Editors of a new US book on the controversy over cartoons caricaturing Muslims and the Prophet Mohammed have triggered a storm by deciding not to reprint the 12 sketches for fear of new violence.

"The Cartoons That Shook the World," due out in November by Yale University Press, examines the reaction of the Muslim world to the 2005 publication of the cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Author Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, reluctantly agreed to cut the cartoons from the book.

"I am sad personally because I feel it is a loss to the book to be published without the illustrations. It is also sad that we have a circumstance where an academic press feels compelled to go ahead and remove these illustrations," Klausen told AFP in a telephone interview.

Other images of Mohammed were also removed, including a 19th century Gustave Dore print illustrating a passage from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy of Mohammed in hell.