A picture can be worth a thousand words, but it can also cause boycotts, burning embassies and deaths.
Twelve political cartoons that ran in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, last September and were reprinted in a Norwegian paper last week depicting Muhammad negatively have caused an uproar across the Islamic world.
Syria and Saudi Arabia have recalled their envoys to Denmark. Sales of Danish goods have fallen or been boycotted altogether. Furthermore, rioters in Syria set the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus ablaze and at least four protesters were killed in Afghanistan.
Danish Siddiqui, president of the Muslim Student Association, said the depictions of Muhammad were "outrageous" and "not called for."
Siddiqui said although violence is not condoned, this is not an issue of freedom of speech, but rather one of hate speech because "it goes to the root of Islam."
Furthermore, he said the defiance of republishing the cartoons is making the situation worse.
Russell Hayes, U of M political science and international studies major, said he supports what the people in Denmark did.
Hayes said an apology should be issued for offending the Muslim world, but not for running the images in newspapers.
Blair Padbury, a sophomore marketing major, said it is an issue of freedom of the press versus offending people's beliefs.
Padbury said he would not republish the pictures, though the reaction to them is "way overboard."
"People take their religion seriously, but I'm amazed at the extremity," Padbury said.
Memphis Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden said he would print the pictures as a news item discussing the outrage surrounding them. However, he said he does not believe the pictures were originally printed in the proper context.
But VanWyngarden does defend the right of the publishers.
"The laws of radical religion have no place," he said. He also said the Flyer is planning to run a cartoon satirizing the fact that people reacted to a cartoon lampooning radicalism by behaving radically.
According to Siddiqui, the best course of action is for people to get to know a Muslim personally because there is "already enough confusion and misunderstanding about Islam."
He encourages students to visit the Mosque on Mynders to learn more about Islam and not to take their views of the religion from the portrayals of Muslims in the media.
