The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  When the Cartoon Crisis was at its peak, and condemnation of Jyllands-Posten seemed unyielding, I found myself thinking about the dissidents I had held in such esteem throughout my adult life. Not that I in any way sought to compare my own situation with theirs. There were many obvious differences. Jyllands-Posten was a leading newspaper, free of threats or censorship from despotic officials, operating in a country that was tolerant and democratic. But I saw that the dissidents had maintained their standpoints regardless of what people were saying, and with no thought for the personal price they might have to pay. It was a lesson, I thought, on the principle of sticking up for what you thought was right.

  I realized that I couldn’t imagine any worse fate than succumbing to intimidation and mouthing opinions I did not really hold. It didn’t matter whether the intimidation issued from politically correct Social Democrats branding me a racist, or from religious fanatics who put a price on my head. If the reasoning behind the Muhammad cartoons made sense in my mind—if it was in sync with my own personal values, and if no one had managed to shift my opinion through rational argument—then it didn’t matter whether a majority disagreed with me. To retain my self-respect and my dignity, I had to stand fast.

  From then on, living with threats and constant surveillance by intelligence agents was easy enough.

  The drawings were published on September 30, 2005. They exploded on the global scene as a political issue in late January and early February 2006. In between, I was doing two jobs: one as culture editor and the other as explainer and defender of the cartoons in the public debate at home and abroad. As the months passed, that second job began to take up more of my time. During the autumn, there were growing calls for the drawings to be retracted, and for the paper to apologize and announce that it would never again publish similar drawings. There were demonstrations, protest petitions, letters to the editor, articles, discussions on radio and TV, and pubic debates. The public prosecutor began investigating whether a case could be brought against the paper for blasphemy or racism.

  In mid-October, I was given the first taste of the international dimension into which the issue was to develop when I learned that ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries had written to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen calling for a meeting to discuss the cartoons and urging him to take measures against Jyllands-Posten.11 Later, the Organization of the Islamic Conference joined the debate with an official complaint about the persecution of Muslims in Denmark, and in November, the issue of the drawings was brought before the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, who expressed sympathy with Muslim disgruntlement.12

  Threats were made against the artists and editors, and I had my first meeting with the Danish intelligence agency PET concerning my security. Foreign media began reporting on the crisis. We were claimed to be leading an anti-Muslim witch hunt, and it got to the point where it looked like I devoured Muslims for breakfast, and Jyllands-Posten was the equivalent of a Nazi, anti-Semitic broadsheet. Misunderstandings, half-truths, and outright lies were legion. The experience was both frustrating and educational.

  Besides debating with Muslims in the media and at public meetings, I also met behind closed doors with the Danish Islamic Society in December to discuss the cartoon issue at length with the society’s leader, Imam Ahmad Abu Laban, and his spokesperson Ahmed Kassem. I already knew Abu Laban; as Moscow correspondent, I had done a piece on a Muslim refugee in Denmark who had gone to Chechnya to fight against the Russians. He had frequented Abu Laban’s Copenhagen mosque, so I had interviewed the imam.

  When we met again in December 2005, Abu Laban presented me with a book titled Freedom of Expression in Islam.13 It said that according to Islamic law, blasphemy was punishable by death. But during our discussion, his opinions were not that of a rabble-rouser. Referring to the drawings as “a possible mistake,” he added that their publication perhaps had been a good thing, since they had sparked a debate about religious values in Danish society, an issue he had been trying to encourage the authorities to address for years. I had no idea that Abu Laban had already dispatched a delegation to Egypt with a view to mobilizing the Muslim world against Jyllands-Posten and Denmark. In fact, he stressed that it was time to look forward, suggesting that our paper, a Danish university, and the Islamic Society should together organize a Muhammad Festival to frame the Prophet in a positive light.

  When he had finished speaking, I placed the newspaper cutting with the cartoons on the table in front of him and explained why we had published them. The intention had not been to cause offense, but to bring into focus the question of self-censorship. I said that the dialogue and tolerance he sought could not merely involve an exchange of platitudes, but they entailed differences of opinion that could be emotionally charged. My impression was that Abu Laban wanted to find a way out of the crisis, but that he needed to demonstrate clear results to his community, so I offered to discuss the issue with him in public, on his own turf, where he and I could confront each other’s views and enter into a dialogue with his community. He could talk about respect for religious sentiments, while I could talk about freedom of speech and make clear that Jyllands-Posten had no hidden agenda targeting Muslims in Denmark.

  Abu Laban agreed to get back to me with a proposed date for the event, but I never heard from him. I did not see him again until we met two months later in a debate on the BBC’s Hardtalk program,14 in which he criticized Denmark for treating Muslims like schoolchildren. By that time, the cartoons had gone global, and it was pretty much impossible to turn on a TV set anywhere without hearing about what had now been dubbed the “Cartoon Crisis.”

  It had taken four months from the publication of the cartoons for the affair to turn into a global crisis. However, that doesn’t mean that until then the cartoons had been ignored by Danish Muslims, Islamic countries, and international organizations, like the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Arab League. The process was influenced by coincidences, misunderstandings, and shortsighted political interests in domestic situations in several countries, but underneath were a logic and cohesion in the unfolding drama culminating in the spring of 2006 that were anything but coincidental.

  Imams in Denmark, governments, commentators, and Islamic scholars in the Muslim world, the Arab League, and the OIC all agreed that cartoons of the Muslim prophet, religious satire, and criticism of Islam had to be banned on a global level. That mandate wasn’t a new one. It grew out of the Rushdie affair in 1989; and since 1999, the OIC had succeeded in getting it into UN resolutions.

  Two days after publication of the cartoons, representatives from mosques and Muslim associations met at the offices of the Islamic Faith Society in Copenhagen in order to work out a coordinated response to the cartoons.15 Raed Hlayhel, a Saudi-educated imam who came to Denmark a few years earlier to receive government-financed treatment for his disabled son, was appointed chairman of a committee to protect the honor of the Prophet. The participants agreed on a plan of action that included taking Jyllands-Posten to court, contacting the embassies representing Islamic countries in Denmark, and contacting the media and Islamic scholars in the Muslim world.

  In an interview with Jyllands-Posten, Hlayhel demanded an apology and a retraction of the cartoons. He also threatened the paper, referring to the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. “When you see what happened in the Netherlands and you nevertheless publish the cartoons, that’s stupid.”

  Apart from his eagerness to defend the Muslim prophet, Hlayhel had a personal bias against the paper. He and Ahmed Akkari, another imam who played a key role in the campaign, felt they had been treated badly, Hlayhel because the paper had publicized one of his controversial Friday prayers. He had lambasted women who used perfume and didn’t cover their full body as “a tool of the devil.” The words triggered a wave of criticism against Hlayhel. Akkari had been featured in a story where he as a teacher had talked approvingly about an attack on a Muslim girl who was targeted in the sch
oolyard for failing to wear a headscarf.

  In mid-October 2005, a demonstration against the cartoons took place at the Town Hall Square in Copenhagen, where 2,000 to 3,000 Muslims called on the Danish government to put an end to the defamation of Islam. In a parallel development, 11 Muslim ambassadors to Denmark sent a letter to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen complaining about what they described as “an ongoing smear campaign against Islam and Muslims in the Danish media and public.” They called on the prime minister to hold Jyllands-Posten accountable according to the laws of the land and asked for a meeting. The letter was signed by the ambassadors from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Algeria, Bosnia, Libya, Morocco, and the Palestinian Authority.

  The Danish prime minister responded two weeks later. He stressed that in Denmark there was freedom of expression; therefore, he couldn’t interfere with the press. But he added that blasphemous and discriminating speech was forbidden, and any offended party could take his or her complaint to the courts. In light of those facts, the prime minister declined to meet the ambassadors.

  Egypt was driving the campaign. In an op-ed, its ambassador to Denmark demanded “an immediate stop to insults to Islam in the Danish media and public circles.” Egypt sent a letter to OIC that was almost identical to the one that the 11 ambassadors wrote to the prime minister, and through diplomatic channels, Egypt expressed its dissatisfaction with the Danish government’s handling of the case, and said that it would raise the matter on an international level. Egypt made sure that the cartoons were on the agenda of the OIC summit in Mecca in December 2005. In the words of Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the goal was to put an end to the publication of cartoons offending Islam and to convince Europe to take all the necessary steps. That was the motive driving Egypt to take its criticism of Denmark to the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Union’s foreign policy coordinator Javier Solana, and two human rights groups.

  The Egyptian embassy in Copenhagen also facilitated a visit to Cairo by the Danish imams’ Committee for the Defense of the Honor of the Prophet. On December 3, a delegation of five arrived in Cairo, where they met with Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, the supreme religious leader of Al-Azhar University; Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s grand mufti; Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League; and Muhammad Shaaban, adviser to Egypt’s foreign minister and former ambassador to Denmark. The delegation justified the visit by claiming that nobody wanted to listen to them in Denmark. That wasn’t the case. They had access to every media platform in Denmark, and I debated leading Muslim voices on radio, on television, and in other public forums. From the publication of the cartoons until the spring of 2006, national newspapers published more than 10,000 letters to the editor and op-eds. A significant number were contributed by Muslims. The fact is that a majority of the public listened and evaluated the arguments put forward by the imams and denounced them as a call for censorship.

  The imam delegation to Cairo brought along a controversial dossier that they gave to their counterparts in Egypt. The dossier was the main source of information for the OIC and the Arab League about the life of Muslims in Denmark. It said that the Muslim faith wasn’t officially recognized in Denmark. That was wrong. The dossier included offensive cartoons that were never published in Jyllands-Posten or any other newspaper but were presented as if they had been. One depicted the Muslim prophet as a pedophile devil; another pictured the praying Prophet being sexually assaulted from behind by a dog; and a third cartoon featured the Prophet as a pig. The latter was in fact a copy of a photo taken from the Internet showing an auto mechanic in southern France. He had participated in a local competition on imitating a pig’s scream.

  The Egyptian press covered the visit and after interviewing the members of the delegation reported that the Koran was about to be censored in Denmark. The local press also claimed that Jyllands-Posten was owned by the government and that the government planned to finance a new documentary, Submission Part II, a follow-up to Submission Part I that was directed by the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and written by Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh was killed by a young Muslim who claimed he had defamed Islam, and Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding after the murder. All the claims in the Egyptian press were false and contributed to the Muslim world’s distorted picture of the life of Muslims in Denmark. In fact, as citizens, Muslims enjoyed more rights in Denmark than in any Muslim country.

  A second delegation representing the Committee for the Defense of the Honor of the Prophet traveled to Lebanon in mid-December. They were received by religious leaders and ministers, among them the grand mufti of Lebanon and the leader of the Shia Muslims. A member of the delegation traveled to Damascus to present his case to the grand mufti of Syria. The delegation was interviewed by Hezbollah’s TV station Manar, which reported that the Danish media and politicians had initiated a campaign to insult Islam and the Muslim prophet.

  The dossier with cartoons that had never been published and that distorted information about Muslims’ situation in Denmark was distributed to the leaders of the Muslim world at the OIC summit on December 7–8 in Mecca, on Egypt’s initiative. The summit was later perceived as a turning point in the escalation of the conflict that culminated in late January and early February 2006. In the summit’s final communiqué, the OIC (in line with its lasting campaign in the UN) demanded a universal criminalization of “insult to Islam and its values” along the same lines as racism. The UN’s high commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, expressed her understanding of the demands of the Muslim world and in doing so gave her support to the pressure being exercised on Denmark. In a critical report to the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN special rapporteur on racism, racial discrimination, and related intolerance, Doudou Diéne, denounced the cartoons as “hatred of Islam.”

  At the newspaper, we imagined that things had calmed down by Christmas, and I left for Miami Beach in the vain hope that when I returned from my vacation, I would spend more time covering cultural life and could leave the cartoon debate behind. It turned out to be wishful thinking. The OIC summit in Mecca didn’t mark the end of the conflict, quite the opposite: a month later, it lead to huge demonstrations, violent attacks on Denmark’s embassies, and the boycott of Danish products across the Muslim world. The conflict moved from the corridors of government to mosques and the media and made it to the top of the domestic agenda in many countries.

  Egypt wanted to use the cartoons to send a message to the West about what would happen if the United States and the EU pressed too hard for democratic change in the Middle East.16 After 9/11, the United States was pushing for a freedom agenda for the Middle East. The thinking was that political reform, strengthening of civil society, and more open societies would, over the long haul, be the most effective way to contain the terrorist threat. To promote that process, the G-8 founded Forum for the Future. It was accompanied by similar initiatives by the EU and the United States. The forum meets once a year to debate reforms in the Arab world. It’s attended by foreign ministers of the G-8 and the Middle East, and human rights activists from the region.

  Forum for the Future met in Bahrain November 11–12, 2005, at a time when the Mubarak regime found itself in the middle of an election in which the Muslim Brotherhood had done pretty well. As a result of U.S. pressure, Mubarak had been forced to accept an “Egyptian Spring” that gave more space to the opposition and to civil society activists. The Egyptian government didn’t like it. The meeting in Bahrain ended in an open disagreement between the United States and the Arab ministers of foreign affairs who were in no hurry to pass democratic reforms, secure freedom of expression, or conduct free elections.17

  In that context, the cartoons became a convenient instrument to manipulate the public and show the West that the repressive regimes in the Middle East were necessary to keep the masses under control. Denmark turned ou
t to be an easy target. Egypt’s assistant foreign minister for European affairs put it this way:

  Eighty-nine percent of the Egyptians hate the United States. Sometimes we can go against the will of the people, but we cannot do it one hundred percent of the time. Of course, we will never do something like this to the United States. We are allies, but who cares about the Danes?18

  The grand mufti of Jerusalem made the same point: “Denmark is an easy target. A small country without any significant importance for the Arab countries. That’s why nobody is concerned that the protests continue,” he explained to a Danish newspaper.19

  On January 10, 2006, a small Norwegian newspaper20 reprinted Jyllands-Posten’s 12 cartoons of Muhammad as documentation for a story about cartoonists’ self-censorship, but the publication was perceived as part of a plot against the Muslim world. The same day in Mecca, an imam called on an audience of 2 million on the spot and another 100 million viewers on TV who followed the imam’s prayer marking the end of the pilgrimage, to oppose the alleged campaign against the Muslim prophet. The Danish embassy received hundreds of letters a day protesting the cartoons, and during the Friday prayer on January 20, imams called for a boycott of Danish goods.

  The call was repeated the next day by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, on his TV show. Qaradawi called for a boycott of Denmark and Norway if the governments of the two countries didn’t put an end to the media’s insult to the Prophet. The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia demanded that Jyllands-Posten be punished. In a few days, the call for a boycott spread like wildfire through email and text messages. The next weekend, Danish products were being taken off the shelves in Bahrain, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates.21 The secretary general of the OIC supported the boycott because the Danish government refrained from punishing Jyllands-Posten. Three weeks earlier, the public prosecutor declined to initiate a criminal case against the paper because the cartoons had been published in the context of an important public debate.