JOHANNESBURG, Feb 4: A South African court has banned the publication of controversial cartoons in the country’s newspapers at the request of a Muslim organisation, to cries of censorship from the media.

In a ruling issued on Friday, Johannesburg’s high court banned main press groups from publishing the cartoons, said Ebrahim Bham, the spokesman of the Council of Muslim Theologians.

“We went to court because (...) these cartoons and caricature of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) are well known to cause deep offence to Muslims throughout the world,” Mr Bham said.

“It has offended the religious sensitivities of Muslims. So we took whatever step we could to see if we could prevent that particular type of thing happening in South Africa.”

South Africa’s press said it would challenge the court decision.

Mondli Makhanya, editor of the Sunday Times, said the court decision affected ‘basically all English language newspapers in South Africa’.

He said his newspaper was against the ban ‘on the basis of principle because we said that we were not willing to have any outside pressure group edit our newspaper for us’.

Earlier he was quoted by the SAPA news agency as saying his groups regard the ban as ‘a serious blow to the freedom of the press and has every intention of challenging the ruling when the matter returns to court’.

He said he had been asked by the Muslim group to undertake not to reproduce the cartoons but had refused.

“We believe that if we were to have given an undertaking not to publish, we would invite similar demands and threats from anyone who felt offended by the stories we publish,” he said.

“No credible newspaper can be held to ransom by the beliefs of a section of a population.”

Joe Thloloe, the chairman of the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF), described the ban as ‘alarming and amounts to pre-publication censorship’.

“It limits freedom of expression in that the decision on whether to publish or not to publish has been taken away from the editors and placed on the shoulders of the court’.

Editor arrested: A Jordanian tabloid editor was arrested on Saturday after his newspaper published the controversial cartoons.

The Jordanian newspapers came under fire after being the only Arab-based publications to reprint the caricatures.

“Jihad Momani was arrested early Saturday afternoon,” the source said, warning that the editor of another newspaper could also face arrest. —AFP