The Globe and Mail's Mark McKinnon files from Beirut, where he says the vast majority of Muslims inflamed by the infamous cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad have never seen them and, in some cases, are being inflamed by things that are no more than rumour.

An excerpt:

Hussain Saad has never seen the controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed that were published in Europe, but he's furious anyway. What he's been told is enough to get his blood boiling.

One picture, he's heard, shows the Prophet wearing a turban with a bomb tucked inside it. That one appeared last September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and has since been published by some other newspapers in Europe and elsewhere, sparking an angry reaction from Muslims worldwide. Mr. Saad believes the picture is insulting, since it implies an association between Islam and terrorism.

But it's the second image he's heard was published that makes him really irate, featuring, he's been told, a bent-over Prophet having sex with another man.

"They are showing the Prophet in a sexual position with another man. We don't have this here. We don't have men sleeping with men, or women sleeping with women," the bearded 20-year-old Shia Muslim said, as other young men listened and nodded their heads in angry agreement.

All those standing in the muddy street said that the damage done by a mob that rioted in downtown Beirut this week, setting fire to the building that houses the Danish embassy, was the "very minimum" response to something so offensive to Islam.

"Our duty is to defend our religion," said Mahmoud Murrad, a 20-year-old Palestinian refugee. He said he had information that Sweden was holding a competition that would see a prize awarded to whoever could draw the most insulting picture of the Prophet.

The cartoon Mr. Saad and the others have heard about in such graphic detail has never appeared in any Western newspaper, nor is Sweden holding an insult-the-Prophet competition. But such myths are popular in the slums of Beirut and the adjoining Palestinian refugee camps, and are helping to fuel the anger boiling across the Muslim world.

Many who have taken part in the violent anti-cartoon protests that have hit places as far-flung as Lebanon, Afghanistan and Indonesia are poor and illiterate, with no access to the Western media or the Internet. They got their information about the drawings largely from word-of-mouth accounts, allowing preachers and politicians who have a stake in feeding the outrage to spread a distorted version of what the offending images contain.

The sexually charged portrait that Mr. Saad and many others have heard about is likely one distributed by a Danish Muslim lobby group called the European Committee for Honouring the Prophet. After two months of fruitlessly protesting to the Danish government about the publication of the original 12 cartoons that appeared in Jyllands-Posten, the group toured the Middle East distributing those caricatures, plus three much more offensive images that it says Muslims in Denmark received in the mail.