PARIS, Oct 24: Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grande Mosquee de Paris and close friend of French President Jacques Chirac, said on Wednesday that he had decided to appeal the decision handed down the previous day by a court which found novelist Michel Houellebecq not guilty of having made derogatory statements against Islam in his last book, Platform, as well as in a magazine interview that accompanied the launch of the book in September last year.

Mr Boubakeur said the decision “is highly unjust”, and could prove responsible in the end for the increased presence of the very form of extremism that President Chirac had been trying to keep out, and notably the poorer suburban neighborhoods of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles.

A complaint had been filed earlier this year against Houellebecq (pronounced Well-beck) by the French League for Human Rights as well as four Muslim associations for having spoken “injuriously” about Islam, and also for having engaged in an “incitement to racial hatred”.

Houellebecq’s last book, Platform, which was published last year, had already created much controversy for its statements with regard to sexual tourism, but it was an interview given to French literary magazine Lire that was responsible for the decision by a number of Muslim bodies and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme to ask the courts to condemn the book and its author for inciting racial hatred.

With his appearance before a Paris court, the lawsuits against him unleashed a campaign on his behalf by some of the country’s leading intellectuals, notably Philippe Sollers, Fernando Arrabal and Claude Levi-Strauss. Nearly 200 of the country’s leading writers signed a petition supporting his case.