The recent violence surrounding the publication in the West of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed illustrate the danger of Islamic "totalitarianism," Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers have said in a statement.Rushdie, French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy and exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen were among those putting their names to the statement, to be published on Wednesday in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo, one of several French newspapers which reprinted the controversial cartoons.
"After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism," they wrote. "We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all." They added that the clashes over the caricatures "revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. The struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. "It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats."