The Danish cartoon controversy raised considerable fervor in the Western press about "clashes of civilization". Some suggested that the uproar by Muslims and the violence in the Muslim world testify to an unbridgeable conflict between liberal and religious values. These values are meant to represent something absolute and fundamental. Whether one is an Islamic fundamentalist or a secular liberal fundamentalist, both sides assert an absolute value absolutely. Whether that value is free press or respect for the Prophet, I argue that to think of them as absolutes is not only illusory, but also leads to an unnecessary and unhelpful breakdown in dialogue and shared understandings.

As a matter of historical Shari'a law, there is no valid legal basis for issuing fatwas calling for the death of the cartoonists or newspaper editors involved in the Danish cartoon controversy. Insulting the Prophet through a cartoon invokes two Islamic legal prohibitions. The first prohibition involves creating images. When the prophet of Islam, Muhammad (d. 632), preached his monotheistic message in Mecca, he was opposed by those committed religiously and economically to a pagan faith involving idol worship. Islam arose in and in part was was defined against a context of idol-worshipping paganism. Consequently, it is not surprising to find early traditions using certain Arabic terms to ban the creation of images, where the Arabic signified statues or idols. This dovetails with the prohibition on depicting Muhammad, since such depictions could be used as icons for worship, thereby diverting one's devotion from God to icons of Muhammad. Just as early Christianity witnessed the iconoclastic movement, so too did Muslim tradition ban images out of concern that they may contribute to a culture of paganism and the demise of a monotheistic spirit.

The second prohibition concerns insulting Muhammad. This legal issue arose in the context of a Muslim ruling power governing territory in which Muslims and non-Muslims lived. If a Muslim insults the Prophet, he is considered an apostate. He can repent; but if he does not he is subject to execution. But what about a non-Muslim who insults the prophet? If a non-Muslim lives outside Muslim lands, there is no Shari'a jurisdiction. But if a non-Muslim chooses to live in Muslim lands, he must enter into an agreement in which he agrees to pay a poll tax (jizya) and abide by other rules. This agreement is the "contract of protection" ('aqd al-dhimma) that binds Muslims to protect non-Muslim interests. If a non-Muslim under a contract of protection insults the Prophet, many Muslim jurists argued that the contract is void. As such the non-Muslim loses his protection, becomes an enemy of the state, and can be executed.

These prohibitions certainly seem to underlie the sentiments expressed by Muslims outraged about the cartoons. But they do not provide a legal basis for the flurry of fatwas issued against the cartoonists and editors. The cartoonists and editors are not Muslim, are not within a Muslim jurisdiction, are not bound by a contract of protection, and have no obligations to refrain from insulting the Prophet.

This is not to deny that some Muslims may truly have been offended for religious reasons associated with this Shari'a rules. But what Shari'a means today is something quite different than what it meant in centuries past. Before, Sharia was a rule of law system embedded within a particular society and its institutions of enforcement. It applied only as far as the executive power could enforce its provisions. Today, Shari'a has been stripped of an institutional framework and is reduced to naked rules that have become anchors for founding and stabilizing a religio-political identity in a quickly changing world. For European Muslims, "Sharia" provides norms that allow them to define and legitimate a Muslim political identity against the onslaught of assimilationist and xenophobic European attitudes.

Muslims with this reductivist view of Sharia now live as minorities in liberal societies in Western Europe, where values like free speech and press are nearly iconic. Certainly those of us in liberal societies can point to a constitutional document that espouses the fundamental values of free speech and press (e.g. The Charter, Section 2). But those same documents allow for courts and the legislature to decide when those values can be restrained (The Charter, Section 1). We may all agree that free speech and press are good things; but what they mean in any given situation will depend on how the contingencies of a case play out in light of equally important and at times competing values in the same document.

To suggest that Muslims do not appreciate these values relies on an illusory absolutist dichotomy that ignores the situation in the Muslim world today. For instance, in press releases and a letter to the King of Morocco, the Committee to Protect Journalists has raised concerns about how the government used the Danish cartoon controversy to harass the Muslim publisher of Le Journal Hebdomadaire (for more information view here) . The Journal covered the cartoon controversy in an issue, and debated whether to publish the cartoons. They decided to publish a picture featuring a European newspaper that published the cartoons. The publishers went further and entirely blacked out the cartoons depicted on the European newspaper, in order to avoid any charges of indecency or blasphemy. After the issue was published, demonstrators suddenly appeared at the newspaper's headquarters. When the paper's reporters asked what the demonstrators were upset about, many had no idea. In fact, some were brought to the site in vans registered to the Ministry of Interior. In other words, the protest was allegedly staged by the government to harass and shut down Morocco's most significant opposition newspaper.

To understand the Danish cartoon controversy, it is useful to distinguish between the response in the Muslim world and Europe. In multicultural societies where Muslims are minorities, the challenge involves both sides honestly considering the interstices of their allegedly fundamentalist values, and whether those interstices can create space for dialogues of accommodation, inclusion, and mutual respect. In Muslim societies, the Danish cartoons represent an opportunity for governments to appease their Islamist constituency, while at the same time undermining the freedoms of those who might otherwise express dissenting views. By recognizing that the meaning of the cartoons will differ from society to society, not only can we understand and situate the appalling violence in the Muslim world, but we can also appreciate the effects of xenophobia on minority immigrant communities in multicultural liberal societies.