The Cartoons That Shook the World

✍ Scribed by Jytte Klausen

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 239
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Five months later, thousands of Muslims inundated the newspaper with outpourings of anger and grief by phone, email, and fax; from Asia to Europe Muslims took to the streets in protest. This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the conflict that aroused impassioned debates around the world on freedom of expression, blasphemy, and the nature of modern Islam.

 

Jytte Klausen interviewed politicians in the Middle East, Muslim leaders in Europe, the Danish editors and cartoonists, and the Danish imam who started the controversy. Following the winding trail of protests across the world, she deconstructs the arguments and motives that drove the escalation of the increasingly globalized conflict. She concludes that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not—as was commonly assumed—a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Rather it was orchestrated, first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria. Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Editors and the Cartoonists
Chapter 2. The Path to a Showdown
Chapter 3. The Diplomatic Protest against the Cartoons
Chapter 4. Muslims’ ‘‘Day of Rage’’
Chapter 5. Seeking the Third Way
Chapter 6. Muslim Iconoclasm and Christian Blasphemy
Chapter 7. Danish Intolerance and Foreign Relations
Chapter 8. The Freedom Agenda Rebound
Chronology
Notes
Index