Muslim unrestFrance braces for Muslim backlash

France said it would temporarily close French embassies, diplomatic facilities, cultural centers, and schools in twenty Muslim countries in anticipation of anti-French backlash. On Wednesday, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons which mocked the Prophet Mohammed.

The French prime minister and other official spokesmen, citing the principle of free speech, said they would not intervene to stop the magazine from publishing the cartoons, although they did emphasize that such freedom should be exercised with responsibility.

NBC News quotes a Foreign Ministry spokesman to say, “We have indeed decided as a precautionary measure to close our premises, embassies, consulates, cultural centers and schools.” Riot police were also sent to the offices of the weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo.

Arab League secretary-general Nabil Elaraby called the drawings outrageous but said those who were offended by them should “use peaceful means to express their firm rejection.”

Tunisia’s ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called an act of “aggression” against Muhammad but urged Muslims not to fall into a trap intended to “derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West.”

Malek Chebel, a religion anthropologist and expert on Islam, says the cartoons could damage President Francois Hollande’s image in Muslim countries, because protesters there don’t make a distinction between Hollande’s views and those of a French private newspaper.

“He had a fairly positive image until now,” Chebel, who is a commentator and translator of the Quran, told the Christian Science Monitor. “And now with this one case, it’s the moment of truth.… He is going to be judged by [public] opinions now.”

Hollande is also popular among the French Muslim community which usually leans to the left. A 6 May survey by French pollster OpinionWay found that 93 percent of Muslims who voted in the second round of the French presidential election chose Hollande over then-incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist and professor at France’s École des hautes études en sciences sociales, says tensions between freedom of speech and freedom of religion are more acute in France than other European countries due to its history of secularism. The tensions involving Islam and French society nowadays are the same that involved Catholicism over a century ago, according to Khosrokhavar, who has done research on Muslim issues in France.

“There is a French specificity first because there is a history of struggle against the Catholic church,” Khosrokhavar told the Monitor. “Now the Catholic church is tamed, if I can put it that way, and it transfers onto Islam.”

The French government also said it would not give a permit for a protest demonstration, scheduled for 22 September, against the crude anti-Islamic movie produced by an Egyptian Christian Copt now living in California. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said yesterday morning that the government will ban the demonstration. “There is no reason for us to allow conflicts into our country that don’t regard France,” Ayrault said. “We are in a republic that has no intention at all of being intimidated by anybody about its values.”

The magazine’s Web site was available only intermittently since Wednesday as a result of sustained cyber attacks . For more on the magazine and its place in French culture, see this Guardian article by Philippe Marlière, a professor of French politics at University College London.