Mick Hartley

Ken’s friend Sheikh al-Qaradawi is calling for today to be an “international day of anger”:

A leading hard-line Muslim cleric, Sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi, called for the day of anger to protest against the printing of the cartoons – first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September – in other European papers.

“Let Friday be an international day of anger for God and his prophet,” said the sheikh, who is the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars. He is one of the Arab world’s most popular television preachers and made a controversial visit to London in July 2004 as a guest of the mayor, Ken Livingstone.

Ahmed Akkari, a Muslim theologian from Copenhagen, said he had attended a meeting this week with the Danish intelligence service, which called the situation “very, very tense”.

He said that a text message had been sent to the mobile phones of young Muslims “telling people not to react to provocations from Right-wing extremists, like burning the Koran, but I know some Muslims will not listen to our message”.

He said the level of anger was “very high” in the Muslim community across Europe and the wider world.

“It is more likely [than not] that any minute we will hear of violence unless the police can control the situation.”

Mr Akkari is the spokesman for a group of Danish imams and activists who brought the cartoons – plus three more offensive ones from an unknown source – to the wider attention of Muslims in trips to Egypt and Lebanon. One of the three new cartoons shows Mohammed with a pig’s snout.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Akkari referred to the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands in 2004. Mr van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death by a Muslim extremist as “punishment” for making a film about the repression of Muslim women that included images of naked women with Koranic verses on their skin.

“For four months we have been trying to take this conflict in hand politically and by the legal system so that we should not see any scenario like Holland,” Mr Akkari said.

I don’t know what that “not” is doing in the last sentence. Clearly Akkari has been doing everything he can – including dreaming up three more offensive cartoons, including Mohammed with a pig’s snout, which were never part of the original twelve – to ensure that the affair will end in violence.