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ISLAMABAD : Muslim anger flared Thursday after Britain defended Salman Rushdie's knighthood, with fresh protests against the novelist and Pakistani traders offering a big reward for his beheading.
Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in Indian Kashmir and Pakistan, while Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, criticised the timing of the honour.
The Indian-born Rushdie was given the award on Saturday, 18 years after he was sentenced to death by Iran's hardline clerical regime for writing what it said was a blasphemous book, "The Satanic Verses".
"We will give 10 million rupees (165,000 dollars) to anyone who beheads Rushdie," Islamabad traders' association leader Ajmal Baluch told around 200 people in one of the Pakistani capital's main bazaars.
The crowd chanted, "Cut off the head of Salman Rushdie!"
Earlier the Pakistani Ulema Council, a private body that claims to be the biggest of its kind in the country with 2,000 scholars, said it had given Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden its "highest title for a Muslim warrior."
"We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah (Sword of Allah) to Osama bin Laden after the British government's decision to bestow the title of 'Sir' on blasphemer Rushdie," council chairman Maulana Tahir Ashrafi told AFP.
Bin Laden has been blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. He is widely believed to be hiding on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Later Afzal Sahi -- the speaker of the Punjab province assembly and a member of the Pakistan Muslim League party that backs President Pervez Musharraf -- said in a debate that he would "definitely kill" Rushdie if he could.
During a protest against Musharraf by thousands of people in Lahore witnesses said a large part of the crowd briefly chanted, "Death to Britain! Death to Rushdie!"
Meanwhile Pakistani religious affairs minister Ijaz-ul Haq -- who said on Monday that the knighthood justified suicide attacks -- said he planned to visit Britain next month at the invitation of a British delegation.
But Britain's Foreign Office said it had not invited him, adding: "We have no plans to do so."
Britain protested to Pakistan on Tuesday after the minister's comment, the same day that Islamabad and Tehran summoned the respective British ambassadors to receive complaints about the Rushdie award.
In Indian Kashmir, a Muslim cleric Thursday called for books by Rushdie to be burned. Grand Mufti Bashir-u-Din argued in a statement that Rushdie was still "liable to be killed for rendering gravest injury."
A small protest in the summer capital Srinagar also saw some 200 Muslim youths torch effigies of the author, whose latest novel "Shalimar the Clown", was partly based in Kashmir.
In Indonesia's first comment on the issue, Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said that the "timing of the British award to Rushdie has not created a conducive situation" for understanding between religions.
Protesters rallied in Malaysia on Wednesday, while Iraq and the Taliban have also condemned the Rushdie award.
Britain defended the knighthood late Wednesday.
Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, standing alongside her Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari, said Britain was "sorry if there are people who have taken very much to heart this honour, which is after all for a lifelong body of literary work."
Earlier, Home Secretary John Reid said the government stood by the award.
Rushdie, who turned 60 on Tuesday, has spent the last 18 years living in the shadow of the Iranian fatwa calling for his death, which has never been formally revoked.
- AFP /ls
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