c. 2006 Religion News Service

PARIS _ Nursing an almost empty cup of coffee in a cafe, Sebhi Mennad confessed he had not even seen the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have unleashed violence across Asia and the Middle East.

The 55-year-old, gray-haired Algerian said Wednesday (Feb. 8) he is not offended by the alleged blasphemy. But he does object to the way fellow Muslims in other parts of the world are not respecting European standards of taste and free speech.

“They can’t meddle with Europe and what Europe does,” said Mennad, who has lived in France for decades and calls himself a believing but non-practicing Muslim. “What happens in Africa and elsewhere is one thing, but what happens in Europe is about Europe.”

Mennad doesn’t speak for all of the estimated 15 million to 20 million Muslims living in Europe, but his attitude reflects what experts say is a distinctive outlook among Muslims living here. Despite pockets of outrage and protest, analysts say many in Europe’s Islamic community appear to be either indifferent to the caricatures or reconciled to the right of free expression, however offensive.

Others see the tempered response as the calm before a storm that could erupt at any time, like the French riots of October.

European Muslims have expressed their anger over the cartoons through largely peaceful demonstrations. Others have used legal tools to register their discontent _ filing charges of defamation, for example, or pressing for court injunctions. On Wednesday, religious leaders in England called for changes in the law to prevent republishing the offensive images.

The scope of reaction has been unprecedented for Europe’s Muslims, but it has lacked the violent rage witnessed in other parts of the world.

“There are a lot of secular Muslims in Europe who are watching these events unfold at a distance,” said Antoine Basbous, director of the Paris observatory of Arab Countries. “There are others who are discontented, but who are expressing their discontent within a state of law.”

Indeed, as angry Muslims overseas attack European embassies and threaten to boycott European products, the cartoons are stoking paradoxical trends here. Even as the relatively mild reaction affirms a budding “European” brand of Islam, the global fury over the cartoons fuels a long-simmering distrust of Islam on the part of non-Muslim Europeans. It may even strengthen fringe Islamic and far-right groups in Europe.

“The (relatively muted) reactions here indicate that indeed Muslims in this part of the world are becoming Europeanized,” said Han Entzinger, an immigration expert at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. “Even as native Europeans are increasingly uneasy about the growing religious plurality that is the result of immigration _ and about Islam in the world.”

So far, more than a dozen European newspapers have reprinted the Muhammad caricatures that first surfaced in a Danish daily last September. One of the most offensive depicts the prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban. On Wednesday, the French weekly Charlie Hebdo reprinted the caricatures, after a court rejected a request to stop its publication by French Muslim groups.

For some Muslims here, the cartoons have spawned conflicting emotions _ pitting their religious convictions against their new European identities.

“When I see the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, I feel some bleeding in my heart,” said Khalil Jaffar Mushib, imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of Copenhagen, Denmark. “But I had the same feeling when I saw the flag of Denmark burned” by angry mobs overseas.

A native Iraqi, Mushib has lived 40 of his 42 years in Denmark. He has never been discriminated against, he said. Nor have his five children.

Still, he defended the Danish clerics who first fanned the flames of Islamic anger by circulating the cartoons in the Middle East. Now however, Mushib said, it was time to set aside differences. “All of us are living in a single land, under a single sky,” he said.

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Simply closing the book on the cartoon controversy, however, may not be so easy in Europe. Even before the caricatures, the continent’s relationship with Islam has been uneasy at best.

While some countries _ notably Britain _ are championing multiculturalism, fears of immigration are strengthening far-right groups in others.

Meanwhile a series of recent events have fostered suspicion and friction between largely secular Europeans and Islamic communities within their midst. They range from the Madrid and London terrorist bombings, to the 2004 killing of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh after his movie on violence against Muslim women to the recent riots in France.

“There is one view that Muslim populations in Europe offer a way of bridging the relationship between Western secular societies and countries in the Muslim world,” said Richard Whitman, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “But there is another view that Islam is becoming a home-grown problem.”

“One of the things the London bombings brought home,” Whitman said, “is the potential for disaffected young Muslim youths to turn against European societies if they feel they’re not benefiting from them.”

Even though cartoon-related violence has been avoided thus far, some see tough choices, with critical consequences, for Europe and its growing Islamic population.

In Paris, Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the conservative Union of French Islamic Organizations, said reprinting the cartoons has intensified discrimination and alienation felt by many of France’s 5 million Muslims _ Europe’s largest population. Such sentiments have been a matter of public debate, after mostly Muslim, ethnic-immigrant youths set off the nationwide riots last October.

Now with the cartoons, Breze said, “we’re no longer in the framework of freedom of expression _ we’ve spiraled to aggression. The Muslim population is being terrorized.”

In other words, the crisis over the cartoons may be just one episode in a crisis that could be playing out for years to come.

“What happened in the last two weeks did not come out of the blue,” said Daud Abdullah, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. “And Europeans _ white Europeans _ must decide whether they want a Europe that is integrated and multicultural, or whether they want to live in a Europe of the 1930s _ where non-whites have a certain status, which is below.”

MO/JL END RNS