Burning The Quran

    For the record, I’ve never burned a book, let alone a so-called “religious” text, and I have no intention of starting now. It is, to say the least, a powerful and provocative act, far more likely to arouse fury than to further sincere dialogue between believers and non-believers. But if we wish to live in a society with freedom of speech and religion, as free-thinking individuals, we should surely have the right to reject the teachings of any religion or other ideology by destroying its symbols—even if that is offensive to believers of that religion. 

    Salwan Momika—an atheist Iraqi asylum seeker living in Sweden—was put on trial in 2023 for “agitation against an ethnic or national group” over his public burnings of the Quran, events at which he was physically attacked by some Muslim individuals who were incensed at his actions. But the verdict in his case will never be heard. On January 29th, Momika was shot to death in an apparent act of revenge for his desecrations of the Quran.

    The Quran teaches that those who desecrate its words and mock the faith will not go unpunished, whether in this world or the next. According to Surah Al-Ahzab (33:57–61), those who insult Allah will face divine retribution; Surah At-Tawbah (9:61–66) warns of severe consequences for those who ridicule Islam or Mohammed. Historically, these punishments have sometimes been administered by Islamic states and sometimes by zealous individuals who see themselves as executing divine justice. 

    This is at odds with liberal and secularist notions of free speech and freedom of religion, which are built upon the notion that we should be able to express our religious beliefs and inclinations without fear of violence and without being forced to comply with someone else’s religious doctrines. These are not just high-minded ideals. They are the basis of prosperity and of human social development.  

    Countries with strong free speech protections, such as the United States, Germany, and the Nordic states, consistently rank among the world’s most innovative and economically advanced. In their book The Price of Freedom Denied, Brian Grim and Roger Finke present empirical evidence to show that countries with greater religious freedom tend to have more stable economies with higher per capita GDP. In addition, countries like Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, which score high on free expression and individual rights, consistently top international happiness rankings. Freedom is not just good for Christian Americans or post-religious Europeans; it’s good for everyone, INCLUDING Muslims. This is at least partly why we see immense migration outflows from less free countries towards freer ones. People flock to places where they can enjoy prosperity and peace. To put it bluntly, there is no "flocking" to Iran. There is however, for a barrel-full of reasons, one of which is freedom of religion, a lot of "flocking" to the United States.  

    Before he became an atheist and an opponent of Islam and of Muslim asylum seekers in Europe, Momika was an Iraqi Christian who served in the militia of the Popular Mobilization Front (PMF), with whom he fought on the battlefield against ISIS. ISIS, if you remember, were radical Islamic literalists who believed that they were enforcing the will of Allah by implementing strict Sharia law and punishing apostates, blasphemers, and all perceived enemies of Islam with ruthless efficiency. Their brutality was infamous—they conducted executions, beheadings, crucifixions, and mass killings of everyone they captured who fell afoul of their rigid, literal interpretation of Sunni Islam. Under ISIS, there was no free speech, no freedom of religion. Their creed was based on the rejection of modernity, and the embrace of bloody medievalism. We should therefore not be surprised to see an individual who fought against ISIS become radicalized against not only ISIS themselves, but also against the book on which ISIS based their ideology.  

    Burning a Quran might be, to quote my grandmother, uncouth and intentionally offensive, but damage to a book cannot be compared to violence against a human being. Despite the remark of Heinrich Heine whose experience of Nazi book-burnings led him to conclude that “those who burn books will in the end burn people,” we should be careful to differentiate those two acts. They should not be treated as equivalents. Burning a piece of writing, however symbolic, is fundamentally different from burning, harming, or persecuting a person. Nobody is physically harmed in the act of tearing down, burning, or desecrating a symbol. It can often be a legitimate form of nonviolent protest, especially when used to protest an ideology like that of ISIS which seeks to strip us all of our freedom of speech and freedom of and from religion. More importantly: What does it say about the state of Europe when a man who fled religious violence in the Middle East is gunned down in Sweden for offending the same ideology that he fled Iraq to escape?

    Some have dismissed Momika’s death as an unfortunate but predictable consequence of his provocations. As I have written before in this space, that particular thought process is disgusting. And if we accept that logic, we must also accept that free speech exists only at the pleasure of those most willing to use force to silence it, that the mere threat of violence is enough to determine what can and cannot be said, and that laws, principles, and rights are secondary to the raw power of intimidation.

    The conflict between secularist liberalism and conservative Islamism in Europe is often attributed to mass migration, but it is not as simple as that. In a world in which we are increasingly interconnected, thanks to modern communication and transportation technologies, we are all involved now. It is a question not just for Muslims or for Middle Easterners but for the whole world: Are we going to defend liberty, openness, and democracy, or are we going to allow radical theocrats and their ideological allies—including decolonial anti-Western leftists—to try to crush our hard-won freedoms?

    Since Momika’s death there have been a spate of copycat incidents, and many people have taken to social media to announce that they plan to burn large numbers of Qurans in his honour. In the UK, an individual named Martin Frost was arrested and has now pleaded guilty to “causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, and distress” after broadcasting a livestream in which he burned pages of the Quran in Manchester city center, beside the Glade of Light memorial for victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

    Witness Fahad Iqbal told Manchester Magistrates Court: “I was quite shocked, disgusted, and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Quran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.” The presiding judge, Judge Margaret McCormack told the defendant: “The Quran is a sacred book to Muslims, and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress. This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behavior.” So in the UK it is clear that public Quran burners face prosecution, just as they do in Sweden. Not only this, but Greater Manchester Police published Frost’s street address only days after Momika’s murder, even though publicly throwing the defendant under the bus in a case like this could leave him vulnerable to a violent attack by radical Islamists. (The UK’s Free Speech Union has taken up Frost’s case.) Meanwhile, Salwan Momika’s co-defendant Salwan Najem, a Swedish citizen, was recently fined 4,000 crowns and given a suspended sentence over his part in Momika’s Quran burnings.

    Individuals who burn the Quran are being punished under what are effectively blasphemy laws both by Western legal systems who are prosecuting them for causing offense and by vigilante Islamists who threaten to murder them. 

    And just so I don’t get accused by anyone of not practicing what I preach, allow me to throw a little heresy at you. I believe with all my heart that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship literary characters. Yahweh, God, and Allah come to us from books; specifically the Torah, the Belated, or New Testament, and the Quran. Not much different than the ancient stories of the Greek and Roman gods. And while I do not believe they are literally true, I absolutely believe they are filled with great literature and even greater poetry, and should be read and appreciated as such. Now you can talk all you want about each of these books being divine inspiration. But you can’t prove it. It’s Shakespeare; or more to the point, they are akin to the ancient stories of the gods of Olympus. The only difference is at some point someone made a political decision to turn secular literature into sacred literature. It’s called metaphor. And literalists aren’t big on metaphor. 

    The above paragraph is enough to get me stoned, drawn, and quartered in some nations. No doubt by conservative literalists in each of those religions (and trust me, I grew up with some of the Christian examples of their ilk). Think of that scene in the original Footloose movie where John Lithgow sees his congregation burning books because he went all Jerry Falwell on them. I grew up with some of those people. 

    Now again, having said all of that, I don’t think it would be helpful to start burning more Qurans. My love, if not obsession, for reading compels me to always respect the written word. As Luai Ahmed put it in his obituary for Momika: “I don’t believe burning the Quran is going to help the Muslim community to progress. Criticizing religion and extremist ideologies should come from a place of care and love.” But Momika’s murder is a very clear sign that the bad ideas which led to the rise of ISIS have gone viral, and until all those who value liberty—including many Arabs, as well as all those of a Muslim background—stand up and make their voices heard to put a stop to this, things will only get worse, and the extremists will simply continue to murder those with whom they disagree. 

    Notions of free speech (including book-burning) and freedom of religion are also being thrown under the bus...every single day. That not only means the freedom to practice your religion, but the freedom to protest and speak out against your religion...including the burning of your sacred texts. As time goes on and the freedoms to do both of these things continue to be curtailed, the cost to our societies will be high indeed.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com