At a party in Copenhagen in 2005, Danish author Kåre Bluitgen was having a beer with a journalist from the Danish wire service Ritzau. Small talk exhausted, Bluitgen mentioned an issue with his new project, a children’s book about the Prophet Muhammad. He’d written the story, but couldn’t find an illustrator willing to draw the revered founder of Islam.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are considered blasphemous by some. Still, it was a kids’ book, and would hardly be the first publication to hazard an artistic guess at Muhammad’s appearance. But Europe in 2005 was a time of strange forces and new tensions. The previous year had witnessed the Madrid bombings and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist objecting to Van Gogh’s treatment of Islam in his short film Submission. In July 2005, London was hit by the 7/7 terrorist attacks and Madrid could not be seen as an aberration.

Denmark, with a Muslim population of 180,000 (out of a total 5.4 million) and no history of serious racial tension, was hardly on the frontline of the War on Terror. Yet the establishment of Islamic extremism in Europe gave the illustrators Bluitgen approached reason enough to turn down the job. The illustrations eventually used in the book came through anonymously.

That night at the party, the journalist listening to Bluitgen heard a story; the next day, he called in a few quotes and sent his article out on the wires. Almost every Danish newspaper picked it up and many, including the popular national Jyllands-Posten, ran it on their front page on Sunday, Sept. 17th. The subject arose at the following day’s Jyllands-Posten editorial meeting. Some wanted to move on, but others wanted to pursue it as an issue of self-censorship and freedom of speech. One reporter suggested asking all of Denmark’s prominent illustrators to provide an image of Muhammad and allowing their responses to demonstrate whether or not the hinted-at self-censorship existed. After an internal debate, the reporter’s plan was enacted.

On Friday, Sept. 30th, the Jyllands- Posten printed a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad alongside an article by cultural editor Flemming Rose explaining the paper’s motivations. This was an exercise against dangerous self-censorship, Rose told the readership. The cartoons ranged from gentle to clearly divisive. No one involved in the feature—indeed, no one at all— could have predicted what would happen next.

The day the cartoons were published, Rose received a phone call from a Muslim newspaper vendor. “He’d been to Friday prayers and talked to other Muslim vendors,” Rose says, sitting in his cluttered office in the Copenhagen branch of Jyllands-Posten. “And together they had decided that they would no longer sell the newspaper because of the cartoons. So that, I guess, was the start.”

Rose is 52 years old and looks and talks like the foreign correspondent he was for over a decade. Professorial in bearing, cerebral and soft-spoken, he is dressed casually in a Marlboro Classic shirt and corduroy slacks. He speaks in perfect English across an expanse of desk littered with the tools of his position: journals, magazines, articles for consideration, a Russian dictionary that is perhaps a relic from his posting in Moscow during the 1990s. He also spent time in Washington D. C., Chechnya and Afghanistan before returning to his native Denmark in 2004. “For a quieter job,” he says, smiling knowingly.

Rose hadn’t been involved in the conception of the cartoon feature, but he eagerly led the project. “It was a classic journalistic exercise,” he says. “It was testing a theory. The journalistic principle—don’t tell it, show it.”

Though some at the paper were worried, Rose felt publishing the cartoons was a timely and necessary decision. His accompanying article touched on a series of related events: the Tate Gallery in London removing a piece of work that included ripped pages of the Qu’ran in the weeks after 7/7, Submission writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali fleeing to America, a Swedish gallery removing an artwork that included a quote from the Qu’ran, a prominent Danish commedian declaring he would urinate on the Bible during a live show but would be petrified of doing the same to the Qu’ran. He also mentioned how, after the Danish Prime Minister met with Islamic leaders to speak about extremism, one of the leaders announced to the press that had told the Prime Minister to force the media to portray Islam more positively.

Cumulatively, for the paper’s management, this seemed to be reason enough to explore the issue. Forty illustrators were invited to submit an image representing “Muhammad as he appears to them.” Amongst the aging ranks of Denmark’s satirical cartoonists, 25 were still actively seeking work. Some didn’t think it a worthy project. Others were contracted exclusively to other publications. Just one openly admitted to Rose that he was fearful of participation. In the end, a dozen cartoons came back.

The cartoons varied in style and tone. If you lay aside the notion that depicting Muhammad is, in itself, an insult, only two of the 12 could be seen as incendiary. In one, the Prophet halts a group of suicide bombers with the refrain “Stop, we have run out of virgins.” Another cartoon, penned by 70-year-old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, was a simple image of Muhammad with a lit-fuse bomb planted in his turban.

The first phone call from the newspaper vendor didn’t overly concern Rose. “You publish a newspaper, you upset some people,” he says. But rumors soon began to circulate about mosques around Denmark organizing themselves against the newspaper. The first protest came a few weeks after the cartoons’ publication. “They came down after Friday prayers,” Rose says, gesturing to the square outside the newspaper’s offices, “Around 3,000.”

Still, he wasn’t concerned. A debate had started; it was what the paper wanted. There was no particular malice in the radio and television discussions that Rose had shared with local Muslim figures; the demonstration had been largely organized by the Islamic Society of Denmark, and Rose even invited some of their leadership to meet with him.

“They sat and told me that they did not want controversy,” he remembers. “They wanted us to debate whether the cartoons should have been printed. I said I understood people being offended, but we had a right to print that was very important and the Danish people agreed. That is what I think was so wrong with what the Islamic Society and others did next. They lost the debate in Denmark so they tried something else. That is where the real problems began. They invited others to join in.”

The headquarters of the Islamic Society of Denmark spreads over several low-rise buildings in northwest Copenhagen. Up to 2,000 Muslims gather here for Friday prayers, but today only a few members pass through the narrow corridors.

The library’s walls are laden with Islamic texts (along with biographies of Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali, and Bob Woodward’s Veil), but take away the bookcases and leave the conference table, whiteboard and projector, and this could be the boardroom of a local business. It’s easy to imagine this room in action in the busy days of fall 2005.

Imran Shah is 34 years old; he’s the spokesman for the Islamic Society, and he’s late. When he arrives, he apologizes and is effortlessly disarming, talking about his love of the British television survival expert Ray Mears and how he’s going to attend one of Mears’ adventure courses in rural Wales. Later he will give me a lift to the airport and dole out detailed advice on sore necks. For now he remembers when he first heard of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

“I saw them and thought they were unnecessary, but didn’t think much more about them,” he says with surprising frankness. “But we decided that it would be fair to ask the Minister of Culture for his views on their publication, so we wrote him a letter. He neglected to reply, so we wrote again, and he neglected to reply once again. That is when we began to organize.” The Islamic Society coordinated the October demonstration outside the Jyllands-Posten offices. “We wanted the Danish government to take us seriously, because the minimum we could expect was a response. We are their citizens, we wanted to know their thoughts. The heat and tension picked up.”

Shah counters the suggestion, voiced by Rose and others, that irate Muslims were trampling over principles of free speech that day.
Instead, he claims it was more about a public relations failing. “We only wanted to discuss the wisdom of publishing these cartoons, not the right to publish them,” he says. “This became lost.”

In December 2005, along with other Danish Muslim leaders, representatives from the Islamic Society traveled to Lebanon and Egypt with a dossier including not just the Jyllands-Posten cartoons but also more grotesque images that depicted Muhammad variously as a pig, a pedophile and engaged in bestiality. (The animal trope is also what allegedly inspired Colleen LaRose, aka Jihad Jane, the recently arraigned Pennsylvania woman accused of plotting to kill a Swedish artist who depicted Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body.)

“They said they received them in the mail,” Rose says of the extra images. “We don’t know. The Prophet as a pig was in fact a Photoshop from a French pig festival. They presented these to their counterparts in the Middle East without making any distinction between our cartoons and these new ones.”

Shah counters: “These were emails we received. We said clearly that this is an example of the harassment that Muslims face, that this was also what we were experiencing in addition to what was in the papers. We clearly stated this was not from the Danish newspaper.”

The images were seized on in their entirety. Shah claims the Islamic Society chose Lebanon and Egypt as moderate countries who they felt could lean politically on the Danish government. But the dossier was passed, reportedly by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, to more radical Islamic states and the result was predictably convulsive. “People with bad intentions utilized the situation, unfortunately,” Shah says.

In January 2006, the conflict boiled over. Saudi Arabia became the first of many countries to recall its Danish ambassador and announce a boycott of Danish companies. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement gave Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes—for Norwegian and Swedish publications had by now also printed the cartoons—48 hours to leave the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades granted Danes and Swedes 72 hours to depart. The first burnings of the Danish flag were spotted in the West Bank, a sight that would soon become commonplace. Danish embassies and EU offices were stormed around the world and, back in Denmark, bomb and death threats began to arrive.

The confusion over the extra images in the dossier split international reaction. Bill Clinton’s grave announcement concerning “these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam” typified the initial responses from Western political figures. The Jyllands-Posten printed an apology in both Danish and Arabic that regretted not the printing of the cartoons, but hurting the feelings of the Islamic population. Rose went on Al-Jazeera, the dominant television provider to the wider Muslim world; although he began his statement with a further apology, he claims that segment was not translated by the channel. By now, he was working solely on the “emergency situation,” liaising with the police and intelligence services and trying to manage the international media’s requests. “I was so wiped out and tired,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep.
The whole world wanted to talk to me.”

Amidst the mayhem, Rose suggested that the paper print some of the Holocaust cartoons regularly carried by newspapers in certain Islamic countries, particularly Iran. It was a theoretical point that played badly in the press and he was was placed on leave, departing for work in the U.S. until May 2006. “Not my decision,” he concedes, “but the right one.”

Meanwhile, at the Islamic Society it was all hands on deck.
Shah remembers a feeling of disbelief. “Containment, that was our reaction,” he recalls. “It had got out of our hands completely.”

He says his organization worked to combat any looming extremism amongst their followers. “We were working very closely with the Danish Secret Service to help contain the situation, and we succeeded. Not one single drop of blood was spilled in Denmark, and we considered that a success.”

And yet, even once the flag-burning was over, the anger lingered.
It became secret, internalized and far more dangerous.

For the past four years, Flemming Rose has led two lives. Within the Jyllands-Posten offices he has continued as an editor.
Outside work he is a ghost, the man who isn’t there, hidden from official record. “Very few people know where I live,” he says. “And I have a continual dialogue with the security services.”

In late 2007 those security services told Rose they believed there was a plot against him and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. In February 2008, pre-dawn raids captured a Danish citizen of Morrocan origin and two Tunisians who confessed to having discussed killing Rose and Westergaard, though their plans centered on the elderly cartoonist. Once again Rose was unrepentant, telling the media that “the murder plot against Kurt Westergaard stresses the fact that we are in the middle of a global fight for free speech.”

Another year slipped by; another plot was foiled, this time in Chicago. “The media storm of 2006 was terrible,” Rose says.
“But this was closer [to me].” The FBI arrested a Canadian and an American, both of Pakistani origin, who had allegedly been in contact and receiving training from Islamist groups in Pakistan. The two were reportedly working on a project they called “Mickey Mouse,” which aimed to murder Flemming Rose and Kurt Westergaard.

There had already been field trips to Denmark. “They wanted to attack the paper and kill me and Kurt Westergaard. They’d been in touch with Al-Qaeda. That’s serious business,” Rose says. “They had been shooting videos of the paper and looking in phone books to try to find me. They had gone to the Jewish synagogue because they thought I was Jewish.”

From the beginning, Rose had heeded the security services’ every warning. Meanwhile, Westergaard tried to mediate his own story. In the early months of the furor, he invited Muslim leaders to his home, a gesture shown on national television. He has done further television interviews, letting reporters into his fortified suburban residence. “Every fool in Denmark,” Rose says, “knows where he lives.”

The Danish city of Aarhus is three hours’ drive from Copenhagen on the eastern coast of the Jutland peninsula. The February temperature stays resolutely sub-freezing and the city’s harbour has been swallowed by ice. At the police station, Chief Superintendent Ole Madsen and his deputy Frits Kjeldsen offer pastries and a bemused air. Madsen looks me up on the Internet, “just to check,” and throughout our interview he politely deems some questions “too sensitive.”

His caution is understandable. The last Danish case that Madsen can remember receiving international media attention was a 2004 blaze at a fireworks factory. Last year Aarhus had just five homicides; this year, the city had an attempted murder that led news reports around the globe.

Kjeldsen relates the events of New Year’s Day 2010: “The accused found his way to Kurt Westergaard’s house. He brought an axe and a knife. When he got inside he tried to attack, but Westergaard ran to his security room. The accused left the house and the police came. He attacked the police with a knife and an axe and was shot in the knee and the hand.”

These are the only details the Danish police have released. Yet it quickly became public that Westergaard’s granddaughter was also in his home and that the illustrator had made the brutal choice of escaping alone to his security room. Fortunately, the girl was entirely unharmed. Danish press knows the identity of the 28-year-old Somali who’s accused of the attack; he has lived in Denmark for the past 15 years, but his identity is protected under the Danish legal system. The country’s intelligence chief has revealed the attacker’s links to Al-Shabaab, a Somali terror group, as well as to Al-Qaeda leaders in East Africa. And in the wake of the attack an Al-Shabab spokesman declared that the group members “appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our Prophet.”

After all the riots, threats, plots and arrests, this was different—it was personal and immediately violent. Flemming Rose remembers finding it “terrifying.” Shah describes it as “truly terrible.”

A short walk from the police station through the streets of Aarhus is the Town Hall, where the Mayor Nicolai Wammen sits in a corner office. The mayor regularly meets with Westergaard and received him for lunch shortly after the attack. “He was in good spirits,” Wammen recalls. “Of course he is angry that he should be the subject of so much hatred and for the attack made on him and his family. But he is a strong man with a sense of humor and that gets him and his family through this.”

Westergaard is now under 24-hour police protection—according to Wammen, “A very good decision.” Deputy Kjeldsen says the joint operation between the Aarhus police and Secret Serveice “has been tightened up.”

Throughout all of these conversations, Westergaard has remained a spectral presence. Rose didn’t know him before the cartoons were comissioned, and speaks only rarely to him now. The Jyllands-Posten had been chilly on my approach to talk to him, and a BBC journalist who interviewed him before the recent attacks had said Westergaard speaks only with close friends in the media. Yet when an assistant at the Aarhus mayor’s office passed my details on to him, I received an email a few days later with a phone number.

Westergaard’s voice was faint and loaded with his 74 years, and his English sometimes slipped, but hearing him speak was a moving experience. “It was one of the worst days of my life,” he says of January 1st. “We had been briefed, my family, that the terrorists would never harm anyone but me, so I had to run to the safety room to call the police. My grandchild was in the living room. The choice was to be slaughtered in front of her eyes.”

Like Rose, Westergaard sees the publication of the cartoons and the subsequent defense of that publication as a vital demonstration of free speech. “We had to go through this discussion in Denmark about freedom of speech,” he says, “and if it hadn’t been for these cartoons something else would have provoked it. I think it has been very necessary for Denmark to have this discussion.”

He describes his initial submission of the cartoon as “just another day at the office,” and decries how Denmark’s image has suffered abroad over the last five years. “The cartoons slipped out of our control and were used to stir up an opinion about Denmark as a racist country. But Denmark is not like that. This country is kind and peaceful, and now we have lost our international innocence.”

Westergaard has lost more than that—both he and Rose live under a threat of death that is jarringly real. “I would say it is getting worse,” Rose told me. Westergaard agrees: “It feels like it has all started again.” Since January, he has never been without close protection. “If people invite me to dinner, they must just plan for two more,” he jokes. “I am nearly 75. Not for me will it ever be over. But I can keep my life almost normal. I am OK.”