According to the BBC, the South African Mail and Guardian published one of the cartoons on its international news page to illustrate a story about last week’s protests.

The paper’s editor, Ferial Haffajee, has been on the revceiving end of a series of threatening and abusive letters and text messages.

“People have been phoning my mother and exercising pressure through her,” Ms Haffajee told the BBC News website.

She said some groups had threatened to march on the newspaper’s offices in Johannesburg.

“It displays a lack of tolerance that is nerve-wracking,” she said.

Ms Haffajee said she felt she was being targeted personally because she is herself a Muslim.

“There are people out there who feel it is their duty to remind me that there is a hereafter and I will be punished.”

Also on Friday, South African Muslim activists won an interdict barring another paper, the Sunday Times, from printing the cartoons.

After the Mail and Guardian reprinted the cartoon, the Muslim organisation Jamiat-ul Ulama won a court interdict stopping the Sunday Times from doing the same.

“We are aware of the sensitivities regarding the cartoons, and the editorial team was discussing whether these sensitivities should be given more weight than the right of non-Muslim readers to see the depictions that had caused huge offence in other parts of the world,” a statement published by the Sunday Times said.

“We declined to give an undertaking not to publish the cartoons, not because we were intent on publishing them, but because we strongly oppose the attempt by any group to edit or censor the newspaper,” the statement said.

“We regard this as a serious blow to the freedom of the press and have every intention of challenging the ruling when the matter returns to court,” the statement concluded.

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