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"Not Everything Can Be Explained By Words Alone”
September 9, 2009
by Jytte Klausen
Jytte Klausen is a professor of comparative politics at Brandeis University and author of the forthcoming The Cartoons That Shook the World. Her previous book was The Challenge of Islam: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2005). This is the first time she has written about the controversy over her new book.
On July 23, over a cup of coffee in the Westin hotel in the Back Bay in Boston, I was told by Linda Lorimer and John Donatich—a vice president of Yale and the director of the Yale University Press—that the university had consulted with experts on security matters and made a decision regarding my forthcoming book. A reproduction of the September 30, 2005, page from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, with the 12 cartoons of Muhammad, would be removed from my book, which is about the protests against those cartoons. My book will appear in a few weeks with both an editor’s note outlining the press’s reasons for the decision and a note from me expressing regret.
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The experts' advice grew into a confidential 14-page memo.
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Over the weeks that followed the experts' advice grew into a confidential 14-page memo. Some names and recommendations were disclosed during our first meeting on the condition that I kept them confidential. The memo was made available to me on the condition that I sign a non-disclosure agreement disallowing me from speaking about both the names and the substances in the memo. I did not sign the agreement and have not read the memo.
Parts are nonetheless known. A few of the experts subsequently stated their reasons publicly. Yale University Press’s webpage now carries a statement on my book that says, “There remains a serious threat of violence if the cartoons were reprinted in the context of a book about the controversy.”
Cited is John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, who worries about “an appreciable chance of violence occurring if these images were published by the press.” In an interview with the Yale Daily News, the ambassador refuted speculations that he was concerned about violence on the campus in New Haven and described the risk of a terrorist response to my book as “generic” but also my decision to include the cartoons as “gratuitous.”
Marcia Inhorn, a professor of anthropology, who also participated in the meeting in Boston, says in the website statement: “If Yale publishes this book with any of the proposed illustrations, it is likely to provoke a violent outcry.” Inhorn’s statement reflects the fact that the press removed not only the page with cartoons but also other illustrations, including a print from a well-known Ottoman illustrated manuscript featuring the Prophet. (The reference to “this” book reflects the fact that Yale University Press in 1997 published a book containing reproductions of famous images of the Muslim Prophet.)
John Donatich has spoken repeatedly about the possibility of blood on his hands (and mine, I have to assume) if we reproduced the cartoons. The Yale Press statement also says: “Republication of the cartoons—not just the original printing of them in Denmark—has repeatedly resulted in violence around the world. More than two hundred lives have been lost, and hundreds more have been injured.”
The statistics, ironically, are culled from my book. However, my book clearly shows that violence broke out in conflicts with little connection to the original protests in Denmark or the international diplomatic protests. Three-fourths of the deaths occurred in northern Nigeria where the imposition of shariah-law has produced a virtual civil war. A press release from Al Qaeda described its 2008 bombing of the Danish embassy in Islamabad as a retribution for the cartoons but was in fact part of a string of attacks on foreign diplomatic missions, all which were followed up by press releases citing various sins of the infidels. The deaths resulted from violence in long-running conflicts where the cartoons became a new symbol in an old terrorist campaign or a rallying point in a protracted standoff between extremists and local governments.
To be sure, there can be honest differences in the assessment of risks of violence. However, none of the experts consulted by Yale in late July and early August had read my book. The manuscript was turned in to the press in December 2008. A draft of the manuscript was subjected to academic review before it was signed on by the press and again after I turned in the completed version. The four reviewers consulted for the academic review process were asked about the propriety of including the page from the newspaper with the cartoons and supported it. The publication committee of the press, made up of Yale faculty members, reviewed the decision to publish and accepted the manuscript, making a note of the importance of including the page with the cartoons.
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I had good grounds for thinking that there was no real danger in reproducing the images.
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I had, of course, thought long and hard about my course of action, but I had good grounds for thinking that there was no real danger in reproducing the images.
In December 2006, I met in Copenhagen with Ahmed Abu Laban, one of the four imams who initiated the protests against cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten. Abu Laban gave me a copy of a dossier he and the mosque activists had put together to publicize their complaint. The imams brought the dossier along on a visit to Cairo in December 2005 and it later turned up at various important junctures at meetings in the Middle East, where angry resolutions against the Danes were passed.
Written in Arabic, the folder included various documentary materials about the situation of Muslims in Denmark. It also contained the 12 original cartoons plus three images—subsequently dubbed the “false cartoons”—which were graphic drawings with vulgarly sexual themes. The dossier provided (not entirely accurate) Arabic translations of the captions. The imams unwisely bragged about their success in spreading the word about the cartoons, and many Danes believed, as did international journalists, that they were responsible for getting Egypt, the Arab League, and the 56-member-state Organization of the Islamic Conference involved in the conflict.
The existence of the dossier was well known. It proved a helpful prop for my research. I produced it at interviews with Muslim diplomats and government ministers, activists and association leaders, and religious scholars, from Cairo to Baku, and from Paris to London. My purpose was to trace the dossier’s trail from Copenhagen to Cairo and Jeddah and back to European capitals and also to see how important the presence of the three “false cartoons” was for Muslim leaders' view of the gravity of the offense caused by the cartoons.
On those occasions I also told my interlocutors about my plans to include the Jyllands-Posten’s page in my book. Most urged me to go ahead. Muslims had been misunderstood, they said: “It never was about depiction.” Or, for those who thought it was about depiction, the problem was not that these were “forbidden” images. Thami Lhaj Breze, secretary general of the French Muslim Brotherhood organization, said: ''It is fine with me if they want to draw the Prophet, but they have to show he is very beautiful.” Even the Danish mosque activists, who did think it was about depiction, were happy to endlessly discuss the images and what was wrong with them.
The book will be out in a few weeks and readers can see what I found out about the role of the Danish imams' dossier in inflaming the global protests. My experience in using the dossier to elicit information about what exactly so many Muslims had against the cartoons taught me that not everything can be explained by words alone. It became clear to me that nothing could substitute for looking at the cartoons and parsing their multiple and contradictory meanings and interpretations.  |
