Turkish authorities arrested three cartoonists on Monday for a drawing published by the satirical weekly Leman. The cartoon seemed to portray the prophets Moses and Mohammed who shake hands over a city that is bombed.
Yilmaz Tunc, the Minister of Justice said That an investigation had been conducted for ‘the publicly insulting of religious values’. In Islam, the Prophet Mohammed is the most important messenger of God. “No freedom gives the right to make the holy values of a belief the subject of ugly humor. The caricature or what form of visual representation of our prophet not only damages our religious values, but also damages social peace,” the minister said. Ali Yerlikaya, the Turkish Minister of the Interior, also spoke on X of a “disgusting drawing” that undermines the “religious values.”
To the AFP news agency, the editor -in -chief of Leman, Tuncay Akgun, said that the drawing is “in no way a caricature of the prophet Mohammed.” According to him, “the name of a Muslim who died in Israeli bombing is fictionalized as Mohammed. On X, the weekly also emphasized that the drawing would be (deliberately) misinterpreted.” More than 200 million people in the Islamic world are called Mohammed. In the work the Prophet Mohammed is not called “,”, thus Leman.
The arrests provided protests in Istanbul on Monday evening, where the weekly is located. Turkish police shot with rubber bullets and tear gas to vary the crowd. According to AFP reporters, around 250 to 300 people were soon involved in the fighting. Turkey consistently scores low on freedom indexes. Reporters without borders placed the country in place 159 of the 180 in their freedom index of 2025.