(CNSNews.com) – As Islamic heads of state line up to criticize France over perceived denigration of Mohammed, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan is urging fellow Muslim leaders around the world to work together to confront “Islamophobia,” which he charged “is spreading in European countries where sizeable Muslim populations reside.”
In a letter to “leaders of Muslim states,” Khan said leaders in Western countries often act out of a “lack of understanding of the intrinsic deep passion, love and devotion Muslims all over the world have for their Prophet” and the Qur’an.
“The time has come for the leaders of the Muslim world to take this message with clarity and unity to the rest of the world, especially the Western world so an end is put to Islamophobia and attacks on Islam and our Prophet.”
Pakistan enforces some of the world’s harshest blasphemy laws, with Christians, Ahmadis and other minorities disproportionally affected by provisions that carry the death penalty for disparaging Mohammed; life imprisonment for defiling the Qur’an; and shorter jail terms for insulting Mohammed’s wives, relatives or “companions.”
In his letter, Khan described a vicious cycle – actions hurt the sentiments of Muslims, who react “as they see their beloved Prophet targeted,” prompting further discriminatory actions by governments, resulting in “marginalization” of Muslims, in turn leading to “radicalization.”
“In this environment, it is incumbent on us as leaders of the Muslim world to collectively take the lead in breaking this cycle of hate and extremism, which nurtures violence and even death,” he wrote.
On Thursday, a knife-wielding Islamist shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a woman and killed two other people preparing for Mass at a Catholic Church in Nice, two weeks after a teacher near Paris was decapitated by a Muslim angered by his showing of a cartoon lampooning Mohammed during a classroom lesson dealing with freedom of speech.
After the church slaying, President Emmanuel Macron announced plans immediately to more than double the number of soldiers deployed at schools and religious sites, to 7,000.
Macron has angered Muslims by defending the right to display caricatures of Mohammed in officially secular France.
On Thursday the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the bloc of mostly Muslim-majority nations, said it “strongly condemns such an unjustified provocation of Muslim feelings under the pretext of freedom of expression.”
The OIC secretariat said it also rejected any attempt to link Islam with terrorism, adding that it “condemns every terrorist act, regardless of its perpetrator, and calls for intellectual and cultural freedom to be a beacon for respect, tolerance, and peace.”
The OIC declared that “defamation of the Messengers (peace be upon them) is unacceptable under any pretext,” and pointed to a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling in October 2018 which stated that disparaging of Mohammed is not covered by the right to freedom of expression.
The ECHR ruling upheld an Austrian court verdict to the effect that comments about Mohammed having pedophilic tendencies – his marriage to the youngest of his dozen wives and concubines was consummated when she was nine, according to Islamic texts – constituted “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace.”
For years the OIC, with Pakistan playing the leading role, campaigned at the United Nations for “defamation of religion” to be outlawed.
For a decade Islamic states and their allies each year promoted a resolution calling for the “defamation of religion” to be outlawed, while mostly Western democracies opposed the move on free speech grounds.
The deadlock was broken in 2011 when the U.N. Human Rights Council passed a compromise resolution entitled “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.”
Co-sponsored by the Obama administration and Egypt, the measure did not contain the provocative term “defamation,” but did express concern about “derogatory stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of persons based on their religion or belief” and urged governments to adopt “measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief.”
On Wednesday, the head of the Alliance of Civilizations, a U.N. project launched by Spain and Turkey in 2006 with the aim of building bridges between Islam and the West, called caricatures of Mohammed “inflammatory.”
“Insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarization and fragmentation of the society,” said Miguel Moratinos, a former Spanish foreign minister.
“Acts of violence cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or ethnic group,” he added.