Word: islamics
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Even if it does, the broader issues raised by the current furor are certain to persist. To some, the dispute over the cartoons is a bellwether of a deepening divide between Western societies and Islam, a civilizational clash on issues as basic as the role of religion in society and the limits of liberty. Although the controversy has revealed degrees of cultural ignorance on both sides, it has been fueled by a brew of willful misunderstanding, manipulation and opportunism--all of which became combustible in the political climate that prevails in much of the Middle East today. In that sense...
...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, citing a widely, although not unanimously, observed taboo against physical representations of the Prophet. But the paper published the 12 submissions it received anyway, on Sept...
...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 but not outrageous," says...
...cartoons among Muslims in Europe and Asia, while negative, has been largely peaceful. In the Arab world, the cartoons were accessible as early as October, when three Egyptian magazines and a newspaper published them to call attention to what it perceived as a distorted Western view of Islam. No one noticed. "We attacked the cartoons and said that this deepens the culture clash and does not resolve it," says Adel Hamouda, 55, editor of al-Fagr, a liberal Cairo-based weekly that ran the cartoons. "Those who saw the cartoons did not react, and those who reacted are the ones...
...showed, holding free elections in such conditions runs a high risk of rewarding fundamentalist groups that have little interest in tamping down anti-Western attitudes. The popularity of Islamists may be discomfiting to the West, but it increasingly seems to be the bargain required for implanting democracy in the Islamic world. Says Mohammed Abdel Koddus, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood: "People are looking for alternatives, and the only alternative they see is Islam...