Rage is growing across the Muslim world at the French president and his perceived attacks on Islam and the prophet Muhammad, leading to calls for boycotts of the French products and security warnings for France’s citizens in majority-Muslim states.

The backlash has cut across an extraordinarily diverse Muslim world with a myriad of cultures, sects, political systems and levels of economic development. It has stoked historical and present-day grievances from the markets of Herat in Afghanistan to the upmarket neighborhoods of Amman and the universities of Islamabad.

Tension has simmered since September when the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished cartoons of the prophet Muhammad on the eve of a trial of 14 people accused of involvement in a terrorist attack against the publication’s offices in 2015 for publishing the same caricatures.

Charlie Hebdo risked further inflaming tensions with Turkey by placing a cartoon mocking president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the front page of its edition published online on Tuesday night.

It was fuelled by a speech Macron gave earlier this month announcing his intention to fight “Islamist separatism”, in which he described the faith as one “that is in crisis all over the world today”, prompting objections from several Muslim leaders and commentators. A fortnight later, the French teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school for showing his class the Muhammad cartoons.

Two French cities, Toulouse and Montpellier, projected Charlie Hebdo caricatures including that of the Islamic prophet on the walls of their regional council buildings as a gesture of defiance and defence of secularism, following a decision by the Occitanie region’s head, Carole Delga. And Emmanuel Macron told a vigil in Paris that his country “would not give up cartoons”.

Source: The Guardian