Grand Immam of Al Azhar

BOMBAY, October 11 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Five people died and 50 were injured Friday, October 11, in the western Indian city of Solapur during a protest over comments by U.S. Baptist minister Jerry Falwell against Prophet Mohammed, which also drew criticism from world and Islamic countries.

“Police fired on crowds of Muslim youths who clashed with groups of Hindus,” Agence France-Press (AFP) quoted a state police control spokesman as saying.

"We do not know for a fact at this stage whether the five people were killed in police firing or in the sectarian clashes," the police spokesman told AFP, adding that 50 others were injured.

He said violence broke out when a crowd of Muslim youths gathered in the city to protest remarks by Falwell, a leader of the U.S. evangelical Christian right who, in a television interview broadcast Sunday, October 6 on the CBS network's "60 Minutes" news program equated Prophet Mohammed with a "terrorist".

"Various Muslim bodies in the city had called for a strike today to protest these remarks. However, violence broke out when the mob clashed with some Hindu groups," the police spokesman said.

A similar strike called by Muslim bodies in India's financial capital Bombay ended peacefully.

Pakistani Islamic parties have also denounced Falwell's comments and called for a nationwide protest on Friday to condemn his derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed.

Falwell

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Wednesday October 8, branded Falwell's comment as "outrageous and insulting".

Speaking during a visit to Iran, Straw sought to play down the affair by asserting the evangelist was "not important".

"If it has been reported accurately I regard his remarks as outrageous and insulting," Straw said.

"I am told that this man is well known in the U.S. and also that he is not important," Straw added, saying that the comments were insulting for both Christians and Muslims.

Commenting on Falwell's statements, Shaikh Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, Grand Immam of Al Azhar, the highest religious authority in the Islamic Sunni world, stressed that Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him), was the personification of peace.

A terrorist is the one who assaults civilians, their property, their freedom and their human dignity; demolishes their houses; besieges their villages; confiscates their earnings; and destroys everything he can put his hands on, Sheikh Tantawi elaborated.

Persecuted by his people, Prophet Mohammad spent 13 years exhorting them to believe in one God and never resorted to violence, he recalled.

He founded the Islamic state on the bases of peace and only raised arms against enemies who sought to destroy his fledging state, Sheikh Tantawi said.

Even at times of war, Prophet Mohammad also preached Muslims not to assault women, children or elders; not to scoop up trees and not to attack non-Muslim worship places, he said.

Straw

Ever since the beginning of Islam, Christian and Jewish places of worship have been protected in countries with Muslim majorities.

Falwell's comments have drawn widespread wrath in several Muslim countries, with neighbor Iran calling upon members of the 55-nation Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to speak out over the matter.

"This insult of the holy Prophet Mohammed by a Christian priest is part of a propaganda war by the U.S. mass media and the Zionists," Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said on Sunday.

Speaking during a meeting with OIC Secretary General Abdul Wahed Belqeziz, Kharazi said Falwell's comments were "proof that the U.S. wants political, cultural and military domination of the world," official Iranian media said.

"Islamic countries, and above all the OIC, must not stay silent in the face of such unashamed accusations, and must not permit this clash of religions and civilizations sought by the expansionist and aggressive Zionists," he added.

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