c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Islamic anger over published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad continued to erupt Monday (Feb. 6), leading to deaths in Afghanistan and a Muslim-American defense of economic boycotts, while Danish cartoonists hid in fear.

Religious and political leaders called for calm, with some Muslims alleging Islamic extremist groups were fomenting outrage and protests to advance their own purposes.

Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said police should “consider all the evidence they have gathered from the protests to see if they can prosecute the extremists.” He said, “It seems to us that some of their slogans were designed to incite violence and even to incite murder.”

“Muslims are fed up with them,” Bunglawala told newspaper and television journalists. “It’s time the police acted.”

In a statement, the Muslim Council, which describes itself as the representative umbrella body for more than 400 affiliated organizations, mosques, schools and charities across Britain, cautioned British Muslims “to not allow themselves to be provoked” over the cartoons issue.

Outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, about 5,000 protested Monday, with two demonstrators killed and 13 wounded, according to Agence France Presse.

A boycott of Danish goods continued in various countries. Leaders of several Muslim-American groups defended the economic action as an appropriate response to the cartoons, first published in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, and since repeated in European publications. One of the cartoons depicts the Prophet Muhammad, whose image is forbidden in Islam, as a terrorist.

“If people throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds do not want to buy Danish products because of what they perceive to be an insensitivity to their way of life, the free market will take its course and companies that took years to be built will fall within days,” said Ahmed Younis, national director of the Washington-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Younis, speaking at a news conference attended by other Muslim-American groups, called the cartoons a “frivolous act of free speech,” and said they could alienate moderate Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East, while empowering Islamic extremists.

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, based in Falls Church, Va., praised the American news media for not publishing the cartoon, for the most part. On Saturday, the Philadelphia Inquirer became the first U.S. newspaper to reprint the cartoon. Fox News has broadcast the images.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday appealed to Muslims “to act with calm and dignity, to forgive the wrong they have suffered and to seek peace rather than conflict.”

In a statement issued Saturday, the Vatican rejected the cartoons as a valid exercise of free speech, condemning their publication as an “unacceptable provocation.”

“The right to freedom of thought and expression,” the statement said, “cannot imply the right to offend the religious sentiments of believers. That principle obviously applies to any religion.”

But the Vatican called violent reactions against Danish institutions “deplorable,” noting that Western democracies were not to blame for the actions of their media.

Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, a Vatican official who monitors Christian churches concentrated in the Middle East, called the cartoons an “abuse of power” and urged European media to practice “self-censorship” when depicting religious symbols.

“Satirizing habits and attitudes is understandable, but not the Quran, Allah or the Prophet (Muhammad),” he said in an interview with Milan’s Corriere della Sera.

While the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten said it published the cartoons as an exercise of free speech, it did not anticipate the global outrage.

The Times of London said the 12 cartoonists have gone into hiding with around-the-clock protection, fearing for their lives. The newspaper quoted an unidentified spokesman for the cartoonists as saying they “are really, really scared.” He added that “they don’t want to see the pictures reprinted all over the world, (but) we couldn’t stop it.”

_ Stacy Meichtry contributed to this story from Rome.

MO/PH END RNS