[Islam, Cartoon Riots]

Bits and Pieces.

The WaPo has a nice story that traces the development of the cartoon drama. It starts out with the rather benign, if naive, impulse by the Jyllands-Posten culture editor soliciting political cartoons of the prophet. It also includes some of the recent political turmoil in Denmark, which is pretty fascinating:

This country of 5.4 million people, including about 200,000 Muslims, has long viewed itself as a haven for all views and faiths. But skyrocketing immigration in the 1990s spurred a backlash that culminated in the November 2001 election of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Rasmussen's government immediately passed some of Europe's toughest immigration laws and changed speech laws to make it illegal to instigate terrorism or offer advice to terrorists. The prime minister has relied on the support of the fiercely anti-immigration Danish People's Party, which holds nearly 13 percent of the seats in Parliament.

The Arab News has a nice turnabout-is-fair-play article, mirroring back our own problems with sacred images (it's actually quite nuanced and totally non-reactionary).:

And in January 1999, David Howard, a top aide to the mayor of Washington was made to resign (read, fired) because he had haplessly said that he would use his budget “in a niggardly manner.” Niggardly, of course, is a perfectly legitimate word, with etymological roots in old Swedish, that simply means to be parsimonious or frugal. Unfortunately for the mayoral aide, who is white, “niggardly” sounded too much like the racial slur associated with the N-word, and thus his fate was sealed.

Not exactly the same as riots, but he makes a good point.

Finally, although I hate to point anyone to the Wall Street Journal (I believe this marks the first link I've created), there is actually an interesting editorial there by Amir Taheri:

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments--which include a ban on depicting God--as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers.

The whole article's good.

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ARTWORK: Muhammad getting ready to ride Buraq on his way to Allah's arash. Persian miniature, 15th Century.