A challenge to freedom
by Sami Zubaida, Emiritus professor of politics and sociology, Birkbeck College, London (open democracy website) Apart from the debatable wisdom, good taste or motives for publishing the offending cartoons, the episode does raise important questions. The denunciations of the cartoons are couched in wider demands: that we should all be bound by Muslim religious prohibitions regarding portrayals of the prophet, as well as showing respect. In Egypt, which is supposedly a pluralist society with room for different religions and for secularism, Islamist demands have long amounted to censorship and...