Muslim outrage gathers pace
By Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and FT Reporters
Published: February 3 2006 18:44 | Last updated: February 3 2006 18:44
Angry protests over newspaper cartoons of the prophet Mohammad continued to spread globally on Friday as Muslim leaders and politicians in Europe expressed mounting concern that the outrage could destabilize the multicultural continent.
In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, protesters stormed the lobby of the Jakarta high-rise building housing the Danish embassy. Other incidents and protests were reported from Pakistan to the Darfur region of Sudan and the Palestinian territories, where European Union observers evacuated Danish and French nationals after gunmen had briefly held a German man in the West Bank on Thursday night.
In London, hundreds of Muslims marched from the Regent's Park mosque, one of the biggest Islamic centres in Europe, to the heavily protected Danish embassy, bearing placards declaring “Behead the one who insults the prophet” and “Free speech go to hell”.
The most serious religious clash since the 1989 Salman Rushdie
affair erupted last September when Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten published 12 caricatures of Mohammad, the seventh-century founder of Islam, in protest at what it called “the rejection of modern, secular society” by some Muslims.
The debate only boiled over last month when European newspapers began reprinting the cartoons, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, sparking a fresh wave of protests in the Muslim world, including boycotts of Danish products and the recalling of ambassadors to Copenhagen.
Islamik Trossamfund, a small Danish Muslim organisation, has been accused of throwing petrol on the fire after its leaders toured the Middle-East circulating highly offensive pictures of Muslims that had never appeared in the Danish press.
Jyllands-Posten wrote in a leader article on Friday that regretted underestimating the strength of Muslim reaction over the drawings but declined to apologise for publishing them.
In Europe, the wave of indignation has triggered a debate about the freedom of the press, responsibility and self-censorship at a time of rising tension between Christian majorities and large, and growing, Muslim minorities.
Community leaders, journalists and politicians in Germany yesterday called on editors to show responsibility in the exercise of free speech while condemning the more extreme reactions to the controversial cartoons.
Die Welt, a conservative daily, reprinted a portrait of Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban on its front page this week in what Roger Köppel, editor, told the FT reflected a “journalist’s duty to report.”
Wolfgang Schäuble, interior minister, rejected calls for the government to apologise on behalf of the press, saying “here in Europe, governments have nothing to say about which paper publishes what.”
The debate has assumed a particular resonance in Germany, where racist cartoons were often used by the National-Socialist press to incite hatred of the Jews and cement prejudice in the population ahead of Hitle’s rise to power in 1933.
Kenan Kolat, chairman of the Turkish community, which makes up the bulk of Germany’s 3.2m Muslims, told the FT: “Any attempt at muzzling the press should be condemned. But editors must also be sensitive in their approach to minorities. There is still a lot of ignorance around about Islam.”
Mr Kolat urged all sides not to “play in the hands of extremists”. The debate, he said, was “a godsend for Islamists and anti-Muslims everywhere. All should be done to stop the escalation now.”
Cebel Kücükkaraca, an academic and head of the Turkish Community in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, said “We must try harder not to give extremists an open flank.”
Highlighting the risk of escalation, the German extreme-right Republican party said in a statement yesterday that the outrage marked “the beginning of open war between cultures in Europe," adding: “the door is now open for blackmail by the Mohammedans.”
In Paris, president Jacques Chirac met with Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Muslim Council and rector of the Paris mosque, to discuss the growing outrage. The French government has given mixed messages over the crisis, defending free speech while condemning any provocative content.
Massoud Shadjareh, the head of the British Islamic Human Rights Commission, distanced his organisation from yesterday’s London march, which he said had been organised by “extremists”. A larger demonstration by mainstream Muslim groups is scheduled for today.
The US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said yesterday: "Intentionally provocative attacks on Islam should be rejected in the same way that credible media outlets quite rightly decline to publish anti-Semitic materials.”
Journalists have come under fire too in parts of the Muslim world. In Jordan, the editor of the Shihan weekly was sacked for reprinting cartoons, while Rakyat Merdeka, an Indonesian tabloid, was forced to remove one of the Danish caricatures from its website yesterday.
“We deplore all the media, including the Indonesian media, that expose (that cartoon),” said Din Syamsuddin, head of Muhammadyah, one of Indonesia’s biggest mainstream Islamic groups.
Abdul Rahman al Noaimy, a lawyer and professor from Qatar university, told the FT on a visit to Cairo that he planned to sue each newspaper that had published the cartoons in their respective European countries.
Additional reporting by Shawn Donnan in Jakarta, Chris Conlon in Budapest, Martin Arnold in Paris, Jimmy Burns in London, William Wallis in Cairo, Pavi Munter in Stockholm and Edward alden in WashingtonEnds
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