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Egypt’s Al-Azhar censures Charlie Hebdo for reprint of blasphemous cartoons

Wednesday, 02 September 2020 4:57 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 02 September 2020 4:57 PM ]

This court sketch made on September 2, 2020 at the Paris courthouse shows the fourteen accused and their lawyers at the opening of the trial of the accomplices in Charlie Hebdo terrorist killings in 2015. (Photo by AFP)

Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world’s foremost religious institution, has denounced the French magazine Charlie Hebdo for reprinting offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

“The insistence on the criminal act to republish these offensive cartoons embeds hate speech further and inflames the emotions of faithful followers of religions,” Al-Azhar’s Observatory for Combating Extremism said in a statement on its Facebook page on Wednesday.

The reprint coincides with the opening of the trial over the deadly attack of 2015 on the magazine’s offices.

In January that year, two terrorists attacked the offices in Paris. Twelve staffers were killed. The attack, condemned by Muslims across the world, was allegedly a response to the blasphemy.

The caricatures reprinted this week were originally published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and then republished by Charlie Hebdo in 2006.

Al-Azhar said Charlie Hebdo’s contentious decision to republish the cartoons was “an unjustified provocation of the emotions of nearly two billion Muslims around the world.”

The terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo were French-born brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who claimed the attacks in the name of al-Qaeda.

Two days later, a jailhouse acquaintance of theirs, Amedy Coulibaly, stormed a kosher supermarket, killing four hostages. He also killed a young female police officer.

The three terrorists were later killed by police.

Fourteen people accused of complicity went on trial on Wednesday. They included the wife of one of the attackers — being tried in absentia — as well as a network of men who allegedly supplied guns, ammunition, transportation, and bulletproof vests to the two brothers who stormed the offices.

Also in its statement, Al-Azhar stressed that “Islam abhors any act of violence.”

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