French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with Al-Jazeera broadcast Saturday that he understood that Muslims might be "shocked" by the publication of the Prophet Muhammad's cartoons, but that the cartoons did not justify violence.

According to excerpts from the interview, the head of state declared, "I understand that we may feel shocked by cartoons, but I will never agree to justify violence," stressing that "our freedoms and our rights, I consider our mission to protect them."

The interview is scheduled to be broadcast in full at 17:00 (16:00 GMT) on the Qatari channel, which broadcasts in several languages, including Arabic and English, and enjoys wide follow-up in the Middle East and the Maghreb.

This is the first interview conducted by the French President since the start of the anti-French protests, which erupted against the background of his statements in which he defended the publication of cartoons in the name of freedom of expression after the killing of a teacher near Paris who showed his students caricatures of the Prophet.

Sources in the vicinity of Macron said that the French president seeks, in this "long" interview, to "clarify his vision in a calm manner," with his desire to show that "his statements about fighting isolationism have been distorted and (his statements) about cartoons are shown in a caricature way most of the time.