Muslim Rage - Deeply Sensitive Again

Muslim radicals burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth Tuesday as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Salman Rushdie's knighthood.

Muslim world inflamed by Rushdie knighthood
Ben Hoyle

Sir Salman Rushdie celebrates his 60th birthday today in familiar circumstances: he is once again the subject of death threats across the Islamic world.

Eighteen years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him, a government minister in Pakistan said yesterday that Rushdie’s recent knighthood justified suicide bombing.

The question of blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s 1988 tale of a prophet misled by the devil, remains a deeply sensitive issue in much of the Muslim world and the author’s inclusion in the Queen’s Birthday Honours last week has inflamed anti-British sentiment.

Gerald Butt, editor of the authoritative Middle East Economic Survey, told The Times: “It will be interpreted as an action calculated to goad Muslims at a time when the atmosphere is already very tense and Britain’s standing in the region is very low because of its involvement in Iraq and its lack of action in tackling the Palestine issue.”

Hardliners in Iran revived calls for his murder yesterday. Mehdi Kuchakzadeh, a Tehran MP, declared: “Rushdie died the moment the late Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] issued the fatwa.”

The Organisation to Commemorate Martyrs of the Muslim World, a fringe hardline group, offered a reward of $150,000 (£75,000) to any successful assassin.

Read the Rest here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1951462.ece

----- UPDATE:

British queen's effigy burns as Rushdie anger mounts
Jun 19

Muslim radicals burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth Tuesday as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Salman Rushdie's knighthood and Iranian hardliners turned their fury on the monarch.

Anger has mounted in the neighbouring Islamic republics since the British monarch gave the 59-year-old author of "The Satanic Verses" the title of Sir Salman for services to literature at the weekend.

The row has thrown Rushdie back in the eye of the storm, 18 years after he was sentenced to death by Iran's revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for blasphemy in a fatwa that has never been revoked.

Pakistan called British High Commissioner, or ambassador, Robert Brinkley to the foreign ministry in Islamabad on Tuesday to receive an official protest against the honour for the Indian-born writer, officials said.

Brinkley had defended the award, hailing Rushdie's "distinguished" career and saying in a statement that it was "simply untrue that this knighthood is intended as an insult to Islam or the Prophet Mohammed."

Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul-Haq on Monday said the award for Rushdie justified suicide attacks, prompting outrage in Britain, although he later withdrew the remark.

Pakistan's senate on Tuesday condemned the "blatant disregard for the sentiments of the Muslims by the British government by awarding (a) knighthood to Salman Rushdie, who committed blasphemy against the Holy Prophet."

Legislators in North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, which is ruled by an alliance of hardline Islamists, called for Pakistan to sever diplomatic ties with London.

Around 150 hardline protesters in the eastern city of Lahore torched an effigy of the British queen and called for Rushdie to be handed to a Muslim country and dealt with by a Sharia court, witnesses said.

"The punishment for a blasphemer is death," Shahid Gilani, who heads the youth wing of Pakistan's radical Jamaat-e-Islami party, told the crowd.

Read the Rest here:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070619133646.y4b9usoy&show_article=1