From Guardian, Sat Feb 4, 2006

Does the right to freedom of speech justify printing the Danish cartoons?
When one person's liberty collides with another's values, there is no clear occupant of the moral high ground

Philip Hensher: Yes

The first thing to say about the contested cartoons published by a Danish paper last September is that some are, indeed, offensive. Jyllands-Posten took up the case of a Danish author who could find no one to illustrate a book about the prophet Muhammad. The paper, presenting this as a case of self-censorship, asked 12 illustrators for depictions of the prophet, and the one that has caused immense offence shows the prophet wearing a turban that conceals a fizzing bomb.

The cartoonist can't be accused of ignorance or lack of research - he has scrupulously transcribed a verse from the Qur'an on the turban - and there's no doubt that this is seriously offensive, and not just to Muslims but anyone who values truthful debate. It just isn't true to say that, from its founding, Islam would inevitably lead to suicide bombing, or even that its founder's teachings bear responsibility for this particular brand of atrocity.

That accusation, if made of any religion or secular school of thought that has spawned violent followers - a comparable image of Marx, say, or, quite plausibly, Darwin - would in most cases be just as offensive and wrong. In this case there is a special, deliberate offence to Muslims because the religion has an edict against such depictions.

Whether action should be taken, in a western democracy, against an argument that is just wrong, or against deliberate offence caused, however great, is another question. It's difficult to see that personal offence should be the basis of legal action in a state professing commitment to freedom of speech. The state takes a view on when personal offence is reasonable and when it threatens to infringe someone else's liberty, largely based on whether offence is caused generally, or just to a section of the community. Do the Danish cartoons cause offence only to isolated individuals? Or do they so attack anyone professing to be a Muslim that they would be caught by the UK's religious hatred law?

The cartoons almost certainly look very different to a Muslim living in a western democracy and to someone in the Muslim world. It's easy to sympathise with a Muslim living in Denmark, who would feel directly persecuted by these images. The Copenhagen Muslim interviewed in yesterday's Guardian certainly had a point when he compared them to the comments of a Danish MP who apparently called Muslims "a cancer in Denmark". Many people in his situation live difficult lives, and such images won't improve matters much.

But along with the sympathy one has to feel for people in that beleaguered situation, the uses that the Danish cartoons have been put to in the Muslim world must be challenged. Around the world, the anti-Danish campaign is being used by Islamist political groups to rally support for extreme causes. The aim of many such groups is, through pressure, to limit free speech on religious matters in the west, and entirely suppress it at home.

It is often forgotten to what degree law-making in the west is still seen across the globe as a model of good practice; and for that single reason our freedom of speech, even if exercised for the purposes of causing offence, even if simply wrong in practice, can't be eroded. To take an example: in Bangladesh in 1994, an attempt was made to introduce a law limiting what could be said on religious subjects. It failed because, it was argued, its terms could not be paralleled in the laws of any democracy. Britain's new law on religious hatred, even in its limited form, removes that defence from liberal voices outside Europe.

Debate on a great many subjects is already severely limited in the Muslim world. Reading Robert Irwin's brilliant new book, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, it is a shock to learn that serious scholarly work by historians on the first years of Islam has to be expressed in code, lest it cause offence to the faithful by contradicting the received account. It is unlikely that a newspaper in a Muslim country will ever want to commission a cartoon along the Danish lines. But we are really talking about groups, even in relatively liberal Muslim countries, that want to draw the lines of permitted debate much tighter than they are at present.

In practice, our freedom of speech is not seriously threatened. Cartoonists will probably be careful about exercising good taste in such an area, as they already do on parallel subjects - for instance, in drawing an Israeli or Jewish politician, a cartoonist will probably avoid the hateful conventions of anti-semitic caricature. After the boycotts and a few noble-sounding words, we will probably go on much as before.

And that's probably the best thing to do. If anti-democratic forces in the Muslim world can make such effective use of a cartoon in a small European country, they would be much more encouraged by any signs of restriction on our part. Anyone in the Muslim world arguing for freedom of speech, on religious or other matters, has only one place to look to - the west. We ought to take into account the sorts of factions in the Muslim world who would regard legal restrictions on our side as part of a wider victory.

· Philip Hensher is the author of The Mulberry Empire comment@guardian.co.uk