PARIS (Reuters) - One man's cartoon can be another man's crime.
The row over Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, which has sparked off protests and boycott calls throughout the Middle East, has turned into a verbal clash of civilizations pitting Western freedom of speech against Muslim taboos.
The more that Muslim countries protest, withdraw ambassadors and boycott Danish goods over what they consider blasphemy, the more some Europeans -- especially journalists -- reprint the cartoons and insist they are free to ridicule any authority.
Like many conflicts over faith, the row has both religious and political aspects. The Muslim reaction is based on Islam's ban on portraying the Prophet and reinforced by outrage that he is presented as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban.
"This is defamation ... and disinformation," French Muslim Council head Dalil Boubakeur said. "The prophet of Islam did not found a terrorist religion, quite to the contrary."
The dispute, which has parallels to the 1989 Iranian death sentence on British writer Salman Rushdie, arises from the fact that Muslims still consider blasphemy -- or insulting the sacred -- as a crime while Westerners no longer take it seriously.
Jesus Christ is mocked so often in Western media and art that it hardly causes outrage anymore and courts usually reject legal suits against the satire. Because of the horror of the Holocaust, Western media are much more cautious about Jews.
Many European countries still have blasphemy on the books, but do not apply it. The last conviction in Britain was in 1922 for a man who compared Jesus to a circus clown.
By contrast, insulting the Prophet Mohammad can bring a death sentence in a Muslim country like Pakistan. Many Arab countries threaten blasphemers with prison sentences.
GLOBALISED TENSIONS
These two views used to be separated geographically, but migration has led to a community of about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making Islam the second-largest religion in most countries. Many Muslim issues have thus become European issues.
Globalisation has also given Muslim countries an economic leverage they did not have before, allowing them to organize boycotts of Danish or other goods on sale in their markets.
"Today's modernity allows (Muslims) to express their profound disapproval of this profanatory and defamatory attack on their religion," Boubakeur said.
Apart from the diplomatic and trade strains it causes, the cartoon row goes straight to the issue of how free multicultural societies can be without offending some of their people.
It also raises the question of whether and how far European countries have to change to accommodate their new minorities.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered a rare defeat in parliament on Tuesday when deputies refused to back his planned law banning religious hate speech, a bill British Muslims backed strongly but many artists opposed as potential censorship.
Rising tensions over religion in Europe have led to unexpected twists. For example, practicing Christians -- now only a fraction of most secularised European societies -- have begun to act like minorities demanding their rights.
Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Catholic archbishop of Lyon, echoed this when he welcomed the Muslim protests and hoped they would lead to more respect for all religions. Joseph Sitruk, Grand Rabbi of French Judaism, also supported the Muslims.
SOME UNCOMFORTABLE FACTS
The fact that most Muslim countries do not allow freedom of the press has prompted aggressive, sometimes abusive, reactions from Europeans who see Muslims trying to curtail rights derived from the Enlightenment and centuries of political development.
"We'd take Muslim protests more seriously if they weren't so hypocritical," Berlin's Die Welt wrote as it published a Danish cartoon. "The imams were quiet when Syrian television showed Jewish rabbis as cannibals in a prime-time series."
Defending its decision to print the Danish cartoons, France Soir wrote that the 1789 French Revolution separated church and state, not to give any religion a right to impose its views.
Among the calmer views expressed, some commentators said the Danish cartoons might not be the best example of what should be defended in the name of press freedom.
"In terms of free speech, there are questions which are much more important than this," Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter wrote.
