Lebanon’s Hezbollah Chief Urges Muslims to ‘Punish’ Quran Desecrators if Governments Fail to Do So

BAGHDAD (AP) — The chief of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah mentioned Saturday that if governments of Muslim-majority nations don’t act in opposition to international locations that permit the desecration of the Quran, Muslims ought to “punish” those that facilitate assaults on Islam’s holy e book.

Nasrallah typically makes use of spiritual events to ship political messages to followers, and on Saturday slammed current incidents by which the Quran was burned or in any other case desecrated at licensed demonstrations in Sweden and Denmark.

He mentioned Muslims ought to look ahead to the end result of an emergency assembly of the Group of Islamic Cooperation, scheduled to happen in Baghdad on Monday to debate the group’s response to the Quran burnings.

The group and its member states ought to “ship a agency, decisive and unequivocal message to those governments that any repeat of the assaults shall be met with a boycott,” Nasrallah mentioned. If they don’t, he mentioned, Muslim youth ought to “punish the desecrators.”

He didn’t elaborate what such a boycott and punishment ought to entail.

Members of the gang, who carried banners with spiritual slogans alongside the flags of Hezbollah, Lebanon and Palestine, chanted, “Oh, Quran, we’re at your service; Oh, Hussein, we’re at your service.”

Shiites characterize over 10% of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims and look at Hussein because the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein’s demise in battle by the hands of Sunnis at Karbala, south of Baghdad, ingrained a deep rift in Islam and continues to this present day to play a key function in shaping Shiite identification.

Tens of millions of Shiite Muslims in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the globe on Friday commemorated Ashoura, whereas Saturday marked the end result of the observances in international locations corresponding to Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.

Tons of of 1000’s of pilgrims gathered within the Iraqi metropolis of Karbala, the place Hussein is entombed in a gold-domed shrine. Within the streets of the Baghdad suburb of Sadr Metropolis, mourners gathered to look at reenactments of the Battle of Karbala and Hussein’s demise.

Within the streets, younger males clad in black and white slashed their heads with swords and knives to exhibit their grief. Pals swabbed one another’s heads with tissues and handed one another water.

In Syria’s capital, Damascus, the crowds had been mourning not solely the demise of Hussein however a lethal assault within the suburb of Sayida Zeinab, dwelling to a shrine to Zeinab, the daughter of the primary Shiite imam, Ali, and granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

A bomb hidden in a motorbike exploded there on Thursday, killing at the least six folks and wounding dozens extra. On Tuesday, one other bomb in a motorbike had wounded two folks.

On Friday, the Islamic State group — a Sunni militant group that usually targets Shiites — claimed duty for the assaults, saying Thursday’s bombing got here “throughout their annual polytheistic rituals.” The group’s excessive interpretation of Islam holds Shiite Muslims to be apostates.

Related Press writers Anmar Khalil in Karbala, Iraq, and Hassan Ammar in Beirut contributed to this report.

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