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In Pakistan and Iran there is growing discontent over the reissue of controversial cartoons of Muhammad in the French satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo”. In Pakistan, thousands of people took to the streets in anti-French demonstrations on Friday after the government harshly criticized the reprint of the cartoons. Tehran condemned the cartoons as “provocation.”
On the occasion of the start of the trial against the alleged collaborators in the attack on the “Charlie Hebdo” newsroom, the satire newspaper had reprinted the cartoons of Muhammad in a special edition this week, thus making him a target of the Islamists.
The hitmen who carried out the attack on the Paris satire newspaper on January 7, 2015, killing twelve people, had justified their act with cartoons. The drawings show, among other things, the prophet Muhammad with a bomb on his head instead of a turban.
“We have to send a strong message to the French that this lack of respect for our beloved Prophet will not be tolerated,” protester Mohammad Ansari said during a demonstration in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. The demonstrations were led by the Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, which has organized large and often violent protests in the past over alleged profanity.
Images of the prophet are forbidden in Islam. Insulting religion is punishable by the death penalty under Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws. Even before the protests, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi wrote on the online service Twitter that the aim of the cartoons was “to hurt the feelings of billions of Muslims.”
For Tehran, the cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2005, represent an “insult” to the more than one billion Muslims around the world. Any disrespectful portrayal of Muhammad or other prophets is “absolutely unacceptable,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Thursday night.
The trial of 14 alleged accomplices of the attackers opened in Paris on Wednesday, who in addition to the editorial team of “Charlie Hebdo” had also attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
