FROM Zanzibar to the Maldives and from Sudan to Indonesia, protests against the cartoons of Muhammad spread to the furthest corners of the Islamic world, with imams denouncing them during Friday prayers.

However, many of the demonstrations were only attended by a handful of people, and calls for an international “day of anger” went largely unheeded. Despite some imams in the Middle East demanding the beheading of the cartoonists, violence was limited.

A group of 150 Islamic militants stormed the Danish Embassy in Jakarta, and a pipe bomb was thrown at a French cultural centre in the Gaza Strip. There were no injuries.

European newspapers continued to defy Muslim opinion by printing the cartoons, with papers in France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Bulgaria printing pictures of Muhammad yesterday. But in Britain the media have been uncharacteristically restrained.

The American and British governments, keen to mend relations with the Muslim world after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, denounced the cartoons.

In Iraq Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shia majority, condemned the cartoons, describing them as “horrific action”. But the moderate septuagenarian leader suggested that “misguided and oppressive” elements in the militant Muslim community had helped to create a “distorted and dark image of the faith”.

Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President and revolutionary cleric, said: “There are one and a half billion Muslims, all of them furious.” However, he called for calm, and his sermon was followed by a slow march of several thousand people shouting “Death to Denmark” and “Death to America”.

In Sudan about 15,000 people marched on the UN offices in Khartoum. The Pakistani Parliament called on the Government to consider economic and political sanctions, while about 800 people protested in Islamabad and 1,200 in Karachi. In other towns the response was poor, with only 20 people gathering in Lahore. About 500 Muslims rallied in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, outside the country’s main mosque, chanting: “Apologise to Muslims.”

In Malaysia about 60 members of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party protested outside the Danish Embassy. In Turkey there were sporadic demonstrations while Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, whose Justice and Development Party has Islamist roots, called the cartoons an unfortunate “attack on our spiritual values”.

The Islamic Defenders’ Front, a group of extremists notorious for raiding nightclubs, invaded the Danish Embassy in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, damaging furniture and stealing a flag to be burnt outside. Youths shouted “Let’s go jihad” and carried a poster calling for the Danish Ambassador to be slaughtered. Many Islamic politicians appealed for calm. President Karzai of Afghanistan said: “As much as we condemn this, we must have, as Muslims, the courage to forgive and to not make an issue of dispute between religions or cultures.”

The influential Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan, who has a large following among European Muslims, called the response excessive. “I condemn the calls to boycott or to kill,” he said. “Muslims have to get used to living in a global world. Their consciousness must be sufficiently robust to master their hurt feelings.”

A US State Department spokesman said: “We all fully recognise and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

But European leaders stood their ground. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, met 76 foreign diplomats to try to defuse the row but, perhaps sensing that the worst was over, he emerged unapologetic. “A Danish government can never apologise on behalf of a free and independent newspaper,” he said.

Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French Foreign Minister, said that it was unacceptable for “extremists, anywhere in the world, because of sketches being printed in the West, to burn flags or adopt fundamentalist or extremist positions that would end up proving the cartoonists right”.

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