Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist who provoked rage among Muslims and was forced into hiding – obituary

Kurt Westergaard, who has died aged 86, was the Danish cartoonist whose sketch of a bearded man wearing a bomb-shaped turban sparked riots across the Muslim world and highlighted the incendiary interface between Islam and the boundaries of freedom of expression in Europe.

In September 2005, Westergaard was one of 12 cartoonists invited by the Danish conservative daily Jyllands-Posten to draw the Prophet Mohammed “as you see him”. He claimed that the drawing did not necessarily depict the Prophet – it could have been a present-day Islamic fundamentalist – but on September 30 2005 the images were published under the headline “The Face of Mohammed” and Westergaard’s cartoon was soon singled out as the most offensive.

Though Islamic law prohibits any depiction of the prophet, initially reactions from the Muslim community were – for the most part – moderate. But when other newspapers reprinted the cartoon in early 2006 as an act of solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, it triggered violence in a number of countries.

In February 2006 Danish embassies in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran were set on fire. Westergaard, too, received death threats and required police protection. In 2008 the Danish intelligence agency arrested three men who were allegedly planning to murder him, triggering what Westergaard described as a “summerhouse odyssey”, as he and his wife Gitte were forced to migrate between holiday cottages and small hotels on the outskirts of Aarhus, spending no longer than four weeks anywhere.

Eventually he chose to live openly in Aarhus, but in 2010 Danish police shot a Somali national with an axe and a knife who had broken into his home, where he had been babysitting his five-year-old granddaughter.

Forced to leave his granddaughter in the sitting room while he escaped to a specially fortified “panic room” (and trusting that his security advisers were right when they claimed that terrorists do not usually target family members), he alerted the police as his assailant tried to smash the door with his axe, shouting “blood” and “revenge!”

The violence culminated in the 2015 attack that left 12 people dead at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris, which had reprinted Westergaard’s cartoon.

Kurt Westergaard was born into a conservative Christian family on July 13 1935 in the Jutland region of Denmark. He qualified as a teacher and read Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, working subsequently as a teacher and later headmaster at a school for disabled children.

He became a cartoonist for Jyllands-Posten in the early 1980s.

An affable figure, Westergaard could sometimes see the funny side of his predicament. Once, in the street, he was confronted by a man apparently of Middle Eastern origin who shouted “May you burn in hell!”

“Can we talk about it?” Westergaard asked.

“May you burn in hell,” the man repeated.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to talk about it in hell, then,” Westergaard observed drily.

But he was shocked to find that he and his wife were sometimes shunned by former friends, one of whom told him: “There are many who say that if something happens to [you], you were asking for it.” On one occasion his wife was phoned and told not to come back to the kindergarten where she worked, a sacking swiftly reversed after Aarhus’s mayor intervened.

“I do not see myself as a particularly brave man,” he told The Guardian. “But in this situation I got angry. It is not right that you are threatened in your own country just for doing your job. That’s an absurdity that I have actually benefited from, because it grants me a certain defiance and stubbornness.

“I won’t stand for it. And that really reduces the fear a great deal.”

Westergaard is survived by his wife and five children.

Kurt Westergaard, born July 13 1935, died July 14 2021