The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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Why I'm leaving the UK

By Andrew Doyle

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following 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”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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By Wolfgang Munchau

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

The burnings had already become a geopolitical conflagration thanks to Sweden’s Nato accession, which effectively led to Sweden’s bid becoming hostage to the whims of Turkey’s President Erdogan. However, beneath the surface of immediate security politics looms a question of the status of religion and the position of minority religious communities in Swedish political culture. The Government’s rhetorical embrace of human rights, including respect of religion, runs in conflict with Sweden’s institutional arrangement that is hostile not only to religion, but also to communitarian claims at large.

As Henrik Berggren and I have argued in our recent book, Sweden is not only one of the most secular countries in the world — its social contract is based on a radical alliance between the state and the individual. The central purpose is precisely to liberate individuals from families, religious communities, charities and other institutions of civil society that limit individual freedom in the name of communal identity. And this moral logic results in a civic universalism that is fundamentally hostile to communitarian claims, including, perhaps especially, those that are made in the name of religion.

In this regard, Sweden sticks out in studies such as the World Values Survey. Not only is the contrast to the Islamic world particularly dramatic, Sweden also stands out compared to Western countries such as  the US and Germany, whose social contracts afford a far greater role to religious and ethnic communities. In Sweden, religious freedom is conceived as a right to practise religion as a private matter. Thus, the Swedish idea of religious freedom is as much, maybe more, a question of freedom from religion as it is a right to religion.

Faith in God or gods takes place inside the home, inside the individual mind, and only collectively in congregations conceived of as private, voluntary associations. Insofar as a church acts publicly, it is expected that they adhere to the values, laws, and mores of secular society. This “civil religion”, focused on individual citizenship, gender equality, and children’s rights, always trumps what is seen as outdated and conservative claims rooted in premodern notions of religious faith and moral codes expressed in various religious texts. The “holy” texts of religion should accordingly have no bearing on the primacy of the constitution and laws of the modern, secular state.

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The spectre of terror returns to Scandinavia

By Lucas Webber and Riccardo Valle

It is in this light one must understand the growing conflict between Sweden and Muslim and Islamist activists, religious leaders and political regimes. And while the burnings of the Quran are important, there is further pre-history to the recent uproar that provides a better context for understanding the heart of the current conflict. Here I refer to the recent social-media campaign in which Muslim activists claimed that Swedish social services were kidnapping the children of Muslim parents. The background is that Sweden has experienced massive immigration in recent decades, including many refugees from Muslim countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This has resulted in cultural collisions in general, but notably over their very different understandings of the role of the family, of parental rights versus children’s rights, and the place of religion and religious faith in a secular society.

While the social-media campaign is most often described as a matter of disinformation and misunderstanding, one must also recognise that what is viewed from a Swedish perspective as legitimate and necessary can, from a conservative Muslim point of view, appear hostile to family values and parental rights. It is also true that children are removed from their families in accordance with laws aimed at protecting and supporting children. This pertains to all families in Sweden, including ethnic Swedes, but foreign-born children are over-represented statistically. While around 10% of ethnic Swedish children determined to need support are removed, the figure for foreign-born families is just over 20%.

In a Swedish context, the state has not only a right but a duty to intervene when it is determined that parents fail to give their children proper care. But this is radically different from what pertains in the Muslim world, where a more conservative parent is likely to see interventions by social workers as an infringement of their right to bring up their children as they see fit: in accordance with religious belief, their views on parental authority and gender roles.

Another illustrative example concerns the demands sometimes made by Muslims, as well as conservative Christians and Jews, in favour of a right to religious private schools and, especially, home-schooling on religious grounds. These demands are routinely rejected by the Swedish state, which maintains that decisions regarding religion should be made once you are an adult. Through these measures, the reach of religious freedom is actively limited. Religion is transformed into something that is a private matter, appropriate perhaps for adults, but certainly not a consideration in an education that is aimed to produce autonomous, modern children.

But this value conflict has a philosophical element: a naïve and abstract sense of tolerance as a positive value, one that is poorly equipped to deal with enduring and concrete forms of cultural difference. My sense is that there has been an implicit expectation that, over time, immigrants arriving in Sweden from less modern, democratic, and developed nations would eventually embrace secular, democratic, liberal values. And there has been, empirically speaking, some basis for this expectation. Many of the refugees arriving in Sweden in decades past, from Chile and Iran, for example, behaved in much this way. Women escaping the Islamist regime in Iran saw opportunity for more freedom in Sweden; refugees from Chile found more political freedom in Sweden than under the repressive government of Pinochet.

Many of these earlier immigrants were well-educated and therefore also well-placed to integrate into Swedish society through employment. However, more recent arrivals, such as those from Afghanistan and Somalia, have tended to be less educated, as well as more conservative and traditional at a religious and cultural level. These contradictions have been hidden by Sweden’s long-standing love affair with being seen as a moral superpower — indeed, today there is more concern over the negative impact on Sweden’s reputation following the Quran burnings than a genuine concern for Muslim religious feeling.

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But what we may be seeing now is the unmasking of this idea of boundless tolerance. We have already witnessed a profound shift in Sweden’s foreign relations: from the vague idealism of autonomous neutrality towards the hardcore realpolitik of Nato membership. Likewise, abandoning our current longstanding but incoherent cultural relativism will open up for a more honest position. Of course, it will be a painful process, accompanied by considerable confusion and conflict. But it may over time lead to greater clarity over what Sweden actually stands — and is willing to fight — for.

For while we live in an era of the “politics of recognition”, which promotes respect for difference in the form of multiculturalism, it is useful to remind ourselves what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who fathered the term, noted in his essay of the same name in 1992. Namely, that while liberalism may involve tolerance as a core value, it is also a “fighting creed” that can and will at times collide with competing ideologies. When push comes to shove, tolerance is of little help in facing challenges from illiberal political and religious ideologies.

In his seminal book, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper put his finger on the same dilemma, which he termed the paradox of tolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Precisely where the lines must be drawn will no doubt be subject to ongoing debate — but for Sweden, one suspects that the primacy of freedom of expression will trump demands for the special treatment of religious sensitivity in the public sphere.