Setting fire to politically and culturally significant artefacts is a popular protest tactic that never fails to divide opinion. The burning of the American flag is a prime example. Many staunch conservatives may object to the notion that a ‘snowflake’ might set the flag ablaze. The symbolism of a person burning the flag seems to go against the idea of freedom. However, the same liberty empowers Americans to destroy the flag if they so desire. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to imprison those who desecrated the Stars and Stripes, evidently unaware that this is a legitimate, constitutionally protected form of free expression.
The same applies to literary works. I despise book sacrilege and consider it an act of wanton aesthetic vandalism. But regardless of property rights, freedom permits us to burn books as we see fit. Trans activists who burn their copies of J.K. Rowling’s books are attention-seeking idiots, but I do not deny them the right to do so in a free Western liberal culture such as ours.
I bring this up because Salwan Momika, a prominent anti-Islam activist, was shot dead at his house in Södertälje in Sweden just last month. The 38-year-old atheist was well-known to Swedish authorities. Momika, an Iraqi, was awaiting a verdict on charges of ‘agitation against an ethnic group’ for setting fire to copies of the Quran in the summer of 2023, i.e. exercising his right to freedom of expression. In the wake of his killing, the charges against Momika have been dismissed, though his co-burner, Salwan Najem, still faces the charges. Five people have since been arrested and released in connection with the murder. It has been suspected, but not proven, that his killing was an act of Islamist retaliation.
Following the Quran-burning demonstration, during which he was attacked, he was initially granted protection, but according to Najem, his and Momika’s protection was removed by the authorities. Momika was ordered to leave Sweden, but he was unable to return to his native Iraq, which is one of over 30 Muslim-majority nations that carry severe penalties for blasphemy, including, in some, the death penalty.
State-sanctioned murder for blasphemy against Islam is not unusual. Just last month, a Pakistani court condemned four people to death for posting ‘sacrilegious’ content online and Iran sentenced a musician to death for insulting the prophet.
Although there is no official law that prohibits the burning of the Quran, Sweden does have de facto blasphemy laws. While Momika’s protest is supposedly protected under Swedish law, it may be seen as incitement or ‘agitation’ under some circumstances.
When this charge is levelled against an individual it is only a matter of time before others blame the victim. ‘He brought it on himself’, goes the familiar refrain. Consider the following example. Not long after Momika’s murder was reported, Bushra Shaikh wrote on X, ‘Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences.’
Shaikh returned to offer a correction, stating that punishment should not include murder and should instead be handled by the government. Her tacit support for blasphemy laws is reminiscent of an edict handed down by mullahs in the Middle East, particularly the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran who issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. The fact that she mentioned murder is revealing. Violence as a form of intimidation is a powerful method for silencing anyone who offends the prophet.
(Rushdie was also, of course, accused of ‘bringing it on himself’, by right and left, religious and secular. The written exchange between Rushdie and John le Carré in the letters pages of The Guardian in 1997 over the fatwa and free speech, which featured ‘Christopher Hitchens [joining] the fray unbidden [and driving] the spy novelist to greater heights of apoplexy’—as Rushdie put it in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton—is worth revisiting for the humiliation rightly meted out to such apologists.)
The threat of violent retaliation looms over dissenting individuals like the sword of Damocles. Even academic Islamic scholars are not immune from the linguistic Savonarolas. Forty years ago, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha was executed for heresy. The Sudanese reformist scholar and Arab enlightenment advocate advocated his ‘Second Message of Islam’, which called for the more violent Medina verses of the Quran to be disregarded as of their time and championed the more peaceful Mecca verses as the ‘true’ Islam—i.e. a religion of peace. Taha was arrested and executed after distributing pamphlets calling for the end of Sharia law. This is just one of many examples of dissidents and reformers in the ‘Muslim world’ being persecuted or killed for speaking out. A more recent example is the murder of the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, in South Africa.
Giving more moral value to the feelings of theists than atheists would be the death knell for liberty.
Even in the West, debating Islam is risky, as evidenced by the examples of Minnesota’s Hamline University and Britain’s Batley Grammar School. The collective grief over the murder of French school teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 vanished as quickly as the writers from PEN America turned their backs on the dozen Charlie Hebdo journalists gunned down by Islamic extremists in 2015.
Indeed, a man was attacked and then arrested (!) after burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London earlier this month; the decision to charge the man in relation to the Quran burning prompted Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick to warn that ‘This decision risks creating a de facto blasphemy law by the back door.’ Also this month, a Manchester man was convicted of ‘racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm’ against a passerby after setting a Quran alight. As Kenan Malik put it in The Observer: ‘Here is a form of blasphemy restriction but in secular garb, a crime of distressing an individual rather than transgressing theological norms.’
Following Momika’s demonstration outside Sweden’s parliament, there was an increase in book burnings in the country. Momika’s flaming impiety was identified as the catalyst and blamed. Last year, The Guardian described these acts as proof of a ‘racism crisis’. A local imam told the newspaper that book burning has ‘nothing to do with freedom of expression’ and one of the Muslim women interviewed inevitably described Quran burning as ‘Islamophobia’.
The notion that we should forgo freedom of expression to appease the cultural sensibilities of a religious minority (or anyone, for that matter) is ludicrous. Giving more moral value to the feelings of theists than atheists would be the death knell for liberty. Besides, Islam is a belief system, not a race. Muslims account for around a quarter of the world’s population, with many belonging to different ethnicities. When you criticise Islam, you are criticising an idea or set of ideas, not a specific racial group. The suggestion that burning a religious text is an example of Islamophobia is nonsensical.
Islamophobia is a contrived neologism used to suppress uncomfortable truths. It should be consigned to history. Islamophobia ‘is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons’, as a line often misattributed to the late great Christopher Hitchens puts it.
I am sure the sight of a burning Quran may offend some people, but that is the trade-off you make when you live in a free country.
Related reading
Kant vs Tahir Ali: why desecration should not be outlawed, by Daniel Herbert
The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem
The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley
The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali, by Ehtesham Hassan
10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attack: a message from the Freethinker, by Daniel James Sharp
Charlie Hebdo: An open letter to the free world from a freethinker, by Khadija Khan
Storm over a tea-cup? The ‘Mug-Gate’ teacher speaks out, by Matt Lovell
Image of the week: ‘Moses Getting a Back View’ (1882), by Daniel James Sharp
Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash
Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans
Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park
The return of non-crime hate incidents: tyranny back on the march, by Noel Yaxley
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