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'To outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian.' (Ole Jensen/Getty Images)
Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come down thyself and work a miracle.” Two scenes later, he is dead.
We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.
He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.
But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.
In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.
That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”
The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.
The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.
But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.
And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.
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SubscribeThe key concept to me here seems to be the quality of self-restraint. Continuing to have a freedom in a given society to burn religious books depends on the ability of the members of said society to exercise self-restraint.
It depends on a) most of the members of the society saying “thanks for giving me the opportunity, but no thanks” to the burning of the text, and b) the respective group who would be offended by such act having the self-restraint to not go berserk when it does happen.
Since the burning of the Koran is still an extremely rare occurrence in European countries, what we have observed indicates that a) is working, but b) isn’t.
No Muslim living in the free West should be proud of being part of a community which cannot express its offence and disgust at said act without resorting to violence. It simply shows a lack of civilisation and a fundamental opposition to the basic notions underpinning Western liberal societies.
Well put. It always dumbfounds me that conservative Muslims demonstrate a ‘religion of peace’ by murderous riots after Pope Benedict cited a Byzantine about Islam being a religion of the sword; and by reacting violently to Koran burning.
A very good post and well-reasoned. When it comes to your last paragraph, there is something that I genuinely don’t understand. How can you expect (emphasis on expect) a newcomer in the ‘free west’ to automatically act in the same way and inherit the same beliefs as people who have lived in the free West for all of their lives?
If somebody comes here, having spent all of their lives living under a religious law, are they being trained before they enter the country? Is there a course which tell you how to behave or do you just hope things are picked up in time? Imagine an immigrant who goes straight to live with family on entering the country. They may never speak English/German for years. They may never watch our TV. How do they get trained about our laws?
Perhaps there should be courses. The alternative is to impose much harder punishments for the violence and hope that the word spreads.
Surely there is a responsibility as an adult if you are moving to a nee country to learn somethinh
to learn something of that country, its culture and its laws. Too many people move to Europe with no reason to assimilate due to our laws on equality. If we move to, for example, Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, we cannot expect to have the same freedoms as we do in Europe and ee have to fit with theur laws, especially wonen. So why no equity in Europe? I believe that human rights are important but with rights come personal respinsibility, and too many are not held to account for that responsibility .
Please understand that I am not making excuses for bad behaviour.
On tbis site everyone is quite clever, very eloquent and able to make rational decisions. But not everyone can do this. Somehow, we need to tell people what we expect of them or we can’t be sure that bad things won’t happen. I believe they have/used to have something like this is the US. There was a short course on how to be a citizen and even a passing-out parade.
Ah, Civics. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, “more than 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy. Just half were able to correctly name the branch of government where bills become laws. ”
And you sure can’t fix what you don’t understand.
Even so, it would seem common sense that the reaction to harming a treasured book would not include murder. Not that ‘common’, I guess, in the Muslim world. That Onion cartoon said it all…
That ship sailed half a century ago (if it ever sailed at all).
Your question is based on the notion of reasonableness. There is no responsibility without a corresponding obligation. We don’t oblige or insist or force arrivals to adopt our values: therefore some don’t.
I’m married to an immigrant. His parents were expected to have sponsors, jobs waiting for them, speak and read English, and be in good health to be allowed residence in the US. There were no classes telling them how to behave like civilized people: they were civilized people.
Raise expectations, be rewarded with grateful and productive future citizens.
Yes, of course. Depends on how quickly and with what force the person leaves his country. It works for people who think and are civilised, as you say, but can we be sure that everybody entering the country does so with the same degree of preparation?
So the Muslims that marched in their thousands and burned Rushdie’s book were just ignorant ? It has zero to do with ignorance . They go to the mosque and take advice from the Imam . They don’t accept our liberal values . That’s one reason why mass migration has been a disaster .
Oh they are ‘prepared’ alright. All young males of fighting age; very few (if any) women or kids on the boats.
I’m stunned by the fact that more people aren’t stunned by the fact that the WEFugees want to turn western nations into the same sort of sh!thole that they are trying to (allegedly) ‘escape’ from.
Those emigrants who come here because they wanted to leave their country and its values, laws, prejudices, lack of safety, etc., yes, they will do well here. But those emigrants who want to bring their country’s values to this country? The answer is obvious, because we now let in far more of the latter than the former.
They are led on these issues by the imam at the mosque . It has nothing to do with ignorance of our society . They wish to change things here
According to almost all posters on this site, our culture is dead anyway.
Yes, in order to be a citizen of the USA, a person has to take a test about the Constitution and about basic knowledge of federal laws. I don’t know whether the test is in English only or is also given in different languages as well. I would prefer that it be in English, as I think a person should be able to function in society.
Anyone can fake a test.
In summary, multiculturalism has failed
“Multiculturalism” is just another B.S.Bingo Buzzword. Just like “Islamophobia“. A ‘phobia‘ is an irrational fear of something. It is in fact entirely rational to fear something (an ideological death-cult….) that wants to kill you because you don’t believe in its ‘teachings’ or its philosophy.
Which any serious person with a solid knowledge of human history should have known would happen. When I was a kid, I believed the multicultural melting pot propaganda that used to be popular and now is considered somehow racist. However, I was always curious about things, particularly about why things were the way they were and what happened before that led to this point. I studied a lot of history and read a lot of news and came to the conclusion that I’d been fed a load of horse crap that somebody came up with so we could pretend America wasn’t a barely functional mess that somehow succeeded despite the chaos.
Because “we are all the same”. Any other opinion is r…….t.
Any would-be immigrant who has no interest in integrating into the society poses a danger and should be rejected. It seems that principle is seldom applied these days, resulting in the chaos and undermining of Western values that we’re seeing.
“… impose much harder punishments for the violence and hope that the word spreads.”
‘Harder punishments’ to include revocation of permanent residence permits and or naturalised citizenship and consequent deportation – plus immediate deportation of all illegal immigrants on arrival, genuine asylum seekers excepted.
These things have never happened and probably never will.
This should come as no surprise. There is no such thing as Muslim civilisation or ever has been.
When these ‘people’ erupted out of the Arabian desert in the mid seventh century, they overran both Sassanian Persia and much the Eastern Roman Empire. They then proceeded to ‘piggyback’ on these two great civilisations thus acquiring a wafer thin veneer of both Greco-Roman and Persian culture. They brought little or nothing original to the ‘party’ themselves.
To believe that these people can throw off the sterile ‘culture’ of desert in a mere fourteen hundred years is both naive and dangerous, as we have seen on so many occasions.
POSTED @ 14:01 GMT.
So 50 minutes in the SIN BIN! Why?
Bad reputation. Don’t quite agree with you. Many of the things which were learned the West – philosophy, sciences, etc, – were translated into Arabic in the Muslim countries. In the West much was lost in the dark ages and relearned by translating it back from the Arabic.
I think I know what you mean. A civilisation is attached to land. The Persian Civilisation was the land, laws and behaviour of the people in the areas ruled by Persia. There wasn’t a Muslim country with a king because Muslim is like Catholic or Buddhist. The Arabic language is responsible for many good things.
The ones needing to show self restraint are the ones who call for violence – not those who would protest against them.
You are right. They are barbarians. And they are multiplying and you are not.
Don’t need to be a genius to see how this ends.
If the Koran causes such issues, maybe Koran should be banned instead of restriciting danish freedoms.
No, you’re just joining in with the bad guys then.
Taking your post as one full of irony, the Koran is a book. The problems are with some readers. The Koran is written in old Arabic, which almost nobody understands, so the message comes from the interpreters -the Imams- who present their views on it.
Oh ok then send the imams back home and train a new generation of Muslims in a massively liberalised form of Islam , with all the horrible bits edited out . Good luck with that
And back home is still home . Arranged marriages to cousins still ensure children are born to first generation migrants from Pakistan .
“Once the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists who violated their treaties wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them on every way.”
Authoritarian laws are ALWAYS sold as “safety measures”. Always.
Massive Muslim migration in the european countries is the Trojan horse of islamism.
I’ve said it before, but I think it is worth repeating, as much because the author doesn’t.
When books, such as ‘The Satanic Verses’ are burnt (or not published because of intimidation) it is because other people (normally for purely ideological reasons) want to restrict, to the point of mass murder, another persons right to free thought. The burning of the Korans, by contrast, is not about (from what I can see, and even if I’m wrong, is still relevant) denying, restricting or abolishing the words or thoughts that the Koran contains, as in the example above, but instead to show the exact opposite, that there is an increasing population, prepared to challenge, to the point of mass murder (although simple death threats seem to work perfectly fine) the post-war Western liberal consensus that one of the most abhorrent things the Nartsees did was burn books. Not because burning ‘paper’ with words written on them is in itself sacrilegious, but because of the ideology behind the act and the ovens, for other ‘waste’ that that inevitably (?) led to.
So, to sum up, the Koran is ‘almost’ irrelevant, the Nartsee is NOT the person(s) doing the burning, but the exact opposite, and the Danish ruling is tacitly (even if only for a quiet life) agreeing with the ‘actual’ Nartsees.
It’s pretty terrifying to me that whole populations are being made to kowtow to the irrational sensibilities of a particular belief system. Where does it all end?
“Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children?”
Because a sufficient number of Muslims are homicidal adults? Or is this a trick question?
How many times does Islam have to violently attack the social mores and criminal codes of the world before everybody says:’Enough! Your religion is evil’?
Can anybody name one country that has been improved by Islam?
Indonesians and Malaysians actually believe that Islam is the best thing that has happened to them!
The Chinese Malaysians who are the dominant economic class certainly do not.
Let me think for a millisecond.No.
Why is the censorship of comments on this essay so draconian?
Is NO criticism of Islam permitted and if not, WHY not!
POSTED @ 14:19.
I answered your post about about ‘Muslim Civilisation’ or the lack thereof. Straight into the Sin Bin.
Why is Islam protected from laws against hate speech . Instead of criminalising someone burning the Koran why not vet it for hate speech and insist those parts are removed ?
Indeed, I am surprised that the Koran has not been bowdlerised by sensitive readers in the UK and US to bring it up to date and remove passages that don’t meet contemporary mores. Certainly it would seem to require an introduction emphasising that the wording and behaviour depicted that was acceptable for its time but will now be regarded as offensive have accordingly been deleted or rewritten to meet modern standards of acceptable conduct and wording.
That said I recently heard a reading in Church from the Bible that retained a prohibition on coveting your neighbour’s slaves rather than the more usual man servant and maid servants so perhaps sensitive readers are needed there as well.
The vast majority of people proclaiming how wonderful Islam is, and that we must all practise tolerance towards it, have never read the Quran.
An excellent idea Sir!
This isn’t difficult.
If we have freedom of speech and freedom to protest then those freedoms must be protected.
Any threat or act of violence in response to what someone perceives as blasphemy is a criminal act and should be prosecuted as such.
Damaging a book is not a crime and must never be.
Hmmmmmm and what about the character assassination of eminent professionals who hold a different view to the government narrative? Sidelining of eminent professors and doctors over their ‘conspiratorial’ views on ‘Covid’ is a form of book-burning in a way!
How will the new Danish Law deal with the Dane who burns a book with a cover saying “Koran” but inside the book is “Satanic Verses”? Presumably the visual offence to the Muslim fundamentalists will be enough to set them off rioting but a perfect defence will exist as the work is not the Koran.
Perhaps it is time for those that wish to support enlightenment values to do a bit of rioting in defence of the right to offend if that is what it takes for craven safety measures authorities to take their views into account. Banning the public burning of all books might be a suitable compromise. At least it would avoid the issue raised in my first question.
This being Denmark, they will presumably deal with it sensibly.
You may not know it, but the original law did not make it through parliament. MPs were worried that it was too imprecise, and that it was unclear what it might have been used to ban, in the future. The second version, that they passed, made it clear that the ban was limited to sacred texts of religions that were established in Denmark. Which should keep the Pastafarians out of the fight, at least.
Unless such a religion is reformed, or superceded by another spiritual tendency then Islam would appear to tilt perpetually towards violence somewhat like the Christianity of the Middle Ages. I find this to be an alarming consequence of the widespread, uncritical faith in multiculturalism which has really gone into drift in the last decade.
It’s frightening that western society has reached this point and even more terrifying when you consider the acceleration of change in the last five decades. Extrapolate forward and you can justifiably highlight a looming existential threat within the next couple of generations. The equal problem is the dumbing down of ‘education’ that has left people ignorant of the threat and blissfully unaware of what is at stake. Sadly I can’t see what is capable of reversing the direction of travel.
The poor Wakefield schoolboy just wasn’t aware that putting the said document on the floor disrespected it.
A lady vicar of my acquaintance told her congregation of her visits to the various local religious communities. On visiting a mosque she was presented with a copy of said religious book and instructed that she must not place in on the floor since this would be disrespectful. As it would be if it were stored in the smallest room in the house. And under no circumstances, the lady vicar was told, must she hold the document while menstruating. To do so would defile it.
To treat these religious documents as literary products of the Enlightenment is to misunderstand how they are regarded by the communities of believers. One might appreciate the poetical language of the King James Bible but that wouldn’t explain why it is held above the head as it is in communion services. If a religious document is considered to have existed in heaven, as with the previously mentioned example, before being imparted to men, it is no mere literary work to be casually reviewed by unbelievers on a take it or leave it basis.
To be sure, the Churches used to have a ceremony called the churching of women that was performed after childbirth. However, this idea of defilement has disappeared from Christianity. Christianity has in turn been affected by the liberal values that it gave rise to by however many removes. Christians have their Lord’s example of turning the other cheek when insulted and His command to love their enemies.
But really, in the light of the ways in which the first-mentioned religious document can be disrespected, the burning of it is not only ignorant but wholly unimaginative. Have the Danish legislators considered that to be wholly effective their laws would have to enable the (religious?) police to examine every household to see if the document were being respectfully stored. And what if a menstruating woman had a copy of the document in her handbag while walking in the shopping mall?
Interesting point about “churching of women” and menstruating women. Tells us a great deal about some of the psychology of organised religion. A plague on all their houses.
A plague on all religions. The world would be far far better place without ALL of them.
Don’t be silly. The Danish legislators were trying to stop people from deliberately and publicly going out of the way to be offensive just for the hell of it / in order to provoke violence. They were not trying to introduce Sharia law. For damage to the Koran that happens in the course of normal everyday life among non-Muslims the believers will have to patiently bear it. Honestly, you sound like the Danish parliament have offended your religious sensibilities by not treating religion and religious sentiment as offensive rubbish.
One could only wish that the various hate speech laws had been written with the same restraint, so that they prohibited targeted public campaigns of offense, but not ordinary everyday insults or the expression of controversial (I mean ‘racist’) opinions.
They could and should have prohibited hate speech in religious texts . Muslims can recite or allude to some hateful saying of Muhammad about Jews or Polytheists (Rishi) and they are in the clear.
So hate speech laws exclude from their purview many of the most hateful (religious) people in the country
You are a faithful atheist, and you want to ban the speech of unbelievers. I wonder whether your rule would be preferable to Sharia- it would certainly not be more tolerant of dissent.
Andrew Doyle – as always, brilliant.
The sad thing is most, nay all, Muslims I’ve worked with are normal rational people with very similar values to us Christians (or the secular version there of)
But there evidently are ghettos of Muslims who have not integrated. I’ve been fortunate enough not to meet them in person.
We should avoid tarring all people of Muslim faith with the same brush
“In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence.” The author seems unaware that the burning of a book is in itself an act of violence and deliberately provocative. And also unaware that not all religious traditions share the same beliefs regarding toleration that have evolved over many centuries in Europe. In other words, he is relying on a tradition as being universal when in fact it is limited to a specific cultural tradition which he has mistakenly taken to be universal.
I think the author is very well aware that not all religions share the same beliefs about toleration. This entire article is about that.
I think we can all agree that Doyle’s essay is spot on. So is the Sam Harris podcast transcript on the same subject that he linked to. But I would like to modify [….] Harris’ concluding paragraph as follows:
”If…….the political left can’t stand against [ nihilism, moral relativism, ‘decolonization’, canon-bashing, sexual confusion, gender confusion, and quite generally anything that can be construed as ‘woke’ ], it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness leads to right wing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders [ actual geographical borders ], fascists will. And that is a world none of us should want to live in [ Amen ].
“The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing.”…..
Though not as revealing as the total absence of support from the police and the courts. It’s time that this “Defender of the Faith” association with the Crown and State ended and Britain followed France to (enlightenment and) secularity.
I have read that Russian interests have been involved in such book burning in Denmark and Sweden to stir up trouble, but it’s been hard to corroborate.
Like a petulant three year old with a loaded gun…
deleted
Insider info… the kid in Wakefield is NOT autistic. This lie was told in an attempt to diffuse the situation.
Given recent events, clearly Denmark has come down on the wrong side of the “Mohammadans”, meaning radical Islamists.
I take this to be traditional European anti-Semitism, re-merging in a dubious country.
Many kinds of offensive speech are worth protecting: The ‘Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons (which were perfectly ordinary political cartoons, in the fairly gentle style preferred locally), proposing critical and unpopular ideas. Even Charlie-Hebdo deserves protection – as long as they keep their disgusting drawings inside the magazine, so that people like me are free to not see them. The Koran-burners are doing none of that. They are deliberately trying to cause maximum offence and distress in order to provoke violence. If they are comparable to anything, it is the people who not so long ago turned up to the funerals of soldiers who had died in Iraq, screaming how great it was that these evil murderers were now burning in hell. These things are not worth protecting. Nor would I argue that e.g. deep-fake pornography should be protected as free speech – would you?
Principles are admirable, but (as they say in Denmark) ‘You can hold the banner so high that you lose contact with the ground’.
and there are those who could hold high their banners, and still manage to walk under a snake.
In cultures where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, no one has any right to be offended!