This is part of an Independent on Sunday story that could be one of the better ones yet on how this whole controversy erupted.

Some excerpts:

... As smaller-scale protests continued, in London among other cities, it is a sobering thought to realise that the whole saga began as the liberal idea of just one well-meaning man.

And yesterday, he sat with The Independent on Sunday in his modest flat in Copenhagen and spoke of his feelings at the conflagration he has unwittingly started. He is Danish author Kaare Bluitgen who, last summer, conceived a children's book on the Prophet Mohamed. The intention, since Bluitgen's children attend schools with a majority of Muslim children, was to contribute to integration.

"These children must learn about Danish heroes and Danish children should learn about Muslim heroes," he said.

He asked three artists to illustrate it, but they declined, and word of this reached Politiken newspaper, which, on 12 September, ran a story asking if, out of fear of reprisals, self-censorship was at work. The paper's rival Jyllands-Posten then had the idea of asking cartoonists to depict the prophet. A dozen obliged, and, crucially, one showed Mohamed with a bomb for a headpiece. The man who drew it, now in the US, is in his late sixties.

All the cartoonists would have known that to draw the Prophet would be a direct and provocative challenge to Islam's prohibition on depictions of Mohamed. Local imams duly protested, both the paper and three cartoonists received death threats, and 5,000 Muslim demonstrators took to the streets. The Danish government, instead of acting as referee between its free press and Muslims, came down firmly on the side of the paper's right to publish. In mid-October, ambassadors of 10 Muslim countries complained to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, but he declined to meet them.

His attitude was not altogether surprising. Denmark, which has 500 troops in Iraq, has long been resolutely Protestant, has a long tradition of vigorous, satirical cartooning, and a Muslim population of only 160,000. Copenhagen has no purpose-built mosque, and one of the country's most influential radical Muslim leaders, Ahmad Abu Laban, said, as he drove to Friday prayers, "in Denmark there has been an extreme sense of Islamophobia ... There is a 'teacher-pupil' relationship. Some Danish people - and the media as well - started to treat Muslims [as] 'sit down keep quiet, listen to your teacher and behave yourself'."