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Outwardly, Muslim leaders and protesters in East Asia have not set the Pacific Ocean on fire in reaction to the Danish cartoons that sought to caricature the Prophet. Foreign diplomats and regional political analysts have nonetheless noticed the groundswell of subterranean fury among the Muslim population.
Indonesia is the world's largest majority-Muslim state, while neighbouring Malaysia currently heads the Organisation of Islamic Conference. Several other East Asian countries have sizable to small Muslim minorities.
As the cartoon crisis erupted, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a conspicuous effort to take the moral high ground and moderate the anger of both ordinary Muslims and "radical" Islamic groups that have become active in recent years. Matching this circumspection, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took time to respond to the crisis. When he responded, he did so without actually referring to the Danish cartoons that outraged Muslim communities and the rest of the world.
For Yudhoyono, in particular, the new challenge was to articulate the wounded sentiments of Muslims in a way that would not upset the diplomatic advances he had made recently towards the United States and the West over a range of issues.
Abdullah Badawi, on the other hand, had to fashion a response that would not be seen by Malaysia's significant minorities - ethnic Chinese and people of Indian origin - as being excessively one-sided. Leaders of these minorities had only recently petitioned him for a suitable reinterpretation of a constitutional provision that left no room for the civil judiciary to intervene in matters decided upon by the Sharia or Islamic courts.
As a result of these political factors, and in a transparent bid to eschew outdoing the West in its apparent insensitivity to the sentiments of non-Westerners, both Yudhoyono and Abdullah Badawi chose to tread a cautious but firm line on the cartoon crisis. However, with the Danish embassy in Jakarta coming under a siege by enraged protesters, Yudhoyono found it necessary to go beyond his initial circumspection. His first reaction to the original cartoons and their subsequent reproductions by other Western publications was to condemn such action. In effect, he laced his denunciation of the West with a fervent appeal to his own people to guard against protesting in a manner that might only help "radicalise" the country's growing number of Muslim "fundamentalists".
When the Danish government withdrew its embassy officials from Jakarta on the ground that their safety was at risk, Indonesian Foreign Minister Wirajuda said the move was unnecessary as the protests had been "relatively peaceful".
Noticing, however, that a number of Indonesians felt inclined to make their inner feelings known, Yudhoyono reinterpreted his initial reaction by writing an opinion-editorial in an international daily. Voicing Islamic concerns, he emphasised that justifying the reproduction of the original and outrageous cartoons as a value-based manifestation of the democratic right of "free speech" was "senseless brinkmanship" on the part of Western protagonists. In an evident bid to explain his objections in a political idiom that might be comprehensible to the West, Yudhoyono maintained that such a skewed defence of democratic rights could turn into "a disservice to democracy" itself. The "conflicting message" from the West was that "in a democracy, it is permissible to offend Islam". For Yudhoyono, who is increasingly recognised by U.S. President George W. Bush as the harbinger of democracy in the world's biggest majority-Muslim nation, this argument on democracy is a good political bet to secure empathy from the West for the feelings of Muslim communities.
Public protests in Malaysia were largely organised by the opposition party, PAS, which stands for the eventual creation of an Islamic state. When Abdullah Badawi finally spoke his mind at an international conference in Kuala Lumpur on February 10, he called for a "critical mass" of "bridge-builders" so that the "huge chasm" between the West and the Islamic bloc, in evidence for centuries, could become a thing of the past.
He stopped short of endorsing Samuel Huntington's thesis about a "clash of civilisations", an idea that has come to mean different things to different people in East Asia in the shadow of the cartoon crisis.
"When the bridge-builders reign supreme, the people of the West will speak for Islam, and the Muslims will speak for the West," he noted optimistically.
For the present he did not downplay the wounds inflicted on the Muslim bloc through the "demonisation of Islam" in some quarters of the West.
In a thinly veiled reference to the Danish cartoons, he called for an end to the mockery of any religion and a cessation of the sacrilege of symbols held dear by the faithful.
Abdullah Badawi and Yudhoyono's "measured responses" to the cartoon crisis are acknowledged across East Asia. However, some Muslim diplomats and politicians in the region have questioned whether the Danish episode and the incremental evidence about the torture of Muslim prisoners at the hands of the U.S. and those of its allies in Iraq and elsewhere could presage a "pattern" of efforts by the West to challenge the Islamic bloc.
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