IMAGES.(The Talk of the Town)(Christian-Muslim relations)

Last week, with Muslims rioting, and dying, because of twelve cartoons about the Prophet published in a Copenhagen newspaper nearly five months earlier, Italy's blithely oblivious Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, compared himself (and not for the first time) to Jesus. "I am the Jesus Christ of politics, a patient victim," he announced to a roomful of Italian moguls. "I put up with everything." He might have said "Muhammad," since, after the riots stop and the boycotts against Denmark fizzle, the patient victim of the Danish cartoon crisis will certainly be the Prophet, put to mockery by the West and to another round of violent political uses by his own people.

By now, the story behind the crisis is fairly clear, although the questions it raises about the claims of literalism and liberalism on a global village of angry neighbors are far from settled. But it is also clear that there are many ways to tell that story, and many moments at which it could be said to properly begin. You could start with the Koran--for Muslims, the words of Allah dictated to Muhammad. The Koran says that there can be "nothing like a likeness" of God, but in fact it makes no reference to images of the prophet to whom the interdiction was revealed. (It is the Hadith, Islam's early narrative, that forbids the faithful to represent him.) And, as Islam spread to Persia and India, civilizations with strong representational traditions, artists did paint him, and the faithful used those paintings in ecstatic devotions. As late as the nineteenth century, Persians were still producing pardehs--huge storytelling canvases--depicting the battle of Karbala and as often as not ending with an image of the Prophet on his horse, his face now hidden by a cloth, ascending to Heaven.

Or you could start the story in 1989, with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, or with the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, in Holland, in the fall of 2004, because those were the first important contemporary instances of Islamist threats against free speech in the secular democracies of the West. Or you could start the story where it officially began, in Denmark, in the summer of 2005, when a children's-book writer looking for an illustrator to collaborate on a book about Islam for Danish schoolchildren was turned down by everyone he asked, on the ground that the project was too "dangerous." By September, his problem had made its way into the liberal Copenhagen daily Politiken, and was promptly co-opted by the conservative daily Jyllands-Posten, whose arts editor--now on "indefinite leave"--asked forty artists to "test the limits of expression" by drawing pictures of Muhammad. Twelve did. The exercise was insensitive, provocative, and arguably imprudent, if for no other reason than that Denmark had spent considerable time and patience on courting Middle Eastern markets. (It stands to lose $1.6 billion in export revenues this year, and one Danish company is already losing $1.7 million a day.) But there was never much argument at home about the newspaper's right to publish the cartoons.

Nor was there any real violence on the part of the two hundred thousand Muslims who live in Denmark; a few thousand demonstrated peacefully in October to protest the cartoons, and some groups filed a criminal complaint against the paper in a local court. There was not even much of a reaction in the Muslim world, which got its first look at the cartoons in mid-October, when Al Fagr, an Egyptian paper, reprinted six of them, one on its front page. Eleven Muslim ambassadors to Denmark did request a meeting with the ordinarily outspoken, conservative Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, but they were turned down, and most people in Denmark, perhaps even the ambassadors, assumed that was ...