Word: prophetic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...director Theo Van Gogh, a portion of the Muslim world has once again demonstrated its intolerance for free speech and democratic pluralism—an intolerance that reiterates the gaping incompatibility between dogmatic religion and democratic dissent. After the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammed dressed as a suicide bomber, many Muslims rose up in arms, setting embassies in Beirut and Damascus ablaze, storming the European Union (EU) office in Gaza, boycotting Danish products or withdrawing their ambassadors, and desecrating the Danish flag. The cartoon, clearly offensive for its rendition of the prophet...
...marchers in Kabul last week were in their teens and early 20s, the kind of zealous, energetic youths Westerners might have hoped would be clamoring for democracy or human rights. Instead, the cause of their protest was caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, first published last September by a Danish newspaper called Jyllands-Posten, which in the past two weeks have provoked Muslims around the world to denounce not just the offending illustrators but also French newspaper editors, Norwegian diplomats, U.S. troops in Iraq and peddlers of Danish food. In Kabul the protest signs read DEATH TO DENMARK and DEATH...
...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, citing a widely, although...
...meeting in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, leaders of the world's 57 Islamic countries issued a joint statement that "condemned the 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...
...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 Antoine Basbous, director...