It was 13 years ago that the influential Foreign Affairs magazine published an article entitled "The Clash of Civilisations?" by Samuel Huntington, in which the author posed the question whether conflicts between civilisations would dominate the future of world politics.

When the expanded article found itself published as a book, its working title was perhaps even more topical in the sense that it was called The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order.

The biggest mistake that is being done right now is the belief that non-Western peoples should adopt Western values, institutions and culture. Huntington described such a rationale as immoral because of what would be necessary to bring it about.

As I write, the Lebanese Interior Minister had just announced his resignation after a mob attacked the Danish embassy in Beirut in riots sparked by the controversial Prophet Mohammed cartoons.

It is pointless to point out that local cartoonists have even taken on the Pope without creating much of a stir both locally or overseas.

The worst mistake we can commit is to try and gauge the mentality and frame of mind of a Muslim through the eyes of a westerner.

This is far from just a debate on the limits and responsibilities of free speech.

At the core of the row is the Islamic tradition which holds that any depiction of the Prophet is sacrilegious.

To go one further by depicting him as a knife-wielding Bedouin and another as wearing a time bomb-shaped turban added insult to injury.

As the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera skilfully explained, while the Koran, the Islamic Holy Book, does not explicitly prohibit the depiction of human figures, Muslims understand Koranic verses 41 to 52 as meaning that Allah and His prophets cannot be captured in an image by human hand, such is God's grandeur.

Any such attempt, the understanding goes, only leads towards idolatry, where the representations themselves can become objects of worship.

This explains that the taboo is not merely on ridiculing the Prophet but on actually picturing him.

If we do not understand this crucial point then the ignorance is at our end and not at the Muslims'.

It is only within this context that we can begin to understand how and why a number of cartoons fanned flames of Muslim rage, leading certain newspapers to report dramatically about embassies burning, riots and demonstrations spreading across the globe, journalists going in hiding and presidents and preachers joining the furious debate.

The world can ill afford such deep tensions and fissures to see the light of day, particularly between the Islamic world and the West at this particular juncture.

Before we argue ad nauseam about our conceptions of a free press we also need to fathom how others see the role of their faith in society.

I say so as a secular person who does his utmost to understand the motivations and the thinking behind the cultures of others with different religious sentiments and beliefs.

If it was in bad taste to carry such cartoons it was even worse to repeat them in what sounded like an act of reckless defiance, regardless of the impact that such irresponsible behaviour would have.

Just put yourself in the position of a Muslim who prohibits the representation of Mohammed, being faced by a cartoon that depicts his Prophet as a man of terror and violence rather than as a man of peace and justice.

Such behaviour demolished in an instant all attempts by the West to try and show greater tolerance and respect for Islam and its followers.

The timing was even worse particularly, since it happened when in the eyes of many the so-called war on terrorism had polarised relations between Islam and the West.

Regardless of what my political opinions may be as a social democrat who considers himself to be a moderate deep down, I can never accept cartoons which have been perceived by many as reflecting Europe's Islamophobia. To me Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are both deplorable and condemnable.

Muslims reacted the way they did because they felt that the cartoons were meant to actually insult, provoke and offend them, thus attributing ulterior motives to what spurred them on.

What is worse is that if that was the case they have succeeded.

When a leading Hamas exponent was recently told that people in Europe value their liberties, he replied: "And we value our religion and our Prophet....We know that the Holocaust started with cartoons like these against Jews and with books like Mein Kampf and then came Kristallnacht and then we know what happened..."

It is useless to try and apply a liberal logic to what has happened. The Muslims' reaction was that when you send out thousands of hate messages against a certain ethnic or religious community every day, you make people hate these people.

Wilfully or not, anything that incites religious or ethnic hatreds cannot be deemed acceptable.

No wonder UN Secretary General Kofi Anan stated recently that "freedom of speech is never absolute as it entails responsibility and judgment".

I do not believe that the man in the street in the West is anti-Muslim but these cartoons have reinforced the profound sense in the Muslim world that the West is essentially anti-Islamic.

Towards the end of his book, Huntington stated that although modernisation has generally enhanced the material level of civilisation throughout the world, it was questionable whether it has also enhanced the moral and cultural dimension of civilisation.

The sad developments of the last few days has shown that this is indeed the case.

leo.brincat@gov.mt

Leo Brincat is Shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs