I discussed the issue with Sergei Kovalev,1 who, following the death of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov in 1989, had become the moral leader of the Russian human rights movement. Kovalev had spent seven years in labor camps and three years in internal exile for anti-Soviet agitation; he had since been elected to the Russian parliament, where he chaired the committee on human rights. Kovalev had been a true dissident, and he was a remarkable and dedicated activist. During the first war in Chechnya, in the early 1990s, Kovalev traveled to Grozny and remained there for the duration of the Russian offensive, which for all intents and purposes leveled the city. Nevertheless, he told me he opposed the idea of a right to self-determination through secession.
Kovalev argued that demands for the establishment of new states more often than not end in bloodshed, and any state founded on principles of ethnicity begets citizens of varying classes. Thus, the principle of national self-determination contradicts human rights. There is no universally accepted definition of a people or a nation, Kovalev said, so it is virtually impossible to identify a group that has an unambiguous right to national self-determination in any case. If it were up to Kovalev, states would be joined together rather than split apart; he saw the European Union as a model for the rest of the world.
“If we accept the right of national self-determination, we open the gate to an essentially infinite process of allowing politicians and careerists free rein. It is one thing for a people to feel its rights are violated,” Kovalev explained. “It is quite another to have greedy political figures with presidential aspirations eyeing their old pal in the neighbor state who has already made it to the top. Whenever an ethnic group breaks away, a new minority will appear which wants to break away from those who already have done so.”
The important thing, Kovalev told me, was to ensure the rights of the individual as a foundation for cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity. Developments in the Balkans and some places in the former Soviet Union had shown, he said, how wrong things could go if national self-determination was accorded more importance than respect for the rights of the individual. There should be only one standard, worldwide: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document that served as an inspiration to Soviet dissidents. I often think back on my discussion with Kovalev, for it came to seem increasingly relevant. It threw a critical light on the notions of parallel societies with special rights, the politics of identity, and the idea of ethnic, cultural, and religious separatism, whether in the Caucasus, in the Balkans, or in Copenhagen.
I had left Denmark in 1990; 14 years later, I was heading back home to start a new life. I had put off the decision to move back several times, for fear I would die of boredom in a country wholly lacking in the kind of world-shaking news that I had been used to covering, from the Kremlin and the White House. But I felt an increasing unease at merely observing other people’s lives and their societies in which they lived without having any kind of responsibility. Even though I was fluent in Russian, had family and friends in the country, and was very fond of the place, I felt that I merely stood on the sidelines observing and was not in any real sense part of the society. Any opinion I cared to entertain involved no personal suffering. The stories I covered had no consequences for me personally. I had begun to ask myself whether the meaning of my life really consisted of flitting about the world, entering the lives of complete strangers, and talking to them about life’s ups and downs only never to see them again.
In the autumn of 2001, things came to a head. Following 9/11, I went to Tadzhikistan in central Asia to try to get into Afghanistan and cover the American assault that everyone was expecting. On my return to Moscow, I began to have problems sleeping. I would wake at night stricken by anxiety. Often, I would find myself gripped by panic; the fear of death worked its way into every cell of my body. In the daytime, I would find myself staring vacantly into a computer for 30 minutes or more, drained of energy and ideas.
At the time, I often traveled to Chechnya, and Afghanistan was certainly neither better nor worse. Yet for some reason, I found the place highly unpleasant. It wasn’t just that four of the journalists with whom I had traveled had been murdered by the Taliban during a visit to the frontline. It appalled me to see how the Afghans could switch sides in an armed conflict so casually. One day, they would be fighting for the Taliban; the next, they were on the other side of the line. Their loyalty was for sale to the highest bidder. Given the country’s recent history, that might not have been surprising, but to me it resonated with the cynicism I wrestled with in my daily work as a journalist.
Moreover, I missed working on a team. Being a correspondent meant you were your own boss; there were no long, time-wasting meetings. You got to travel the world and talk to people in all walks of life; you learned to take care of yourself and to write about anything, from tiny hunter communities in Siberia to big-time international politics. You could grow, professionally and personally. But you were alone. The first few years, I was out conquering Russia, and my appetite for that self-contradictory—at once both repugnant and tantalizing—country and its people was huge. But with time, I felt lonely.
So I had accepted the job of culture editor at Jyllands-Posten. It meant I was once again part of a community, everyone pulling together to make the best possible newspaper they knew how. Bearing in mind where I was coming from, with my long experience as a correspondent, it seemed obvious to me that I should endeavor to internationalize the paper’s cultural coverage. When I started the job in the spring of 2004, I wrote the following to my staff:
Jyllands-Posten calls itself Denmark’s international newspaper, and this is something that will be reflected in its culture section to a much greater extent than previously. During the years and decades to come, we are going to find the world at large edging closer, ceaselessly breaching national borders. The challenge for the cultural section of Jyllands-Posten will be to stand our readers in good stead so that they may be equipped to meet the world of tomorrow.
I would have to say that in that I succeeded. Jyllands-Posten would indeed live up to its self-image as Denmark’s international newspaper, though in quite a different way from what I had ever envisaged.
When I took the job, I felt there were two major stories in the world: One was the collapse of Soviet communism and the reforms of Chinese communism, which meant roughly 3 billion people were now integrating into a global market economy dominated by the United States. The second was the interface between Islam and the West in the wake of 9/11. Both stories fit neatly in the category “globalization” and as such would clearly occupy many column inches in the culture section.
Hardly had I settled into my office on Copenhagen’s famous Kongens Nytorv Square before Islam critic Ibn Warraq’s international bestseller Why I Am Not a Muslim appeared in Danish translation. I interviewed him. He warned Europe against compromising the rule of law, equality of the sexes, equality before the law, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and the right of religious free exercise. “What we risk,” he said, “is the Islamization of democracy instead of democratization of Islam.”
Warraq, who hails from Pakistan, but who as a child was sent to public school in England, stressed what he considered to be the great strength of Western society: its ability to level not only criticism but also self-criticism. It means, he said, that errors can be corrected, power cannot be exerted arbitrarily, and authority can be challenged. For that reason, he found it puzzling that so many on the political left were reluctant to criticize oppression elsewhere in the world. In Warraq’s view, they failed to distinguish between justifiable criticism of rights violations in the Islamic world and the need to combat racism and intolerance toward immigrants in Western societies. Many of the issues Warraq mentioned pointed forward to the debate that would follow publication of the Muhammad cartoons.
In my first week on the job, I also reviewed Israeli writer Amos Oz’s little collection of essays, How to Cure a Fanatic. That was another boo
k that would later help me gain perspective. In it, he coined a new slogan—Make Peace, Not Love—and claimed (tongue firmly in cheek) that 9/11 was actually Osama bin Laden’s declaration of love. Bin Laden cared so much about us that he wanted to turn us into Muslims and make us all better humans, redeeming us from such worldly evils as democracy, freedom of speech, materialism, and scantily clad women. Oz wrote:
The essence of fanaticism lies in the desire to force other people to change: the common inclination to improve your neighbor, mend your spouse, engineer your child, or straighten up your brother, rather than let them be. The fanatic is a most unselfish creature. The fanatic is a great altruist. . . . He wants to save your soul, he wants to redeem you, he wants to liberate you from sin, from error, from smoking, from your faith or from your faithlessness, he wants to improve your eating habits, or to cure you of your drinking or your voting habits.2
Oz was skeptical about what he saw as European naiveté. Europeans, he claimed, consider all conflict basically to derive from misunderstandings that can be cleared up if only the conflicting parties sit down and talk to each other for a sufficient length of time. And indeed, the Cartoon Crisis was all about misunderstandings and the kind of naiveté Oz mocked.
Skimming through Jyllands-Posten’s weekly culture magazine Kultur-weekend from the spring of 2004, when I began my work as editor, through to publication of the Muhammad cartoons in September 2005, I found many stories about Islam. The subject interested me, but my knowledge of the debate that was going on in Europe about Islam, Muslims, and immigration was limited. That limitation became painfully apparent on November 2, 2004, when the Dutch filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh was murdered by a young Muslim in Amsterdam. That afternoon, I received a call from one of Jyllands-Posten’s former interns, who was in the Netherlands working on his journalism thesis. He had interviewed van Gogh the previous day and gave me first option on the piece, quite possibly van Gogh’s last interview.
I had no idea who van Gogh was; and for that reason, I was unable to see the story. An unknown filmmaker murdered by a Muslim; so what? I turned him down. It was an enormous blunder. Our competitors at the daily Politiken grabbed the interview, and I realized not only that my knowledge about Islam was insufficient, but also that I knew far too little about the kind of violence and intimidation that was going on in the West in the name of Islam.
In the few weeks before we published those fateful cartoons, the Danish media were full of stories that together frame the context of the debate that would rapidly explode.
On Sunday, September 11, 2005, four years after the 9/11 strikes, Jyllands-Posten carried a major piece on the front page of its Insight section about a research project carried out by Dr. Tina Magaard of the University of Aarhus, which compared concepts of the enemy and images of violence in the central texts of 10 religions.
Dr. Magaard concluded:
There is no doubt that Islamic terrorists are able to find passages in the Koran, hadith, and the biographies of Muhammad which they may use as arguments in favor of performing acts of terrorism against civilians. In Islam, terror is from the outset a legitimate concept and on occasion an obligation. The texts of Islam depart significantly from those of the other religions; to a much greater degree they encourage violence and aggression. This is an issue that has long been taboo in scholarship about Islam. Some imams have claimed that the Koran forbids the killing of innocent civilians, but this is not the case. There are a number of passages in the Islamic texts in which it is quite apparent that the killing of civilian infidels is permitted.3
Imam Ahmad Abu Laban, who would come to play a significant role during the Crisis, reacted angrily to Magaard’s research, condemning her as “stupid, prejudiced, and dishonest.” He accused her of misusing the scriptures to launch an attack on the Muslim community and claimed that she was out to promote misconceptions of the Prophet and of Islam in general.
But during his trial in the summer of 2005, Theo van Gogh’s murderer, 27-year-old Mohammad Bouyeri, gave a very different account. His court statement was a spine-chilling document that confirmed that at least some Muslims do interpret the holy scriptures of Islam in such a way as to justify violence. Bouyeri rejected all speculation that he had felt discriminated against as a representative of an ethnic minority, or offended by van Gogh referring to Muslims as “goat-fuckers.” Turning to van Gogh’s mother, Bouyeri said the following:
You should know that I acted out of my own conviction and not because I hated your son for being Dutch or for having offended me as a Moroccan. I never felt offended. And I did not know your son. I cannot accuse him of being a hypocrite. I know he was not, and I know that he was true to his own personal conviction. So the whole story about me feeling offended as a Moroccan or because he had insulted me is nonsense. I acted on the basis of my belief. What is more, I said that I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been my own father or brother. So there is no reason to accuse me of being sentimental. And I can assure you that if one day I should be released, I will do exactly the same over again. As for your criticism, perhaps you mean Muslims when you say Moroccans. I do not blame you for that, for the same law that demands that I cut the throat of anyone who offends Allah and his Prophet says that I must not reside in this country. Or at least not in a country that goes in for freedom of speech, as the prosecution calls it.4
Shortly after the story on Tina Magaard’s research, Danish police announced that a Danish-Moroccan binational, Said Mansour, had been detained on a charge of inciting terrorism. At Mansour’s home, police had found a CD that included texts in tribute to Theo van Gogh’s murderer, referring to the passages of the Koran that Tina Magaard had highlighted. Mansour had preached hatred of the infidel for some 20 years, becoming a source of inspiration for terror cells operating out of Denmark.5
Ten days before the Muhammad cartoons appeared, a Danish comedian, Frank Hvam, mused about the limits of humor in an age of religious fundamentalism and terror. Rejecting the idea that anyone could dictate what he was allowed to be funny about, Hvam nevertheless had to admit that a little self-censor had wormed its way inside his own mind.
You can do comedy about the fact that we find it acceptable to kill animals and eat them but not to have sex with them. If I was a pig and someone gave me the choice of being killed and eaten or getting shagged once in a while, I’m pretty sure I know what I’d go for. People get so worked up about that kind of thing being talked about in public. I’m not saying this because of any personal urge to go out and shag the first goat I meet. I just find it interesting to explore why you’re not allowed to fool around with a chicken when it’s perfectly acceptable to tear its head off and eat it.6
Clearly Frank Hvam is not a man to respect a taboo, but he had found himself making an exception in the case of Islam.
I realized that I wouldn’t have the guts to mock the Koran on television. For me, this was a frustrating discovery, because I was brought up to believe that we all have the right to say whatever we want. I find it hugely provoking that there are people who are threatening enough to make me keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to whip up sentiment or anything, but I do want to make the point that we all should have the right to express ourselves on whatever stage we choose, though at the same time we should respect the stage of others. You’re not going to get me running into a mosque, yelling and screaming and ridiculing Islam. That’s just not something I can permit myself to do. But I do insist on the right to get up on my own stage in front of a paying audience and say things that mock Muslims, Christians, and chicken farmers if that’s what I want to do.
By way of conclusion for what was in every sense a remarkable interview, Frank Hvam laid out his philosophy of humor, its essence, and its purpose. It was similar to the approach of many of our newspaper’s cartoonists. “When you venture out as a comedian into that rather provocative borderland, it’s not just because you want to provoke,” Hvam said. “You do it because you want to discover tr
uths, explore the point at which it starts to hurt, reveal hypocrisy. Why mustn’t we eat each other? Why mustn’t we go to bed with our sister? Why mustn’t we kill each other or steal? Nothing is fixed.”
The immediate issue that led to my commissioning the Muhammad cartoons was Kåre Bluitgen’s children’s book on the life of the Prophet. Bluitgen, at the time 46, had trained as a teacher and spent years as an activist working for the rights of oppressed peoples in the Third World. He lived among immigrants in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district and had on more than one occasion sharply criticized his peers on the left, whom he considered to be naive about the intolerance and oppression he saw within the Muslim community in his own neighborhood.
At a party in the summer of 2005, Bluitgen ran into a reporter he knew from the press agency Ritzaus Bureau.7 Bluitgen confided his problems in finding someone willing to illustrate a manuscript he had written about the Muslim prophet. Three illustrators, he said, had already turned him down for fear of violent reprisal. The journalist found the story interesting, and a couple of months later got in touch with Bluitgen to find out how the project was proceeding. In the meantime, Bluitgen had found someone willing to illustrate his biography, but that person insisted on remaining anonymous.
Ritzaus Bureau ran a story about Bluitgen’s difficulties in finding an illustrator to depict Muhammad on Friday, September 16. Like most Danish papers, Jyllands-Posten carried the story the next day: “Illustrators Balk at Depicting Muhammad” was the headline. The following Monday, our managing editor, Jørn Mikkelsen, called me to discuss an idea that had been suggested at an editorial meeting over the weekend. To carry the Bluitgen story further, and to explore whether Danish cartoonists really did self-censor when it came to depicting Muhammad, we should invite them to draw the Prophet.
The Tyranny of Silence Page 4
