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Journalism of Courage
Denmarks’s National Library plans to archive the original Prophet Muhammad caricatures that sparked violent protests across the Islamic world two years ago, a spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Despite objections from some Muslim leaders, the library in the Danish capital will preserve the 12 cartoons for research purposes, but will not make them available to the public for at least 10 years, spokeswoman Jytte Pedersen said.
“It is not our intention to provoke or anything like that,” Pedersen said. “We are preserving them for future generations.”
The 12 cartoons were first published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005, and reprinted by a series of Western newspapers early the following year. Mass protests erupted in Muslim countries where the cartoons were widely seen as insulting. One of them showed Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a lit fuse.
The Copenhagen-based Islamic Faith Community, a network of Muslim groups, which spearheaded protests against the cartoons in Denmark, said archiving the original drawings was a bad idea.
“It might send a wrong signal to Muslims in Denmark and the rest of the world,” the network’s spokesman Kasem Ahmad said. He added that his organisation was not planning any formal protest against the decision.
Danish imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen disagreed, saying it was important to preserve the caricatures as part of the historical record of “a very important event that turned the world upside down”.
Syria’s deputy ambassador to Denmark Raib Altbaab questioned the purpose of the collection. “Do they have an intention of making more provocation or just to calm the situation?” he asked.
