Around 10,000 people in Bangladesh demonstrated in the South Asian nation’s capital on Tuesday to protest against the president of France and his strong support for secular laws that consider cartoons depicting the free speech-protected prophet Muhammad.
Protesters from the conservative group Islami Andolon Bangladesh, which supports the introduction of Islamic law in the Muslim-majority country, carried placards and banners reading: “All Muslims in the World Unite” and “Boycott France.” It was the largest protest so far against cartoons in recent days.
Some carried portraits of French President Emmanuel Macron with an “X” on his face. A protester carried a cropped image of the French president with shoes around his neck as a sign of insult.
The problem has come to light again in recent days after a gruesome beheading near Paris of a French teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class. The 18-year-old Chechen refugee who carried out the attack was shot and killed by the police.
The teacher, Samuel Paty, has been heralded as a symbol of France’s strong secular ideals and its rejection of religious intrusion into public spheres. Macron and members of his government have pledged to continue supporting cartoons as protected by freedom of expression.
Muslim politicians, religious scholars, and ordinary people have condemned such depictions as a form of hate speech and consider them sacrilegious and insulting to Islam. Muslims have been calling for protests and a boycott of French products in response to France’s stance on cartoons of Islam’s most revered prophet.
Five years ago, French-born Al Qaeda extremists assassinated 12 employees of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in response to the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Those cartoons also sparked mass protests in Muslim-majority countries, and some turned deadly.
Elsewhere, Iran summoned a French diplomat to protest France’s stance on the cartoons. A state television report on Tuesday said that an Iranian official at the country’s Foreign Ministry told the French diplomat that Paris’s response after Paty’s murder was “reckless” and that France was allowing hatred against Islam. under the guise of support for freedom of expression.
A powerful clergy association in the Iranian city of Qom also urged the government to convict Macron. The hard-line Iranian newspaper Vatan-e Emrooz described Macron as the devil and called him Satan in a cartoon on its front page on Tuesday.
Pakistan’s parliament passed a resolution condemning the publication of cartoons of the prophet.
In Saudi Arabia, the country’s state-run Saudi Press Agency issued a statement from the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday saying the kingdom “rejects any attempt to link Islam and terrorism, and denounces offensive cartoons of the prophet.” Saudi clerics have also condemned the cartoons, but have also cited the prophet’s “mercy, justice, tolerance”. Another prominent sheikh asked Muslims not to overreact.
The Arab Gulf state of Qatar also condemned what it described as “the dramatic escalation of populist rhetoric” that incites religious abuse. In a statement, the government said that an incendiary speech is fueling calls to repeatedly attack nearly 2 billion Muslims around the world through the deliberate offense of the Prophet Muhammad and has led to increased hostility towards Muslims. .
Bangladeshi protesters gathered in front of the Baitul Mokarram main mosque in central Dhaka on Tuesday morning. The group walked towards the French Embassy, but the police intercepted the march, which ended without violence.
Protests have also recently taken place in Iraq, Turkey, the Gaza Strip and in opposition areas of northwestern Syria controlled by Turkish-backed rebels.
Rezaul Karim, the head of the Islami Andolon group in Bangladesh, called on France to refrain from showing cartoons of the prophet.
“We Muslims never made cartoons of other religious leaders,” he said.
“Allah sent the Prophet Muhammad as an ambassador for peace … Macron and his associates learned nothing from history,” he added, before asking Muslims to boycott French products.
Karim also said that Macron should be treated for his “mental illness”, comments similar to those made days earlier by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been the most vociferous in his criticism among political leaders, saying that Macron needed him to. They examined his head and that he had lost his mind. road. Since then, France has withdrawn its ambassador to Turkey and other European nations have defended Macron.
The Bangladeshi leadership, however, has not criticized France, as have Turkey, Pakistan and other Muslim-majority nations. Bangladesh, a nation of 160 million people, mostly Muslim, is governed by a secular constitution.
In the Middle East, Kuwaiti stores removed French yogurts, cheese and bottles of sparkling water from their shelves, the University of Qatar canceled a week of French culture and calls to stay away from the French-owned Carrefour supermarket chain, they were trending on social media in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
.
