Muslim world blasts Macron
‘‘Love of the prophet cannot be expressed by killing, sabotaging, or responding to evil with evil.’’ Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa, Egyptian minister of religious endowments
Tens of thousands of Muslims, from Pakistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, poured out of prayer services to join antiFrance protests yesterday, as the French president’s vow to protect the right to caricature the Prophet Muhammad continues to roil the Muslim world.
Hardline Islamist groups have seized on the French government’s staunch secularist stance as an affront to Islam, rallying their supporters and stirring up rage.
Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, turned violent as more than 2000 people who tried to march towards the French embassy were pushed back by police with tear gas and batons. Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron from a highway overpass after pounding it furiously with their shoes.
In Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, an estimated 10,000 followers of the radical Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik party celebrating Muhammad’s birthday took to the streets. They chanted anti-France slogans, raised banners, and clogged major roads en route to a Sufi shrine.
‘‘There’s only one punishment for blasphemy,’’ shouted Khadim Hussain Rizvi, a fiery cleric leading the march.
‘‘Beheading! Beheading!’’ the protesters yelled back.
The demonstrations, largely led by Islamist parties, come amid rising tensions between France and Muslim-majority nations, which flared up earlier this month when a young Muslim beheaded a French schoolteacher who had shown caricatures of the Muhammad in class.
The images, republished by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to mark the opening of a trial over a deadly 2015 attack against the publication,
have stirred the ire of Muslims around the world, who consider depictions of their prophet to be blasphemous.
On Friday, a knife-wielding Tunisian man carrying a copy of the Quran killed three people at a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice.
Several hundred demonstrators in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, flocked toward the Palais des Pins, the official residence of the French ambassador, but found their way blocked by riot police.
In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, worshippers thronged a Shiite mosque after prayers yesterday, chanting slogans and holding signs lampooning Macron.
Turkey has led regional condemnation of the French president, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s verbal attacks prompting France to recall its ambassador last weekend.
Hundreds of Palestinians also protested against Macron outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third- holiest site in Islam. Scores more turned out in the Gaza Strip, where militant group Hamas organised antiFrance rallies at mosques across the territory, which it controls.
Cries of ‘‘ Death to France’’ rang out in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and several other provinces as thousands filled the streets. Demonstrators trampled portraits of Macron and called on
Afghan leaders to close the French embassy, halt French imports. and ban French citizens from visiting the country.
In the western Herat province, protesters hoisted an effigy of Macron on a crane and set it alight.
Muslims also rallied outside the Middle East, with a huge crowd of more than 50,000 noisy protesters in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, torching effigies of Macron.
During the past week, protests and calls to boycott French products have spread rapidly in the Muslim world, and social media has been full of anti-France hashtags.
The attack in Nice has drawn condemnation from leaders of countries that voiced outrage over the caricatures, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt.
The leader of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, denounced the attack, which he said was rejected by Islam.
However, in a televised address yesterday, he criticised French authorities and Macron for their insistence on defending the Muhammad caricatures in the name of freedom of expression. ‘‘No Muslim in this world can accept insulting his prophet.’’
In a sermon aired live on Egyptian state TV, the country’s minister of religious endowments appeared to denounce any violent retaliation for the cartoons.
‘‘Love of the prophet cannot be expressed by killing, sabotaging, or responding to evil with evil,’’ said Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa.
Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad yesterday stood by his widely condemned comments on attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying they were taken out of context, and criticising Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.
Mahathir sparked widespread outrage when he wrote on his blog on Friday that ‘‘Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past’’.