Daily now, Muslim protests are growing worldwide over Danish newspaper cartoons published earlier this week, which employed depictions of the Prophet Muhammad to criticize Islamic terrorism. You probably knew that. And maybe even that the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus have been set afire by protestors. Which strikes me as rather a bit much. But you may not have yet stumbled across this penetrating piece by BBC's Arab Affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi.

The row over the Danish cartoons would probably have remained a local dispute between some Muslims and a Danish newspaper had it not been for three factors: the rise of violent political Islam; America's war on terror; modern transnational media. America's war on terror is still largely perceived in the Arab world as a war on Islam - a perception reinforced by the fact that it is happening exclusively in Muslim countries, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.

Issues such as the Iraq war are seen as catalysts in the row. Parts of the Arab media describes it as a modern crusade. Many Arab columnists often speak of a campaign to distort and discredit Islam. For them, the row over the Danish cartoons is yet another confirmation of this perception. But long before the 11 September attacks and America's war on al-Qaeda, Islamists were aggressively promoting their world view and attacking liberal secular values, not only in the West but across the Arab and Muslim world as well. The best-known example in the West is the row caused by Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, which culminated in the notorious death fatwa against its author by the late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeyni. In Egypt, the Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, survived a knife attack in 1994 for allegedly insulting Islam in one of his novels. Another prominent writer, Farag Fouda, was gunned down in Cairo for alleged apostasy.

The internet and satellite broadcasting are being diligently used by Islamist activists across the world to drum up support for the doctrine of a universal Muslim nation up against an aggressive and imperialist West. A local Danish dispute is thus quickly elevated to the level of a global conflict. The row over the Danish cartoons is yet another dramatic illustration of the huge gap between secular liberal values in the West and the predominantly religious outlook of Middle Eastern societies. But for Muslims living in Europe it poses anew the same old dilemma about integration and cultural identity....part of the Western consensus is that poking fun at religious figures is acceptable. It seems that some Muslim activists living in Europe are determined to redefine the boundaries of that consensus.

Multiculturalism is the slipperiest of slippery slopes, in this day and age. To the theocratic intellectual fascists offended by the cartoons - offended to the point of violence, arson, and/or issuance of deathly threats: If you can't take the heat, sorry, but you don't get to burn down the kitchen.

In a not entirely perverse way, the cartoonishly evident demons afflicting Islam today lead me to conclude that it's not so bad, after all, that the extremist group Hamas won the Palestinian elections. As U.S. Rep. Sam Rayburn said in 1953: "A jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one." Or, as the late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago once said of his critics: "What trees do they plant?"

The burden of Islam's assimilation with modernity lies squarely with Muslims. The same Internet and communications technology which now feed global Muslim alienation could be used instead to spread a message of modernity; of real mulitcultural tolerance which respects Western civilization; of the great value and importance of modern, secular education; secular legal institutions; economic development; and electoral reform. In the end, promulgation and penetration of these values is the only way Islam will survive the death wish of the Wahhabist zealots.

TECHNORATI TAGS: MUSLIM. CARTOONS, PROTESTS, EMBASSY FIRES, DAMASCUS, BBC, MAGDI ABDELHADI, CENSORSHIP, ISLAM