Tempest behind the turban
PARIS
''THE BOMB in the turban," as many Frenchmen are calling this explosion after the most controversial of the Danish cartoons, has blown up in everybody's face here in the country with the largest Muslim population in Europe.
French Muslims themselves are divided over the issue. While one group, the Union of Muslim Associations, organized a protest march in the Place de la Republique last weekend, the larger umbrella organization, the French Council of the Muslim Faith, was strongly opposed. With tensions so high, many French Muslims thought anything that might further inflame the situation should be avoided.
Most of the Muslims I talked to thought it was important that French President Jacques Chirac had made a statement that Muslims took to be sympathetic. Some, although they may have been upset at the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, were nonetheless mindful of the long tradition in France of satirical publications.
The Council went to court last week trying to prevent the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo from reprinting the Danish cartoons plus printing new ones of its own. One showed Mohammed looking at the cartoons and saying, ''This is the first time the Danes have made me laugh."
The lawsuit to stop publication failed on a technicality, but the Council intends to sue papers that reprinted the cartoons on the basis of a French law that forbids insulting a religion. Chems-eddine Hafiz, a lawyer for the Council, told me that a precedent could be found in a case last March against a French fashion company for posing half-naked girls in the positions of the 12 apostles as portrayed in Leonardo da Vinci's ''The Last Supper." The Catholic Church brought suit and won.
The Kuwaiti ambassador to France, in his role as the dean of ambassadors from Muslim countries, had told the Council that all expenses for any legal action would be taken care of, according to Hafiz, who wasn't sure whether the Council would accept the offer.
I spoke to Tewfik Allal, an Algerian Frenchman born in Morocco who started an Association for the Manifestos of Liberty, and he told me that the cartoon issue was more divisive than when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Salman Rushdie's death for writing ''The Satanic Verses" in 1989. He said it was more divisive even than banning head scarves for Muslim school girls, '' because of the context, social and political." The perceived blasphemy comes when so many tensions between East and West are being played out at the same time. ''This makes for terrible tension," he said, both in France and abroad.
Allal made a name for himself in France by stressing that you can be a good Muslim and accept European values as well. He wrote an article in last week's Charlie Hebdo that was eclipsed by the cartoons, but quoted Hezbollah as saying that if only Khomeini had found someone to execute his fatwa against Rushdie, ''this rabble in Denmark, in Norway, and in France who insult our Prophet Mohammed would never have dared to do this." Allal's response was that this is nothing less than a demand that no Muslim be entitled to be a European, or think like a European -- a demand he rejects.
I asked Olivier Roy, the French writer and expert on Islam, why he thought the bomb in the turban had caused so much anger in the Muslim world beyond Europe four months after the cartoon was originally published. He said to look closely at some of the areas where the worst demonstrations were taking place: Gaza, Iran, Beirut, Damascus, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Each, Roy said, had a reason to punish Europe.
Europe had always seemed to be a friend of the Palestinians while the United States favored Israel, he said. Yet, after Hamas's victory in elections last month, Europe seemed to be hardening its attitude, while the Bush administration was uncharacteristically quiet on the matter.
On Iran, after years of playing the good cop to America's tough cop, Europe supported Iran's recent referral to the UN Security Council. Damascus was still hurting from the French role in driving Syria out of Lebanon, and in Afghanistan, European troops were moving into new areas under the authority of NATO, which helped take the pressure off the thinly-stretched American military. This was not coincidental, according to Roy. Yet manipulated or not, the affair of the cartoons shows that the alienation between East and West has never been more intense.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 