A group of secular Muslims in Sweden wants to organize an exhibition showing drawings of the prophet Mohammed as a dog and subsequently stage a public debate with the artist, Islamic scholars and other opinion makers.

SEMUS, Secular Muslims of Sweden, presented their initiative last week as a reaction to Swedish art institutions’ rejection of drawings of Mohammed made by Lars Vilks. Hooman Anvari, spokesman for SEMUS, explained that the debate about the drawings has focused exclusively on the issue of free speech, and in order to move beyond this issue somebody has to show the drawings to the public.

”It’s impossible to engage in a public debate about the drawings without having seen them. That’s the reason why I find it important to have them on public display. It’s my intention to have a dialogue with Lars Vilks about the drawings,” Hooman Anvari told Svenska Dagbladet.

He added that he finds the drawing tasteless and awful.

Lars Vilks, 60, who was a professor at the Academy of Art in Bergen, Norway 1997-2003, said that he had been invited by an art school to participate in an exhibition having dogs as it main theme. The organizers put no restrictions on the works to be presented. But right before the opening of the exhibition the art school removed the drawings of Mohammed. So did another art institution. Both referred to a possible security threat, and one of them in an interview with Jyllands-Posten underlined the fact that the drawings might be offensive to the Muslim minority in Sweden.

The controversy has caused a heated debate in Sweden, and last week a member of parliament called on the government to provide security for art institutions that present exhibitions with controversial art.

”Artistic freedom and the right to free speech has been put on hold and needs to be defended,” Cecilia Wikstroem, member of parliament for the conservative People’s party, said to Dagens Nyheter.

”What we have seen over the last couple of years since the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Jyllands-Posten is that people are showing all kinds of considerations,” she added.

She has raised the issue with the minister of justice and the government.

”It should be possible to call on the police in cases like this. We need a serious survey of the situation in order to find out what happened to free speech. Do the institutions feel more insecure today? If there is a sense of a growing threat then we have to provide ressources to strengthen security.”

Lars Vilks, the artist behind the drawings, doesn’t think there is any need for more security.

”The threat only exists in the minds of the organizers. They have watched too much television,” Vilks told Dagens Nyheter.

But he supports the idea that art institutions should be able to contact the authorities if they feel threatend.

Writing on his blog Vilks acknowledges that his work hasn’t been supported by the art world.

”To change the situation the art world has to reconsider its relationship with Islam and so called weak minorities lacking confidence. But that’s a big change that isn’t likely to take place in the near future. Anyway, I think I am on to something: When you define Muslims as weak and lacking confidence you create a reality of ”we feel sorry for them”. You put a whole group of people under the same label ”weak”. Probably, it would be better to do exactly the opposite. I hold the view that this exposed group is strong enough to be taken serious and that they are capable of defending themselves in a debate.”

It’s important to stress that the Swedish media for a long time has avoided this kind of debate, and it’s a widely held view in Sweden that the Danes are xenophofic and racist because of it’s tighter immigration policy. Many swedes think that the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Jyllands-Posten proved this point. None of the big Swedish newspapers published Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons back in 2006. Jyllands-Posten and other Danish newspapers have published Vilks drawings of the prophet. It caused no reaction whatsoever.

It doesn’t happen so often that Scandinavian novelists are featured in the New York Times Book Review, but this summer novels by the Norwegian Per Petterson and the Dane Christian Jungersen have featured prominently in the review: Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (2004) and Jungersen’s The Exception (2006). Both are award winners, bestsellers in Europe and treated very kindly by the Times.
Here the similarities end. Out Stealing Horses is a masterpiece, while The Exception is a good story based on an excellent idea that is poorly executed. It is 250 pages too long and the plot intends to be so clever and sophisticated that it falls apart in the last part of the novel. The story evolves around the Danish Center for Information on Genocide, where four women work, two of them are close friends in their late twenties, the other two are ten years older with family and children.
At the center they study evil, and try to bring crimes against humanity to the public’s attention. Sounds like a very noble cause, but somebody is of another opinion, and the two younger women receive anonymous death threats in their mail. In the beginning they suspect a Serbian war criminal, whom they have exposed in their writings, but later they grow suspicious of one another, and the very same mechanisms of evil that cause genocide begin to play themselves out in the relationships between the four women at the office.
Jungersen builds his narrative skilfully by constantly shifting point of view as the story unfolds. But it goes on for too long, and I agree partly with the L.A. Times reviewer Donna Rifkind who wrote:
”…without the reader’s emotional investment, this thriller fails to thrill. Its repetious Big Idea about the fluidity of identity – the notion that humanitarians can be as malicious as the genocidal criminals they study – is less shocking than galumphingly obvious.”
Out Stealing Horses is a great novel, one of the best I have read in recent years, and the author’s fellow Norwegians seem to agree. It has sold 100.000 copies in a country with a population of 4,5 million. Quite remarkable. It’s a melancholic story about fathers and sons, parents and children, about the art of growing up and getting old, and not least, it is a story about grief and treason.
The main character, Trond Sander, has retired, and after having lost his wife and sister in a car accident he moves to the country side, not far from the region, where he as a teenager spend his summer holidays right after the end of the Second World War. His new neighbour in the country side turns out to be a childhood friend. Meeting him takes Trond back to the summer of 1948 and dramatic events that changed his life forever.
It was a time when Trond recognized the strong and some times irrational desires of grown ups, a time when he encountered sudden death for the first time, and most importantly, it was the last time he saw his beloved father.
The father who doesn’t have a name in the novel leaves Trond and the rest of his family behind, probably to join a woman with whom he had a secret relationship during the war and German occupation. They both took part in the resistance. In fact, this woman is the mother of his new neighbour, but Trond shies away from asking him painful and troubling questions about what actually happened that fateful summer after his father left. The composition of the novel is tight, it’s not a word too long and it’s a tense read. No wonder, Petterson is flooded by phone calls and letters from men who want to talk about difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
My recommendation: If you want to spend 22 dollars on Scandinavian literature buy Out Stealing Horses. Are you willing to spend twice this sum buy both novels.