Recently I've heard a lot about Danish cartoonists and Muslim extremists, and it seems that they're not the best of friends right now. Danes are lambasting, Muslims are brandishing, and Danish Muslims, well, who knows what Danish Muslims are doing about anything?
As Tufts prides itself on its strength in international relations, we should see if we can shed some light on this most concrete example of IR in action.
Cultural battles, like cultures themselves, often start with bedtime stories. For those of you who haven't been paying attention to the Danish press recently, this particular skirmish all began with K??re Bluitgen, a Danish journalist and sometime Islamic scholar who wanted to publish a seemingly-anodyne children's book telling the story of Mohammad.
Trouble is, he couldn't find an illustrator. The first three candidates he approached feared reprisals from the militant Islamic community and outright refused, citing the murder of Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh (yes, related to the van Gogh) and the assault of a lecturer teaching the Qur'an in Danish at the University of Copenhagen.
A story about Bluitgen's difficulty set off a subdiscussion about Islam in the general discussion of 'self-censorship' in the Danish media, Denmark being liberal and peaceful enough to fret about such things. It was in the context of this debate that the cultural editor for the big daily newspaper in Demark, Jyllands-Posten - which has a definite right-wing (for Denmark) spin - commissioned and printed the 12 infamous cartoons, in the typically slow Friday edition, Sept. 30, 2005.
The rest, as they say, is that annoying kid from your Intro to IR class's wet dream. In the process, not only Denmark, but also hyperborean Scandinavia and, ultimately, 'the West' as a whole, has been vilified in many Muslim countries.
Rather than go through the details of further developments here, I'd prefer to take the space to suggest that Denmark and Mohammad are not such natural enemies as some people seem to think.
It may be helpful to point out that Islam was a state before it was much of a religion, and so just because at the present moment one group tends to have feelings about cellular phones similar to those the other has for the hajj is no reason for warfare, cultural or otherwise.
Both groups also can't seem to help but be a little bit xenophobic domestically, despite what many from the inside would describe as their best efforts. They both have to deal with a dwindling territorial legacy as well: Just ask Sweden and India. Many people like to identify with the oppressed nowadays, but the inheritors of a diminished empire have their own psycho-cultural burdens.
Muslim countries also seem to be in the midst of trying to figure out how they fit into larger political structures, just like Denmark with the E.U., although the clerical headaches in each case do take very different forms.
These basic similarities may do much to suggest that these two don't have any really good reasons to distemper each other, but this doesn't say much about the political realities on the ground. Rational justification has rarely enjoyed a breakout role in IR's little dramas, much oftener being relegated to makeup and costumes.
If, as Tufts students are so often instructed, we let the idealist scales drop from our eyes, several things indeed become immediately clear. One is that non-Muslims who concern themselves with Muhammad or his religion are often uniquely attacked, literally or figuratively.
For the most part such attacks are targeted at critics of Islam, but there are exceptions, as the October 2004 attack at the University of Copenhagen sharply illustrates. They certainly have little to do with any supposed an-iconism or iconoclasm in either mainstream Islam or any of its Islamicist splinters, as historically such doctrines have rarely been enforced outside of the religious sphere.
This newfound clarity also allows us a measure of sardonic amusement that a cartoon linking Islam to violence has caused such a stir as to bring some Muslims to, well, blow some s-t up.
Given the unprincipled nature of such attacks, three courses of action suggest themselves: total capitulation, total warfare or economic salve, all of which have been publicly advocated in recent weeks.
All three of these seem to have something going for them, but perhaps the most novel is the one taken by the "Support Denmark" campaign: economic salve. As currently formulated, this is a stopgap effort to make up for the economic stress imposed by the boycott of Danish products. The one-sidedness of this approach is explained not only by the fact that we find Denmark's actions apropos of the controversy understandable and the reaction in the Arab world extremely messed up, but also by the fact that the only economic harm inflicted so far has been on Denmark.
(Certainly there's still a lot of Afghani opium consumed in Copenhagen's Vesterbro district, despite the interregional tensions, so it's not clear why Danish dairy products are such a problem on the other end.)
Since the other alternatives are so bleak, I suggest that we push this option as far as possible and bathe both regions in money until they forget what they were worried about. Never mind that neither theocracies nor heavily socialized democracies seem particularly sensitive to economic pressures; Americans need to drastically up their consumption of products from both regions in order to still the tensions produced by boycotting.
Let's all just smoke some sh?®sha, eat some of those little cookies from the blue tin, and set an example of harmony for the rest of the world.
