The Cartoon Row

A New Zealand newspaper became the first in that country Saturday to reproduce Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, saying it was standing for press freedom and would not be intimidated by threats of trade boycotts or other reprisals. The Dominion Post newspaper in New Zealand's capital, Wellington, published the drawings on an inside page in company with an article reporting international...

In recent years, some Christians have been deeply offended by modern "art" that pictures Jesus's face on the lid of a "toilet altar." That has a Crucifix immersed in urine or offers a picture of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung. Some see such images as a blasphemous affront to faith and an attack on believers. But the American and British artists who produced these images were free to...

DESPITE the outcry, the Danish cartoons of Muhammad are just the latest in a long line of depictions of the Muslim prophet, both in the West and in Islamic countries. From Ottoman religious icons to market stalls in Iran, from the US Supreme Court building to the South Park cartoon, Muhammad has been frequently portrayed in flattering and unflattering lights. Many painters, including William Blake...

PARIS: Western newspapers were split yesterday over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), as several of Europe’s top dailies reprinted the cartoons but others argued that the defence of freedom of speech could not justify such offence to Muslims. La Tribune de Geneve in Switzerland, France’s Liberation and Austria’s Die Presse all ran sketches of the Prophet, whose publication first in...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - North American newspapers have given extensive coverage to the anger that cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad unleashed across the world but have taken a hands-off approach to reprinting the caricatures themselves. "I don't see it as a necessity to run them," said John Diaz, editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "There's a lot of ways that we can gratuitously...

The publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has caused deep divisions across the world. For some, they are a transient form of entertaiment, for others, an attack on Islam. No-one knows what the Prophet Muhammad looked like. Images of him that can be found today were produced within a few hundred years of his death in the 7th Century. These tend to be exalted representations of a...

Newspapers across Europe and now even in Jordan have published political cartoons mocking Mohammed as a suicide bomber (his turban is a bomb with a lit fuse). The Muslim "street" has responded with the usual vitriol of violent protests. However, the cartoon is a legitimate criticism. No religion should be free from criticism. When we see Muslims beheading innocent people and blowing themselves and...

TO the West it may seem like a massive over-reaction by Muslims to a run-of-the-mill satirical cartoon. But even for Muslims like me who are seen by the Islamic hardliners as too liberal or even too "integrated" this is a step too far. When an ink drawing of the Prophet Mohammed was published by a Danish newspaper I wasn't amused. Partly because it wasn't that funny, but mostly because by now I...

The controversy that erupted after a Danish publication carried a cartoon humiliating the Prophet Muhammed is turning into a major provocation that threatens to unleash the much-feared clash of civilizations. Christians may be used at poking fun at their own beliefs, at the Christian Church or even at the Prophet Jesus, but this is unacceptable in the Muslim world where religious values are too...

Modern society rests on the contest of ideas, the ability to question perceived wisdom and to challenge authority, The Dominion Post writes in an editorial. Without that contest, and the right to free speech that makes it possible, societies stultify and become entrenched in their beliefs. That freedom to question and to challenge must include the right to be offensive, to affront people's most...