French writer who called Islam 'stupid' cleared by judges

The best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq was cleared yesterday of stirring racial and religious hatred when he called Islam "stupid" and "dangerous" in a magazine interview.

A Paris court rejected a complaint from four moderate Islamic organisations that Houellebecq's words broke a French law which forbids racial insults and incitement to racial or religious hatred.

Three judges ruled that Houellebecq, 45, or any other writer, could not shelter from the law on the grounds of literary immunity or freedom of speech alone. However, the judges decided that the novelist's words were a personal criticism of Islam, and other religions, rather than an attack on Muslims themselves.

In an interview with the magazine Lire last year, Houellebecq said that he rejected all monotheistic religions but that the "most stupid religion" was Islam. To read the Koran was to be "crushed", he said. Islam was a "dangerous religion and always had been". If found guilty, Houellebecq could have been fined €45,000 (£28,000) or sent to prison for up to a year.

The case has been compared in France and elsewhere to the fatwa, or death sentence, issued in 1989 against the British writer Salman Rushdie by fundamentalist Islamic clerics in Iran. Rushdie himself contributed an article to a French newspaper this month saying that important principles of freedom of speech were involved. "Fences cannot be erected around ideas, philosophies, attitudes or beliefs," he said.

Unlike Rushdie, Houellebecq was not being attacked for what he wrote. His novelPlateforme, published in France last September, describes an Islamic terrorist attack on a western holiday resort in Thailand, similar in some respects to this month's attack on a nightclub in Bali. The book also contains virulent attacks by its characters on Islam.

However, Houellebecq was being prosecuted privately for what he said in a promotional interview in the magazine Lire. In the court hearing last month, the writer said that he had been quoted out of context. He repeated that he felt "contempt" for Islam as a religion but said that he had no ill-feeling towards its followers.

Jean-Marc Varaut, the lawyer for one of the Islamic groups which brought the case, said they intended to appeal.