FRANCE: The French novelist Michel Houellebecq did not make the journey from Ireland to Paris to hear the verdict in the court case brought against him by Muslim groups which accused him of "incitement to racial hatred". Mr Houellebecq was cleared yesterday but Mr Jean-Marc Varaut, a lawyer whose clients include the convicted Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, said he would appeal on behalf of the Paris mosque.
The writer outraged many Muslims when he told Lire magazine last year: "The most stupid religion is Islam. When you read the Koran, it's dreadful ...dreadful!"
If convicted of inciting racial hatred, Mr Houellebecq (45) could have been sentenced to a year in prison and fined €45,000.
"I'm pleased that the offence of blasphemy has not been re-established in French law," his lawyer Mr Emmanuel Pierrat said. "The verdict recognises freedom of expression. Michel Houellebecq says it is possible to criticise a religious ideology, like a political ideology. He makes a distinction between an ideology and an ethnic group."
Mr Pierrat claimed his client does not confuse "Islam, Muslims and Arabs" but was attacking ideology. "He attacks Islam. I think he will continue - just as he attacks all monotheistic religions."
In court, the novelist had said: "The basic texts of monotheism preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. From their inception, these are hateful texts."
Earlier this year, Mr Houellebecq won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his 1998 novel, Atomised. His most recent novel, Plateforme, published in France last year, ends with the bombing of a bar called the Crazy Lips frequented by sex tourists in Thailand.
"In front of the bar a dancer was crawling on the ground, still wearing her white bikini, her arms cut off at the elbow," Mr Houellebecq wrote. "Near her, a German tourist sat amid the rubble holding the intestines that were falling out of his belly. A woman was lying near him, her chest open, her breasts half torn off. Dark smoke hung inside the bar; the ground was slippery, covered with blood, human bodies and organs . . . The nuts and bolts had gouged out eyes, torn off hands, torn faces apart. Some bodies had literally blown apart, their limbs and insides were spread across several square metres."
When nearly 200 people were killed in the bombing of a discotheque in Bali on October 13th, many French people were struck by the similarity with the graphic description in Mr Houellebecq's novel, published more than a year earlier.
Mr Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Paris mosque who was one of the civil plaintiffs against Mr Houellebecq, has other problems at the moment. The government is attempting to establish a council of French Muslims, but the undertaking has been delayed because radical Muslims are feared to outnumber what Mr Boubakeur calls "liberal" and "modern" Muslims in France.
The free daily newspaper 20 Minutes asked Mr Boubakeur if people are fantasising when they claim the immigrant suburbs have been infiltrated by radical groups. "Alas, no," the rector replied. "The Islam of the suburbs is the Islam of fanatics. More and more young people are going from the housing projects to [the Pakistani city of\] Peshawar."
Mr Boubakeur was appointed by the Algerian government, which has been fighting a fundamentalist rebellion for more than a decade. A half dozen French citizens from immigrant suburbs are among fighters captured by US forces in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo.
The rector's remarks raised an outcry in the French Muslim community.
