Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0300124724, Hardcover)
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Five months later, thousands of Muslims inundated the newspaper with outpourings of anger and grief by phone, email, and fax; from Asia to Europe Muslims took to the streets in protest. This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the conflict that aroused impassioned debates around the world on freedom of expression, blasphemy, and the nature of modern Islam.
Jytte Klausen interviewed politicians in the Middle East, Muslim leaders in Europe, the Danish editors and cartoonists, and the Danish imam who started the controversy. Following the winding trail of protests across the world, she deconstructs the arguments and motives that drove the escalation of the increasingly globalized conflict. She concludes that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not—as was commonly assumed—a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Rather it was orchestrated, first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria. Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:45:57 -0500)
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was a new type of protest. "This was not a campaign against the capitalist exploitation of natural resources or other issues recognizable within the normal European politics of left versus right," she writes. "Demands were made in the name of the ummah, or community of believers." She does not, however, always see what a big difference this makes. Denmark, a country of 5 or 6 million people, was being attacked in the name of a community of 1.5 billion. It is not just the categories of left and right that get confused in such a case, but the categories of majority and minority.
Why shouldn't Danes have been worried, not just over their interests abroad but over the loyalties of their Muslim fellow citizens?
While never seeking to soft-pedal the real threats of violence in Denmark, Klausen argues that if you disentangle the different motivations of the protesters, you will find they were not as monolithic as they looked. Arab diplomats, Danish imams, and populist firebrands of the Indian subcontinent "shared no consensus on exactly what was the problem with the cartoons." That may be true. The question is whether that opened up to Denmark any realistic alternative path for dealing with the cartoon crisis. It probably did not. . . .
Danes, Klausen laments, were for the most part incapable of decoding the different rationales for Muslim protest. They "heard only that they were being told to change their laws and ways." This was indeed an unsubtle way of looking at things. But it was an accurate one.