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Some of the larger and more famous recent attempts to export blasphemy restrictions from the Muslim world to the West have had such a complex and long lasting effect that they require particular examination. These are detailed in Chapter Ten and include the continuing affair of The Satanic Verses, renewed when author Salman Rushdie's was given a knighthood by the British government. The so-called “Danish Cartoons” crisis of 2005–2006 continues to reverberate when the images are republished or forbidden to be printed, as in 2009 when Yale University Press censored them and other images from a book detailing the cartoons crisis itself. Other examples include Newsweek's account of a Qur’an flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, a report which was later disproved; Pope Benedict XVI's controversial speech at Regensburg; and Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders's provocative film, Fitna. These upheavals frequently involved political manipulation. For example, the Danish cartoons were first published in September 2005 and republished, even in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia, without any outcry. Only in January 2006, following a decision by the OIC in its Mecca meeting to make an issue of the caricatures, did riots, violence and boycotts erupt and some 200 people die.

This chapter examines how the Muslim question has been linked to the question of freedom of speech. A clash of civilizations that saw the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Muslims in the realm of religion, custom, and tradition, has long been part of spectacles in the Western public sphere. Ayatollah Khomeini gave new life to these civilizational theatrics when he issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses became the center of a controversy that cast freedom of speech as a Muslim question. However, the martyr to free speech was not Rushdie but Theo van Gogh, the murdered producer of the film Submission. The chapter shows how the dramas surrounding Rushdie, van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's copycat cartoon provocations mark Muslims as the enemies of free speech.

This chapter examines a different dimension of the religiously based presumptions and affect of Euro-Atlantic secularism. It challenges the way the conflict between secular necessity and religious threat is conceptualized, with an emphasis on religious extremism. It also looks at the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the 2005 Danish newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad—and argues that the violence or moral injury that the cartoons cause to believing Muslims cannot be fathomed by the Christian secular understanding of blasphemy. This is due to profound differences in the so-called “reading practices” flowing from Islamic piety and secular Protestantism and, more specifically, different semiotics of iconography and representation pertinent to religious deities and prophets. Such differences pertain to a particular (and contestable) modality of belief and hermeneutics in certain traditions within Islam and Christianity.

In September 2005, the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish tabloid with a reputation for being critical of immigrants, published twelve images mocking the Prophet Muhammad. The cartoons immediately sparked an acrimonious debate worldwide that became known as the Danish cartoon war, the Muhammad cartoon controversy, the cartoon intifada, and the cartoon jihad. This chapter examines the conflict generated by the Danish cartoon war and argues that it was largely about media representation. It suggests that whether cartoons function as vehicles of racism or freedom depends on how their representational codes are manipulated. Despite the controversy's obvious real-world consequences, it was fought primarily on virtual battlegrounds, the greatest of which was the World Wide Web. Commentaries from Muslims around the world in general and from the Muslim minority in Denmark in particular underscore cartoons' global dimensions and enduringly self-critical potential, even as they continue to perpetuate western cultural racism.

One of the oldest established Muslim minorities in Central Europe is that of the Tatars, whose history dates back to the fourteenth century. They settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth mostly as mercenaries brought to fight the enemies of the country. This chapter recounts how, in return for military service, Tatars were granted land together with a social status similar to that of the local nobility. They were also granted the right to practise Islam, erect mosques etc. Subsequently, they remained an integral part of the social and military structures of the country. It was therefore natural that during the Danish cartoons affair, the state authorities in Poland supported Muslim protests against publishing the cartoons. This chapter argues that the historical role of the Tatars was the reason for their continued strong acceptance as an integrated and active citizens by present-day Polish society and by the state authorities.

This chapter examines discursive oppositions between Islam and secular Christianity on issues of free speech and blasphemy, and between a political Islam linked to aggression and death and a secular West associated with rationality and life. Focusing on the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the publication of twelve editorial cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005 and in several European newspapers in 2008—it questions conventional ordinances of secularism, religion, insult, injury, blasphemy, dissent, and criticism. It also considers secular criticism, which is identified with freedom, truth, and reason, and religious censure, which is associated with obscurantism, intolerance, coercion, and arbitrary dictum.

This chapter examines the impact of linking injury, blasphemy, religious pain, and Muslim identity together. It considers two academic representations of the varieties of Muslim hurt. One is a consideration of Muslim responses to the Rushdie affair and another to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons. Both are concerned with the specificity of Muslim pain in response to insults to the Prophet of Islam.

This chapter focuses on the riot that took place in Lahore, Pakistan following the publication of the “Danish cartoons” on February 14, 2006. It shows the importance of emotions in the transition to violence by focusing on three levels of observation. At the micro (individual) level, one must articulate certain types of emotions to moral sentiments and specific frameworks of perception. At the meso level (the riotous crowd), the “emotional work” of the entrepreneurs of mobilization failed to stem the micro-conflicts that were playing in the crowd, and these entrepreneurs are to be seen in the wider context of everyday urban violence. Finally, at the macro level (the political system), the chapter highlights the need for a renewed interest in an aspect often neglected in studies on the impact dimension of social movements, namely the politics of emotions produced by the state.

This book is comprised of essays that were first presented at a fall 2007 symposium entitled “Is Critique Secular?” sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. The symposium was conceived to probe the presumed secularism of critique. One of the papers focuses on the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the 2005 Danish newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. It explores the discursive oppositions between Islam and secular Christianity on issues of freedom, speech, and blasphemy, and between a political Islam associated with aggression and death and a secular West associated with rationality and life.

In this chapter, the author responds to the essays by Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood regarding the critique of secularism, as well as issues of free speech, blasphemy, and religious extremism raised by the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the 2005 Danish newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. The author weaves together and extends their critiques of the inherent secularism attributed to critique in the modern Western tradition. She also affirms their challenges to Western representations of blasphemy, injury, and freedom by citing the existence of a normative framework constraining and regulating the semantic fields in which such terms operate. In addition, the author makes a distinction between critique and criticism before offering her own critique of sexual freedom in “secular” immigration politics in the Netherlands.

In this chapter, the author responds to the essay by Judith Butler on the issue of secular critique. While she agrees with Butler’s contention that secularism does not entail a monolithic process or a single ontology of the subject, there are certain modular arrangements and practices that are identified with modern secularity that account for the coherence and structure of secularism. She also refutes Butler’s claim that she is a “culturalist,” that she abjures politics and law in favor of ethics. The author also talks about the kind of moral injury at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the 2005 Danish newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad—as well as the relationship between Muhammad and pious Muslims, along with Europe’s hate speech laws and legally permissible restrictions on free speech.

In this chapter, the author responds to the essay by Judith Butler on the issue of secular critique. He agrees with Butler’s argument that intellectual inquiries into events such as the Danish cartoon controversy—the protests and debates sparked by the 2005 Danish newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad—must go beyond the normative judicial framework to which those who defend both “free speech” and “religious sensitivities” have addressed themselves. Instead of focusing on “the meaning of the injury at issue,” he discusses the assumptions of coherence that underlie what may be called the secular liberal interpretations of religious violence. Aside from secularism, he also talks about the distinction between critique and criticism.

According an argument by Georges Dumézil, Ideological use of the mythology may go back to Indo-European times, and it certainly goes back to Viking and medieval Scandinavia, where a “ruler ideology” can be discerned within it. In early modern Denmark and Sweden, the mythology served to create great national pasts, and later it served the needs of national romanticism in Scandinavia and Germany. Later still it was appropriated and twisted by Nazi ideology and that of white supremacy. After WWII, leading fiction writers produced works inspired by it, such as Villy Sørensen (Ragnarøk, 1988) and A. S. Byatt (Ragnarök: The End of the Gods, 2011), who related eschatological themes to the world in which we live, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) pits the old gods against the new “gods” of technology. Within pop culture the mythology reflects dominant social notions, and even the wonderful Danish cartoon series Valhalla (1979-2009) may be seen as exemplifying Danish values.

The 2005 Danish cartoon controversy reminds us that provocative expression counts among the most controversial problems of our time. Hate speech bans are widely advocated as remedies, on the view that democracies may legitimately curb some citizens’ speech in order to protect other, and in particular vulnerable members of society. The book’s task will be to challenge that view. It will have to show that viewpoint-selective penalties within public discourse may in some circumstances promote state security interests, but never promote democratic interests. It will indeed be impossible to make progress on regulating expression without first distinguishing between overlapping yet distinct state spheres of democracy, security, and rights.

Despite the autocratic nature of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, its weakness in Cyrenaica (Libya’s eastern province) became apparent in the 1990s. A series of protests there over specific issues—the deaths at Abu Salim prison in 1996, the children’s AIDS crisis in Benghazi, and the cartoons protest in 2006—allowed embryonic social movements using civil resistance to emerge. Regime attempts to suppress demonstrations linked to these events provoked a general uprising against it in Cyrenaica in mid-February 2011, which spread into Tripolitania and the Fezzan (the western and southern provinces respectively). Although civil society flourished after the removal of the Gaddafi regime, the failure of formal governance over the next four years led to extremist attempts to suppress any manifestation of civil resistance. The reasons for this are rooted in the nature of the previous regime as well as in the way in which the Libyan revolution evolved.