It was said that liberal Denmark didn’t deserve to be tarnished. But it is a hotbed of intolerance toward Muslims. In no other EU country is there so much xenophobia and hostility toward Islam, according to the European Network Against Racism. Queen Margrethe has stated that there’s “something scary” about the “totalitarianism that’s part of Islam.” Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s parliamentary coalition partner, the People’s Party, has called Muslims “cancer cells,” “seeds of weeds” and “a plague on Europe.”17 The party also displays paranoia: “Muslim immigration is a way for Muslims to conquer us, just as they have done for the past 1,400 years.” “All countries in the West are infiltrated by Muslims. They are nice to us until they are enough to kill us.”18

It was said that Muslims were trying to force non-Muslims to live by Islamic taboos. Not so. Muslims in the West were only asking that democracies live up to democratic values, namely, the laws and mores governing freedom of speech. The real issue was that freedom of speech does have limits. PEN International, the writers’ group that is also a leading advocate of freedom of speech, speaks in its charter to the “unhampered transmission of thought.” But it also insists that “since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.” It calls on PEN members to foster “good understanding and mutual respect among nations...to do their utmost to dispel race, class and national hatreds, and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world.”

The Rushdie, van Gogh and Danish cartoon issues show that the West and the world of Islam are no longer planets apart in this global village. What we say about each other has repercussions, both worldwide and in the West, especially given the presence of millions of Muslim citizens in Europe, North America and Australia. How the West conducts itself toward Muslims is a test of its pluralistic civility, cosmopolitan collectivity and the most fundamental principles of democracy.

THE HIJAB DEBATE

A head covering on a Muslim is a political statement but it is not when on a Christian nun’s head.

—Riem Spielhaus, Humboldt University19

A simple scarf. That’s all a hijab is. Yet it has had the power to unnerve Europe, and parts of the Muslim world. In some Islamic nations, women must wear it. In parts of Europe and in Turkey and Uzbekistan, schoolgirls and teachers must remove it. There’s something about this small piece of cloth that unnerves democrats and despots alike. The hijabi woman has been the target of fascist and feminist as well as racist and religious wrath. She is victimized by those wanting to subjugate her or liberate her. She is the battleground on which anti- and pro-Islamic ideological armies wage wars.