c. 2006 Religion News Service

LONDON _ Hundreds of Islamic religious leaders in emergency talks Wednesday (Feb. 8) called for changes in the law to stop “insulting” caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which already have been printed in continental Europe, from being published in Britain.

The meeting in Birmingham, called by the Muslim Action Committee (MAC), demanded that Britain’s powerful Press Complaints Commission’s code be tightened to bar British newspapers and magazines from following Danish and French media in printing the images.

The MAC’s spokesman, Shaikh Faiz Saddiqi, also told journalists that some 20,000 to 50,000 Muslim protesters are expected to signal their continuing outrage in a march across the heart of London, from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park, on Feb. 18.

Some 300 Muslim scholars at the Birmingham talks also urged that Britain’s Race Relations Act be strengthened to give Muslims the same rights as Jews and Sikhs _ an issue which itself has long been a bone of contention in the nation’s Islamic community.

But the ongoing fury over the cartoons published first in a Danish newspaper dominated the meeting. Saddiqi described it as the biggest insult to Islam since Salman Rushdie published his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses,” 18 years ago _ which prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for the author’s death.

“Insulting the Prophet of Islam is worse than insulting your wife, children or sister,” Saddiqi said. “It happens once, it happens twice, but a third time you are going to take action.”

“Enough is enough,” he said. “We have to get back to a civilized society.”

Saddiqi said the outrage over the cartoons and the “deep anger and frustration” it generated show that “once again, we have not learned the lesson from the last time the Prophet Muhammad was insulted.”

“It’s as if the media around the world just don’t get it; the publication of an image of the Prophet Muhammad in itself is a deep insult,” he said.

Saddiqi described the Birmingham gathering of Muslim religious leaders as the largest meeting of its kind that he has known of in his 25 years of living in Britain. He said the intent was to “bring cohesion” to the debate over the cartoons and how to prevent them from spreading even further than they already have.

MO/JL END RNS