“They’re free to publish what they like but it affects us, it’s going to hurt us a lot,” a Muslim woman identified as Salya told France Info radio from outside a mosque in Clichy-La-Garenne, a Paris suburb inhabited by many Muslims originally from north Africa.
Outside France, Muslim leaders condemned the weekly’s decision to put a cartoon of the prophet back on the cover. It shows a weeping prophet holding up a sign saying “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), the slogan of global solidarity with the magazine’s journalists who were killed in their offices last Wednesday. The headline reads “All is forgiven”.
In the Philippines, police said about 1,500 people protested in the Muslim-majority city of Marawi, with local politicians and teenage students packing the main square and some raising their fists in the air as a Charlie Hebdo poster was burned.
“What happened in France, the Charlie Hebdo killing, is a moral lesson for the world to respect any kind of religion, especially the religion of Islam,” the organisers said in a statement released during the three-hour rally, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported. “Freedom of expression does not extend to insulting the noble and the greatest prophet of Allah.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member