I emailed Akkari the morning Danish television broadcast video of Abu Khattab pumping bullets into his photo. I asked if we could talk again: “Yes, of course you call anytime you see fit. Or write, since I’m leaving for a trip to get distance [from] the escalation here.”

The last time Akkari fled Denmark, to Greenland, he returned with an armful of philosophy books and a passion for Enlightenment values. “You go to a place to try to find meaning in life—God, a secure environment, a community you feel good about—and you end up looking very strangely at the world. I can’t explain to you how relieved I feel, sitting at my friend’s house drinking coffee, with the way I see my surroundings. It’s difficult to explain.”

During the cartoon crisis, a popular Saudi imam told Al Jazeera that free speech was the enemy of religious faith: “The problem is that [the Danes] want to open up … everything for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.”

It now seemed a prescient observation, because it was liberalism, the consumption of dissenting ideas—the very thing he had once dedicated his life to shutting down—that changed Ahmed Akkari. Jacob Mchangama argues that, for Akkari, the Danish tradition of free speech acted as a disinfectant. “The Akkari affairs shows the fallacy of the argument that we need to ‘compromise’ and be ‘pragmatic’ when it comes to free speech and religious sensitivities.”