A dozen Danish cartoons and the wrath of the Muslim world

Abstract

How do we understand the outrage in the Muslim world against the 12 cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten? And can we move on from anger and misunderstanding? Is there room for dialogue? It is now several weeks since the Muslim world exploded with anger at a series of cartoons originally published in Jyllands- Posten. The cartoons variously depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist and murderer, the best known of which shows him wearing a bomb as a turban. The cartoons were later re-published in a Norwegian evangelical newsletter. After they were first published a group of Danish imams approached the Danish courts, but were advised that there were no legal grounds for seeking redress. Subsequently, the imams traveled to the Middle East, taking with them a pamphlet in which they reproduced the newspaper cartoons, but added three more images which had been circulating on the internet and elsewhere. These images were entirely unrelated to the newspaper cartoons.

Keywords

• cartoonists
• culture
• Islam
• political cartooning
• religion
• freedom of expression