COPENHAGEN - Denmark and Norway on Monday condemned as incitement to murder a Pakistani cleric’s offer of a reward to anyone who kills any of the 12 Danish cartoonists who lampooned the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
"It’s murder and murder is also forbidden by the Koran," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller told a news conference with his colleague Jonas Gahr Stoere from Norway, which has been dragged into the row after a paper published the cartoons.
"Islam is also a religion of peace, mercy and forgiveness. That is why it is my opinion, but also the opinion of many Muslims, this is un-Islamic," said the Danish minister.
A Pakistani Muslim cleric and his followers offered rewards on Friday amounting to more than $1 million for killing one of the Danish cartoonists, who are under police protection.
At Friday prayers in Peshawar, Maulana Yousef Qureshi set a bounty of 500,000 rupees ($8,400) and two of his congregation put up rewards of $1 million and one million rupees plus a car.
The Danish paper Jyllands-Posten first published the cartoons last September, but Danish Muslim leaders brought them to the attention of imams in the Middle East in December and January. Many newspapers and magazines in Europe and elsewhere have run the cartoons in defence of free speech.
No fatwa needed
Scandinavian Muslim groups denounced the bounty offer.
Ahmed Abu-Laban, a Danish imam who helped organise a trip to Egypt and Lebanon last year by local Muslim leaders to rally support against the drawings, condemned the threats and said he was now satisfied with the development of dialogue in Denmark.
"We have enough religious leaders in Denmark and Norway to issue a fatwa if one is needed. We have no need for one and we will not import a foreign one", he said. A fatwa is a legal pronouncement in Islam, issued by a religious law specialist, often associated with death threats.
The Islamic Council of Norway, an umbrella group of moderate Muslims, said it had no complaints since the editor of a paper in Norway that published the cartoons apologised.
But the editor of the small Norwegian Christian paper Magazinet, vilified in the Muslim world like Jyllands-Posten for publishing the drawings, defended his right to free speech.
"I will continue this fight. I just as much want to fight for my right to free speech as before," Vebjoern Selbekk told Reuters from Spain, where he went after apologising on Feb. 10.
One Danish cartoonist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday his drawing was meant "as a practical joke... I didn’t think anybody outside the newspaper’s readers in Jutland would see it, now more than a billion people have."
While many of the 12 cartoons first published in September depict the Prophet, which is forbidden by Islam, others lampoon the newspaper itself or a Danish anti-immigrant party and one shows a nervous artist labouring over a cartoon of the Prophet.
