 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
| The Atlantic Affairs Security. Ideologies. Multiculturalism. |
Cartoon protests show clout of globalized Islam
By Sadanand Dhume
Posted: February 26, 2006
In recent years, the anti-globalization movement has rallied against
symbols of alleged American hegemony: the golden arches of McDonald’s,
bodacious Baywatch babes and shadowy cigar-chomping oil tycoons with
200-foot yachts. In the Muslim world, Islamists - those who believe in
ordering modern life according to the precepts of the Koran - have been at
the forefront of this opposition.
Yet, as the controversy over a Danish newspaper’s decision to publish
satirical cartoons of Prophet Mohammed shows, globalization is equally
responsible for the growing influence of radical Islam. Globalization
deserves the credit for another image increasingly familiar from London to
Jakarta: that of the enraged Muslim protestor.
Slogan-chanting mobs in Damascus and Beirut have razed embassies,
masked Palestinian gunmen have occupied offices in the Gaza strip and
protestors, often assembled through SMS text messaging have clogged
streets as far apart as London, Beirut and Kuala Lumpur.
A massive boycott across the Arab world saw Danish products pulled off
supermarket shelves and three Arab ambassadors recalled from
Copenhagen. Amidst a barrage of death threats, some of the offending
artists went into hiding. All this over a dozen relatively innocuous, though
admittedly tasteless, cartoons in a newspaper that was virtually unheard of
outside Denmark.
The controversy began with the newspaper, “Jyllands-Posten,” learning of
the difficulty faced by a local writer in finding an illustrator for his children’s
book on the Prophet for fear of violent reprisals by Muslim extremists. In
September 2005, as an exercise to test whether fear had fostered a climate
of self-censorship in Denmark, the newspaper published the cartoons.
One shows the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse.
Another shows him in heaven turning away a long line of still-smoking
suicide bombers with the words, “Stop, stop we ran out of virgins,” a
reference to the popular belief that the bombers are motivated by a
promised reward of 72 beautiful virgins in paradise. A third depicts a
cartoonist sweating with fear and glancing nervously over his shoulder as
he sketches the Prophet.
Predictably, the cartoons offended Muslim sensibilities. For one, Sunni
Islam prohibits all images of the Prophet—let alone satirical ones. The
cartoons also reinforced what many Muslims see as the unfair stereotyping
of their faith as sympathetic to terrorism and oppressive toward women.
Even so, the uproar was far from spontaneous.
In November and December a delegation of Danish imams toured the
Middle East with a 43-page binder that included not only the Jyllands-
Posten cartoons but others which insulted Islam and the Prophet in far
more graphic and sexual terms. They found a sympathetic audience at Al-
Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious seat of learning,
and among officials of the Arab League. In late December, the League
criticized the Danish government.
Four weeks later, the boycott of Danish products began in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait before quickly escalating into protests around the Muslim world.
Ironically, Islamic globalization employs the same technologies - among
them the Internet, satellite television and desktop publishing - as its much-
derided American counterpart.
The ancient Islamic goal of creating a unified community of believers, or
ummah, long symbolized by the annual haj pilgrimage, is now being
achieved by wireless bank transfers and text messaging. It is no
coincidence that the anti-Danish protests were publicized widely on pan-
Islamic television channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Al Manar
and websites like IslamOnline.net. Or that the person who called on
Muslims to mark an “international day of anger” after Friday prayers on
February 03 was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Egyptian-born cleric and
talk show host associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist
movement whose ideological offshoots range from Hamas in the
Palestinian territories to the hardline Justice and Prosperity Party in
Indonesia.
Over the past several decades, Saudi Arabia, buoyed by its enormous oil
revenue, has emerged as the principal backer of transnational Islam. The
Saudis follow Wahhabism, a puritanical and intolerant strain of the religion
alien to the vast majority of Muslims. In Saudi Arabia women aren’t allowed
out of the home without a male guardian and the practice of no faith other
than Islam is permitted. The Koran serves as the constitution.
Only about 2 percent of the world’s Muslims are Wahhabis, yet as
custodians of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, the Saudis
wield outsized influence.
In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia welcomed Muslim Brotherhood ideologues
fleeing secular Egypt, and once there they came to dominate universities
that educated a generation of literalist Muslims, many from poor nations in
South and Southeast Asia. The spike in oil prices following the OPEC crisis
of 1973 added dramatically to Saudi clout. According to the Center for
Security Policy, a Washington think tank, between 1975 and 2002 the
Saudis spent $70 billion on “overseas aid,” which for the most part meant
bankrolling mosques and madrassas.
The Saudi-sponsored organizations propagating a Wahhabi worldview
include the Muslim World League, World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the
International Islamic Relief Organization and the Al-Haramain Foundation.
Part of this vast pool of Saudi money washed up in Europe. Children of
Muslim immigrants, cut off from the traditions of their parents, often drifted
toward the muscular, back-to-basics of Wahhabism.
This has helped create a small but highly visible cohort of disaffected youth
-- at times as much at odds with their own families as with the easygoing
secularism of the societies where they live. The right to satirize Islam has
become a recurrent flashpoint.
In 1989, Muslim extremists in Britain publicly burned Indian-born British
author Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” for allegedly insulting
Islam, and backed Iranian calls for his assassination. Fifteen years later, a
Dutch Moroccan stabbed and shot to death filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in
Amsterdam. Riots in France and bombings in London and Madrid have
added to the tensions between Muslim immigrants and their European
hosts. Europe, of course, is proud of its unfettered freedom of speech; the
right to criticize church dogma was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment.
Danish laws, among the most liberal in the world, have long shielded the
hard-core pornography industry and the right to exhibit controversial films
such as Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which includes
a scene in which Jesus Christ makes love to Mary Magdalene.
In launching their cartoon jihad, Islamist leaders such as al-Qaradawi have
chosen their battle shrewdly. The universal veneration of Muslims for the
Prophet makes the cartoons a highly emotive issue, an effective wedge
between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The leaders may also have figured that with only 5.4 million people
Denmark was small enough to bully.
If so, they have miscalculated. By and large, Europeans, recognizing the
principles involved, have rallied behind the Danes. Norwegian, German,
Belgian, Icelandic, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Hungarian,
Swiss and Portuguese papers have published the cartoons. The
blogosphere has exploded with sites proudly showing the cartoons and
encouraging viewers to neutralize the Arab boycott by buying Danish
products. The prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has called on
European Muslims “to understand that laughing at religion is a part of the
broader culture in which they live.” Having triumphed over the church, it
appears unlikely that secular Europe will now allow itself to be cowed by the
mosque.
### ### ###
Sadanand Dhume is a former correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic
Review. This article, under the copyright of the YaleGlobal Online, is
published with permission.
By Sadanand Dhume
Posted: February 26, 2006
In recent years, the anti-globalization movement has rallied against
symbols of alleged American hegemony: the golden arches of McDonald’s,
bodacious Baywatch babes and shadowy cigar-chomping oil tycoons with
200-foot yachts. In the Muslim world, Islamists - those who believe in
ordering modern life according to the precepts of the Koran - have been at
the forefront of this opposition.
Yet, as the controversy over a Danish newspaper’s decision to publish
satirical cartoons of Prophet Mohammed shows, globalization is equally
responsible for the growing influence of radical Islam. Globalization
deserves the credit for another image increasingly familiar from London to
Jakarta: that of the enraged Muslim protestor.
Slogan-chanting mobs in Damascus and Beirut have razed embassies,
masked Palestinian gunmen have occupied offices in the Gaza strip and
protestors, often assembled through SMS text messaging have clogged
streets as far apart as London, Beirut and Kuala Lumpur.
A massive boycott across the Arab world saw Danish products pulled off
supermarket shelves and three Arab ambassadors recalled from
Copenhagen. Amidst a barrage of death threats, some of the offending
artists went into hiding. All this over a dozen relatively innocuous, though
admittedly tasteless, cartoons in a newspaper that was virtually unheard of
outside Denmark.
The controversy began with the newspaper, “Jyllands-Posten,” learning of
the difficulty faced by a local writer in finding an illustrator for his children’s
book on the Prophet for fear of violent reprisals by Muslim extremists. In
September 2005, as an exercise to test whether fear had fostered a climate
of self-censorship in Denmark, the newspaper published the cartoons.
One shows the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse.
Another shows him in heaven turning away a long line of still-smoking
suicide bombers with the words, “Stop, stop we ran out of virgins,” a
reference to the popular belief that the bombers are motivated by a
promised reward of 72 beautiful virgins in paradise. A third depicts a
cartoonist sweating with fear and glancing nervously over his shoulder as
he sketches the Prophet.
Predictably, the cartoons offended Muslim sensibilities. For one, Sunni
Islam prohibits all images of the Prophet—let alone satirical ones. The
cartoons also reinforced what many Muslims see as the unfair stereotyping
of their faith as sympathetic to terrorism and oppressive toward women.
Even so, the uproar was far from spontaneous.
In November and December a delegation of Danish imams toured the
Middle East with a 43-page binder that included not only the Jyllands-
Posten cartoons but others which insulted Islam and the Prophet in far
more graphic and sexual terms. They found a sympathetic audience at Al-
Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious seat of learning,
and among officials of the Arab League. In late December, the League
criticized the Danish government.
Four weeks later, the boycott of Danish products began in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait before quickly escalating into protests around the Muslim world.
Ironically, Islamic globalization employs the same technologies - among
them the Internet, satellite television and desktop publishing - as its much-
derided American counterpart.
The ancient Islamic goal of creating a unified community of believers, or
ummah, long symbolized by the annual haj pilgrimage, is now being
achieved by wireless bank transfers and text messaging. It is no
coincidence that the anti-Danish protests were publicized widely on pan-
Islamic television channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Al Manar
and websites like IslamOnline.net. Or that the person who called on
Muslims to mark an “international day of anger” after Friday prayers on
February 03 was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Egyptian-born cleric and
talk show host associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist
movement whose ideological offshoots range from Hamas in the
Palestinian territories to the hardline Justice and Prosperity Party in
Indonesia.
Over the past several decades, Saudi Arabia, buoyed by its enormous oil
revenue, has emerged as the principal backer of transnational Islam. The
Saudis follow Wahhabism, a puritanical and intolerant strain of the religion
alien to the vast majority of Muslims. In Saudi Arabia women aren’t allowed
out of the home without a male guardian and the practice of no faith other
than Islam is permitted. The Koran serves as the constitution.
Only about 2 percent of the world’s Muslims are Wahhabis, yet as
custodians of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, the Saudis
wield outsized influence.
In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia welcomed Muslim Brotherhood ideologues
fleeing secular Egypt, and once there they came to dominate universities
that educated a generation of literalist Muslims, many from poor nations in
South and Southeast Asia. The spike in oil prices following the OPEC crisis
of 1973 added dramatically to Saudi clout. According to the Center for
Security Policy, a Washington think tank, between 1975 and 2002 the
Saudis spent $70 billion on “overseas aid,” which for the most part meant
bankrolling mosques and madrassas.
The Saudi-sponsored organizations propagating a Wahhabi worldview
include the Muslim World League, World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the
International Islamic Relief Organization and the Al-Haramain Foundation.
Part of this vast pool of Saudi money washed up in Europe. Children of
Muslim immigrants, cut off from the traditions of their parents, often drifted
toward the muscular, back-to-basics of Wahhabism.
This has helped create a small but highly visible cohort of disaffected youth
-- at times as much at odds with their own families as with the easygoing
secularism of the societies where they live. The right to satirize Islam has
become a recurrent flashpoint.
In 1989, Muslim extremists in Britain publicly burned Indian-born British
author Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” for allegedly insulting
Islam, and backed Iranian calls for his assassination. Fifteen years later, a
Dutch Moroccan stabbed and shot to death filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in
Amsterdam. Riots in France and bombings in London and Madrid have
added to the tensions between Muslim immigrants and their European
hosts. Europe, of course, is proud of its unfettered freedom of speech; the
right to criticize church dogma was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment.
Danish laws, among the most liberal in the world, have long shielded the
hard-core pornography industry and the right to exhibit controversial films
such as Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which includes
a scene in which Jesus Christ makes love to Mary Magdalene.
In launching their cartoon jihad, Islamist leaders such as al-Qaradawi have
chosen their battle shrewdly. The universal veneration of Muslims for the
Prophet makes the cartoons a highly emotive issue, an effective wedge
between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The leaders may also have figured that with only 5.4 million people
Denmark was small enough to bully.
If so, they have miscalculated. By and large, Europeans, recognizing the
principles involved, have rallied behind the Danes. Norwegian, German,
Belgian, Icelandic, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Hungarian,
Swiss and Portuguese papers have published the cartoons. The
blogosphere has exploded with sites proudly showing the cartoons and
encouraging viewers to neutralize the Arab boycott by buying Danish
products. The prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has called on
European Muslims “to understand that laughing at religion is a part of the
broader culture in which they live.” Having triumphed over the church, it
appears unlikely that secular Europe will now allow itself to be cowed by the
mosque.
### ### ###
Sadanand Dhume is a former correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic
Review. This article, under the copyright of the YaleGlobal Online, is
published with permission.
| (c) 2006 The Atlantic Affairs |