STOCKHOLM,
April 25, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – After vowing
to take him to court, several hundred Muslims demonstrated Sunday,
April 24, outside a Pentecostal church in Stockholm against a preacher
who made improper remarks about Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).
Police
said about 400 Muslim protesters, including women and children,
gathered in front of the Philadelphia Church, the main site of the
Pentecostal movement in Sweden, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In
March at this church, Runar Sogaard, a 37-year-old Norwegian preacher
living in Sweden, made comments about several religions including
Islam.
“Mohammed,
he is not God, he was a confused pedophile... Read the story of what
Mohammed did. He married girls at age nine, 11,” Sogaard said in a
sermon which was sold on a CD by his followers.
A
statement signed by "Muslims of Sweden" called his remarks
“immature and ridiculous,” noting that at the time when the
prophet lived girls were married at very young ages.
With
reports that Sogaard received death threats after his provocative
remarks, a top Muslim scholar in the country urged his law-abiding
fellow Swedish Muslims not to take the law into their own hands.
“We
beg those who threatened Sogaard, in the name of Islam, to let Swedish
law judge between him and us,” said Hassan Moussa, the head of
Sweden’s council of imams.
After
Sogaard's sermon was reported in the Swedish press, the preacher tried
to justify his remarks.
“I
made humorous descriptions of different religions, including
Christianity,” he said in a television interview last week.
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