Fanning the Flames

By Romesh Ratnesar

The marchers in Kabul last week were in their teens and early 20s, the kind of zealous, energetic youths Westerners might have hoped would be clamoring for democracy or human rights. Instead, the cause of their protest was caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, first published last September by a Danish newspaper called Jyllands-Posten, which in the past two weeks have provoked Muslims around the world to denounce not just the offending illustrators but also French newspaper editors, Norwegian diplomats, U.S. troops in Iraq and peddlers of Danish food. In Kabul the protest signs read DEATH TO DENMARK and DEATH TO THOSE WHO PUBLISH CARTOONS. A stuffed pig meant to represent Denmark was burned, along with a Danish flag. "We are all willing to sacrifice ourselves," said Qasi Nazir, 20. "We are calling for the death of Jews and Christians." On the side of the road, a teenager wearing a blue winter hat watched the marchers. "It's democracy, no?" he asked before heading into the crowd.

It is, of a sort, and protesters like those in Kabul have a message for the West: Get used to it. Across the Islamic world, daily demonstrations of varying size and intensity have brought hundreds of thousands into the streets--some driven as much by disgruntlement as by religious fervor, but many others motivated by genuine outrage at the perceived desecration of the most revered figure in Islam. Yet even for Westerners sympathetic to Muslims' right to vent their anger, the mayhem that marked the protests last week was as unsettling as the cartoons themselves. A day after mobs in Damascus torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies, rioters set fire to the Danish consulate in Beirut; Iranians hurled gasoline bombs at Denmark's embassy in Tehran and smashed the windows of Austria's. In Afghanistan a protest outside a U.S. military base left two people dead after local police opened fire on the crowd; nine more people died in similar clashes around the country. A Taliban leader reportedly offered 100 grams of gold to anyone who killed the cartoonists. It wasn't hard to find potential takers. "The word Islam is derived from peace. You cannot just go and attack people," says Walid el-Sallab, 23, student-union president at the American University in Cairo, who organized a peaceful rally against the cartoons. "But honestly, I feel that if I were to see the Danish Prime Minister, I might kill him myself without thinking."

Given the excesses of the protests--which included retaliatory cartoons mocking the Holocaust--it's not surprising that some in Europe and the U.S. have lashed back. The Bush Administration initially declared the caricatures offensive while denouncing the violence. But as the protests turned violent and critics grumbled about the Administration's failure to stand up for free speech and the U.S.'s suddenly besieged European allies, the Bush team ratcheted up the rhetoric. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "There is no excuse for violence," and she accused regimes in Iran and Syria of deliberately stirring up anti-Western sentiment. Aboard Air Force One last Tuesday, President George W. Bush phoned Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, with whom Bush has a close relationship, to stress Washington's solidarity and "buck him up," says a senior Administration official. But Bush aides acknowledge that the cartoon uproar has been an unwelcome distraction at a time when the U.S. is fighting insurgencies in two Muslim countries and trying to build support to curb the nuclear ambitions of a third. "We all hope it calms down," says another senior Administration official.

Even if it does, the broader issues raised by the current furor are certain to persist. To some, the dispute over the cartoons is a bellwether of a deepening divide between Western societies and Islam, a civilizational clash on issues as basic as the role of religion in society and the limits of liberty. Although the controversy has revealed degrees of cultural ignorance on both sides, it has been fueled by a brew of willful misunderstanding, manipulation and opportunism--all of which became combustible in the political climate that prevails in much of the Middle East today. In that sense, the crisis may also offer a useful if sobering glimpse of the raucous, religiously infused brand of democracy that is emerging in the Muslim world. Says Joseph Bahout, a professor of geopolitics at the National Foundation of Political Sciences in Paris: "The Arab world keeps hearing the U.S. speak of democracy as one size fits all--but they don't like the size the Americans wear."

If nothing else, the editors of Jyllands-Posten--a right-of-center newspaper based in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city--knew that publishing cartoon images of Muhammad would get them attention. That was the point: last September the paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, invited 40 Danish cartoonists to submit caricatures of the Prophet in a deliberate attempt to provoke a debate about what Rose perceived as the stifling of coverage of issues related to Islam and Denmark's 200,000 Muslim residents. A leading Danish religious historian, Tim Jensen, warned that some Muslims would take offense at the images, citing a widely, although not unanimously, observed taboo against physical representations of the Prophet. But the paper published the 12 submissions it received anyway, on Sept. 30. To a neutral observer, the drawings ranged from puerile to mildly provocative: one shows Muhammad as a Bedouin flanked by two women in burqas, another with a bomb in his turban. Fatih Alev, an imam in Copenhagen, says he "wasn't particularly incensed" when he saw the cartoons in the paper but suspected it would anger some local Muslims. "Many Muslims in Denmark are not used to reading long articles. Many don't even read Danish," says Alev. "All they saw were cartoons depicting Muhammad in unflattering caricatures. It was a recipe for disaster."

Still, the initial reaction remained muted. Two weeks after the appearance of the cartoons, Muslim leaders organized a mostly peaceful demonstration of 3,500 people in Copenhagen, demanding that the paper issue an apology for the drawings. The paper rebuffed the demand. But the tempest might have remained a largely local dispute had Prime Minister Rasmussen not compounded the editors' intransigence by refusing to meet with the ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries to discuss the cartoon flap. "This was a major mistake," says Denmark-based Bashy Quraishy, president of the European Network Against Racism. "I have never in my long political career heard of a group of diplomats asking for a meeting on such an important subject and being refused."

In response to Rasmussen's slight, Muslim activists in Denmark embarked on a provocative campaign of their own. In mid-November, Abu Laban, the country's most radical imam, made arrangements on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Faith to send a delegation of Muslims to the Middle East to publicize the cartoon issue. They brought with them a 43-page dossier that contained the 12 cartoons and three even more inflammatory drawings, not published by Jyllands-Posten but allegedly sent to Danish Muslims in the wake of the initial protests. (One of the images, purportedly showing Muhammad with a pig's nose, was a photograph of a costumed contestant at a pig festival in France.) In December the delegates showed the entire dossier to journalists, religious and political leaders in Cairo, Lebanon and Damascus. Within days, the contents were being circulated on the Internet and condemned by Muslim bloggers, even though the most derogatory images in the dossier had never even been published. Says Quraishy: "I don't think these representatives knew what they started."

It didn't take long to find out. At a meeting in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, leaders of the world's 57 Islamic countries issued a joint statement that "condemned the desecration" of the image of Muhammad. In late January an imam at the Grand Mosque of Mecca declared that "he who vilifies [the Prophet] should be killed." The Saudi government withdrew its ambassador to Denmark in late January as groups throughout the Middle East organized a boycott of Danish goods.

At each juncture, attempts by some parties to defuse the crisis were overwhelmed by those intent on escalating it. Even as Jyllands-Posten apologized on its website for offending Muslims with the cartoons--though not for publishing them in the first place--media outlets in France, Germany and Spain ran some of the drawings in a defense of press freedom. Many Muslims say the republications exacerbated their belief that the cartoons' sole purpose was to humiliate them. Meanwhile, the most violent reactions in the Arab world came after a Copenhagen cleric appeared on al-Jazeera in late January and mentioned rumors that Danes planned to burn copies of the Koran in Copenhagen's City Hall Square. No copies were burned. In early February, almost three months after refusing to meet with the 11 Muslim ambassadors, Rasmussen summoned the entire foreign diplomatic corps in Denmark to explain his position. But by that time, says Mona Omar Attia, Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, "this was no longer a government issue but one of the masses."

Could the crisis have been avoided? By missing or ignoring opportunities to contain the controversy at an early stage, the editors of Jyllands-Posten, Muslim leaders and Danish politicians all contributed to the notion that the dispute was the product of irreconcilable cultural differences. The most obvious centered on the Islamic taboo on images of the Prophet: devout Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet blasphemous. But the Danish cartoons stirred outrage among moderate Muslims less because the cartoons depicted Muhammad than because of the way in which the Prophet was portrayed. "Eleven of the series were problematic but not outrageous," says Antoine Basbous, director of the Observatory of Arab Countries in Paris. The cartoon that showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, however, "was simply far beyond the pale. The direct link between him, and Islam, to terrorism acted like a bomb among Muslims."

That may be true. But why did it take so long to detonate? It's worth noting that reaction to the cartoons among Muslims in Europe and Asia, while negative, has been largely peaceful. In the Arab world, the cartoons were accessible as early as October, when three Egyptian magazines and a newspaper published them to call attention to what it perceived as a distorted Western view of Islam. No one noticed. "We attacked the cartoons and said that this deepens the culture clash and does not resolve it," says Adel Hamouda, 55, editor of al-Fagr, a liberal Cairo-based weekly that ran the cartoons. "Those who saw the cartoons did not react, and those who reacted are the ones who did not see them."

Hamouda and other Muslims across the Middle East point out that the eruption of rage over the cartoons coincided with the electoral success of religious parties in Egypt, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, as well as the escalating confrontation over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Those developments have emboldened forces in the region who benefit from seeing the frustration felt by Muslims about their lives channeled into hostility toward the West, forces that range from radical clerics to secular Arab autocrats. In that sense, the cartoon uproar may have a lot less to do with religion or culture than with politics. "Arabs should have responded in a cooler way," says Mourad Gharib, 42, a journalist in Cairo. "But it's as though we're standing on a hot piece of metal. Any slight change in temperature can affect Arab society."

For the U.S. and its Western allies, that should serve as an admonishment. The Bush Administration's promotion of democracy in the Arab world since Sept. 11 has helped rouse stirrings of participatory democracy throughout the region; even a society as closed as Saudi Arabia's has held local elections for the first time. But for most Muslims, any credit owed to the U.S. for such advances is outweighed by simmering resentment over the war in Iraq and the lack of progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. As the triumph of Hamas in last month's Palestinian elections showed, holding free elections in such conditions runs a high risk of rewarding fundamentalist groups that have little interest in tamping down anti-Western attitudes. The popularity of Islamists may be discomfiting to the West, but it increasingly seems to be the bargain required for implanting democracy in the Islamic world. Says Mohammed Abdel Koddus, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood: "People are looking for alternatives, and the only alternative they see is Islam."

So what can the U.S. do? Aides to Bush say the unrest roiling the Muslim world hasn't shaken his faith that democracy helps relieve extremism in the long run, because the prosaic work of governing tends to make ideological politicians more pragmatic. "Elections are just the start in his view," says a senior Administration official. It's encouraging, U.S. officials say, that powerful Muslim figures--including Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, and even some leaders of Hamas--have tried to quell the unrest over the Danish cartoons out of fear of a collapse in law and order. But even if that tames the passions unleashed over the past month, there's every reason to expect the voices of Muslim discontent to grow more assertive, not less. "Before this, people believed that Muslims were sleeping and would never wake up," says Yusef Hamdan, 23, a radio engineer in the Gaza Strip. "But the cartoons prove you can provoke the Muslim nation." Having lit the fuse of liberty in the Arab world, the U.S. has little choice now but to watch it burn.

With reporting by Reported by Matthew Cooper with, Bush, Bruce Crumley / Paris, Julian Isherwood / Copenhagen, Scott MacLeod / Tehran, Amany Radwan, Lindsay Wise / Cairo, Simon Robinson / Gaza City, Phil Zabriskie, Muhib Habibi / Kabul