By Jacob Mchangama
How a cartoon crisis transformed a local debate into a global reckoning over censorship and religious sensitivities – one whose aftershocks continue to shape Western democracies two decades later
In Sept. 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ignited a global firestorm when it published 12 cartoons – some depicting the Prophet Muhammad – under the headline, The Face of Muhammad. What began as a challenge to self-censorship in a secular democracy quickly escalated into an international crisis that reshaped geopolitical fault lines, redefined legal boundaries, and, perhaps most profoundly, tested the resilience of liberal democracies against the rising tide of religious extremism and demands for censorship.
Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, commissioned the cartoons to challenge what he saw as an emerging climate of fear, in which the threat of violent retaliation for offending religious sensibilities was already influencing public discourse in liberal democracies. In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic fundamentalist, due to Mr. Van Gogh’s Islam-critical film Submission. Later that year, three Muslims became offended by and beat a Danish university lecturer who had recited from the Koran during a class. In 2005, a Danish stand-up comedian admitted that he was too afraid to poke fun at Islam while a Danish children’s author announced that he couldn’t find cartoonists for a book about the Prophet Muhammad. Accordingly, Mr. Rose tested the extent of self-censorship by asking various cartoonists to depict Muhammad as they saw him.
Mr. Rose wrote an accompanying essay entitled Freedom of Expression. His aim was not gratuitous offence or anti-Muslim bigotry, but to defend the foundational principle that free speech must apply universally – including to ideas some may deem sacred, regardless of whether they belong to a minority or not. Therefore, Mr. Rose argued, affording special protections for Islam and Muslims was “incompatible with a secular democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be prepared to endure mockery, scorn, and ridicule.”
As Mr. Rose recently told me, the cartoons were based on the premise that freedom and equality go hand in hand and that Muslims should neither suffer discrimination, nor enjoy special privileges, as equal members of Danish society.
In Western Europe, and in an extremely secular and liberal country like Denmark, where I’m originally from, this seemed like an uncontroversial and long-settled idea – a principle vindicated during the Salman Rushdie affair of the late 1980s, when, despite some debate, most Western intellectuals, writers, and public opinion sided with Mr. Rushdie over Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Mr. Rushdie’s death.
Like the Rushdie affair, the cartoon crisis transformed a local debate into a global reckoning over free speech, censorship, and religious sensitivities – one whose aftershocks continue to shape Western democracies two decades later.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).