After the Danish Cartoon Controversy

By Lorenzo Vidino

My friend Pernille Ammitzbøll and I recently published a long analysis of the origins, developments and aftermath of the Danish cartoon controversy in the Middle East Quarterly. As tomorrow marks the anniversary of the peak of the crisis, it might be interesting to read it to see, a year later, what lessons we have learned from it.

On February 5, 2006, at the height of the tension following the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim protesters torched Denmark's embassies in Beirut and Damascus. While many in the West looked on with bewilderment, protests spread across the Muslim world, and stores in Muslim areas removed Danish products from their shelves. Even as the cartoon crisis captured headlines around the world, most people outside Denmark remain unfamiliar with the forces propelling it. Like the Salman Rushdie affair before it and the furor over Pope Benedict XVI's remarks at Regensburg University after it, the cartoon controversy had less to do with genuine outrage over the depiction of Islam's prophet and more to do with the ambitions, first, of a small group of radical imams and, later, of jousting Middle Eastern powers. Now that the dust has settled, what is the legacy of the crisis, not only for Denmark but also for the Western world?

The background
Beginning in the late 1960s, a small Muslim population of Turks, Lebanese, and Somalis began to settle in Gellerup, a Western suburb of Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. Gellerup, known to most locals as "the ghetto," suffers not only lower income, poorer education rates, and a higher crime rate than the rest of the city but also physical isolation. Its high-rises, which 28,000 Gellerup residents call home, are surrounded by a thick ring of public green and large boulevards. Designed in 1968 to house blue-collar workers and students from the local university, within two decades, Gellerup had become the destination of thousands of foreign immigrants who had moved to Aarhus to work in the city's food industry. By the mid-1990s, few ethnic Danish residents remained in the development.

While some politicians and commentators embraced an extreme tone, as when a People's Party spokesperson compared Muslims to cancer cells, much of the debate was constructive. For the first time, newspapers began to report crimes committed by gangs of teenage immigrants and honor killings of young Danish Muslim women. Politicians detailed overrepresentation of immigrants in benefit abuse and criminal activities. For example, in 2004, Danish authorities pressed charges against five times as many second generation immigrants than against ethnic Danes. In Copenhagen, three in four minors arrested is of immigrant background.

You can read the rest of the article here. Two interesting developments have taken place since the publication of the article, both affecting the two chief architects of the controversy. In November Raed Hlayel left Denmark to move back to his native Lebanon, from where he has sworn to continue his battle against Denmark. Ahmed Abu Laban, the country's most famous imam, died of cancer Friday in a Copenhagen hospital.

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