because the only cost was to relations with a small country like Denmark.

On Tuesday, the grand sheik of the Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi -- the foremost Sunni authority -- led a procession of 20,000 students and others in a protest against the caricatures. He and other leading Egyptian clerical figures gave speeches. The Egyptian clerics are often criticized by the lay Muslim Brotherhood as mere stooges of the military government, so this controversy was a means for them, too, to assert their religious leadership.

Next page: In Iraq, Sistani was pushed to the right by the rise of Muqtada al-Sadr