Western embassies tightened security in Sanaa, fearing the cartoons published in a French magazine on Wednesday could lead to more unrest in the Yemeni capital where crowds attacked the US mission last week over an anti-Islam film made in America.
In the latest of a wave of protests against that video in the Islamic world, several thousand Shiite Mohammedans demonstrated in the northern Nigerian town of Zaria, burning an effigy of US President Barack Obama
This is a teachable moment...
and crying "Death to America™".
In the Pak capital, about 1,000 stone-throwing protesters clashed with police as they tried to force their way to the US embassy on Thursday and the government shut down mobile phone services in more than a dozen cities as part of security arrangements ahead of protests expected on Friday.
The US embassy in Pakistain has been running television advertisements, one featuring Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as
America's Blond Eminenceand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Dean Rusk...
, emphasizing that the US government had nothing to do with the film.
The US and French embassies were closed on Friday in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, which has the world's biggest Mohammedan population, and diplomatic missions in the Afghan capital, Kabul, were on lock-down.
The cartoons in La Belle France's Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly have provoked relatively little street anger, although about 100 Iranians demonstrated outside the French embassy in Tehran.
In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring revolts, the Islamist-led government decreed a ban on protests planned on Friday against the cartoons. Four people died and almost 30 were maimed last week when protesters incensed by the movie about the Prophet Muhammad stormed the US embassy.
An Islamist activist called for attacks in La Belle France to avenge the perceived insult to Islam by the "slaves of the cross".
Muawiyya al-Qahtani said on a website used by Islamist bully boyz and monitored by the US-based SITE intelligence group: "Is there someone who will roll up his sleeves and bring back to us the glory of the hero Muhammad Merah?"
He was referring to an al Qaeda-inspired gunman who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, in the southern French city of Toulouse
...lies on the banks of the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Toulouse metropolitan area is the fourth-largest in La Belle France...
in March.
Condemning the publication of the cartoons in La Belle France as an act verging on incitement, Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa said on Thursday it showed how polarized the West and the Mohammedan world had become.
Gomaa said Muhammad and his
"But his example was always to endure all personal insults and attacks without retaliation of any sort. There is no doubt that, since the Prophet is our greatest example in this life, this should also be the reaction of all Mohammedans."
His statement echoed one by Al Azhar, Egypt's prestigious seat of Sunni learning, which condemned the caricatures showing the Prophet naked but said any protest should be peaceful.
An official at the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, whose population of 83 million people is 10 percent Christian, also condemned the cartoons as insults to Islam.
Last week, some Egyptian protesters scaled the US Embassy walls and tore down the flag. They clashed with police for four days, although most of the thousands of Egyptians who erupted into the streets did so peacefully.
Mohammedan grievances
Gomaa said insults to Islam and the response, including the killing of the US ambassador in Libya and attacks on other Western embassies in the region, could not be dissociated from other points of conflict between the West and the Mohammedan world.
He cited the treatment of Mohammedans at the US detention center in Guantanamo, the US-led war in Iraq, drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistain, and the demonisation of Mohammedans by far-right European parties as "underlying factors" for the tension.
"To then insist on igniting these simmering tensions by publishing hurtful and insulting material in a foolhardy attempt at bravado - asserting the superiority of Western freedoms over alleged Mohammedan closed-mindedness - verges on incitement," he said in his statement published on the Rooters blog FaithWorld.
After the invasion of the US embassy in Tunis on Friday last week, the Tunisian Interior Ministry has banned protests against the cartoon this Friday "to prevent human and material losses".
The European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
issued a joint appeal, through its foreign policy chief, with the Arab League
...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
, African Union
...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful...
and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for "peace and tolerance".
"We condemn any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to hostility and violence," the EU said.
"While fully recognizing freedom of expression, we believe in the importance of respecting all prophets, regardless of which religion they belong to."
Iran's Foreign Ministry front man, Ramin Mehmanparast, condemned the cartoons as "a systematic plot" against Islam.
"The coordinated and continued silence of Western countries towards these hateful anti-Islamic actions, is the primary reason for the repetition of such insulting actions," he said.
He was speaking a day after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called the publication of the cartoons a provocation.
The Danish cartoonist who outraged Mohammedans with a drawing of the Prophet seven years ago said the West could not let itself be muzzled by fear of offending Islamic sensibilities.
Kurt Westergaard, whose lampoon of Mohammad in the Jyllands-Posten paper nearly got him killed by an axe-wielding assassin in 2010, told Austrian magazine News he had no regrets about his work and said freedom of speech was too precious to relinquish.
"Should we in future let ourselves be censored by Islamic authorities in deeply undemocratic countries?" he asked.
For many Mohammedans, any depiction of Muhammad is blasphemous.
The furore over the anti-Islam film and the cartoons has presented a tough challenge to new authorities in Arab countries where popular uprisings have tossed entrenched autocrats.
In Libya, where militias that helped overthrow Muammar Qadaffy
...Custodian of Wheelus AFB for 42 long years until he was ejected from the gene pool by his indignant citizens...
still wield much power, the foreign minister offered a further apology for US ambassador Christopher Stevens' death to visiting US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns on Thursday.
Stevens and three other Americans died in an attack on the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi by gunnies among a crowd protesting against the film that denigrated the Prophet.