Word: danishes
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...nothing else, the editors of Jyllands-Posten--a right-of-center newspaper based in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city--knew that publishing cartoon images of Muhammad would get them attention. That was the point: last September the paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, invited 40 Danish cartoonists to submit caricatures of the Prophet in a deliberate attempt to provoke a debate about what Rose perceived as the stifling of coverage of issues related to Islam and Denmark's 200,000 Muslim residents. A leading Danish religious historian, Tim Jensen, warned that some Muslims would take offense at the images...
...Organization of Islamic Faith to send a delegation of Muslims to the Middle East to publicize the cartoon issue. They brought with them a 43-page dossier that contained the 12 cartoons and three even more inflammatory drawings, not published by Jyllands-Posten but allegedly sent to Danish Muslims in the wake of the initial protests. (One of the images, purportedly showing Muhammad with a pig's nose, was a photograph of a costumed contestant at a pig festival in France.) In December the delegates showed the entire dossier to journalists, religious and political leaders in Cairo, Lebanon and Damascus...
...desecration" of the image of Muhammad. In late January an imam at the Grand Mosque of Mecca declared that "he who vilifies [the Prophet] should be killed." The Saudi government withdrew its ambassador to Denmark in late January as groups throughout the Middle East organized a boycott of Danish goods...
Could the crisis have been avoided? By missing or ignoring opportunities to contain the controversy at an early stage, the editors of Jyllands-Posten, Muslim leaders and Danish politicians all contributed to the notion that the dispute was the product of irreconcilable cultural differences. The most obvious centered on the Islamic taboo on images of the Prophet: devout Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet blasphemous. But the Danish cartoons stirred outrage among moderate Muslims less because the cartoons depicted Muhammad than because of the way in which the Prophet was portrayed. "Eleven of the series were problematic...
...pragmatic. "Elections are just the start in his view," says a senior Administration official. It's encouraging, U.S. officials say, that powerful Muslim figures--including Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, and even some leaders of Hamas--have tried to quell the unrest over the Danish cartoons out of fear of a collapse in law and order. But even if that tames the passions unleashed over the past month, there's every reason to expect the voices of Muslim discontent to grow more assertive, not less. "Before this, people believed that Muslims were sleeping and would...