Police in Turkey detained four cartoonists on Monday in connection with the publication of a caricature they interpreted as depicting Moses and Mohammed fraternizing in heaven as Jews and Muslims fight below them.
The detention of the cartoonists, who are affiliated with the LeMan satirical magazine, followed the gathering of angry protesters outside the publication’s headquarters, CNN reported.
Indignation over the depiction of Mohammed, which in forbidden according to prevalent interpretations of Islam, had brewed online in recent days, leading to the protests and the cartoonists’ arrests, Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, a Turkey expert at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, told JNS.
The arrests are an unusual escalation in the level of intervention by authorities on matters that upset religious Muslim sensibilities, he said.
The crackdown “came from bottom up. Social media triggered the street. So people came there, began to protest and since today’s Turkish government is marketing itself as very sensitive towards religious affairs, obviously they had to do something, as well as to preserve public order,” he said.
The decision to publish the caricature was also unusual, Cohen Yanarocak said, as “cartoonists and other visual artists in Turkey generally know not to cross the invisible line” of depicting the Muslim prophet.
LeMan, a weekly political satire magazine, claimed the person titled Mohammed was not meant to represent the prophet but a generic Muslim man bearing his name who had been killed by Israel.
“This cartoon is not a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him. In the work, the name Mohammed is fictionalized as belonging to a Muslim person killed in Israel’s bombardments. There are more than 200 million people named Mohammed in the Islamic world. The work does not refer to the Prophet Mohammed in any way,” the magazine said in a statement.
The cartoon shows a bearded man wearing a top hat resembling that of Haredi Jews saying “I’m Musa” as he shakes hands with another bearded man wearing a taqiyah—a Muslim headcover—who replies: “I’m Mohammed.” Both have wings and are depicted as hovering over burning buildings and rockets.
Musa is Moses’s name in Arabic.
Ali Yerlikaya, Turkey’s interior minister, called the cartoon a provocation and said those “who dare to do this will be held accountable before the law.” The cartoon was not protected by freedom of expression or freedom of speech, said Yerlikaya.
The country’s Justice Ministry announced an investigation had been launched into the incident under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code for the crime of “publicly insulting religious values.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a conservative who runs the Justice and Development Party, or AK, which is widely regarded as Islamist and has led a broad crackdown on independent media and dissidents while promoting laws that correspond with the Muslim faith, including a ban on abortions and taxes on alcohol.
