The escalating — and, by this point, utterly ludicrous — row sparked by the provocative cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad first published by best-selling Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30th of last year have recently created a furore in the Muslim world, despite the fact that they were published in October of last year by the Egyptian newspaper al-Fagr, which went largely unnoticed. The cartoons were published by Jyllands-Posten alongside an editorial critical of self-censorship in the Danish media.  

Here are a few statistics:

One million dollars: the bounty offered by Maulana Yousaf Qureshi, a Muslim cleric in Peshawar, Pakistan, to anybody who murders one of the cartoonists.

44 people (at least): the number of people of who have died in cartoon-related protests.

12 gold coins: the prize offered by Hamshahri, Iran’s best-selling newspaper, in a contest being launched for the 12 “best” cartoons about the Holocaust. Farid Mortazavi, an editor at the paper, asserted that the intentionally provocative competition would serve to test Europeans’ dedication to the notion of freedom of expression.

Mimi Hanaoka