BEIRUT ( Associated Press) — Protests have been held in several Muslim-majority countries to condemn recent desecration of Islam’s holy book by activists in Sweden and the Netherlands.
Protests in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, among other countries, ended with peaceful dispersal of people. In Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, police officers detained protesters who tried to march on the Swedish embassy.
Around 12,000 Islamists from Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP) party demonstrated in Lahore, the capital of eastern Punjab province, to condemn the desecration of the Quran in two European countries. In his speech to the protesters, TLP chief Saad Rizvi called upon the government to lodge a strong protest against Sweden and the Netherlands so that such incidents do not recur.
Similar events were held in the southern city of Karachi and in the northwest.
The protest ended peacefully on Friday. However, in recent years the TLP has sparked violent protests in France and other parts of the world over the publication of caricatures of the Muslim prophet.
Hundreds of people marched and burned the Swedish flag after Friday prayers in Iran’s capital Tehran.
In Beirut, around 200 angry protesters burned Swedish and Dutch flags outside the blue-domed Mohammed al-Amin Mosque in Beirut’s central Martyrs’ Square. Smaller demonstrations of Koran burning also took place in Bahrain, a small island in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
In the middle of the month, Rasmus Paluda, a Danish far-right activist, received authorization from the police to organize a protest outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, where he burned a Quran. A few days later, Edwin Wagensveld, the Dutch leader of the far-right Pegida movement, tore pages from a copy of the Quran and tore them near the Dutch parliament.
