The "angry Muslim": a history of misrecognition

Danish artist Kurt Westergaard died at the age of 86 on 14 July 2021. The illustrator was the creator of one of the twelve drawings published by Denmark's largest daily conservative newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, in an article entitled Muhammeds ansigt (The face of Muhammad). 

Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the daily had written about the project commissioned by him and which Kurt Westergaard was part of:

Modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context. ... we are on our way to a slippery slope where no-one can tell how the self-censorship will end. That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.

Rose, addressing Danish Muslims, construed the project as an inclusive endeavour: 

We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

The publication of the cartoons was also accompanied by an editorial titled "Truslen fra mørket" ('The Threat from the Darkness') accusing Muslim leaders of feeling "entitled to interpret the prophet's word, and cannot abide the insult that comes from being the object of intelligent satire." 

In their obituaries of Westergaard, Danish and international media focused more on the so-called  Muhammad cartoons controversy than on the rest of the illustrator's life and represented his Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon and the broader Muhammeds ansigt initiative as the spark of a fifteen-year-long history of Muslim anger at the public depiction of the prophet that often turned violent and even murderous. This is not so much a note about Westergaard but about the narratives revolving around the notion of the angry Muslim that has been reproduced by the media on the occasion of his death.

Kurt Westergaard - Muh

Such narratives, as I have argued, focus on the systematic misrecognition of Europe's Muslims. In a homogenizing sweep, they single out the offence allegedly taken by Muslims in Denmark and, later on, worldwide, due to the "reproduction" of irreverent depictions of Muhammad, including the one crafted by Westergaard that has him wear a turban featuring a bomb. They trace the mutation of their anger into anti-Danish violence across the Muslim world in 2006, with attacks on Danish embassies, including Denmark's embassy in Damascus which was gutted by fire, and the loss of life in the process. They focus on its culmination into death threats and assassination plots against Westergaard personally. They note the decision of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, to reprint the cartoons in 2012 as what led to yet another cycle of senseless violence in 2015, when another group of angry Muslims went on a rampage in the offices of the weekly killing of 12 people.

The way much of our media treated Westergaard's passing was reductive as it reduced Westergaard's life's work to his participation to Jyllands-Posten's vicious attempt to "externalize" their Muslim compatriots and treat them as "ignoble savages". Media obituaries totally bypassed Westergaard's life and death, as their actual focus was these angry Muslims, these ungrateful outsiders, and their inability or unwillingness to integrate (in the sense of rejecting and denouncing everything that informed their identities prior to the present), to be taught how to "become proper Danes", and to be told off for all their "shortcomings" emanating from their "savage" past without protest, without contradiction.