Muslims push for talk on cartoons

Local leaders see a chance to teach

Weeks of protests - sometimes violent - over newspaper cartoons showing the prophet Muhammad may seem overzealous to the Western world, but some Triangle Muslims say the depiction aggravated long-standing frustration.

One of several cartoons published in a Danish newspaper depicted Muhammad, the founder of one of the world's largest religions, with a bomb-shaped turban.

Last week, demonstrators in Iran responded by attacking the Danish, French and Austrian embassies with stones and firebombs.

The depiction in the Danish newspaper is like a cartoon mocking the Holocaust or showing people in blackface, Triangle academics and Muslims said Sunday.

A cartoon published Thursday in The Daily Tar Heel, the UNC-Chapel Hill student paper, used a drawing of Muhammad in an effort to comment on the reaction to the Danish cartoons. It also drew complaints on campus.

The cartoons violate a long-held Muslim tradition of not depicting Muhammad, and feel like an assault from the West, said Akram Khater, associate professor of history and director of the Middle East studies program at N.C. State University. "This has come to embody years of what many Muslims consider to be unfair characterizations of their prophet and their religion and themselves," Khater said.

"Ever since 9/11, basically, most Muslims in the world felt like they have unfairly been targeted as a collective," Khater said, "and tarnished, basically, as a violent people who practice a violent religion."

The Islamic Association of Raleigh has denounced the cartoons but also is urging restraint in the protests, saying that Muhammad promoted freedom of expression and would not approve of violence in the name of defending his honor.

The association hopes to use the controversy to educate non-Muslims and Muslims alike, said Hani Chohan, a spokesman. The association plans to dedicate its Friday night sermons for three months to the life of Muhammad, run newspaper ads and sponsor an open house.

Chohan said the offense the cartoons cause to Muslims could be compared to the reaction many American Christians had to "Book of Daniel," an NBC show that features a pill-popping priest who talks to Jesus.

"This kind of sentiment and disappointment, in terms of the emotion that was raised by that show, is very similar," Chohan said.

A delicate balance

On the global stage, reaction among U.S. officials to the Danish cartoons and the protests has been careful to condemn violence while supporting the right of a free press.

The Danish press was free to publish the cartoons, but that isn't really the point, said Ellen Mickiewicz, a public policy and political science professor at Duke University. These cartoons -- a broadside against an entire religion and perhaps culture -- don't seem to do very much other than incite, she said Sunday.

"We have a lot of freedoms that we don't practice to their limit all the time," she said. "You can have the perfect right to do something that's offensive, but don't be terribly surprised if it's offensive."

Most American newspapers -- including The News & Observer -- have not published the cartoons, but some have. The Philadelphia Inquirer published one of the cartoons with a note explaining that decision, said Amanda Bennett, the Inquirer's editor.

"This is the kind of work that newspapers are in the business to do," Bennett told The Associated Press. "We're running this in order to give people a perspective of what the controversy's about, not to titillate, and we have done that with a whole, wide range of images throughout our history. ... You run it because there's a news reason to run it."

The Danish cartoons, however, came at a time when Nordic nations such as Denmark are for the first time seeing significant Muslim immigration, Khater said. Many of Europe's 25 million Muslims have felt marginalized and banished to living in the equivalent of ghettos, he said.

Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, certain conservative leaders have taken advantage of the cartoons to mobilize followers and incite anger over them, Khater said.

But, like the Raleigh group, some world Muslim leaders have used the cartoons as a time to call for dialogue between the Muslim and Western worlds. Those calls, however, Khater said, have not received the same publicity as the protesters.