The Muhammad cartoons started out as a political gag. Flemming Rose, the paper’s culture editor, decided last summer that he was fed up with what he described as the spreading of “self-censorship” on matters related to Islam and solicited cartoonists for drawings of “how they saw the Prophet.” Cartoons are an important anti-totalitarian expression, Rose wrote, and therefore the paper had asked 40 Danish cartoonists to draw their image of Muhammad. Only 12 responded. The 12 cartoons were published last September, under the headline “Muhammad’s Face.” As examples of the epidemic of self-censorship, Rose cited a stand-up comedian who had complained that he was afraid to make fun of Muhammad on television, and a children’s book author who complained that he could not get anyone to illustrate his book about Muhammad. Rose also claimed that three theatres had put on shows deriding George W Bush but none Osama Bin Laden. (Considering that a member of parliament from the Danish People’s party has called Muslims “a cancer on Danish society,” some people—including the former foreign minister and EU commissioner, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen—say the problem is that there is too little self-censorship in Denmark.)

The paper received support from the government for its culture war. “We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid,” boasted the minister of cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, in a speech at his party’s annual meeting the week before Rose’s cartoon editorial. He continued, “The culture war has now been raging for some years. And I think we can conclude that the first round has been won.” The next front, he said, is the war against the acceptance of Muslim norms and ways of thought.

It is said that humour does not travel well, but these cartoons really were not very funny. Several are a predictable mix of self-righteous unfunny commentary and depictions of shady-looking faces with big, bulbous noses and blood-dripping swords. Two portray the Prophet much the way Jesus is usually drawn but with a halo that has turned into horns. My favourite shows Muhammad as a 14-year-old schoolboy, who has written on the blackboard in Farsi, “The journalists at Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionaries.” (It was published without translation, and it is not clear when Rose found out that the joke was on him.) Another is of a benign-looking Prophet, who stands on a cloud turning away a line of suicide bombers, saying, “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” That was the only one that elicited a laugh in my family. Some are funny in a self-referential way. One (a version of which was reprinted in this month’s issue of Prospect) shows the Prophet holding back his crusaders, saying, “Calm down my friends, it is just a silly cartoon by a provincial Dane.” Another has an orange dropping into the turban of the author who complained that he could not get an illustrator for his book. “PR-stunt,” it says on the turban. In Danish, having an orange dropped into your turban means that you have been undeservedly lucky. The cartoon speaks the truth. The book has been published and is selling well. Its cover features a picture of Muhammad on a winged horse. Journalists have been unable to verify the existence of the illustrators that supposedly expressed concern about providing illustrations of Muhammad for the book.

One of the 12 cartoons has been widely reprinted. It depicts a man who has been taken to be Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, but the image has not been understood outside Denmark. The Prophet’s face is that of Sheikh Abu Laban, a notorious Danish radical cleric who achieved world fame for showing the 12 cartoons (plus a few more for extra effect) to various religious and political authorities in Egypt. The cartoon could be interpreted as suggesting that Abu Laban likes to portray himself as the Prophet, rather than as a simple besmirchment of the Prophet. But that is probably too sophisticated.

Abu Laban has been a political refugee in Denmark since 1984. He was born to a Palestinian family in Jaffa and gained refugee status after expulsion from the Emirates. Two years ago, I attended Friday prayers in Denmark and heard the khutbah, the Friday sermon, at his mosque. Abu Laban does not speak Danish and he often loses his temper. When I asked him what should be done about radical imams, he angrily denounced the failure of western democracy to live up to its commitments to religious toleration. He called for the return of the caliphate across Arab lands and suggested that eventually, perhaps, there would be enough converts in Europe to extend the righteous empire there too.

It was the Egyptian ambassador to Copenhagen, Mona Omar Attia, who put Abu Laban’s trip together. According to a report by three Danish journalists working for the liberal paper Politiken, she made sure that Abu Laban and his fellow delegates got to see the Egyptian assistant minister of foreign affairs, representatives from the Organisation of Islamic Conference, the Arab League and top religious leaders. The Egyptian foreign ministry instructed its ambassadors in Islamic countries to inform the governments of the Danish cartoons and the insult they represented.

By coincidence, 11 ambassadors from Muslim countries to Denmark were together in Copenhagen at a social event the day the cartoons were published. They decided to ask for a meeting with the government to lodge a protest and ask that it address the increasing hostility towards Muslims in Denmark. They wrote to the Danish foreign ministry on 12th October, just before the start of Ramadan, raising issues not only about the cartoons but also the hateful speeches in parliament by the Danish People’s party and Mikkelsen’s “culture war” against Islam. The government refused a meeting. It continued to refuse any meeting until 3rd February, a week after the boycotts started.

The rejection infuriated the ambassadors. “Does he think I am stupid?” asked a fuming representative from the Palestinian Council. It also angered 22 former Danish ambassadors to Islamic countries, who in January published a public letter criticising the government for violating international protocol and jeopardising Denmark’s standing in the international community.

For four months, the government gave the same reason for not meeting with the ambassadors. “They want us to take legal action against Jyllands-Posten,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen. “Naturally, we cannot do that.” In fact, the ambassadors had asked that the government “take all responsible to task under the law of the land.” There are laws that might apply. Article 140 of the Danish criminal code allows for a fine and up to four months of imprisonment for demeaning a “globally recognised religious community.” Mogens Glistrup, a tax protestor and xenophobe, was imprisoned for 20 days in 2005 for racist speech. Today, the foreign ministry continues to insist that it read the letter as a demand for specific legal action against the newspaper, which the ambassadors deny.

Would the cartoon war have been avoided if the Danish government had exercised better political judgement? Well, some sort of action would probably have meant that the Danish imams would not have gone on their travels. Would the cartoons have been forgotten or seen as a silly prank by a provincial paper? Years ago, before the blogs, photo phones and SMS, the paper would have reached only its 150,000 daily readers and the newsagents (some of whom are Muslim and were the first to protest). End of story. Today, however, the cartoon war is a cautionary tale about the feedback loop between political dissent in the Islamic countries and in Europe, and about how easily new communication technology can be used to incite instant political mayhem. But it is also an old-fashioned tale about a crisis caused by an inflexible government. The Danish paper printed the cartoons because it wanted to provoke. The governments of the Islamic countries got into the fight because they wanted to teach the Danes a lesson, and found that they could do that while also showing the Islamists that they too know how to fight for the faith.

What should we conclude? Amid the Danes’ cries of victimhood and the Islamists’ demands for boycotts and beheadings, a consensus of a kind has emerged among the non-combatants. Free speech is an important value in liberal societies, and Islamic religious prohibitions cannot be applied against secular European newspapers. The Danish paper was nevertheless at fault for printing cartoons that were insulting, but the Islamic countries should have stayed out of it. This consensus reflects a new maturity both among Europe’s Muslim elite and in the European media—a welcome evolution from the Rushdie affair of 1989.

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