Sudan Calls For Mass Protest Against Anti-Islam Film

State-backed Islamic scholars in Sudan have called for a mass protest after Friday prayers over a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammed that originated in the United States and an Islamist group threatened to attack the U.S. embassy.

Protests over the film, which depicts the Prophet as a womaniser and religious fake, have spread to several countries after Egyptian demonstrators scaled the U.S. embassy walls in Cairo on Tuesday and tore down the American flag.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry also criticised Germany for allowing a protest last month by right-wing activists carrying a caricatures of the Prophet and for Chancellor Angela Merkel giving an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet in 2005 triggering demonstrations across the Islamic world.

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is under pressure from Islamists who feel the government has given up the religious values of his 1989 Islamist coup.

The official body of Islamic scholars called for the faithful to defend the Prophet peacefully, but at a meeting of Islamists, some leaders said they would march on the German and U.S. embassies and demanded the ambassadors be expelled.

"We have 5,000 mosques in Khartoum with 2 million people ... attending Friday prayers," said Salah el-Din Awad, general secretary of the scholars' body in Khartoum state.

"Tomorrow we will all got out to defend Prophet Mohammad ... We will do this peacefully but with strength," he told reporters after meeting government officials on Thursday.

The Foreign Ministry said in its statement: "The German chancellor unfortunately welcomed this offence to Islam in a clear violation of all meanings of religious co-existence and tolerance between religions."