In late December, a young Danish man flew to Beirut. In his suitcase was a package of spiral-bound booklets in green covers, neatly compiled using a colour photocopier. Their contents consisted mainly of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
He was unlikely to have stood out. A short man of 31 who could have passed for half that age, he had a feminine voice and soft hands and was somewhat toughened by his struggling beard and an air of calm confidence.
Ahmed Akkari, a young Islamic scholar and Danish activist, was on a mission. Having failed to get the Prime Minister to take action over the cartoons' perceived slight to Islam, he had sought help from esteemed figures in the Muslim world, he says.
Over the next few weeks, he would hand copies of his green booklet to the grand mufti of Egypt, the chief cleric of the Sunni faith, leaders of the Arab League, the top official of the Lebanese Christian church and others.
They stared in amazement at the images in the book, he remembered during a lengthy interview yesterday, and vowed to take action to help him.
"They said to me, 'Do they really say this is the Prophet Mohammed? They must really have no respect for religion up there in Denmark.' And they said they would make it known."
Mr. Akkari now finds himself regretting the results of his brief journey, the somewhat distorted message of which flashed around the Muslim world by Internet, newspaper and text message, and caused millions of Muslims to believe that Denmark and the Nordic countries had become home to blasphemies.
While the Koran does not forbid depictions of Mohammed, the prohibition stems from concerns the Prophet expressed that even well-intentioned images could lead to idolatry or show disrespect for Islam's founder.
Violent protests continued yesterday in cities around the world. As many as four protesters were shot dead in Afghanistan, raising the death toll to at least nine as the United Nations, the European Union and major governments struggled to contain the escalating unrest.
As he sat in one of Copenhagen's neat brown stone buildings yesterday and gazed at the melting snow, Mr. Akkari grappled awkwardly with the global emergency that has sprung from his mission. Friends, strangers and close family members are now blaming him for exactly the thing he says he was trying to prevent: the caricaturing of Muslims as violent fanatics.
The riots, he acknowledged, have placed his fellow European Muslims in a far worse position than they had previously known.
"Yeah, it has been more violent than I expected," he said. "I had no interest in any violence. . . . It is bad for our case because it's turning the picture completely from what this should be about, to something else -- and this is a dangerous change now."
This has led to a dramatic switch in his tone: While he still expresses anger at the media for glibly printing images considered offensive to his faith, Mr. Akkari yesterday was eager to find a way to quickly resolve the crisis -- and to send a message to the violent Muslim protesters that might cause them to cease and desist. He suggested a joint news conference with the Danish Prime Minister or with the editor of the newspaper that first printed the images in which both sides would demand that their communities cease their most offensive activities.
Such a détente now seems unlikely.
For his booklet contained not only the 12 depictions of the Prophet Mohammed that had appeared in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September. He also filled it with hideous, amateur images of the Prophet as a pig, a dog, a woman and a child-sodomizing madman.
