‘We are internalising Islamic blasphemy laws’

On 30 September 2005, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. What began as a minor local controversy soon ignited a firestorm across the Arab and Muslim world. Danish goods were boycotted, embassies were firebombed and violent protests led to at least 200 deaths. In Denmark, some of the cartoonists and journalists needed lifelong police protection, as they faced constant credible death threats. Kurt Westergaard, who drew Muhammad wearing a turban with a bomb inside, was targeted in multiple assassination attempts. Free speech was pitted violently against Islamic intolerance.

Speaking to spiked’s Fraser Myers to mark the 20th anniversary of the Danish cartoons controversy, Flemming Rose – the then culture editor of Jyllands-Posten – fears the West is now internalising the blasphemy codes that the Muhammad cartoons challenged. What follows is an edited extract of the interview. You can watch the full thing here.

Fraser Myers: Can you take us back to the beginning of the story. What was the context for publishing the cartoons?

Flemming Rose: It’s important to note that those cartoons didn’t come out of the blue. It wasn’t that I or somebody else set out to offend millions of Muslims. They were published as part of a national debate in Denmark at the time.

The debate began in the middle of August in 2005, when a Danish children’s writer said he had written a children’s book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but had struggled finding an illustrator.

It turned out that one illustrator did eventually do the job, but he insisted on anonymity, and wouldn’t draw any images featuring Muhammad’s face. The illustrator later went on record saying he had self-censored because of cases like Salman Rushdie, who had received a fatwa in 1989 for writing The Satanic Verses, and Theo van Gogh, who was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004 for making a film critical of Islam.

At our newspaper, we wondered how we could follow up on the story. One of our reporters came up with the idea of inviting illustrators to draw the prophet, to test the self-censorship angle. So we got in touch with the head of the Danish Cartoonist Association who said, ‘Okay, let’s try it’. In total, we received 12 cartoons – which accounted for about half of the association’s active members back then.

We didn’t publish the cartoons immediately. We actually waited around 10 days or so, deciding whether the story was worth running at all. During that time, several things happened. There was an exhibition at the Tate Britain in London by John Latham, which featured an installation called ‘God is Great’. It showed a copy of the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud, all torn into pieces and layered in a piece of glass. The Tate withdrew the piece without consulting the artist or curator.

A similar case happened in Gothenburg, Sweden – Arab artist Louzla Darabi presented a painting of a man and a woman having sex, and at the top of the painting was the first verse of the Koran. Muslims in Sweden called the museum director and complained, and she withdrew the artwork, again without asking the artist or the curator. In Finland, a translator of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book of essays – which were very critical of Islam – insisted on total anonymity.

Finally, in Copenhagen, there was a meeting in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London, in which imams called on the Danish prime minister to prevent further criticism of Islam in the public sphere. This was a call for censorship.

All of this convinced me and the other editors at Jyllands-Posten that there was a story here. We proceeded to publish the cartoons on 30 September 2005.

Myers: How long did it take for the backlash to arrive?

Rose: It took a while. On the day of publication, I received maybe a couple of phone calls. One was from a vendor in a part of Copenhagen where a lot of Muslims live, who complained and said he wouldn’t be selling Jyllands-Posten anymore. But you get those kinds of calls every now and then as an editor. I didn’t see it as unusual.

A couple of weeks later, there was a peaceful demonstration in Copenhagen against the cartoons. By this point, they had sparked a lively debate in Denmark. It took three months or so for the story to become an international event – a progression triggered largely by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Saudi Arabia. Some of the Danish imams who had lost the debate in Denmark took their case to the Muslim world, and sent delegations to Egypt and Lebanon, where it became a big public issue. The curious thing is that they presented cartoons that hadn’t even been published in Jyllands-Posten – as if the ones we had put out weren’t quite offensive enough.

By the end of January, we were seeing violence. You had demonstrations in Afghanistan and in the Palestinian territories. 2005 was the first time the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to participate in a parliamentary election in Egypt, but interestingly, it was the secular Hosni Mubarak government that used the cartoons in its campaign to prove itself the true defender of Muslims’ rights. The same thing happened in Palestine. It wasn’t Hamas who used the cartoons to gain favour, but the secular Fatah.

Myers: Before the Jyllands-Posten controversy, there was the Salman Rushdie affair. Then the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened 10 years later. Is this intolerance still thriving?

Rose: Yes, absolutely. I appeared as a witness in a court case on behalf of Charlie Hebdo back in 2008. These people were not just colleagues, but also friends. The attack on them was a big shock.

The Danish government responded to the attack on us and similar incidents by getting rid of its 334-year-old blasphemy law. I think that was the right response. But fast forward to 2023, the same Danish government passed a new law to clamp down on Koran-burnings in Denmark. I think that this is part of a general trend in Europe, now that geopolitical power is shifting.

Studies show there is a correlation between countries with harsh blasphemy laws and higher levels of religious violence. In other words, the more serious a crime that blasphemy is perceived to be, the more religious violence occurs.

Right now, people are speaking out in Denmark against these laws. But after enough people have been arrested and killed, people will internalise the new restrictions. With enough time, no one will challenge them anymore.

Myers: Even without blasphemy laws on the books, isn’t there a danger people will self-censor?

Rose: The key to free speech is courage, because in so many ways, it goes against human nature. Instinctively, you don’t want to be exposed to points of view that you dislike. You’d rather turn off the TV or close the book and pretend they don’t exist. Tolerance has to be intentionally cultivated.

I think the issue with self-censorship in particular is that, unlike regular censorship, it is invisible. You only get to talk about it if people are honest about their motives – which they seldom are. When the topic of our cartoons comes up, Danish media sometimes say, ‘We now know what the cartoons look like, so we don’t have to publish them again’. My response is that we also know what Donald Trump looks like, but every time there is a story about him, we see a picture of him. The reality is the media are afraid of the consequences.

Danilo Kiš was a Serbian who wrote in socialist Yugoslavia – a truly unfree society. He said self-censorship is like reading your own text with other people’s eyes. You don’t want to become an outlier, and therefore you try to conform with the consensus. I think this is a really good definition.

Flemming Rose was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the interview below: