Summit the catalyst for cartoon protests

MIDDLE EAST - A summit of leading Muslim nations held in Mecca in December played a key role in stoking outraged protests across the Islamic world against a series of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

A dossier of the cartoons, compiled by Danish Muslims, was handed around the sidelines of the meeting, the largest of its kind ever held, attended by 57 Islamic nations including leaders such as Iran's firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Saudi King.

The meeting in Islam's holiest city appears to have been a major catalyst for turning local anger at the blasphemous images into a matter of, often violent, public protest in most Muslim nations.

It also persuaded a number of countries including Syria and Iran to give huge media exposure to the cartoon controversy in their heavily state-controlled media.

Muhammed El Sayed Said, Deputy Director of Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said the Mecca meeting was a turning point in internationalising the cartoons issue.

"Things started to get really bad once the Islamic conference picked it up," he said.

"It came to the point where everyone had to score a point to be seen as championing the cause of Islam."

The emergency summit of the Organisation of the Islamic conference (OIC) was originally called to address terrorism and sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims, but came to be dominated by the satirical caricatures of the Prophet, originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten by editor Flemming Rose.

Despite the absence of the cartoons from the formal agenda, the OIC issued a strongly-worded condemnation of them in its closing statement.

"[We express our] concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemn the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad."

The communique went on to attack the practice of "using the freedom of expression as a pretext for defaming religions".

Following the expanded media coverage of the Danish cartoons in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, there have been a series of violent protests and at least 10 people have been killed across the Islamic world so far.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said the cartoons had provided Arab governments under pressure from the West for democratic reforms with an opportunity to hit back in the public opinion stakes.

"[Demonstrations] started as a visceral reaction - of course they were offended - and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look this is the democracy they're talking about'," he told the New York Times.

Ahmed Akkari, a Lebanese-born Dane and spokesman for a group of Danish Muslim organisations, said the Mecca summit had been the culmination of a slow-boil campaign to publicise the offending cartoons.

He denies allegations that a second set of more offensive, unpublished cartoons - faxed to Muslim groups by far-right extremists - were presented to Muslim leaders without distinction.

The published cartoons in the dossier were in colour and the unpublished ones were clearly marked and in black and white, said Akkari.

After a number of failed attempts to highlight the issue to Muslim ambassadors in Denmark, Akkari was part of a delegation that flew to Cairo in early December where they met the Grand Mufti, the country's spiritual leader, and the Foreign Minister Abdoul Gheit.

"The meetings [in the Middle East] had a certain importance," he said. "We thought we would mobilise influential people so that they could give us their voice in Denmark."

Ahmed Abu Laban, a radical cleric and leading critic in Denmark of the cartoons, said the purpose of the delegation to the Middle East was to raise awareness, not to stoke anger.

"We have been addressing the issue with a cool head.

"We were trying to seek academic and religious help from the Middle East," he said.

- INDEPENDENT