Despite the outrage in the Muslim world caused by the recent publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in several European newspapers, such controversy is nothing new in the realm of political caricature.

Amazingly, 81 years ago David Low caused a similar response from the Muslim world when he drew a rather benign looking Muhammad looking up at the English cricket hero, Sir Jack Hobbs. According to a Calcutta correspondent, when it appeared in the Indian version of the Morning Post, it “convulsed many Muslims in speechless rage. Meetings were held and resolutions of protest were passed”.

Cartoonists are thus only too aware that approaching religion can be a minefield. Steve Bell, of The Guardian, admits that he was particularly conscious of this during the early 1980s with the Salman Rushdie affair. According to Bell: “It does make you think twice, although I did my best at the time, taking the p*** out of Ayatollah Khomeini.”

The Times cartoonist Peter Brookes believes that being provocative for the sake of it is not only “meaningless but also invariably leads to injury or violence to someone. If you asked the Muhammad cartoonists whether they were glad now, I’m sure that they’d say no.” After the July 7 bombings Brookes’s cartoon drawing an “immoral equivalence” between the atrocity and the bombing of Iraq led to reader criticism.

A particular risk for the cartoonist is that as a visual image a cartoon can easily be misinterpreted. For example, when Dave Brown, of The Independent, drew a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian baby — an allusion to a well-known Goya painting — to comment upon Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, many Jewish people believed the imagery in the cartoon had been lifted straight from the virulent anti-Semitic Nazi organ Die Stürmer . Mainly because of its contentious subject matter, the cartoon was voted Political Cartoon of the Year 2003 by members of the Political Cartoon Society. This resulted in the society receiving the condemnation of Jews around the world.

Another famous example is a cartoon by Philip Zec, published in the Daily Mirror in March 1942, showing a torpedoed merchant seaman hanging on to a life raft. The caption read: “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny: official.” It was intended to show that the public should use fuel sparingly as it was costing lives to bring it across the North Atlantic. However, the cartoon so infuriated the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who misread it, that he almost had the paper shut down.

During the 1930s British cartoonists had the Nazis up in arms by ridiculing their Führer. On July 8, 1936, during the Berlin Olympics, Sidney Strube, of the Daily Express, produced a cartoon to which Hitler took an instant dislike. Orders were given that all copies of that day’s Daily Express were to be confiscated as soon as they arrived in Germany.

A year later the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax held talks with Germany’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, who complained that British cartoonists were damaging Anglo-German relations. Goebbels singled out Low for special attention. Halifax told the Evening Standard’s manager Michael Wardell, who was asked to arrange a meeting between Halifax and Low: “You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause. As soon as a copy of the Evening Standard arrives, it is pounced upon for Low’s cartoon, and if it is of Hitler, as it generally is, telephones buzz, tempers rise, fevers mount, and the whole governmental system of Germany is in uproar.”

Halifax personally asked Low to modify his criticism of Hitler. Low agreed. However, the respite lasted only three weeks as Hitler then occupied Austria. Low felt vindicated and renewed his attacks upon the Nazi regime.

The meeting between Low and Halifax was probably the only time that a senior member of the British Government has personally censured a cartoonist. After the war Low and Strube found their names on a Nazi death list, emphasising that a cartoonist’s lot is not always a safe one — as the cartoonists who have depicted Muhammad have also discovered.

Dr Tim Benson is the founder of the Political Cartoon Gallery, WC1 (020-7580 1114). Its current exhibition is Misunderestimating the President through Cartoons, until March 16