On 30 September 2005, 12 cartoons appeared in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, under the headline, ‘The face of Muhammad’.
The headline was not entirely accurate. One of the cartoons made fun of the Jyllands-Posten editors for commissioning the series, while another showed Islamist suicide bombers being turned away from heaven. ‘Stop. Stop. We have run out of virgins’, ran the caption.
At least Kurt Westergaard’s now infamous effort chimed with the title. He had drawn Muhammad wearing a turban containing a bomb, accompanied by the Muslim declaration of faith: ‘There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.’ The cartoons were undoubtedly provocative, as indeed they were intended to be. They stood firmly in a long-standing, anti-clerical tradition of satire.
They were commissioned in response to reports that Danish children’s author Kare Bluitgen had been unable to find an illustrator for a book about Muhammad. It wasn’t hard to guess why. A rising tide of sometimes vicious Islamic intolerance had fomented an increasingly fearful, self-censoring climate throughout Europe. In the previous 12 months alone, Theo van Gogh had been murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist . . .
They were commissioned in response to reports that Danish children’s author Kare Bluitgen had been unable to find an illustrator for a book about Muhammad. It wasn’t hard to guess why. A rising tide of sometimes vicious Islamic intolerance had fomented an increasingly fearful, self-censoring climate throughout Europe. In the previous 12 months alone, Theo van Gogh had been murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist . . .
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