Paris, France - A French paper accused of insulting Muslims by printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad surprised a court hearing on Wednesday with a letter of support from presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy.
"I prefer an excess of caricatures to an absence of caricatures," Sarkozy, the conservative interior minister who helped launch the French Muslim Council, wrote in a letter read out by a lawyer for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The letter from the presidential race frontrunner, whose ministry is also responsible for religious affairs, drew an angry response from one of three Muslim groups suing the weekly.
"He should remain neutral," Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque told journalists outside the Paris court hearing the case on Wednesday and Thursday. A ruling will be handed down at a later date.
Sarkozy, who brought competing Muslim groups together in 2003 to form the Muslim Council to represent Islam in France, noted he had often been "a favourite target" of Charlie Hebdo but supported "the right to smile at everything".
The Grand Mosque, World Islamic League and Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) sued the magazine for printing two of the Danish caricatures -- which sparked violence in the Muslim world causing 50 deaths -- and adding one of its own.
The Muslim groups said the cartoon showing a bomb in the Prophet's turban slandered all Muslims as terrorists, as did Charlie Hebdo's cartoon showing the Prophet reacting to Islamist militants by saying: "It's hard to be loved by idiots."
"This is an attack on Muslims," UOIF President Lhaj Thami Breze told the court. "It is as if the Prophet taught terrorism to Muslims, and so all Muslims are terrorists."
WHAT IS SACRED?
Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val said he published the caricatures in February 2006 after the editor-in-chief of the Paris tabloid France Soir was fired after reprinting them.
He said the lack of prompt European support for Denmark as its embassies were attacked in the Middle East also upset him.
Val said the cartoons targeted Islamist militants: "In no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith."
He rejected suggestions from lawyers for the Muslim groups that Prophet Mohammad should be beyond criticism, saying religion had no place in the political sphere and that debate and criticism were essential elements of a democracy.
"What is sacred for a religion is sacred only for believers of that religion," he told the court? "If we respected all the taboos of all religions, where would we be?"
Charlie Hebdo has called more than a dozen politicians and intellectuals as witnesses, including Francois Bayrou, a centrist candidate in the presidential vote in April and May.
Its first witness, Paris University philosopher Abdel Wahhab Meddeb said he laughed when he saw Charlie Hebdo's cartoon. "I urge Muslims to adapt to Europe and not the other way around. That would be catastrophic," he told the court.
"The trial against Charlie Hebdo is one of a different age," the daily Le Monde wrote in an editorial. "In a secular state, no religion and no ideology is above the law. Where religion makes the law, one is close to totalitarianism."
The cartoons were originally published in 2005 in the Danish daily Jyllens-Posten and later reprinted by several European publications as a defence of free speech.
Courts in France, which observes a strict separation of church and state in the public sphere, have repeatedly defended free speech rights against religious objections.