New Charlie Hebdo cartoons will ‘stir hatred’

Al Azhar in Egypt has warned that the latest edition of French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which depicts a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed, could spark a new wave of hatred in French and Western society.

A sign in French that saya ‘Charlie Hebdo - Sold Out’ displayed outside a news agent in Dunkirk on January 14, 2015 as the first edition since the massacre at the French satirical weekly goes on sale.Show more

CAIRO // Sunni Islam’s most prestigious centre of learning, Al Azhar, has warned that new cartoons published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo will only serve to “stir up hatred”, with other global Muslim leaders adding their condemnation.

The drawings “do not serve the peaceful coexistence between peoples and hinders the integration of Muslims into European and Western societies,” the Cairo-based body’s Islamic research centre said on Tuesday.

Al Azhar was among the first Muslim groups to condemn last week’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 people dead.

The latest edition of the magazine, which went on sale on Wednesday, features a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed on the front cover. He is pictured with a tear in his eye and holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign, under the headline “All is forgiven”.

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Hussein condemned the front cover cartoon on Wednesday as an “insult [that] has hurt the feelings of nearly two billion Muslims all over the world. The cartoons and other slander damage relations between the followers of the [Abrahamic] faiths”.

The mufti, who oversees Jerusalem’s Muslim sites – including Islam’s third holiest, the Al Aqsa mosque compound – slammed the “publishing of cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, and the disregard for the feelings of Muslims”.

But many have taken a different stance in an effort to calm tensions. French Muslim leaders have urged their communities – many of whom have already been targeted – to “stay calm and avoid emotive reactions”.

Earlier on Tuesday, Egypt’s state-sponsored Islamic authority, Dar Al Ifta, also denounced the new cartoons as a provocation.

“This edition will result in a new wave of hatred in French and Western society. What the magazine is doing does not serve coexistence and the cultural dialogue Muslims aspire to,” it said.

The edition, which also mocks the gunmen who carried out the attack, was put together by surviving staff members, working out of borrowed offices, and had a print run of 3 million – more than 50 times the usual circulation.

Meanwhile, a Turkish court ordered a block on websites featuring the magazine’s front cover, the state Anatolia news agency said on Wednesday.

“Words, writing, cartoons and publications denigrating religious values and the prophet is regarded an insult to the followers of that faith,” the court ruling said.

Parts of the magazine had already appeared as a four-page insert in the country’s centre-left opposition daily newspaper, Cumhuriyet. It stopped short of publishing the magazine’s controversial cover, however.

The publication triggered a Turkish Twitter hashtag #UlkemdeCharlieHebdoDagitilamaz (Charlie Hebdo may not be distributed in my country).

Few Turkish websites published the cover but among those that did was the opposition website T24.tr. Access to the picture was still unfiltered Wednesday afternoon despite the court ruling.

* Agence France-Presse