PARIS: A French paper accused of insulting Muslims by printing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad  surprised a court hearing yesterday with a letter of support from presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy.
“I prefer an excess of caricatures to an absence of caricatures,” Sarkozy, the conservative interior minister who helped launch the French Muslim Council, wrote in a letter read out by a lawyer for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The message from Sarkozy brought a swift reaction from the official French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM).
Furious at what it saw as government interference, the CFCM summoned an emergency meeting late yesterday, amid reports that its board might resign.
A source close to the Paris Mosque rector said the CFCM board may resign in protest.
The letter from the presidential race frontrunner, whose ministry is also responsible for religious affairs, drew an angry response from one of three Muslim groups suing the weekly.
“He should remain neutral,” Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque told journalists outside the Paris court hearing the case.
Sarkozy, who brought competing Muslim groups together in 2003 to form the Muslim Council to represent Islam in France, noted he had often been “a favourite target” of Charlie Hebdo but supported “the right to smile at everything”.
The Grand Mosque, World Islamic League and Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) sued the magazine for printing two of the Danish caricatures - which sparked violence in the Muslim world causing 50 deaths - and adding one of its own.
The Muslim groups said the cartoon slandered all Muslims as terrorists, as did Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon showing the Prophet reacting to Islamist militants by saying: “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”
“This is an attack on Muslims,” UOIF President Lhaj Thami Breze told the court. “It is as if the Prophet taught terrorism to Muslims, and so all Muslims are terrorists.”
Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val said he published the caricatures in February 2006 after the editor-in-chief of the Paris tabloid France Soir was fired after reprinting them.
He said the lack of prompt European support for Denmark as its embassies were attacked in the Middle East also upset him.
Val said the cartoons targeted Islamist militants: “In no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith.”
He rejected suggestions from lawyers for the Muslim groups that the Prophet should be beyond criticism, saying religion had no place in the political sphere and that debate and criticism were essential elements of a democracy.
“What is sacred for a religion is sacred only for believers of that religion,” he told the court. “If we respected all the taboos of all religions, where would we be?”
Charlie Hebdo has called more than a dozen politicians and intellectuals as witnesses, including Francois Bayrou, a centrist candidate in the presidential vote in April and May.
Its first witness, Paris University philosopher Abdel Wahhab Meddeb said he laughed when he saw Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon.
“I urge Muslims to adapt to Europe and not the other way around. That would be catastrophic,” he told the court.
“The trial against Charlie Hebdo is one of a different age,” the daily Le Monde wrote in an editorial.
“In a secular state, no religion and no ideology is above the law. Where religion makes the law, one is close to totalitarianism.”
The plaintiffs are demanding 30,000 euros ($38,750) in damages and want Charlie Hebdo to publish the ruling on the front page of the weekly, if it comes down in their favour.
A conviction under this offence can also carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a fine of up to 22,500 euros.
The closely-watched case is seen as a test of the limits of freedom of expression in France.
A group of 50 intellectuals including many French Muslims published an open letter on Monday urging support for Charlie Hebdo.
“Democrats the world over and especially Muslims hope to see in Europe, and above all in France, a secular haven where their words are not blocked by dictators or fundamentalists,” they said.
Media rights watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) also launched a campaign under the slogan ‘With Charlie Hebdo, let’s refuse to shut up’.
Some 15 witnesses have been asked to make sworn statements on behalf of Charlie Hebdo, including exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who became the target of death threats from fundamentalists in her home country for her writing.
The editors of Jyllands-Posten were acquitted in October of any wrongdoing in a separate case in a Danish court and very few editors among the dozens of newspapers worldwide that re-printed the cartoons have faced legal action.
A Russian editor of a small newspaper was fined 100,000 roubles (3,000 euros) last April and convicted of inciting religious hatred for publishing one of the cartoons.  – Agencies