MORE FREE-PRESS REPORTED COMMENTS
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THE WORLD OF ISLAM
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said what he called "takfiri terrorist groups" had insulted Islam more than "even those who have attacked the messenger of God through books depicting the Prophet or making films depicting the Prophet or drawing cartoons of the Prophet."
"But we can't exonerate the West for its insulting of the prophet. I'm not justifying what happened, but these are causes," Sheikh Ashraf Saad [an official from al-Azhar, the state-run Egyptian institution that is one of the most prestigious centers of Sunni Islam] said. "Just as we condemn extremists, we must also condemn these freedoms that have reached the point of insulting the prophet." He was countered by a Saudi journalist on the panel, Mshari al-Thaydi. "But the question is, why is it Muslims who get so angry and kill and blow things up? The French magazine insulted the pope, the Dalai Lama. ... Why do we express our anger in this way? "We have 1,436 years in the history of Islam," he said. "Why do we hand ourselves over to a particular person who picks what he wants from that heritage and says that's Islam and accept it or you've left the faith?”