At the end of June, one of Türkiye's last satirical magazines, LeMan, published a cartoon with two angels named Muhammad and Moses. Some political Islamists saw this as a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad – illegal in fundamentalist Sunni Islam – and around 300 of them protested against the magazine at its café on 1 July in Istanbul.

Driven by the political Islamist protesters, Turkish authorities then arrested four journalists working there, charging them with ”inciting public hatred and enmity”. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government described it as an ”Islamophobic hate crime”. The politically Islamist government uses labels like these to blame the opposition for denying Türkiye's religious roots.

Tuncay Akgün, the magazine's editor-in-chief, denied those allegations. ”More than 200 million people in the Islamic world are named Muhammad. (It) has nothing to do with prophet Muhammad.”He said that the cartoon was intended to highlight the suffering of Muslims and especially Palestinians, represented with a Muhammad – the most common given name – not the Prophet, during armed conflict.

This theologian agrees, and many believe the escalation was not accidental, but rather a planned effort in the government's ongoing culture war.