When an Iraqi migrant burnt a copy of the Holy Quran in front of Stockholm’s largest mosque on Eidul Azha, at the time of the Eid prayer, he was clearly trying to get a rise out of the Muslim world. That he did. Not only did the Swedish envoys to the Muslim world get called in to receive the displeasures of their host governments, but there was a special OIC session to condemn the desecration. Pakistan’s Parliament also condemned the incident, and it has been taken up by the United Nations Human Rights Council. The act of desecration took place with official permission, but the Swedish government also joined in the process of condemnation, thus showing that the argument that such desecration is protected by the freedom of speech. It is perhaps a sign of something being fundamentally wrong that such incidents are taking place in liberal Scandinavia. Starting with the blasphemous cartoon published by a newspaper in Denmark in 2005, and the more recent Quran burning by a far-right politician in January outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.
The last incident may yield a clue as to where the problem lies. Scandinavia especially has witnessed the rise of the far-right. Far-right politicians have made it a staple of their discourse that immigrants are overwhelming them, and exploiting the welfare systems put in place by social democrat governments. There is a lurch towards Islamophobia because the migrants often come from Muslim countries. Thus Islamophobia, and tacit support for actions such as the Quran burnings, has a strong element of racism intertwined within it. Though Muslims were not targeted by the July 2011 mass killings by Anders Behring Breivik in 2012 in Norway, the manifesto he released at the time of the killings included a call for the deportation of all Muslims.
It is positive that there seems to be an agreement that such incidents do hurt people’s feelings and cannot be defended as expressions of freedom of speech. However, it should be acknowledged that the kind of hate speech which far-right politicians engage in, which is also protected as freedom, is productive of such incidents. That a far-right journalist was behind this latest incident is indicative of the forces at work. It is a tough task, but cleaning up their societies, and cleansing themselves of both racism and Islamophobia, is a task for the Western countries, because while the evil has shown itself in Sweden, it is present thoughout the West.
