The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Conflict

The “Muhammad crisis,” the “Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,” or “The Jyllands-Posten Crisis” are three different headings used for the global, violent reactions that broke out in early 2006. The cartoon crisis was triggered by the publication of 12 cartoons in the largest Danish daily newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005 and the Danish governments refusal to meet with 11 concerned ambassadors. However, Jyllands-Posten’s record on covering Islam; the ever growing restrictive identity politics and migration policies and the popular association of Islam with terrorism made it predictable that something drastic would eventually happen, although neither the form of the counter-reaction or the stubborn anti-Islamic forces were unknown. This collection of chapters seeks to fill out some of the most glaring holes in the media coverage and academic treatment of the Muhammad cartoon story. It will do so by situating the conflict more firmly in its proper socio-historical context by drawing on the author’s basic research on the Danish news media’s coverage of ethnic and religious minorities since the mid 1990s. The author uses thick contextualization to analyze this very current theme in IMER studies, which has consequences for most immigrants of non-Western countries to the Nordic countries.