Indonesian Muslim group calls for calm amid Islamic world’s fury at France’s Macron

Name: Muslims protest against French leader’s defence of Prophet Mohammed cartoons, call for boycott
Uploaded: 2020-10-28T14:38:10.000Z
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: Muslims protest against French leader’s defence of Prophet Mohammed cartoons, call for boycott

Head of Nahdlatul Ulama said ‘responding to the insult … by killing the perpetrator is a savage act that has the potential to trigger widespread instability’

In Malaysia, the foreign minister said the country strongly condemned the ‘defamation of Islam’ as he expressed concern over growing hostilities towards Muslims

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A Palestinian in East Jerusalam erects a mural with the slogan “Anyone but the Prophet” and the portrait of French President Emmanuel Macron with boot prints and placed on the body of a dog. Photo: AFP

Amy Chew

Published: 10:38pm, 28 Oct 2020Updated: 1:18am, 29 Oct 2020

Indonesian group Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim organisation, on Wednesday called for calm while criticising France’s “extreme secularism”, even as Muslims across the world reacted furiously to French President Emmanuel Macron’s defence of free speech and description of Islam as “a religion in crisis”.

“Humiliating the honour of the Prophet Mohammed is considered an insult to Islam,” said Yahya Staquf, secretary general of NU, which has an estimated 90 million members.

“However, responding to the insult to the Prophet by killing the perpetrator is a savage act that has the potential to trigger widespread instability without control,” he warned.

More than 90 per cent of Indonesia’s population of 270 million identify as Muslim, making it the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

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Muslims protest against French leader’s defence of Prophet Mohammed cartoons, call for boycott

Staquf was reacting to Macron’s statements in the wake of the beheading of French high schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen extremist on October 16 after Paty showed his students some of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons published in 2015 by Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper.

The publication of the cartoons led to the massacre of 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo the same year.