Stockholm, Sweden - After vowing to take him to court, several hundred Muslims demonstrated Sunday, April 24, outside a Pentecostal church in Stockholm against a preacher who made improper remarks about Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).
Police said about 400 Muslim protesters, including women and children, gathered in front of the Philadelphia Church, the main site of the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In March at this church, Runar Sogaard, a 37-year-old Norwegian preacher living in Sweden, made comments about several religions including Islam.
“Mohammed, he is not God, he was a confused pedophile... Read the story of what Mohammed did. He married girls at age nine, 11,” Sogaard said in a sermon which was sold on a CD by his followers.
A statement signed by "Muslims of Sweden" called his remarks “immature and ridiculous,” noting that at the time when the prophet lived girls were married at very young ages.
With reports that Sogaard received death threats after his provocative remarks, a top Muslim scholar in the country urged his law-abiding fellow Swedish Muslims not to take the law into their own hands.
“We beg those who threatened Sogaard, in the name of Islam, to let Swedish law judge between him and us,” said Hassan Moussa, the head of Sweden’s council of imams.
After Sogaard's sermon was reported in the Swedish press, the preacher tried to justify his remarks.
“I made humorous descriptions of different religions, including Christianity,” he said in a television interview last week.