BELGRADE, August 18, 2008 (AFP) - A Serbian company has ordered bookshops to withdraw a novel about the Muslim prophet Mohammed's love life that has already been halted by US publishers after protests, reports said Monday.

'The Jewel of Medina' -- a debut novel by US journalist Sherry Jones -- is about the life of Mohammed's child bride A'isha. Publisher Random House abandoned plans to release it in the United States earlier this month.

Its Serbian distributor, BeoBooks, had 1,000 copies of the novel printed and sent out to bookshops, but ordered their recall under pressure from Islamic leaders.

Mufti Muamer Zukorlic, one of Serbia's main Islamic leaders, had compared the book with the controversial Danish cartoons that sparked Muslim outrage and violent protests when published in 2005.

'This is a work that absolutely stopped at nothing in order to desecrate something that all Muslims hold sacred,' Zukorlic said in a report by the Serbian broadcaster B92.

This, he added, was 'an insult to all Muslims in the world and especially for us here in Serbia,' where Muslims account for around three percent of the eight million population, excluding newly independent Kosovo.

BeoBooks chief executive Aleksandar Jasic apologised to Serbia's Muslim community.

'It was not our intention to offend anybody, which is why we have immediately recalled the book from (all) stores and apologised to the Islamic community,' he said, adding: 'I hope the matter will end there.'

Zukorlic later accepted the apology and called for calm, according to the news agencies Tanjug and Beta.

'We hope that this affair will be used as a lesson so that this type of thing does not occur again any more,' they quoted the Muslim leader as saying.

Earlier this month, Random House warned publishers it had received information that 'this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence.'

The Serbian edition of the book, which follows the life of A'isha from her engagement to Mohammed at the age of six until his death, was the first to be published in the world, according to local reports.