On February 12, 2008, Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Danish man of Moroccan background in connection with a plot to assassinate Kurt Westergaard for drawing the turban-bomb cartoon.103 Danish intelligence later revealed that the two Tunisians had cased Westergaard’s home and learned his schedule. The younger of the pair, a martial arts expert, had planned to strangle the cartoonist.104 While the younger Tunisian left Denmark voluntarily in August 2008, the elder remained under a “tolerated stay” policy, according to which even foreign nationals who have committed a crime may remain in Denmark if they will likely face ill treatment upon return to their country of origin. The Danish Supreme Court ruled in November 2008 that the evidence against him was inadequate to keep him in custody.105
Westergaard, whose drawing was most often singled out by critics as an example of Danish infamy, had, at the time of the arrests, been in hiding since early 2006. In November 2007, when word of a plot to murder him first surfaced, he had to relocate to a well-protected hotel room. February 15, three days after the revelation of the plot’s details, he was evicted from the hotel for being “too much of a security risk.”106 Meanwhile, Jyllands-Posten editor Carsten Juste stated that his staff had “become more or less used to death threats and bomb threats since the cartoons, but it’s the first time that we’ve heard about actual murder plans.”107
On February 13, newspapers in Denmark, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands reprinted the offending cartoon in connection with their coverage of the arrests. Berlingske Tidende explained, “We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech.”108 In total, seventeen Danish papers that had originally declined to publish the cartoons now did so as a show of support for Westergaard; Jyllands-Posten, despite its previous apology, also reprinted them.109 Flemming Rose linked the cartoon controversy to the cases of those accused of blasphemy in the Muslim world and argued: “In the West, there is a lack of clarity on these issues. People suggest that Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen and Kurt Westergaard bear a certain amount of responsibility for their fate. They don’t understand that by doing so they tacitly endorse attacks on dissenting voices in parts of the world where no one can protect them.”110
Terrorists cited the republication of the cartoons as the motivation for a new spate of threats. In April 2008, Denmark evacuated the staff of its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan as a result of threats linked to the February cartoon republication.111 On June 2, at least six Pakistanis died in an Al-Qaeda bombing of the Danish embassy in Islamabad, whose perpetrator said the act was retribution against Denmark’s “infidel government” for the cartoon republication, and warned of further attacks unless the Danish government apologized.112 In September 2008, Al-Qaeda released a video profiling the perpetrator of the attack and reiterating its threat to strike against “the Crusader states which insult, mock and defame our prophet and the Koran in their media and occupy our lands, steal our treasure and kill our brothers.”113
In October 2009, two men living in Chicago were arrested for planning an attack on Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Denmark. (One of the conspirators told authorities he had suggested amending this plan and instead attempting to murder Flemming Rose and Kurt Westergaard.) The plot, code named the “Mickey Mouse Project,” was discovered by the FBI and the PET. David Headley, born as Daood Sayed Gilani, and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, American and Canadian citizens respectively, admitted to receiving training in Pakistan from Lakshar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group. While in Pakistan, Headley met with Al-Qaeda operative Ilyas Kashmiri to set his plan in motion. He also traveled to Denmark to scout for targets; officials discovered short videos of the Jyllands-Posten office and other potential targets in his checked luggage after arresting him at the Chicago airport.114
On January 1, 2010, a man linked to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabab broke into Kurt Westergaard’s home with an axe and a knife. Westergaard, whose five-year-old granddaughter was also in the house, saved himself only by fleeing to a specially installed panic room in his house’s bathroom. While his attacker attempted to break down the door and shouted, according to Westergaard, about “blood” and “revenge,” the seventy-four-year-old cartoonist pressed a button to call police. Danish Intelligence later described the attack on Westergaard as likely “terror related.” Facing two counts of attempted homicide in a Danish court, the suspect denied the charges against him in court. An Al-Shabab spokesperson, however, praised the assault and urged “Muslims around the world to target the people” like Westergaard.115
The global campaign of outrage over Jyllands-Posten’s alleged blasphemy took a heavy toll. In addition to extensive destruction of property, scholar Jytte Klausen estimates that, by 2006, at least 241 people had died in related violence. Many deaths occurred in Nigeria, followed distantly by Afghanistan and Libya.116 It seems likely that much of the force of the crisis came from the intersection of institutionally amplified anticartoon rhetoric with existing conflicts and tensions.
Klausen, whose account of the crisis is often less than sympathetic to Jyllands-Posten and its project, concludes that, since the cartoon imbroglio, “New rules—formal and informal—apply that undoubtedly shrink the space for speech and artistic expression.”117 Her assessment proved uncannily accurate, as we discuss in chapter 13, when, in August 2009, Yale University Press, which had previously published at least four books containing images of Muhammad, refused to reproduce an image of the Jyllands-Posten issue containing the cartoons, along with other historic depictions of Muhammad, in a book chronicling the Danish cartoon affair—Klausen’s own book, The Cartoons That Shook the World.118
Pope Benedict’s Lecture at Regensburg
The Danish cartoons controversy might have appeared to some as a collision between religious and secular values, particularly given the Vatican’s support for Muslim protests against insulting their religion. However, the next major global crisis involving a purported Western insult to Islam proved that religious leaders themselves are far from immune to such charges. This furor originated in an academic lecture by Pope Benedict XVI, given at Regensburg, Germany, on September 12, 2006, on the relationship between faith and reason. While discussing the place of reason in the Christian tradition, the pope quoted from a dialogue between the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus II and a Muslim Persian, which at one point turned to the question of holy war:
The emperor … addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”119
The pope’s primary purpose for the quotation was to elaborate on the emperor’s key claim that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature,” the theme to which he devoted the remainder of the lecture. He described a Muslim teaching that “God is absolutely transcendent”—not bound to rationality or even, in the view of one Islamic theologian, to His own word. The pope then contrasted that view with what he described as the Catholic position, based on the synthesis of biblical faith and Greek philosophy, “that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy.” The bulk of the lecture focused on this heritage and the modern, mainly Western, challenges it faces. The pontiff called for faith joined with reason in the broad sense and contrasted this with either a positivist truncation of reason to exclude faith or a divorce between religion and rational inquiry.
However, ma
ny critics in the Muslim world quickly seized exclusively on Paleologus’s assertion that Muhammad had brought “evil and inhuman things.” In response, Vatican spokesmen emphasized that the pope had no wish to offend Muslims and hoped for respect and dialogue between faiths.120 This explanation failed to quell the outcry. Notably, a Muslim Brotherhood official, who warned that the pope’s remarks were likely to provoke “an extreme reaction,” went on to explain that they “harm Islam more than the cartoons because they come from a leader who represents millions of people and not just from a journalist.”121
Once again, Muslim government entities spoke alongside clerics in condemning a perceived insult to their faith. While some merely called the remarks ignorant or offensive, others characterized the speech as an effort to foster conflict among civilizations or even as a flashback to the Crusades. On September 14, 2006, the OIC stated that it “regrets the quotations cited by the pope on the Life of the Honorable Prophet Mohammed, and what he referred to as ‘spreading’ Islam by the sword,” which show “deep ignorance of Islam and Islamic history.”122 The Gulf Cooperation Council demanded an apology and expressed its displeasure that the pope could make such remarks “at a time of multiple campaigns hostile towards Muslims.”
Yemen’s president denounced the pope. Malaysia’s prime minister said the pope should apologize, withdraw his remarks, and “not take slightly the spread of outrage that has been created.”123 Hamas leader Minister Ismail Haniyah demanded that the pope “revise his comments and stop attacking Islam.” Libya’s General Instance of Religious Affairs stated that the alleged slander on Islam “pushes us back to the era of crusades against Muslims led by Western political and religious leaders.” Jordan’s Minister of Religious Affairs called for an immediate explanation, as did Egypt’s Foreign Minister, and an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesperson said the comments worked to “reinforce calls for a war of the civilizations.”124 Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei described the pope’s comments as “the latest chain of the crusade against Islam started by America’s Bush.”125 Pakistan’s government complained to the Vatican’s diplomatic representative, and its Parliament said that Benedict “should retract his remarks” since they “have injured sentiments across the Muslim world and pose the danger of spreading acrimony between religions.”126
In Turkey, the prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, said that the pope’s “ugly and unfortunate” remarks should be taken back.127 Senior religious official Ali Bardakoglu claimed that Benedict’s comment represented an “abhorrent, hostile and prejudiced point of view” that reflected the mind-set “of the Crusades” and called for the pope to apologize.128 Bardakoglu asserted, “We also criticize the Christian world for its wrongs, but we never defame either Christ or the Bible or the holiness of Christianity.”129 Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of the governing Justice and Development Party, said the pope had “a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” was attempting to “revive the mentality of the Crusades,” and, as “the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks,” would be “going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.” Opposition leaders, although secularist, also said the pope should apologize before visiting Turkey in November.130
In response to allegations of a “war on Islam,” violence against indigenous Christians—whether Roman Catholic or not—promptly erupted. In Gaza on September 15, 2006, a Hamas official proclaimed to 2,000 protesters, “This is another Crusader war against the Arab and Muslim world.” That same day, four improvised bombs exploded outside a Greek Orthodox compound in Gaza City, fortunately causing no injuries.131 On September 16, gunmen targeted an Orthodox church; a caller from the Islamic Organization of the Swords of Righteousness claimed to have “carried out this shooting because of the pope’s statement” and demanded a papal apology. Others armed with guns and Molotov cocktails assaulted four churches of various denominations in the West Bank city of Nablus; one gunman fired inside a fifth Nablus church, which was, in fact, Catholic. A group calling itself the Lions of Monotheism, which linked its action to the pope’s lecture, firebombed Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches. Police were dispatched to the besieged churches, a Hamas parliamentarian denounced the attacks, and a leading Palestinian Muslim cleric called for Palestinian Christians to be protected. But at the same time, he called for “our Muslim and Arab countries not to receive the Pope so that he does not make any comments that may ignite fire and in order to avoid any assault on him that may ignite a religious war.”132
In Iraq, a bomb went off at an Assyrian Catholic church in Basra on September 15, and an unknown militant group posted statements in mosques threatening to attack Iraqi Christians if the pope did not apologize. Islamic militants murdered two Assyrian Christians in the days following the speech, and Christian leaders warned Iraqi Christians to remain at home.133
In Egypt, Coptic leader Pope Shenouda III, very attuned to the precarious position of the Mideast’s Christian minorities, said that he had not heard the pope’s actual words but that “any remarks which offend Islam and Muslims are against the teachings of Christ,” which “instruct us not to hurt others, either in their convictions or their ideas, or any of their symbols—religious symbols.” He later stated that he “wish(ed) the Catholic pope had considered the reaction to his remarks” and that “criticizing others’ faith breeds enmity and divisions.”134
On September 16, newly appointed Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, stated that the pope “did not mean, nor does he mean, to make [the Byzantine emperor’s] opinion his own in any way” but, “as is evident from a complete and attentive reading of the text,” simply meant to issue “a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come.” He continued: “The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions. Indeed it was he who, before the religious fervor of Muslim believers, warned secularized Western culture to guard against ‘the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom.’”135 This statement failed to satisfy many critics. Morocco withdrew its ambassador from the Vatican, effective September 17, due to the pope’s “offensive remarks.”136 A threat from the Mujahedeen Army of Iraq, perpetrators of numerous terror attacks, “to send you people who adore death as much as you adore life” led the Vatican to increase the pope’s security.137 Another Iraqi insurgent group, Ansar al-Sunnah, declared that it would attack Christians. Security for churches in several countries was tightened for the Sunday services to be held on September 17.138 Their fears were realized when gunmen murdered a sixty-five-year-old Italian nun working in an Austrian-funded hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia; Sister Leonella Sgorbita was shot seven times, and her bodyguard was also killed. As she lay dying, the nun said she forgave her killers. The pope wrote that Sister Leonella’s forgiveness of her attackers represented “the most authentic Christian witness, a peaceful sign of contradiction which shows the victory of love over hate and evil.”139
On the day of these attacks, Benedict personally stated that he was “deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address” and noted that they “do not in any way express my personal thought.” Such a statement of personal regret from the pope is a highly unusual event. The pontiff’s comments were printed in Arabic in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.140 The response was mixed.141
On September 20, the pope again expressed his “profound respect” for Muslims and said that “the negative words pronounced by the medieval emperor” do not “reflect my personal conviction.” Again, the Muslim Brotherhood expressed dissatisfaction, although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated that there was “no problem” now that Benedict had made it clear he did not endorse Manuel’s remark. Meanwhile Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk
ish man who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, warned Benedict from jail that his life would be in danger if he visited Turkey.142
Amidst this barrage of threats and denunciations, a number of voices in the West supported the pope’s comments and the right to speak freely about Islam generally. German chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Australian prime minister John Howard came to his defense.143 On October 3, a plenary assembly of German bishops declared that “the Catholic Church and all people who, in Germany and throughout the world, respect and defend freedom of speech, will never allow themselves to be intimidated.”144 They also expressed concern over attacks against Christian minorities and particularly the murder of Sister Leonella, stressing the urgency for dialogue between Christianity and Islam and calling for Muslim governments to show reciprocity with regard to the religious freedom enjoyed by Muslims living in Germany.145
In a further effort to calm the controversy, on September 25, the pope met with ambassadors from twenty-one Muslim-majority countries—all those, except Sudan, that had diplomatic ties to the Vatican—as well as an Arab League representative. Once again, Benedict reaffirmed his respect for Muslims and the need for Christian-Muslim dialogue.146 The pope’s speech was broadcast live on Al Jazeera, and a representative of the Muslim World League, Mario Scialoja, expressed his approval.147 However, the following day, an OIC summit declared that the pope should still “retract or redress” his Regensburg statement to prevent “tension between the Muslim world and the Vatican, to the detriment of the real interests of the two parties.”148
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