PARIS -- A Paris court is to rule Wednesday whether an Italian journalist who wrote a controversial book criticizing Islam and the Muslim culture violated French anti-racist laws.

Human rights and anti-racist groups brought the suit against New York-based author Oriana Fallaci and her French publisher, Plon, for inciting racial hatred in the book, written in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and titled "The Rage and the Pride".

In its pages, Fallaci notably writes that "Muslims breed like rats", claims that there is an unbridgeable gap between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and warns of a "Pearl Harbor" against the West.

The book has become a best-seller in Italy, where more than one million copies were sold.

Fallaci, 72, will not be in court for the verdict.

Ill-health has left her confined to her New York apartment.

During the arguments phase of the court case in early October, her lawyers defended the work by saying Fallaci was lashing out against the religious interpretation of Islam touted by Muslim clerics, and not against Muslims themselves.

"It's a denunciation of the rise of (Islamic) extremism," one of the lawyers, Christophe Bigot, said then.

But the plaintiffs rejected that. Patrick Baudoin, a lawyer for the League of Human Rights, said Fallaci had given herself over to "a discourse of rage" that tried to present Western civilization as "the only good civilization".

On October 22, a similar case against another author, best-selling French writer Michel Houellebecq, was thrown out after a Paris court determined that comments he made to a literary magazine were not punishable under the anti-racism laws.

Houellebecq had told February's issue of ***Lire*** magazine that he felt Islam was "a dangerous religion right from the start" and that it was "the dumbest religion".

While the remarks were less-than-noble and unsubtle, they did not intentionally seek to insult Muslims, the court found.