Paris has ordered special security measures at official buildings, including diplomatic and consular representations, and instructed those in 20 particularly sensitive countries to close on Friday, the Islamic prayer day.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister said he was “concerned” at the possibility of hostile reactions to the caricatures published in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The cartoons, some of which feature Muhammad, come amid continuing protests by Muslims around the globe over an anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims.

The offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed last November after it published an edition entitled Charia Hebdo, supposedly guest-edited by Muhammad.

On Wednesday, France’s prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said in a statement: “In the current climate, the prime minister wishes to stress his disapproval of all excesses and calls on everyone to behave responsibly.”

Questioned on RTL radio, he added: “We are in a country where the freedom of expression is guaranteed, along with the freedom to caricature.”

Shortly afterwards there were calls for protests against the caricatures and the film in Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon and Paris. Ayrault said a request had been made for police authorisation to hold the demonstration in Paris on Saturday, but that it would be refused. On Sunday, police arrested more than 100 people who had gathered to protest against Innocence of Muslims near the US embassy in the French capital.

An Afghan suicide bombing linked to protests about the film killed 12 people on Tuesday.

All 75,000 copies of Charlie Hebdo sold out according to the magazine, whose editors are planning to print more on Friday. The magazine’s website was unavailable all of Wednesday after it was apparently hacked and closed down.

According to L’Express magazine an unnamed association had begun legal proceedings against Charlie Hebdo for incitement to hatred. Dalil Boubakeur, the senior cleric at Paris’s biggest mosque, appealed for France’s four million Muslims to remain calm.

“It is with astonishment, sadness and concern that I have learned that this publication is risking increasing the current outrage across the Muslim world,” he said.”I would appeal to them not to pour oil on the fire.”

The publication of the caricatures, on the front cover, as well as on the inside and back pages of Charlie Hebdo brought widespread condemnation.

Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, said in a statement that “inciting hatred in the name of freedom was to be totally rejected”.

Essam el-Erian, the acting head of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, said the French judiciary should deal with the issue as firmly as it had handled the case against the magazine that published topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge. “If the case of Kate is a matter of privacy, then the cartoons are an insult to a whole people. The beliefs of others must be respected,” he told Reuters.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said French law should deal with insults against Islam in the same way as it deals with Holocaust denial. “If anyone doubts the Holocaust happened, they are imprisoned, yet if anyone insults the prophet, his companions or Islam, the most [France] does is to apologise in two words. It is not fair or logical,” he said.

Richard Prasquier, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, said he disapproved of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the killings in the row over the film.

“It is in consideration of those deaths that I disapprove of Charlie Hebdo’s initiative,” he said in a statement. “To publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in these times, in the name of freedom, is an irresponsible kind of panache.”

André Vingt-Trois, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, told French radio the cartoons would “provoke revulsion among many Muslim believers, who will feel their faith has been insulted”. He added: “You cannot say anything in the name of freedom of expression”.

Outside Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices, the magazine’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, was unrepentant and denied he was being deliberately provocative. Charbonnier, who drew this week’s front page, and two of his fellow cartoonists, have been under police protection since the firebomb attack.

“The freedom of the press, is that a provocation?” Charbonnier said. “I’m not asking strict Muslims to read Charlie Hebdo, just like I wouldn’t go to a mosque to listen to speeches that go against everything I believe.”

Earlier he had told French journalists the latest caricatures would shock “only those who will want to be shocked”.

Richard Malka, the magazine’s lawyer, added: “We are in a secular country … the tradition of caricaturing religion goes back more than a century.”

And France’s interior minister Manuel Valls, who met Muslim leaders on Wednesday, said caricature was a “fundamental right” of freedom of expression. He added that protests that caused public order issues or were aimed a “sowing hatred” would not be tolerated.

Announcing the security measures, Fabius said he was “against all provocation”.

On Wednesday evening, Egyptian authorities announced they would be ordering French schools and cultural centres to close on Thursday to head off potential trouble.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten caused an international storm by publishing 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad. The ensuing protests across the world resulted in more than 100 reported deaths. The Danish embassy in Pakistan was bombed, and Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran were set alight.

One of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who uses the name Tignous, defended the drawings. “It’s just a drawing,” he said. “It’s not a provocation.”

Source: Guardian News