Attitudes towards Muslims are hardening even in Europe's most liberal, multicultural societies.

When the cartoonist's pen is mightier than the sword
James Button, February 7, 2006


WE ALL know September 11, 2001, transformed the US. But will historians say that in the long run it transformed Europe just as much, even more? It is a question worth asking as the fire lit by the publication of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad continues to burn. Because a straight line runs from September 11 to here.

September 11 enraged Pim Fortuyn and drove him into politics. Fortuyn was the maverick Dutch politician who called Islam a "backward" religion. He might have rocketed to the prime ministership had he not been murdered (by an animal rights activist) in May 2002.

Fortuyn broke the consensual, multicultural mould of Dutch society. He inspired the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, also incensed by September 11, to make his film Submission, which overlaid verses of the Koran onto a naked female body as it explored the alleged oppression of women in Islam.

Van Gogh's 2004 murder, by an Islamic extremist, effectively completed a revolution in the Netherlands. Non-European immigration has virtually stopped; 26,000 failed asylum seekers are being expelled. Migrants are being told to speak Dutch and integrate.

The terrorism in the US is not the only cause of the upheavals in Holland, but it is central to them. A poll from June 2004, before van Gogh's murder, found that 86 per cent of people of Dutch descent felt threatened by Dutch Muslims (who are one million in a total population of 16 million).

The shockwaves have radiated far past the Netherlands. Belgian councils have banned the burqa. Italy has closed radical mosques. The German state of Baden Wurttemberg has brought in what is called the "Muslim test", in which Muslim applicants for citizenship are asked about their views on September 11, gay relationships and whether their teenage daughters are allowed to attend swimming classes.

And so to Denmark last year, when a children's author was unable to find an artist who would dare illustrate a children's book on Muhammad. Presumably they knew Muslims consider it idolatrous to make images of the Prophet. But what was most on their minds, by all reports, was the van Gogh murder.

When he heard about this, Flemming Rose, culture editor of the conservative newspaper Jyllands-Posten, was annoyed. To "see how deep this self-censorship lies in the Danish public", he asked 40 cartoonists to draw Muhammad. Twelve took up the dare, three drew Muhammad as a terrorist, and another chain reaction was set off.

September 11 matters in Europe because, while the US Muslim population is relatively small and well integrated, Europe has 15 million Muslims. They have high rates of unemployment. They are some of the continent's most marginalised people, and some of the most angry. A US study last year found that of 373 jihadists who plotted terrorist acts in Europe and North America, a quarter were western European nationals. Several newspapers which republished the cartoons justified the decision by saying they refused to be cowed by fundamentalists who wished to silence debate. The implication was that Muslims, or at least radical Muslims, are powerful.

But that is not how most European Muslims see it. They feel embattled, discriminated against, even despised. Every day more of their young people are drawn to radical Islam's conspiracy theories of a global plot against Muslims. Publishing the cartoons is likely to feed their sense of grievance and, at times, victimhood.

Naser Khader is a liberal Muslim MP in Denmark who thinks the episode has helped extremists on both sides. "The campaign against the caricatures is a clear manoeuvre on the part of Muslim radicals," he told the German newspaper Die Zeit. But he also says when an MP from the far-right Danish People's Party calls Islam a "cancer" and no one objects, it "prepares the ground" for extremism.

At a protest in London on Friday, one young person was dressed as a suicide bomber; some people carried placards calling for beheading of the cartoonists. As a response it was fanatical and out of all proportion. It also underlined Khader's point: publication has emboldened those for whom the prospect of a clash of civilisations is enticing. On its own, that is not an argument against publication. Causing offence, even rage, is an inherent and necessary risk that goes with free speech.

But the right to free speech does not exist in isolation from other values, such as empathy and respect. As a Guardian editorial says, no Western newspaper would publish anti-semitic cartoons of the kind that were published in Nazi Germany and are still published in many Arab countries.

Yes, the editors were free to run the cartoons. But what greater good was served in doing so? As Khader and others have said, a struggle for the soul of Islam is under way in Europe. Victory could mean a new form of Islam, comfortable with secularism, pluralism, dissent and women's rights. Defeat is too awful to contemplate. It is impossible to see how the cartoon wars have nudged the larger struggle in the right direction.