The Jyllands-Posten Cartoons

Sunday February 19, 2006

More than two weeks after the initial controversy began, after-effects are still being felt around the world. Rioting over the controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad claimed another 16 lives last night in Nigeria as more churches were burned by protesting Muslims. Witnesses said hotels and shops were torched where the first protests flared in the provinces of Borno and Katsina.

The cartoonist at the heart of the row, Kurt Westergaard, who has gone into hiding after a bounty was put on his head, conducted an interview with the Glasgow Herald newspaper via written questions. He said he did not expect so much controversy, but did not regret the drawings - the most controversial of which depicted the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban - or their publication.

The latest violence erupted because he defended the cartoons as 'a protest against the fact that we perhaps are going to have double standards [in Denmark and Western Europe] for freedom of expression and freedom of the press'. The inspiration for it was, he said, 'terrorism - which gets its spiritual ammunition from Islam.'

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten created the furor over depictions of Mohammed by publishing a series of 12 drawings after a local author said he was unable to find any artist willing to depict Mohammed for his upcoming illustrated book. The publication of the images in Jyllands-Posten has been condemned around the Islamic world, and has led to calls for a boycott of Denmark by Muslim nations.

Here are the Jyllands-Posten drawings, for the record:

Higher-resolution jpegs of each individual cartoon can be found here (scroll down the page).



This is what the original Jyllands-Posten page looked like. Notice that there were only 12 cartoons.
(Hat tip: Joanna.)

Yet when a delegation of Danish imams went to the Middle East to "discuss" the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars, the imams openly distributed a booklet that showed 15 images -- not only the original 12 cartoons, but three fraudulent anti-Mohammed depictions that were much more offensive than the ones published in Denmark. It is now thought that these three bonus images are what ignited the outrage in the Muslim world. The newspaper Ekstra Bladet obtained a copy of the booklet and presented the three offensive images on its Web site (though not in an easy-to-find place). All look like low-quality photocopies. Here they are:
(Hat tip: Gerry, Martin H., and rfs.)



Mohammed with a pig snout, singing into a microphone. (Link to original source file at Ekstra Bladet is temporarily overloaded.)


The caption says in Arabic, "This is why Muslims pray." (Link to original source file at Ekstra Bladet is temporarily overloaded.)
(Hat tip: Daniel and Ken.)



A sketch of Mohammed as a demonic pedophile. (Link to original source file at Ekstra Bladet is temporarily overloaded.)



The entire controversy started when Danish author Kåre Bluitgen complained that he could not find an artist brave enought to illustrate his upcoming book about Mohammed. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten issued a call for submissions from any artists willing to take up the challenge. In the ensuing brouhaha, the original book was almost forgotten; it has now been released, and does feature page after page of Mohammed depictions. This site features scans of several of the pages (hat tip: Rune, Kim and Mikkel.). This image above, taken from the book (titled Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv, or The Koran and the life of the prophet Mohammed in English), apparently shows Mohammed with his child-bride Aisha. This Danish blog also has some information about the release of the book.