What was it about Picasso? Or Sudjojono? Some time in the early 1950s, when Sudjojono was not yet 40, he decided to do something unusual: He and other artists rode their motorbikes from Yogya to Jakarta. Their aim was to convince President Sukarno to agree to the idea of Sticusa, the Dutch foundation for cultural cooperation, to mount a large exhibition of 20th-century European painters: Picasso, Matisse, Braque.

A sad aspect of history is when there are no longer any innocent people. If it is true that an imam in Queens, New York, was shot in the head at close range merely because he was a Muslim or in Middle Eastern dress, then he was seen as someone implicated in crime, even cruelty, in another place, in another time, carried out in the name of Islam. Maulana Akonjee was an imam, a gentle man, but the man who shot him decided he was part of a political force of evil people. The label was fixed. Revenge could be wreaked upon him.

Religion, anxiety and prejudice, all are semi-mute on the old Prague clock. Built over 600 years ago, the Orloj timekeeper gradually became a sign of distrust; there was something that had to be rejected, something called 'the Turk'. Affixed to the tower on the southern wall of the ancient City Hall in Staromstak Nmst, the Orloj bears a message conveyed with symbols.