The Pakistani religious affairs minister who sparked uproar with his criticism of the author Salman Rushdie's knighthood today announced he was planning a visit to Britain.
Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq said he might join a delegation travelling to London to discuss ways of engaging Muslim clerics in a "constructive dialogue".
"The visit would also help clear many things and misunderstandings about my remarks about the knighting of Salman Rushdie by Britain," he told the AFP news agency.
Mr ul-Haq stoked the controversy by telling Pakistan's parliament: "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."
He later said he did not mean such attacks would be justified but was merely saying militants could use the knighthood as a justification.
The Foreign Office said today no official invitation had been issued to Mr ul-Haq but he would be able to come to the UK in a private capacity. An official at the high commission for Pakistan in London said: "Nothing has been conveyed to us."
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said a British delegation had met Mr ul-Haq on Monday as part of a programme of planned visits to discuss Islamic issues. Later, though, the minister made his remarks that prompted Britain to express its "deep concern".
The former Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who has lived in self-imposed exile for nearly a decade, said Mr ul-Haq should be sacked for his remarks, which were expunged from the record of the national assembly by the speaker on the grounds of national interest.
"The minister had done a great disservice to the image of Islam and the standing of Pakistan by calling for the murder of foreign citizens," Ms Bhutto said.
Mr ul-Haq is the son of the former military dictator General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, whose pro-Islamist policies in the 1980s are often blamed for sowing the seeds of militancy in Pakistan.
In 1977, General Zia overthrew Ms Bhutto's father, the then prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was executed two years later. The general was satirised in Rushdie's second novel, Shame, which focused on turmoil in Pakistan during that period.
Those entering the controversy over the knighthood today included hardline Pakistani Muslim clerics and the author Martin Amis.
The clerics have responded to the knighthood by bestowing a religious title on Osama bin Laden, the man behind the September 11 2001 attacks against the US.
The Pakistan Ulema Council gave the al-Qaida leader the title Saifullah, or sword of Allah.
"If a blasphemer can be given the title 'Sir' by the west despite the fact he's hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah," the council chairman, Tahir Ashrafi, said.
Amis today defended the decision to honour Rushdie with a knighthood, saying the right to free speech should not be sacrificed to religious sensitivities.
"The tradition of free speech is in danger to people who lose their nerve and feel for various ridiculous reasons that religion is in a special sanctuary and not open to the kind of questioning that we give to everything else," said Amis.
