A French court was set to hear a request on Wednesday to halt distribution of a popular book that anti-racism campaigners claim incites hatred against Muslims.
The Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People, or MRAP, is seeking a French ban on "The Rage and the Pride," by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.
Two other human rights groups are asking the court to require the book to contain a warning about the content to readers.
In one passage the Movement Against Racism objects to, Fallaci wrote that Muslims "multiply like rats." In another, she says "the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day."
In June, a Paris judge refused to ban the book but sent the case to another court to hear arguments in greater detail. A hearing was scheduled on Wednesday.
Despite critics accusing Fallaci of writing an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant tirade, the book has been a big hit. It sold some 45,000 copies in France and more than 1 million in Italy. It was also a best seller in Germany.
Both the French Catholic and Protestant churches have joined Muslim leaders in decrying the book, calling it "repulsive" and its interpretation of the Koran "dangerous."
Fallaci, 72, a former Resistance fighter and war correspondent best known for her uncompromising interviews with world leaders, ended a decade-long, self-imposed silence after September 11 by writing the book in angry reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York, where she lives.
"This book deliberately makes all the world's Muslims accountable and guilty for the September 11 attacks," the Movement Against Racism said in a statement.
Fallaci has threatened to sue the group for calling her book racist. Her lawyers argue the book has the right to exist in the name of freedom of expression.
The book is due to be published in the United States this fall.