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By LOUISE NORDSTROM, Associated Press WriterTue Sep 18, 4:45 PM ET
A Swedish artist displayed a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad to a seminar in
Stockholm on Tuesday despite a death threat from al-Qaida in Iraq.
"Nobody has really seen this image and it has just become more and more
impossible to show it, so I thought that ordinary people should be given the
possibility to see it live," Lars Vilks told a crowd of about 100 people at a
seminar.
He then held up the drawing a rough sketch depicting Muhammad's head on a
dog's body to applause from the crowd at the Berwaldhallen concert hall in
the Swedish capital.
Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and Islamic law generally
opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to
idolatry.
On Saturday, the putative leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi,
offered rewards for the killing of Vilks and a Swedish newspaper editor who
published the cartoon on Aug. 19.
Vilks said Monday that police had moved him to a secret location and told him
he cannot return to his home following the threat.
Security guards searched the bags of visitors entering the concert hall where
the 61-year-old artist joined a panel of speakers Tuesday for discussions on
freedom of expression and Islam as a politicized religion.
During a question-and-answer session, a bearded man wearing a knitted skullcap
walked up to a podium on the stage and delivered what appeared to be a threat
against Vilks.
"I hope that your fate will be a lesson for you others," the man said in broken
Swedish, drawing an angry reaction from a majority of the crowd, who booed,
whistled and shouted at the man to get off the stage.
The man, who didn't give his name or identify the group he was representing,
left the auditorium with an entourage of about 10 people and security guards
following closely behind.
After the seminar, Vilks said he took the al-Qaida threat seriously, but added
he was not afraid.
"Because I'm brave," he said, laughing. "But if they are going to do something
they will probably wait a while. It will be more dangerous a few weeks from
now."
Vilks told the seminar that he made a series of drawings of Muhammad to test
the boundaries of artistic freedom, saying "a work of art is successful when it
meets resistance."
His drawings drew protests from Muslims in Sweden and abroad after Nerikes
Allehanda, a newspaper in Orebro, published one of them in an editorial
criticizing Swedish art galleries for refusing to exhibit the cartoons.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt invited 22 ambassadors from Muslim
countries on Sept. 7 to talk about the sketch in an attempt to prevent a repeat
of last year's uproar over Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.