The civilizational theatrics presenting the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Islam as its enemy, have been part of spectacles in the Western public sphere since Ernst Renan lectured—and Jamal al din al Afghani challenged him—in nineteenth-century Paris. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gave new life to these theatrics when he issued his notorious fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie. The production of Submission, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the threats to Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and the riots that followed; and Geert Wilder's Fitna and his ongoing trial continue them.

For Flemming Rose and Carsten Juste, the object of the initial publication of the cartoons appears to have been less about free speech than about the willful harassment of a minority.Footnote ¹ Juste argued that Muslims needed to be cured of their “sickly oversensitivity.” Rose wanted Muslims to be subject to cultural initiation through humiliation: hazed like pledges in a national fraternity. He later told Die Zeit that “by making fun of people we've also including them in our society. It's not always easy for those concerned, but that's the price they've got to pay.”Footnote ² As Jytte Klausen notes, Jyllands-Posten had earlier refused to publish cartoons of Jesus, which they feared would offend readers. The paper would later make legal attempts to silence a professor who had advised against publishing the cartoons (pp. 30; 32). Rose and the Jyllands-Posten “are not fundamentalists in our support for freedom of expression,” Rose wrote in the Washington Post, and “would not publish pornographic images, or graphic images of dead bodies; swear words rarely make it into our pages.” “The cartoon story,” he continued, “is different.”Footnote ³ So it is.

The now-notorious article came and went. There appears to have been no significant reaction at all either in Denmark or the Middle East. The Jyllands-Posten appears to have been dissatisfied with this lack of reaction. Journalists circulated them, after publication, to prominent imams in Copenhagen. The imams were disturbed but called only for an apology from the paper. There was no violent (or even inflammatory) reaction.Footnote ⁴ The cartoons had been noticed abroad. The Egyptian newspaper al Fagr had published them with a negative editorial in October, which neither urged nor produced a violent reaction.

Months later, in December, Abu Laban and other Danish imams brought a folio of these and other anti-Muslim cartoons to a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference they were scheduled to attend in Mecca. The imams wished to discuss the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. They therefore brought not only the cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten but other examples of anti-Muslim caricature. Klausen refers to these as the “fake” cartoons, “though there is no indication that the imams laid them at the door of Jyllands-Posten (p. 187). The meeting produced a formal diplomatic expression of “concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims” and over “using the freedom of expression as a pretext for defaming religions.” It did not call for violent action, and no violence occurred in response to the meeting. One of the Danish imams later said of himself and his colleagues, “We are not professional enough to know what would be the response of media, nor the interest of politicians there.”Footnote ⁵ He might have said the same of the Danish journalists.

As the cartoons began to circulate farther afield, the file enlarged. Muslims added other, more offensive, caricatures as evidence of anti-Muslim sentiment, and the images moved outside Europe, outside the realm of the diplomatic and into a rougher politics. Politicians and media figures in the Islamic world did as Flemming Rose and Carsten Juste had done: They circulated and supplemented the images in the hope of kindling a more outraged—and hence more newsworthy—response. They got it.

Klausen's Table 2 presents the “number of victims associated with demonstrations against the Danish cartoons.”Footnote ⁶ The number of deaths and injuries appears large indeed until one reads the table carefully. Klausen counts 241 to 248+ deaths over a four-month period, of which 205 to 207 come from a single five-day period in Nigeria. She counts 790 to 800+ injuries, of which 485+ come from Nigeria.Footnote ⁷ These figures are, unfortunately, not remarkable in the Nigerian context. The BBC reported more than 200 deaths in Nigeria on January 20, 2010, writing that “[t]he area has seen several bouts of deadly violence in recent years. At least 200 people were killed in an outbreak of fighting between Muslims and Christians in 2008, while some 1,000 died in a riot in 2001.”Footnote ⁸ The next largest—but much smaller—group of deaths (11) was of Libyan rioters shot by Libyan police. This group of rioters had split off from a larger peaceful demonstration and was attacked by the police after it became violent. Here, the link to the Danish cartoons is tenuous. The deaths were of Libyans by Libyans. The protest was directed at the Italian consulate and was prompted by an Italian minister who wore a T-shirt displaying the cartoons during a television appearance. The cartoons became inflammatory in the Libyan context only when they were linked to Libya's former colonizer, Italy.Footnote ⁹ The four deaths in Afghani riots against the cartoons might be compared with 14 deaths in anti-US riots in the same period. Denmark has soldiers serving with US forces in Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁰

Only one of the deaths and none of the injuries occur in the West. The single death was a suicide.

Klausen's refusal to accept the conventional construction of the cartoon controversy as a dispute over freedom of speech that divided Muslims and “Westerners” (who, by definition, cannot be Muslim) is a critical and invaluable intervention (pp. 2; 53). This construction is profoundly misleading. There was no threat to freedom of speech. No Dane feared the intervention of the state. Nor did they fear the reaction of outraged majority sentiment. They did not even fear the “sickly oversensitivity” of the Muslims they sought to offend. They were correct. Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons. The newspaper was printed, circulated, and read. Those who objected to the cartoons did so in print and in demonstrations that remained peaceful.

The controversy in the West—and beyond—was not over the publication of the cartoons but over the insistence on their republication. The demand was not simply that Muhammad be visible, that Muhammad be represented as a Westerner would have him, but that he be caricatured, and that these representations constantly proliferate—that they be repeated over and over again. It was not enough that artists could draw Muhammad in forms that might be offensive to some Muslims; they were required to do so. It is not enough that they do so once; the images must be endlessly repeated, published, and republished. If Muslims did not react, the images had to be brought to their religious leaders. When the religious leaders did not react with sufficient outrage, the images had to be republished and recirculated. What is at stake in this continually reiterated demand?

Objections to republication of the Muhammed cartoons came from a variety of Westerners, as well as the belatedly outraged in the East. Tariq Ramadan wrote that “Muslims must understand that laughing at religion is a part of the broader culture in which they live in Europe, going back to Voltaire.” He endorsed the principle of freedom of speech and affirmed the legality of the cartoons, though he condemned their publication. “In any society,” he wrote, “there is a civic understanding that free speech should be used wisely so not as to provoke sensitivities, particularly in hybrid, multicultural societies we see in the world today. It is a matter of civic responsibility and wisdom, not a question of legality or rights”Footnote ¹¹

Most newspapers in the United States and Britain chose not to publish the cartoons, citing editorial policies of respect for religious belief. The Wall Street Journal's editorial read: “The right to mock a religion may be absolute, but so is the right to publish most forms of pornography: Neither is appropriate in a serious publication,” adding, “That applies whether the religion is Islam, Christianity or any other, and whether the cartoons are being published for the first time or reprinted elsewhere as acts of solidarity in the face of an implied threat” (February 4, 2006). Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, citing the “purposely sacrilegious” character of the cartoons, said that the Star-Tribune does not publish something offensive “simply to prove we can.”Footnote ¹² The New York Times editorial read: “The New York Times and much of the rest of the nation's news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them. That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols.”Footnote ¹³

Most European newspapers republished the cartoons, presenting their action as a courageous defense of free speech. Praising one's own courage is always suspect, but in this case it seems more than usually disingenuous. Insulting a minority religion is a poor test of both freedom of speech and civil courage. If freedom of speech is at issue, a defiance of majority opinion provides a more effective test. If offending Muslims is an act of courage, then Mme. Odile Bonnivard ladling out her pig soupe identitaire should be in the running for the Legion of Honor.Footnote ¹⁴ Had Jyllands-Posten called for the public sounding of the Muslim call to prayer or defended the wearing of headscarve,s we might praise its civil courage. European journalists, however, preened themselves on their courage in attacking a minority population with little political power and subject to discrimination and continuing slights.

A more complex endorsement of the reprinting of the cartoons came from diverse elements of the European Right. Dyab Abu Jahjah of the Arab European League agreed with the position taken by the European press, writing that he too believed “that one must be able of publishing and saying anything. I do not believe in red lines, and I do not believe that anything should be above the freedom of human expression.” He added, “Europeans think that freedom of speech is guaranteed in Europe, and that they are defending it against Islamic pressure,” but argues that “Muslims and others” could not, for example, express “disgust” with homosexuality, or call it “a sickness and a deviation.”Footnote ¹⁵ Abu Jahjah was immediately endorsed by Paul Beilin, the editor of the Brussels Journal, “The Voice of Conservatism in Europe.” “Mr. Jahjah certainly has a point here,” Beilin wrote. “Not only Muslims are not allowed to voice all their opinions. Only last week the French parliamentarian Christian Vanneste was sentenced in court to a heavy fine because he had stated that homosexual behaviour endangers the survival of humanity and that heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality.”Footnote ¹⁶

The conservative Flemish nationalist Beilin and the radical Abu Jahjah both endorse the expression of opinions that are unpopular, shocking to many, and in some cases illegal. This is not pretty, but it is what the Enlightenment aimed to protect. Speech of this kind—politically unpopular speech; speech that would outrage the powerful or the many; speech that extends the range of political debate; speech that addresses questions of immediate political moment—is what freedom of speech was meant to secure. Shock jocks, whether they speak on American radio or post cartoons on the front page, urinate on the Bible, or burn the Koran, may be protected (I believe they should be) by provisions securing freedom of speech, but they are parasites on a right that has more profound commitments. They diminish a right meant to secure speech that is more political, more important, and far more dangerous than theirs.

Casting the debate over the cartoons as a moment in a “clash of civilizations” presents a false West, and a false Islam. Muslim secularists and free speech fundamentalists disappear. Western cosmopolitans and cultural conservatives disappear as well. Each civilization is reduced to something more parochial: less thoughtful, more uniform, less contentious; more dogmatic, less political; in short, less civilized.

Casting the controversy over the cartoons as a debate over free speech conceals the structures and strategies that most endanger free speech in the West. We of the West are encouraged to think that we speak freely when we are most constrained; to exchange the hazardous practice of speaking truth to power for the less risky business of mocking minorities; to forget that the right to remain silent is at the heart of freedom of speech.

There is more than one way to take away freedom of speech. People can be silenced, but they can also be made to speak. Freedom of speech requires that when people speak, they speak as they choose, according to their own will. We know that people can be made to say things they do not wish to say. Struggles for religious and political freedom in the early modern West were marked by resistance to loyalty oaths and test acts. Inquisitorial institutions, past and present, have developed a number of technologies for making people speak. “We have ways of making you talk” is what we have the most abhorrent villains say.

There are more subtle ways of making people talk. Anyone who has read Michel Foucault or watched daytime television knows the power of the confessional impulse. Late moderns in Europe and America are taught to reveal themselves whether they want to or not: to speak, and speak endlessly, of matters once thought wholly private.

The cartoon controversy shows us people who are not permitted to speak freely, who are obliged instead to say what others would like them to say, to speak texts dictated to them by others, to publish what they would rather not publish, and to do so over and over again. These compulsory speech acts are a prominent part of contemporary political discourse. They include the demand that “moderate Muslims,” “more Muslims,” or “Muslims” denounce the 9/11 attacks and accept or even engage in the mockery of their religion; that Palestinian politicians, Palestinian, academics, the Palestinian Authority, or “Palestinians” recognize Israel or reject the electoral victory of Hamas. In response to these prescriptive imperatives, people can speak—they are required to speak—but they cannot speak freely.

The content of these demands testifies to the presence of prejudice. That the demands proliferate testifies to the radical narrowing of the right to free speech. The emergence of new—and the revival of old—strategies to constrain speech extends beyond the initial Muslim targets to Christians, Jews, and secularists: to anyone who wants to dissent from or go beyond the prescribed speech.

It is not enough for the soi-disant defenders of the Enlightenment that the cartoons were drawn and printed, that they were published and republished. It is not enough that they are readily available on the Internet. They must continually circulate, and they must circulate without challenge or response.

For these so-called defenders of free speech, only one genre of speech act is permissible. Speech proves its freedom to them when—and only when—it is used to attack Muslims, Islam, or the Koran. The discourse that shows Muslims opposed to freedom of speech makes Muslims the compulsory targets of that speech. It is not enough that one speak of Muslims. It is not enough that one speak ill of them. One is required to speak ill of Muslims: to do it in prescribed ways, and to repeat it over and over, without challenge or critique.

Under this regime of speech, freedom of speech is no longer a matter of supporting the expression of unpopular opinions, defending the rights of minorities to a place in the public square, or speaking truth to power.

Early modern liberalism recognized the hazards of denying silence and compelling speech. Early liberals protested against compulsory speech acts in resistance to loyalty oaths and compulsory professions of faith, and enshrined the right to remain silent. Late-modern thought recognizes the imperative to confession—the requirement that one speak, and speak endlessly, in compulsory self-disclosure—as a strategy of surveillance, repression, and control. We must recognize that the compulsory speech acts required of Muslims and in regard to Muslims mark a broader political deployment of this strategy. If we are to protect freedom of speech effectively, we must recognize that the greatest threats now come not from those who would silence speech but from those who would dictate just what it is we have to say.