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France is seeking to appoint a special envoy to explain Emmanuel Macron’s thinking on secularism and freedom of expression in an attempt to quell the growing anti-French backlash in some Muslim countries, officials said.
Rising anti-French sentiment also has the potential to deepen the already entrenched conflict between Macron and Turkey over Libya and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.
Macron has already conducted a lengthy Al Jazeera Arabic interview seeking to justify his approach, but so far he has only received full support for his stance from the UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash.
Macron also spoke by phone with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to assure him that he distinguished between terrorism and extremism on the one hand, and Islam and Islamic thought on the other.
Many Arab leaders have condemned the assassination of French professor Samuel Paty on October 16, the subsequent killings in Nice, and the latest killings on Monday night in Vienna, but the degree of explicit and implicit criticism of Macron’s stance on freedom expression has surprised some. French officials.
It was also concerned that some of the major news agencies in Turkey and Qatar have published opinion pieces claiming that the rights of Muslims in France have been suppressed.
Macron has been personally caricatured in the Iranian press as the devil and his effigy burned in Bangladesh when 50,000 protesters took to the streets. A call for a boycott of French products was also launched, encouraged by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to little effect.
The Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry said it “rejects any attempt to link Islam with terrorism and condemns the offensive cartoons of the prophet.”
His government also requested that “intellectual and cultural freedom be a beacon of respect, tolerance and peace that rejects the practices and acts that generate hatred, violence and extremism and are contrary to the values of coexistence.”
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad wrote on Twitter that “Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people over the massacres of the past,” and criticized the French president’s attitude as “very primitive.”
Gargash, an ally of the French and an opponent of Turkey in Libya, said in an interview with Die Welt: “[Muslims] You have to listen carefully to what Macron said in his speech. He does not want to ghettoize Muslims in the West, and he is absolutely right. “
He added: “As a Muslim, I am offended by certain cartoons. But as a thinking person, I see the policies that are carried out around this issue. With his attacks on France, Erdogan manipulates a religious issue for political purposes.
“The French president’s words were deliberately taken out of context.”
Gargash said Erdogan was using the controversy to mount a political recovery. “As soon as Erdogan sees a loophole or weakness, he uses it to increase his influence. Only when the red line is shown is he ready to negotiate, ”he said.
“Erdogan wants to become the leader of Sunni Islam. That’s why he staged it that way. But in truth this is a political project, not a theological one ”.
He said the Turkish president’s real goal was to expand his country’s influence in the Muslim world, which already stretches from the Gulf to the western Mediterranean.
“Erdogan wants to take advantage of this situation and rebuild the Ottoman empire. Like Iran, it follows an imperialist policy and that is one of the main dangers in the region, ”he said.
“Macron is one of the few European politicians who is openly opposed to Turkey’s regional expansion,” says Gargash. “Europe needs a united stance towards Turkey.”
Macron has emphasized that the cartoons were not official publications. He said: “I understand and respect that these cartoons may surprise us, but I will never accept that we can justify physical violence from these cartoons. I will always defend in my country the freedom to say, write, think, draw ”.
