Should governments ban the “improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community”? That is what the Danish government is suggesting in a new law it announced last week that could see offenders imprisoned for two years. The proposed ban comes after a spate of incidents in Sweden and Denmark in which Qur’ans have been publicly burned, provoking an outcry across the Muslim world.
The answer to the question is both simple and complex. It is simple because any law outlawing any kind of blasphemy is unacceptable and should be opposed. Having abolished its blasphemy law in 2017, for Denmark to seek to reintroduce it in a new form is retrogressive.
It is complex, though, because at the heart of the controversy lie two issues: on the one hand, freedom of religion and speech, and, on the other, anti-Muslim bigotry. In defending the first, one must also oppose the second.
Blasphemy laws are objectionable not just because they seek to impose religious norms on those who don’t believe, or who believe in a different god, but also because in so doing they serve to protect political power, too.
“The sacred order,” as the Polish Marxist-turned-Christian philosopher, Leszek Kołakowski, observed, “has never ceased, implicitly or explicitly, to proclaim ‘this is how things are, they cannot be otherwise’.” Whether in theocratic states or within minority communities in liberal democracies, the charge of blasphemy helps to shore up the power of religious leaders and institutions and to silence critics and dissenters.
The issue is complicated, however, by the context of the book burnings. Burning a book, supporters of the Danish law argue, is not a form of speech. To ban the practice is therefore not a free speech issue, especially when the ban seeks to curb the activities of far-right bigots.
All book burnings are, to my mind, senseless, whether it be Christian pastors torching LGBTQ+ books or trans activists torching copies of Harry Potter. They are at best crude attempts to make a political point. Nor should one forget the long history of state-enforced book burnings aimed at buttressing tyrannical rule and often targeting vulnerable social groups.
Nevertheless, the burning of symbolic objects, whether books or flags, has long been part of the tradition of protest, and in an age when the right to protest is continually curtailed – even within liberal democracies – we should not lightly dispense with it. In any case, the proposed Danish law seeks to criminalise not simply book burnings but all “improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance” – an expansive ban on blasphemy.
Freedom of religion is vital for minority communities. Anti-Muslim bigotry is often expressed through denying the right of Muslims to practise their faith, from calls to ban the Qur’an to hostility to the building of mosques. Challenging such bigotry requires us to oppose restrictions on freedom of religion, not reinforce them.
If all believers should be free to practise their faith, equally, the irreligious – or those whose understanding of their faith differs from imposed norms – should be free to assert their rights. Many groups struggling for justice and equality – women, gay people, non-believers – have to battle against faith-based restrictions and cannot but be blasphemous. While racist bigots may burn Qur’ans, those fighting repression imposed in the name of Islam also do so, not to fuel hate but to challenge religious intolerance.
The Iranian-born Danish artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan, a vocal opponent of Iran’s theocratic regime, has shredded the Qur’an as part of her performance art. Another Iranian-born artist, Sooreh Hera, who lives in the Netherlands, had her photographs of two gay Iranian exiles wearing masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law, Ali, censored by the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague because, in the words of the museum director, “certain people in our society might perceive it as offensive”. Both artists could find themselves imprisoned under the proposed Danish law.
So could Andres Serrano for his Piss Christ. Or Chris Ofili for his painting Holy Virgin Mary. Or the late John Latham, were he still alive, for his work God is Great. All were seen by believers as denigrating their faith, as treating religious objects and symbols with insufficient reverence, and as promoting hate.
One can debate whether these works of art are valuable or insightful, but it would be an illiberal society that denied the artists or activists the right to interrogate religion in this fashion.
If Qur’an burnings are, in certain cases, a form of “punching down”, targeting the weak and the oppressed, blasphemy laws are even more so. There are power relations within Muslim communities as well as between Muslims and wider society, and religious taboos help maintain coercive power inside those communities.
Muslim leaders, and bodies such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), are highly selective in their hostility to bigotry. They have whipped up a fury about the burning of Qur’ans but barely said a word about the fate of a million Uyghurs locked up by China, many tortured and killed. Indeed, Islamic states and the OIC have actively supported Beijing.
During a 2019 visit to China, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman parroted Chinese propaganda, saying of Beijing’s Uyghur policies: “We respect and support China’s rights to take counter-terrorism and de-extremism measures to safeguard national security.” Many Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, have detained or extradited Uyghurs back to China.
Nor have such leaders said much about Danish immigration policies which have become increasingly illiberal in recent years. Denmark became the first European country to deport Syrian refugees, and attempted for a while to negotiate its own Rwanda deportation scheme (though that has been abandoned in favour of a Europe-wide policy).
Such policies degrade the lives of minorities, and of Muslims, and legitimise extremist ideas, to a far greater degree than do a handful of bigots setting Qur’ans alight. Those raging about the burning of Qur’ans are not interested in defending Muslims facing real terror and brutality but are simply attempting to latch on to an issue that is useful in buttressing their political power.
To oppose anti-Muslim bigotry, we need also to oppose restrictions on blasphemy. In defending free speech, we must also stand against bigotry wherever it reveals itself. To do one but not the other is not to be serious about either.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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