Combine the treatment of Muslims in Europe with the European resistance to Turkey and you get the uneasy feeling that Europe is sitting on a time bomb. It is a situation that can only be defused, as the Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has often pointed out, by acknowledging that Islam is as much a religion of Europe as Christianity and Judaism, that Muslims are also European, that there is no dichotomy in being Muslim and European any more than there is in being Jewish and European, that Muslims are there to stay, and that they deserve no less in terms of basic human rights than their fellow citizens.14

RUSHDIE TO VAN GOGH TO CARTOONS

It goes without saying that the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his anti-Islamic documentary Submission, about the mistreatment of Muslim women, was shocking; that his artistic collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali should not have had to live under 24-hour police protection; and that the 1989 fatwa of death by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie for his book, The Satanic Verses, was a call for medieval jungle justice. It was the duty of civilized peoples everywhere to stand steadfast with Rushdie and force Tehran ultimately to recant the fatwa. The Dutch police also deserve kudos for apprehending van Gogh’s murderer, and the courts for sentencing him to life imprisonment.

But — yes, there is a but — there is a debate in democracies over whether freedom of expression has limits. It does in countries that have anti-hate laws. Even those that don’t legislate limits have their own notions of what is and is not acceptable. It seems that the self-restraint normally exercised in challenging the sacred is more readily abandoned in dealing with Islam. The attacks on Islam and Muhammad are, arguably, more persistent, more inflammatory and more vulgar than those against other faiths and other prophets.

In the Rushdie novel, the prostitutes were named after the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, and their customers drew pleasure because they were the wives of “Mahound,” the derogatory name given the Prophet by post-Crusades Europe. In van Gogh’s documentary, a verse from the Qur’an was projected onto a woman’s naked body, leaving the impression that God decreed women to be the chattel of men. In fact, Islam ended the treatment of women as property (see Women).

To the West, the van Gogh and Rushdie cases proved the murderous irrationality of Muslims. To most Muslims, it showed how incendiary some can be in vilifying Islam.