Wall Street Journal - February 7, 2006
How Muslim Clerics Stirred Arab World Against Denmark
Newspaper Cartoons Unite Religious, Secular Forces; Dossier Fans the Flames
By ANDREW HIGGINS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
COPENHAGEN - When Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Denmark's leading newspaper, published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad late last September, he got an angry telephone call from a local Muslim news vendor who said he had removed the paper from his shelves in protest.
The complaint didn't cause much alarm. "We get calls every day from people complaining about something," recalls Mr. Rose. Anger over the cartoons, he figured, would flare out in "two or three days."
Today, the 47-year-old editor has a security-service escort when he appears in public. He has received death threats and gets insulted by strangers on the street. His newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, evacuated its offices twice last week after anonymous bomb threats.
Across the Muslim world, Denmark, a nation of just 5.4 million, has been hit by a tsunami of rage. Protesters rally daily from Iraq to Indonesia. Mobs over the weekend stormed its diplomatic missions in Syria and Lebanon. Demonstrators yesterday attacked its embassy in Iran, and security forces in Afghanistan opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least four. A boycott of Danish products has hammered some of Denmark's biggest companies.
"The reaction is totally surrealistic," says Mr. Rose, whose wife has started reading the Quran to try to understand what has happened. Mr. Rose himself has consulted with experts on Islam and now says he regrets that he "didn't know more beforehand" about Islamic taboos on depictions of the prophet.
The cartoon uproar has fed on wider racial and economic tension in Europe between Muslim immigrants and native citizens. Also at play is America's policy of promoting democracy, which has helped unleash a struggle within the Arab world between largely secular regimes and increasingly powerful Islamist groups.
In this volatile environment, a group of Danish Islamic clerics angered by the cartoons succeeded in enlisting help from Egypt's secular government, which has been struggling to contain a potent Islamist opposition. Secular forces in the Arab world, eager to burnish their image as defenders of Islam, provided an important initial impetus for the protests, but now are scrambling to control the fury.
From his office at the Islamic Faith Society in Copenhagen, Ahmed Abu-Laban, a fundamentalist Palestinian cleric, has been at the forefront of a campaign to force an apology from the paper. "This was the last drop in a cup of resentment, disappointment and exploitation," he says.
Jyllands-Posten, a center-right newspaper, first waded into these treacherous waters last fall. Mr. Rose, alarmed by what he considered a rise in self-censorship relating to Islamic issues, invited Danish cartoonists to "draw Muhammad the way that they see him." Twelve submitted drawings.
One mocked a far-right Danish leader, putting her in a police line-up with a turban, and another ridiculed Mr. Rose and his newspaper, labeling it a "reactionary provocateur." Others, though, poked fun at Islam. One depicted Muhammad in a turban shaped like a bomb. Another showed a turbaned figure in heaven telling ascending suicide bombers to stop because "we've run out of virgins," a reference to a reward said to await Islamic martyrs.
The cartoons were published Sept. 30, which Mr. Rose and his colleagues were unaware coincided with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Soon after the angry newspaper vendor called, a second-generation immigrant phoned the paper to make threats against the cartoonists. The caller, who was quickly found by police, turned out to be mentally ill.
After a few days, Mr. Rose thought the worst was over. Then clerics in Copenhagen and elsewhere used their sermons to denounce the paper. Ambassadors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and nine other Islamic countries requested a meeting with Denmark's center-right prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen declined, saying the state had no right to interfere with the country's free press. Angry local Muslim leaders organized protest rallies, demanding an apology. The paper refused.
In Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city, a radical cleric gave an interview denouncing Mr. Rose and reminding him of "what happened" to Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 by a Dutchman of Moroccan descent. Mr. Rose got a security briefing from police and had his telephone number and address de-listed.
Under pressure from young radicals for results, Mr. Abu-Laban, the Copenhagen cleric at the forefront of the campaign, and several others formed the "European Committee for Honoring the Prophet," an umbrella group that now claims to represent 27 organizations across a wide spectrum of the Islamic community. (Moderate Muslims dispute this and say the group has been hijacked by radicals.)
Frustrated by the Danish government's response, the committee decided after a series of meetings in October and November that "our only option was take our case outside Denmark," Mr. Abu-Laban says. There was growing interest from Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen and their home governments, including Egypt.
Mr. Abu-Laban, who grew up in Egypt and was arrested there in the early 1980s after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for his preaching, took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. He denies holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Mr. Abu-Laban began working closely with Cairo's embassy in Copenhagen, holding several meetings with Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, Mona Omar Attia. "Egypt's embassy played a fundamental role," he says. Egypt and other Arab regimes saw the furor as a good opportunity "to counteract pressure from the West" and "to show people they are good Muslims," he says.
Ms. Attia, the ambassador, says she wasn't motivated by political concerns but by personal outrage. "I was very angry. I was very upset," she says, describing the cartoons as an unacceptable insult to all Muslims. She acknowledges meeting with the Danish clerics several times but denies coordinating strategy with them.
Keen to "globalize" the crisis to pressure the Danish government, Mr. Abu-Laban and his colleagues decided to send delegations to the Middle East. They prepared a dossier to distribute during the travels. The document, which exceeded 30 pages, featured copies of the published cartoons and Arabic media reports about the controversy. It also contained a group of highly offensive pictures that had never been published by the newspaper, including a photograph of a man dressed as a pig, with the caption: "this is the real picture of Muhammad."
Ahmed Akarri, a 28-year-old Islamist activist involved in the committee, says the photographs had been sent to Danish Muslims anonymously and were included as examples of Denmark's anti-Muslim sentiment. He denies any attempt to mislead the Arab public about what had been published in Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Rose, the editor, describes it as a clear attempt at "disinformation."
The first delegation left for Cairo in early December. As that nation was about to hold the final round of the first democratic election in modern Egyptian history, the government was battling accusations from some quarters of insufficient piety. Ms. Attia, the ambassador, denies that authorities tried to manipulate the cartoon issue as an electoral ploy.
One member of the Danish delegation, Ahmed Harby, an Egyptian who runs a cleaning business in Copenhagen, says the trip wasn't designed to stir hatred against Denmark. It was intended, he says, to appease hotheads in Copenhagen and elsewhere who might take violent action if Jyllands-Posten wasn't forced to apologize. He says he didn't realize the dossier contained pictures the newspaper had never published.
The delegation met with a special assistant to the foreign minister, with the head of al-Azhar, the Muslim world's oldest university, and with the Egyptian head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. During a meeting with Cairo's senior Muslim cleric, Mr. Harby says, a fatwa, or religious opinion, was drafted calling for a boycott of Danish goods. The order was never formally released, he says.
Later in December, a second delegation traveled to Lebanon to meet with religious leaders and appeared on television. Mr. Akarri, the Copenhagen activist, later traveled alone to Syria to deliver the dossier to Syria's senior Sunni cleric.
Back in Denmark, the pressure on Mr. Rose mounted. He was warned that a security-service informant had reported that some Muslim radicals were spreading word that killing him was halal, meaning sanctioned by Islam. "It was the only time I felt cold running down my spine," he says.
Denmark's government began to reach out to Muslim ambassadors and others it had earlier rebuffed. In a New Year's speech, the prime minister retreated slightly from previously strong support for Jyllands-Posten. Egypt promptly claimed credit for the modest shift and suggested in a foreign ministry statement it was ready to drop the matter.
Protests elsewhere were intensifying, fanned by both Islamists and secular forces eager to prove their Islamic credentials. In Jordan, a pro-Western monarchy, Parliament condemned the cartoons as "racist and evil." Tunisia and Libya, where police regularly arrest Islamist activists and block protests, also denounced them.
Late last month, influential clerics in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere called for a boycott of Danish goods. Arab consumers began to shun Danish products en masse.
"Our business in the whole Middle East is at a total standstill," says Finn Hansen, head of international operations for Arla Foods, a big Danish dairy company. The chairman of Dansk Industri, a trade organization for Danish businesses, issued an open letter calling on the newspaper to explain its position, and appeared in a television debate with Mr. Rose.
Last week, Jyllands-Posten apologized for causing offense, and Mr. Rose appeared on al-Jazeera and other Arab television stations in an effort to persuade viewers that the newspaper never intended to insult Islam. Its intent, he said, was to join a domestic Danish debate about free speech.
Protests escalated. Returning late one night to his Copenhagen apartment, Mr. Rose slumped in a leather sofa with his wife to watch the news. It showed protesters waving signs that read "Behead Those Who Insult Islam." "This whole thing is crazy, totally crazy," he groans. "I had no idea anything like this would happen."