New Muhammad sketch comes under fire in Muslim world

Iran strongly criticized as provocative the latest edition of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for putting a new cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on the front cover while the jihadist Islamic State group called it “an extremely stupid ” act.

Also, Turkish authorities prevented a local newspaper from including the magazine’s drawings of Muhammad in its pages.

The magazine cover “provokes the emotions of Muslims and hurts their feelings around the world, and could fan the flame of a vicious circle of extremism,” said Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham. She added that the carton was “insulting” and “provocative.”

The Islamic State group’s radio also panned the magazine for the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed.

“Charlie Hebdo has again published cartoons insulting the prophet and this is an extremely stupid act,” said a statement read on Al-Bayan radio, which the jihadist group broadcasts in areas under its control in Syria and Iraq.

The new issue of Charlie Hebdo followed an attack by Islamist gunmen last week at the magazine’s office in Paris which killed 12 people.

Iran denounced the massacre the day it occurred and Afkham said Wednesday that such attacks “have no closeness or similarity to Islam” and are “in complete contradiction to Islamic teaching.”

However she indicated that the new cartoon was “abuse of freedom of speech, which is common in the West these days.”

Such publication “is not acceptable” and such “abuse should be prevented.”

“Respecting the beliefs and values of followers of divine religions is an acceptable principle,” she added.

In defiance of the terrorists who killed its staff, Charlie Hebdo’s new edition had a cartoon of a tearful Muhammad on its front page holding a sign saying “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”).

He was shown under the ambiguous title “All is forgiven.” Cartoonist Renald “Luz” Luzier said he cried after drawing it.

Some followers of Islam feel any depiction of the prophet is sacrilege.

The magazine, which printed 5 million copies instead of its usual 60,000, was sold out in many locations in Paris within minutes of going on sale.

In Turkey, police stopped trucks as they left a pro-secular newspaper’s printing center and checked the paper’s content after it decided to print a selection of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, the paper said on Wendesday.

Cumhuriyet newspaper said police allowed distribution to proceed after verifying that the satirical French newspaper’s controversial cover featuring the Prophet Muhammad was not published.

The paper printed a four-page selection of cartoons and articles on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo but left out cartoons which Muslims may find offensive. However, two Cumhuriyet columnists used small, black-and-white images of the Charlie Hebdo cover as their column headers in Wednesday’s issue.

“While preparing this selection, we respected societies’ freedoms of faith and religious sensitivities,” said Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief Uktu Cakirozer.

“Following a large number of consultations we decided not to include the magazine’s cover page,” Cakirozer said. He did not mention the two columnists’ decision to use images of the cover in their columns.

Caricatures featured in Cumhuriyet included some depicting Pope Francis and French President Francois Hollande, and one referring to a massacre by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Police intensified security outside Cumhuriyet’s headquarters and printing center as a precaution. A small group of pro-Islamic students staged a protest outside the paper’s office in Ankara, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

In Pakistan, censors removed an article about the cartoon whole cloth from editions of the New York Times’s international edition.

A statement at the bottom of the section read “The article was removed by our publishing alliance in Pakistan. The International New York Times and its editorial staff had no role in its removal.”

On Tuesday, Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious center of learning, warned that the new cartoons will only serve to “stir up hatred.”

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 center added in a statement.

Earlier in the day, Egypt’s state-sponsored Islamic authority, Dar al-Ifta, denounced as a provocation the new cartoons in Charlie Hebdo.

“This action is an unjustified provocation against the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims,” it said.

“This [magazine] 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.”

Last Wednesday Islamic extremist brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine killing ten workers and two policemen. The brothers declared the shooting was in revenge for the weekly having published cartoons featuring depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. They were both later killed in a shootout with police.

The killings, which came alongside the slaying of a policewoman and four Jewish shoppers at a kosher grocery in the French capital by another Islamic gunman, drawn global condemnation and prompted a unity march in Paris on Sunday, led by 50 world leaders and diplomats, that was attended by over 3,000,000 people.