AP: Muslims Skeptical of Newsweek Retraction

Muslims Skeptical of Newsweek Retraction of Desecration of Quran Report

By PAKINAM AMER
The Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt - The now-retracted report that American interrogators flushed a Quran down a toilet did not spark violent protests in the Middle East as it did in Afghanistan and Pakistan but it added another layer of bitterness among many Arabs who see the United States as anti-Muslim.
Across the Islamic world, many were unconvinced by Newsweek's retraction of the report. From Afghanistan to Egypt, some people believed the U.S. had pressured Newsweek to deny the story, using the magazine as a "scapegoat."
In many countries, politicians skeptical of Newsweek's about-face said the United States should make public the details of its investigation into the reported desecration.
"Although the magazine that published this piece of information has backed off it, we call on the American administration to investigate the incident, which we consider a major crime against more than 1.2 billion Muslims in the world," Jassem al-Kharafi, the parliament speaker in Kuwait a top U.S. ally said in the Al-Watan daily Wednesday.
U.S. officials have said they found nothing to substantiate the Newsweek report that interrogators at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a copy of the Quran down the toilet to unnerve an inmate.
But given frequent reports of mistreatment at the camp from released detainees, some Muslims remained convinced the desecration happened.
"In Guantanamo they're throwing Muslims into the garbage. ... To flush their holy book down the toilet is the easy part," said Walid Kazziha, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo.
"It is easy for (the Americans) to humiliate the Quran, for them it is just a book," said Fatma el-Hefny, a student there.
In the Arab World, the street reaction to the Quran desecration was limited to a demonstration by several thousand university students in the Yemeni capital San'a on Saturday and another by several hundred activists from the Islamic militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip a day earlier.
They were nothing on the scale of the three days of rioting in Afghanistan in which 15 people died and protesters threw rocks at police.
Arab television stations and newspapers mentioned the Newsweek report and the U.S. investigation but did not feature it strongly. Even Web forums where Islamic militants post messages hardly mentioned the incident.
In part, the difference in reaction may be political. In Afghanistan, officials accused "foreign" parties of stirring up the trouble to destabilize the government. In the Middle East, few political groups seemed to have much interest in using the report for their ends.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood which is seeking to take a more active role in Egyptian politics issued a statement condemning the desecration if it occurred. But one leader in the group, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was not a cause for great uproar since it was not known if it was true and may have been the act of a single person.
Still, the talk of violating the sanctity of the Quran struck a deep nerve. Muslims revere the Quran as the literal word of God, transmitted to the prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. Some Muslims believe they must be ritually clean before they touch the Quran and often keep it in a high place in the home.
Ajil al-Nashmi, a fundamentalist columnist, wrote in Kuwait's Al-Watan newspaper that if "Muslim peoples revolt (against the desecration of their holy book), even mass destruction weapons won't be able to stop them."
In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, news coverage of the Newsweek controversy has faded, but questioning of its retraction has not.
"The Newsweek correction didn't calm the anger because many people believe the detention of those suspected of terrorism at Gunatanamo Bay is really unfair," said Din Syamsuddin, secretary general of Indonesian Ullema Council, which represents the country's clerics.

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