Cartoons were last straw

Even as protests intensified Wednesday against the publication of cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad, scholars who study the Muslim world cautioned that the cartoons themselves are almost unimportant.

What matters more, they said, is an ammunition dump of frustration and anger among Muslims that was ready to be ignited, if not by cartoons originally published in a Danish newspaper then by some other image or event that in the West would at first seem unremarkable.

Citizens of many Middle Eastern countries are aggrieved by corruption and a lack of democracy, and eager to express their fury, said Sanam Vakil, assistant professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, wary governments have seized on the cartoon controversy to deflect that frustration. “They are allowing people to unleash their anger on foreigners rather than on their leaders,” Vakil said.

“You have to understand that many of these protests are sanctioned by their governments, and many of these governments are autocratic dictatorships,” she said.

The editor of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper in which the cartoons first appeared, has said that Danish Muslims worked with clerics in the Middle East to publicize the images, including some never published by the newspaper, and launch the protests that have continued for a second week.

But the gulf between Islam and the West is not wholly the result of efforts by radicals, some researchers say. It is also a product of grievances that range from discrimination against Muslim immigrants in Europe to the perception of bias in the West’s handling of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

The divide has been aggravated, many say, by the failure of the United States and the European Union to distinguish between extremist and moderate Islam in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the bombings in London and Madrid.

“The Islamic world is mad at the West, they are furious at the West,” said William Beeman, an anthropologist at Brown University who has worked extensively in Iran. “For people in the Muslim world, it seems like we’re condemning all Muslims. And most Muslims don’t feel that they deserve it.”

Westerners don’t appreciate how shocking it is for some Muslims to see those outside the faith drawing images of Muhammad, because any representation of the prophet is considered blasphemous. “To change that image, and make it into a mocking or hateful depiction of the prophet, that further compounds the problem,” Beeman said.

“One can insult an individual, a clergyman even, but one cannot criticize the prophet” in Islam, said Marius Deeb, a professor of Islamic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies. “This is unacceptable.”

Several analysts pointed out that only a minority have taken to the streets in protest. But many of those who remain on the sidelines have also been shaken by the cartoons, and by the perception that they are under siege by the West.

An Iranian blogger who goes by the name Yasser, a 21-year-old microbiology student at Azad University in Tehran, has written about his admiration for Western freedoms, but recently posted an entry about the Danish cartoons under the title, “Because of freedom you can insult me.”

“I really bewildered when I see these paradoxes,” he wrote in the blog, called “Under Underground.” “If newspaper reprint these offensive cartoons about Prophet Mohammed for insisting that they have freedom of speech, so could you (print) an offensive cartoon about Jesus?”

Not all of the protests have occurred under totalitarian regimes. Demonstrations erupted throughout Afghanistan after local imams denounced the cartoons in local mosques, and police killed protesters there Wednesday.

The cartoons have bolstered support for al-Qaida and weakened sympathy for the West, he said, because many Afghans have come to believe that “democracy means to insult religion, to do whatever you want to do.”