Stalin’s quip – “How many divisions has the Pope?” – is often taken for a universal truth: for all its power to describe man’s nature and destiny, religion lacks the brute force to affect the world of politics and diplomacy. The uproar over caricatures of Mohammed that appeared in a Danish daily shows that the rule does not apply to Islam in quite the same way. This week’s death threats, bomb threats and mass demonstrations reveal two big problems. First, an important part of the Muslim world is fighting a war of civilisations, whether the west wants one or not. Second, the west cannot figure out whether it ought to deal first with those Muslims or the peaceable ones.

Fleming Rose, culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, commissioned the 12 cartoons in an effort to clear the air of “self-censorship”. A Danish children’s writer had announced he could find no artists willing to illustrate his biography of Mohammed. You can see why the artists worried. Islam holds such drawings to be idolatrous. When they were published last September, the cartoons – some mere gags and doodles, others potentially insulting – caused resentment in Denmark and outrage in Pakistan, where the radical party Jamaat-i-Islami put a price on the head of the biographer.