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ISLAM

Veiled woman ‘incited riot’ after ID check

A French Muslim woman has been charged with assault and inciting a riot after she refused a police ID check becausevshe was wearing a banned full-face veil, a police source said Tuesday.

Published: 7 August 2012 15:33 CEST

The 18-year-old is to appear in court in the northern city of Lille on October 30 charged with assault, insulting police and inciting a riot after police tried to take her to a station for refusing to provide identification.

A French law passed in 2011, the first of its kind to be enforced in Europe, banned the wearing of the full-face-covering Islamic veil.

The law came into effect at an already fraught moment in relations between the state and France's Muslim minority – the largest in Europe – with then
president Nicolas Sarkozy accused of stigmatising Islam to win back votes from a resurgent far right in this year's election.

Supporters of the law have defended it as a measure aimed at supporting women's rights although the text makes it clear that a woman cannot choose
herself to cover her face in public.

The woman, arrested on Saturday, was stopped by officers in Roubaix, outside northern France's largest city of Lille.

She allegedly said she did not have time and did not want to show her ID card and covered herself up with another veil as she walked away, the police
source said, asking not to be named.

When police tried to take her to the station, she allegedly grabbed hold of a vehicle and started kicking, punching and screaming, the source added.

She allegedly tried to bite police and scratched one of them before being taken into custody. None of the officers were hurt.

In a similar incident on July 24, three officers in the southern city of Marseille sustained minor injuries after they stopped a fully veiled woman by
a mosque. The woman, two men and a minor are due in court over the alleged assault.

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RELIGION

Al-Azhar university calls for Sweden boycott over Koran burning

The Sunni Muslim world's most prestigious educational institution, Al-Azhar in Egypt, has called for the boycott of Swedish and Dutch products after far-right activists destroyed Korans in those countries.

Published: 26 January 2023 15:10 CET
Al-Azhar university calls for Sweden boycott over Koran burning

Al-Azhar, in a statement issued on Wednesday, called on “Muslims to boycott Dutch and Swedish products”.

It also urged “an appropriate response from the governments of these two countries” which it charged were “protecting despicable and barbaric crimes in the name of ‘freedom of expression'”.

Swedish-Danish far-right politician Rasmus Paludan on Saturday set fire to a copy of the Muslim holy book in front of Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm, raising tensions as Sweden courts Ankara over its bid to join Nato.

EXPLAINED:

The following day, Edwin Wagensveld, who heads the Dutch chapter of the German anti-Islam group Pegida, tore pages out of the Koran during a one-man protest outside parliament.

Images on social media also showed him walking on the torn pages of the holy book.

The desecration of the Koran sparked strong protests from Ankara and furious demonstrations in several capitals of the Muslim world including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the Koran burning, expressing “deep concern at the recurrence of such events and the recent Islamophobic escalation in a certain number of European countries”.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson condemned Paludan’s actions as “deeply disrespectful”, while the United States called it “repugnant”.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price on Monday said the burning was the work of “a provocateur” who “may have deliberately sought to put distance between two close partners of ours – Turkey and Sweden”.

On Tuesday, Turkey postponed Nato accession talks with Sweden and Finland, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Stockholm for allowing weekend protests that included the burning of the Koran.

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