Analysis | How Quran burners got the global attention they wanted
This current wave of Quran burning ignited in January by Danish-Swedish far-right provocateur Rasmus Paludan outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm. Paludan followed up again the next week outside the Turkish Embassy in Copenhagen. However, it was brought to further global attention in June, on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, when an Iraqi man burned a Quran outside a mosque in Copenhagen and placed a strip of bacon on it.
Since then, the number of Quran-burning incidents has grown steadily, throwing the Swedish and Danish governments into the center of a swirling of international backlash. “We are currently in the most serious security situation since the Second World War,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a statement Sunday, following a call with his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen.
That may not be an exaggeration. Last month, angry protesters stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad and set it on fire as Iraq cut diplomatic ties with Sweden. Other countries have made similar diplomatic moves. The Taliban government in Afghanistan announced it had suspended all Swedish activities in the country in July, while just this week, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an intergovernmental body made up of 57 nations, called on its members to downgrade their diplomatic ties with Stockholm and Copenhagen.
In late July, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said that if a government supported the Quran burners, it would be “equivalent to going into battle-array for war.”
There has been fear of a wave of terrorism in Sweden and Denmark, recalling the 2015 attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where gunmen killed 12 people in retaliation for cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad years earlier. Last week, the Swedish government said that an increase in threats has led to the adoption of a new law that gives police more powers to check the country’s borders and use electronic surveillance.
Despite their outsize impact, the book burners are not a large group. In an article published this week, Jyllands-Posten wrote there was “a small handful of highly active men … behind virtually all the recent Quran burnings.” Most of them had deep ties to Stram Kurs, or Hard Line, a far-right movement led by 41-year-old Paludan, the Danish newspaper reported.
Salwan Momika, the 37-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who burned the Quran for the first time in June, appears to have a more complex background. Though he has described himself as an atheist, Middle Eastern outlets have reported that he was linked to extremist Christian militias while in Iraq.
The Quran burners are helped in their efforts to inflame by Muslim leaders who find their own reasons to stoke the outrage. Experts linked the storming of the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad last month to a show of political strength by the powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters led the action that exposed the government’s inability to protect the diplomatic outpost. Iraq’s weak government faces a national election before the end of this year which Sadr and his allies may be hoping to gain from.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tied the Quran burnings to Stockholm’s bid to join the NATO military alliance, suggesting repeatedly that he would hold up the ascension process if Swedish authorities kept granting permits for these protests. Though Turkey promised to ratify Sweden’s membership of NATO during the military alliance’s summit in June, Erdogan’s allies have floated the possibility that Quran burnings could cause further problems, describing it as a country that “brings problems to NATO.”
Again, domestic electoral politics have factored in. Erdogan, in power for two decades, faced a major political battle ahead of a presidential election in May due to an economic crisis caused by bizarre policies. In January, polling experts told Reuters that by focusing on foreign policy, Erdogan could consolidate his base.
“If you can come up with a security problem, then people rally behind the strong leader,” Ozer Sencar, chairman of pollster Metropoll, explained. It worked: Erdogan won the vote in the second round.
Erdogan’s delay of Sweden’s NATO ascension also aligned with Russia’s attempts to divide the alliance. Sweden’s minister for civil defense, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, told reporters last month that “Russia-backed actors” had been “amplifying incorrect statements such as that the Swedish state is behind the desecration of holy scriptures.” During a visit to the Russian Republic of Dagestan in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly received a copy of the Quran, which he said was “sacred for Muslims and should be sacred for others,” adding that Russia banned its desecration.
The tension between freedom of speech and religious beliefs highlighted by the burnings is a real one. Some Muslims, though far from all, believe it is blasphemy to even portray a religious figure like the prophet Muhammad, let alone in a mocking manner as Charlie Hebdo and some others have done so. No religion welcomes the burning of their holy books, regardless of whether the act is considered a form of free expression.
Israeli officials complained when a Syrian man applied to burn the Torah and a Bible outside of its embassy in Stockholm in July. Ahmad Alush, 32, had received permission but did not burn the books on the day, telling reporters he was only protesting the recent burning of the Quran.
“I want to show that freedom of expression has limits that must be taken into account,” Alush said, according to the Times of Israel.
Despite long-standing protections for freedom of speech, both Sweden and Denmark used to have blasphemy laws on the books, although they were sparingly used in more recent years. The former ditched the law in the 1970s, while the latter only in 2017. It did so after a number of high-profile cases, including one involving a caricature of Muhammed published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, were dropped.
The Danish government has been far more conciliatory in its approach this time, suggesting it would attempt to make it illegal to desecrate the Quran and other holy books outside foreign embassies. “The Danish government is on a knife-edge between our staunch support for freedom of speech and the necessity to protect Denmark’s security,” Lykke Friis, the head of think tank Europa and a former lawmaker, told the Financial Times.
Sweden, meanwhile, is likely to continue to be the focal point of global anger over the Quran burnings, with Kristersson announcing Tuesday that the global fallout over the desecration isn’t worth abandoning its standards for free speech. It may be a principled stance, but it is unlikely to protect it from more stunts from anti-Islam provocateurs, or the world leaders who tacitly embrace their stunts by giving them the attention they want.
