Author Kare Bluitgen, the man behind the Danish Mohammed cartoons that set off a firestorm when they were published 15 years ago on Wednesday, refuses to give in and is publishing a new illustrated Koran.
“I started this book to teach Danish young people about the second-biggest religion in Denmark and it ended up killing more than 200 people,” Bluitgen told reporters yesterday.
In the summer of 2005, the writer published an advertisement saying he was having a hard time finding an illustrator to draw the Prophet Mohammed — whose depiction is banned by Sunni Muslims — for a youth book he was writing on Islam’s founder.
Photo: AFP
It was the first flutter of the proverbial butterfly’s wings.
Flemming Rose, at the time the cultural editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten daily, took him at his word and invited Danish illustrators to draw Mohammed however they wanted.
“The newspaper wanted to see if I was lying or not when I said it was difficult for me to find an illustrator. They didn’t believe me,” Bluitgen said.
Twelve cartoonists heeded the newspaper’s call and their caricatures were published on Sept. 30, 2005, under the heading “The Face of Mohammed.”
Most of them were harmless or mocked the task itself. The most controversial ones depicted a sword-wielding bearded man in a white turban flanked by two women in niqabs, and a prophet with a bomb in his turban with a lit fuse.
“I knew there would be a few extremists, al-Qaeda especially, that would be angry, but I had no idea it would be a worldwide crisis,” Bluitgen said.
He ended up not using any of the drawings for his book, but did finally find an illustrator who asked to remain anonymous.
The cartoons in Jyllands-Posten went almost unnoticed initially. After two weeks, a demonstration against them was held in Copenhagen and then ambassadors from Muslim countries in Denmark lodged a protest.
The anger then escalated into anti-Danish violence across the Muslim world in February 2006. It culminated in a 2015 massacre that left 12 people dead at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris, which had reprinted the cartoons in 2012.
Last week, the suspect behind a knife attack in Paris said he also wanted to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s decision to again republish the cartoons last month.
A number of Danes associated with the cartoons still live under police protection, such as Rose, who needs an escort to “be able to live the way I want.”
For him, the decision to publish the cartoons was a journalistic exercise intended to illustrate the extent of self-censorship when it comes to drawing Mohammed.
“Today that decision makes sense to me... I have no regrets,” Rose said.
Denmark tops global rankings when it comes to freedom of expression.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, prime minister at the time the cartoons were published, refused to apologize for them even when faced with an unprecedented boycott of Danish products.
“The cartoons affair has not been forgotten in Islamist militant circles,” the Danish Security and Intelligence Service wrote in a report in March.
As for Bluitgen, he is publishing a new illustrated Koran on the 15th anniversary.
“It’s a tradition in Europe that when we have big, complicated books for children we use illustrations. We cannot give up on that,” he said.
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