Yet that ‘crisis’ was kicked off in 2005 when an editor at Jyllands-Posten learned that a Danish children’s publisher could not find any cartoonist willing to contribute cartoons for the volume on Islam in a series of children’s books on the world’s religions. Startled that such a taboo should exist in a free society, the newspaper tested whether that taboo was breakable. They showed that it was, but at a great cost. As well as leading to riots and embassy-burnings across the Muslim world, there were also protests by Muslims throughout Europe. In London protesters outside the Danish Embassy held signs saying ‘Freedom go to hell’, ‘7/7 is on its way’ and ‘Behead those who insult Islam’. After several thwarted attempts on the life of Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, an axe-wielding Muslim trained by al-Shabaab in Africa entered the cartoonist’s house on New Year’s Day 2010 in an effort to decapitate him. A safe-room that Westergaard had been persuaded to install in his home was the only thing that saved him. This soon became the new normal in Europe. In the wake of the Danish affair, ‘cartoon crises’ started breaking out across Europe.

In 2006, in Norway, the editor of the Christian paper Magazinet chose to reproduce the Danish cartoons to show his readers what all the fuss was about. The Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, not only criticised the paper’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, for doing so, but threatened him with prosecution. When a mob burnt down the Norwegian Embassy in Damascus the Prime Minister claimed that Selbekk was jointly responsible for the outrage. Other political and cultural figures lined up to attack the ‘provocation’ and lack of respect shown by the paper, while Selbekk himself was forced to go into hiding and receive police protection.

The next year a cartoon crisis broke out in Sweden when the artist Lars Vilks drew a picture of Mohammed and was chased into hiding. As with the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, in the years that followed there were multiple terrorist efforts to kill him. In 2011 the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – one of the only publications to reprint the Danish cartoons – were firebombed in Paris. In 2013 the Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard – a prominent Danish critic of Islam – was visited at his door in the morning by a gunman who fired two shots at his head. The 70-year-old survived because the assassin’s gun jammed on the second bullet. Hedegaard managed to punch the man, who subsequently ran off, finding sanctuary in Turkey.