BEIRUT, 28 May 2005 — Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians held sit-ins yesterday across Lebanon after Washington admitted some US guards at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba had “mishandled” the Qur’an. There were similar protests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, when around 1,500 people responded to calls for protest from the Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, the Islamic Action Front party.
Thousands of Egyptians, led by members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, burned US and Israeli flags. The protest outside the Lawyers Syndicate in Cairo was also a show of strength by the Brotherhood, more than 900 of whose members are in custody in a crackdown which began in March after the Islamist group began demonstrations for political reform.
Several thousand took part in a similar protest in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, witnesses said. Islamists said police prevented hundreds more from attending. The protest in Cairo had an overtly anti-government aspect, based on the perception that the government had not taken a strong position on reports that US troops desecrated the holy book.
The preacher in the Friday sermon earlier said US troops in Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba had immersed the Qur’an in dirty water, trodden on it and torn the papers. The preacher said: “The president of the country has not uttered a single word as a result of this. The states of the world have not moved. There is no hope to be had from them.” “The role of our rulers is finished. We ask them for nothing, neither in Egypt nor among Arabs or Muslims,” he said.
Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hassan El-Banna, son of the founder of the Brotherhood, said the demonstrators wanted the government to join them in demanding an apology from Washington. “The United States loses much by such behavior, a loss they will not be able to make up for 100 years. Its moral position and reputation in the Arab world has been shaken in the last few years and every day it loses more,” he added.
A university professor, who asked not to be named, said the movement could sustain the detention campaign. “These individuals (detainees) have given themselves to God Almighty. They know they will be detained and may be killed. There’s nothing new in that,” he said. But Mohamed Tousson, who coordinates between the Brotherhood and the Lawyers Syndicate, said: “It looks like the government is content with the ones it has detained.”
In the historic Al-Azhar Mosque in another part of Cairo, scuffles broke out after Friday prayers between opponents and supporters of President Hosni Mubarak.
In Lebanon, hundreds of people bearing anti-US placards gathered after weekly prayers in front of the Dar Al-Fatwa, seat of the Sunni Muslim clergy, in Beirut. The Lebanese Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah staged similar sit-ins in its strongholds in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the eastern city of Baalbek and the southern port of Tyre. At the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain El-Hilweh in southern Lebanon about 5,000 people held a sit-in in response to a call by Islamic parties, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “Our Qur’an is a red line,” and “With our soul, with our blood, we shall redeem you,” chanted the crowd, winding its way through the streets of the camp.
“O America, listen, listen, with my blood I will protect my Qur’an,” shouted thousands of Lebanese at a Hezbollah rally in a Shiite suburb of Beirut. “America is the enemy of Muslims.” Similar protests swept the country’s Palestinian refugee camps, where Islamists hoisted pictures of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and his Iraq-based ally Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Beirut, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Kassem demanded the perpetrators be punished. “This insult to the holy Qur’an, to all Muslims and to humanity altogether with such cheap desecration is a crime that cannot be ignored,” he told protesters.
In Jordan, protesters denounced the US, with banners proclaiming: “Our Qur’an is the light, America is the darkness”. Another read: “Any aggression against the Qur’an is aggression against all religions”.
Protests erupted across the Muslim world after a report in Newsweek magazine early this month said interrogators at the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, threw a Qur’an in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
