How European far-right desecrates Quran to galvanise hatred against Muslims

In the 1980s, Maurits Berger studied Arabic and Islamic law in the Middle East for eight years. He frequented mosques in Egypt and Syria to understand the message of the Quran. Born in the Netherlands, he aspired to be a lawyer. He says that learning about Sharia legal interpretations was like trying to grapple with ancient Roman law.

“I told them who I was. I didn’t want to be like another Lawrence of Arabia,” he says about his time spent with Islamic scholars.

“​I wanted to present myself as who I was: someone from Europe, who was not Muslim. So no dressing up or simulations.”

One day during a study session in a mosque, he carelessly laid a copy of the Quran on the floor without giving it a second thought. He was immediately reprimanded by a fellow student who asked him to place Islam’s holiest text on a higher surface.

“The Bible is treated with respect but differently than what’s accorded to the Quran (by Muslims),” says Berger, now a professor of Islam and West at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

For many white people in an increasingly secular Europe, the Quran is a religious scripture like any other. Seeing Muslims taking deep offence and engaging in street protests if someone insults their beliefs and scriptures bewilders them.

“Europe has experienced an enormous backlash against religion. The Catholicism Church has been considered by many as extremely oppressive,” says Berger.

“For many Europeans, religion was blocking the freedoms they have now. For them, religion stands for the past, for backwardness. And then they see a Muslim woman donning herself [in abaya] voluntarily and they ask ‘why do you want to go back in time’.”

This difference in how communities approach matters of their faith is being routinely exploited by far-right politicians, who burn and tear pages of the Quran to rile up Muslims. It’s an incitement to violence.

While there is a tradition in Islam of burning old or used copies of the Quran if its pages are falling apart or can’t be restored, this is only done out of respect — to preserve the sanctity of the religious text.

On June 28, Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi refugee in Sweden burned pages of the Quran in front of a mosque in Stockolm, triggering protests.

In April last year, Rasmus Paludan, leader of the far-right group Hard Line and a citizen of both Sweden and Denmark, sparked riots in the Swedish cities of Linkoping and Norrkoping after setting fire to copies of the Quran under the protection of Sweden’s police. Dozens of people were arrested as protestors clashed with the police and burned cars.

A few month later, Lars Thorsen — a Norway-based anti-Muslim bigot and leader of Stop the Islamization of Norway (SIAN), which gained notoriety for desecrating the Quran in public places — set fire to the Quran in Mortensrud, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in the suburbs of Oslo, proclaiming that his act was “a protest against the political content" of the Quran.

As he fled the scene, two Muslim women in a hatchback car chased him and rammed his military-style jeep off the road, flipping it over. He walked away with minor injuries. Police arrested the women. A video of the incident went viral, with one person commenting, “Brave women! Allah bless you both with goodness in both worlds. Smashed it.”

Freedom to repress

Thorsen and Paludan belong to a band of European racists who propogate conspiracies that Muslim immigrants are taking over Europe and trying to replace Western culture and its values with their own.

Many of them take inspiration from controversial works of scholars who have been criticised for harbouring anti-Muslim views. These include British-Jewish historian Bat Ye’or and French writer Renaud Camus.

For instance, Eurabia, written by Ye’or in 2005, promotes a conspiracy theory that the European political elite and the Arab world are secretly cooperating to convert Europe into a bastion of Islam. Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a gun and bomb attack in 2011, cited the book as one of his ideological influences.

Camus’ The Great Replacement, which has had an even broader influence and has become doctrine for Neo-Nazi activists on the internet, peddles an outlandish conspiracy theory that white European populations are being demographically and culturally replaced with Muslims.

Emboldened by these texts, far-right leaders routinely burn the Quran to rile Muslims up, exploiting the angry backlash to further vilify the Muslims they paint as fearsome interlopers.

“Quran burning is the ultimate provocation,” says Berger, whose research focuses on Muslims in modern Europe. “People who are doing it want to see ‘how can we make others jump.’ It is poking fun in a derogatory manner.”

In recent months, copies of the Quran have been torched multiple times under the garb of ‘freedom of expression’— sometimes under police protection — with reactions from the Muslim community being used by anti-immigrant parties to stir public debate around the issue of migration.

“The whole thing is a huge tragedy. Norway no longer has laws against blasphemy as the Norwegian people believe it conflicts with freedom of speech,” says Fahad Qureshi, chairman of Islam Net, a Muslim organisation based in Oslo.

"A petition was signed by over 4,000 people, demanding the attorney general to take action against the Quran burning,” Qureshi tells TRT World.

“But nothing happened. They are still burning the Quran and we have realised that the Norwegian government will not do anything to stop it.”

More than just words

Children in observant Muslim households are taught to handle the Quran with care from an early age. They kiss and press it to their foreheads once they are done reading it.

Prophet Muhammad commands the same reverence. Any derogatory comment made against him constitutes blasphemy — a sensitive matter that can lead to violent consequences, as seen after the publication of derogatory cartoons in Denmark in 2005.

But to the average European, who does not ascribe to far-right ideology in any way, such devotion to religion can be a befuddling enigma.

Europe's definition of secularism has created a radical narrative against Muslims and Jews. Both communities see their religion as part of their cultural identity, which is something larger European society views as alien to their "secularised" culture.

“Don’t forget that Europe is very, very secularised these days. So for most people, religion has no meaning,” says Joram van Klaveren, a board member of the Islam Experience Center, a Netherlands-based organisation trying to build bridges between Muslims and other communities.

Klaveren is one of a small number of individuals who have an insider’s view of how the far right works. For years, he was a close associate of and spokesperson for Greet Wilders, the Freedom party leader notorious for hosting contests in which participants competed to draw the most derogatory cartoon of Prophet Muhammad.

In 2018, Klaveren renounced the Freedom party’s politics. While researching a book highlighting the dangers posed by Muslims, he wrote Apostate — a book about his conversion to Islam.

“Secular Europeans know the Quran is important for Muslim believers, but fail to grasp their deep devotion to the word of God,” he says.

“They just don’t understand religion and religious feelings anymore. Not when it comes to Christianity — and certainly not when it comes to Islam.”

Today, many European adults are not practising Christians — but that was not always the case. Religion was an important part of everyday life and Islam’s influence was seen as an existential threat — and that fear has been passed down through generations.

The divine divides

In November 1095, Pope Urban II gave his famous speech, calling all Christian forces to unite in a war against the Muslims that came to be known as the First Crusade.

Before that, Europe consisted of clusters of tribes and small fiefdoms ruled by the Franks, the Normans and the Saxons, among others.

“A wave of intoxication swept over the Continent, an elation which for the first time overstepped the barriers between states and tribes and classes,” writes Muhammad Asad, a Muslim scholar, in his seminal book The Road to Mecca.

“The traumatic experience of the Crusades gave Europe its cultural awareness and its unity; but this same experience was destined henceforth also to provide the false colour in which Islam was to appear to Western eyes,” he adds, in reference to a series of battles waged by the Christians against the Muslims between the 11th and 13th centuries.

Historically, European leaders and priests have struggled to understand Islam.

“Islam recognises other religions, in particular Judaism and Christianity. But Christianity doesn’t recognise anything but Christianism,” says Berger.

He says the fact that the two religions share similar themes, yet are practised in such different ways, left Europeans puzzled.

Take the question of alcohol consumption.

“In medieval Europe, water quality was really bad. Beer or wine was much safer to drink. So they wondered why Prophet Muhammad prohibited alcohol. To explain this, Christian folklore mixed up stories they knew from Sirah-e-Nabwi (Life of the Prophet),” says Berger.

Muslims have lived in Spain, Poland, Albania and other Balkan nations for centuries. But in other parts of Europe, Christians and practising Muslims didn’t come face-to-face until four or five decades ago, he adds— and “that’s historically unique.”

Although Muslims constitute just seven percent of Europe’s population, the presence of women in scarves and men praying at mosques has become a rallying cry for right-wing politicians.

Changing perspectives

Since 2015, when the Syrian civil war displaced millions, the European political discourse has been dominated by the debate on migration and how refugees must be treated. Muslims feature prominently in these discussions as they constitute many asylum seekers.

The first generation of Muslim migrants arrived in Europe mostly as labourers seeking jobs during the reconstruction boom after World War II.

“Now, the second and third generation of immigrants have good jobs. Some of the children of immigrants are in the parliament, have government jobs and decision-making roles,” says Muhammad Aqib, who heads the Islamic Cultural Center of Sweden.

Far-right groups, which represent a small segment of European society, view that progress as a threat to their financial security and culture, he says.

“When they burn the Quran or insult the Prophet, Muslims react. And when that provocation leads to protests, they use them to portray Muslims as being violent.”

Aqib, originally from Pakistan, says his organisation is working with the local church to spread awareness about Muslim sensitivities towards the Quran.

It’s not the easiest of tasks.

Many migrants and asylum seekers are forced to move due to desperate circumstances. They don’t have the education or confidence to participate in the discourse when they can’t present Muslim points of view effectively.

“We need young people who can speak Swedish to engage with the public,” says Aqib.

Meanwhile, far-right politicians such as Lars Thorsen will continue to burn copies of the Quran.

Unable to stop the SIAN leader through legal measures, Islam Net’s Qureshi is, instead, redirected Muslim anger towards donations for a mosque and Islamic centre in Norway.

“When they burn the Quran, we use it to raise funds, so they will see that their burning of the Quran is having the opposite effect of what they want — Muslims are being encouraged to give for the sake of Allah and that is leading to the spread of Islam.”