The Muslim News - The way out of the Danish quagmire: Not an apology, but a resignation

Issue 202, Friday 24 February 2006 - 25 Muharram 1427

The way out of the Danish quagmire: Not an apology, but a resignation

By Abdelwahab El-Affendi

The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, should be very, very sorry. Not because a Danish newspaper has offended most Muslims and many others beside, but because he has presided over the destruction of his country’s international reputation, in particular in the Muslim world. Within just three months, Denmark’s image has plummeted in status from that of a squeaky clean Scandinavian nation that hardly offends anybody, to a status down there below the US and Israel in the ranks of Muslim demonology. Things have deteriorated so much that even American-occupied Iraq took the “revolutionary” step of cancelling all reconstruction contracts granted to Danish companies. When things get that far, and when even Saudi Arabia decides to withdraw its ambassador, and the Afghan Parliament issues condemnations, you know that you have a problem on your hands.
The debacle is tantamount to Rasmussen’s fellow-Scandinavian, Sven-Göran Eriksson helping relegate the England team to the bottom of the world league in the qualifying matches for this year’s world cup. No matter what the extenuating circumstances might be, it is a blunder that warrants a resignation. And similarly here, only a new Danish Government that would wipe the slate clean and start anew could the long process of healing start. The current strategy of escalating the crisis into a Muslim-European one in order to take the heat off Denmark would only make matters infinitely worse.
Rasmussen’s proximate sin was to have disastrously mismanaged the crisis which erupted with the publication of cartoon drawings of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September. Those cartoons, which were neither intelligent nor funny, elicited protests from a number of Muslim Ambassadors and from local Muslims. The whole incident could have been quickly resolved had the Danish Government sufficiently distanced itself from the paper’s conduct and clearly condemned its deliberately provocative approach. Instead, the Prime Minister took the stupid approach of hiding behind vacuously pious statements on the freedom of expression, thus permitting the conflict to escalate and spill on the streets and beyond the control of rational actors.
Of course, many Muslims have also got it wrong, and not just by their overreaction, but by taking the lead in calling for restrictions on freedom of speech. This is especially so since the reality about the fiction of absolute freedom of expression, has been made perfectly clear to some in no uncertain terms. The Muslim Council of Britain’s General Secretary, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, was painfully reminded of the limits on free speech when he received a visit from the Metropolitan Police in connection with his anti-gay comments on a BBC radio programme. In any case, Sacranie is much luckier than Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is languishing in jail on account of his fiery sermons. Abu Hamza, who was convicted days after Leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, was acquitted of charges of inciting racial hatred, was unable to take refuge in the “sacred” right of free speech. The Judge told Abu Hamza: “You are entitled to your views and in this country you are entitled to express them - up to the point where you incite murder or incite racial hatred.”
To take a freedom of expression angle on the debate is already to slant it ideologically. The whole point of this “deliberate provocation” by the Danish paper, according to a very sympathetic Muriel Gray of The Sunday Herald, was to prove the point that (Islamic?) fundamentalism “has successfully undermined the very linchpin of our freedom.” Acts of violence committed or threatened by Muslim mobs had such “an effect that they have bought Islam immunity from criticism, not through respect, but through fear.”
That is a very inaccurate characterisation of the problem. The issue in question has never been Muslim oversensitivity to criticisms of Islam. The Qur’an is full of accounts of criticisms of Muhammad and other earlier prophets by their foes. Western libraries and media are teeming with books and articles critical of Islam, old and new. Right wing politicians and even priests call Islam an evil religion almost on a daily basis. Rarely have Muslims demonstrated against such attacks and insults.
What happened then in Denmark to incite all this furore? Liberal fundamentalists like Muriel Gray do not appear to have a clue. She was right in relating this new offense to the one committed by the notorious Salman Rushdie, but leaps to the scribe’s defense without knowing what crime he had been accused of. According to her, his offense was to have written “a novel that contained another Islamic taboo, that of disrespecting the Koran.” Wrong again. Rushdie’s offense was not that of breaking a taboo, just as the issue with the cartoons was not defying the Muslim taboo of not pictorially depicting the Prophet. The majority of Muslims are rational people who understand that other communities are not bound by their taboos.
What Rushdie did was to mount a barrage of personal insults against the Prophet. Not satisfied with depicting him as a con artist, something he could have gotten away with, he goes a step further and portrays the Prophet’s wives as prostitutes. Is that, and the Danish cartoons, a serious criticism of religion? This gratuitous denigration of religious symbols is not only a direct attack on people’s identities, but the expression of active hate of the bitterest kind. Given the personal attachment of the bulk of Muslims to their Prophet, such gratuitous insults are deeply felt. In this age of the mass media, they also reach far and fast. And like the alleged acts of desecrating the Qur’an or flushing its pages down the toilet by US prison guards in Guantanamo, these are acts of hate and vidinctiveness meant to hurt and humiliate, and do not admit of any alternative benign interpretations, such as freedom of inquiry.
The question, therefore, is not one of freedom of speech nor respect for religion. It is a question of respect for other people. To cause such a deliberate and gratuitous offense to fellow-human beings could only be justified if we posit the existence of junkies, some sort of sadists, who get a kick out of antagonising and humiliating other people. Prime Minister, Rasmussen, knows the feeling of hurt quite well, as evidenced by his call for Arab leaders to condemn the burning of Danish flags. The man is not a free speech fundamentalist after all, and he understands that there are some forms of offensive self-expression that should indeed be condemned.
And that leads to the real core problem: the reluctance of the Danish Government to distance itself sufficiently from the offense. The Prime Minister refused to condemn the cartoons, pleading respect for freedom of speech. Now even for a free speech fundamentalist, believing in the freedom of people to say what they want, does not entail agreeing with them. To Quote the Herald’s Gray again, one does not have to respect the beliefs of extremists in order to defend their rights to express them. “We despise [the beliefs of Nick Griffin and and the BNP]. What we respect is Griffin’s right to be despicable.”
The insistence of Rasmussen and his Government to defend the despicable conduct of Jylland-Posten, instead of just their right to engage it, has made all the difference. And it was not incidental, but due to the fact that this was a right wing xenophobic Government which identifies with this sort of sentiments and conduct. In a civilised society, freedom of expression should go hand in hand with the solidarity of decent people against those engaged in making deliberately hateful and gratutitoulsy insutling gestures. Muslims should not make the same mistake they made during the Rushdie controversy by calling for restriciton of free speech or blashphemy laws. That was what lost them that cause. They should instead try to build coalitions of decent citizens against those who would insult sacred symbols, desecrate holy books or cemeteries, just for the fun of it. They may be allowed their freedom to hate and express it, but they should be shunned and condemned by all civlised people.
As for the Danish Government, it is now too late for to repair the damage it has done, because it is too arrogant to admit its error, and is lacking in credibility even if it comes around to apologising and expressing remorse. Only regime change in Denmark is going to restore peace to the world, and the sooner the better.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.