the best article I’ve read so far on the context of the muslim cartoon controversy:

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3] That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

this to my mind explains why so much of the reaction seems to be a lashing out in fear. Fear of losing control in the face of an information age. Fear of losing ground. Fear of the erosion of faith through widespread exposure to the secular world. Fear of social constructs collapsing.

These seem to me to be the desperate measures of desperate people trying to stop the march of the inevitable.

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muslim cartoon controversy