The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) issued on Monday a resolution condemning the recent burnings of the holy Quran in Sweden and Denmark and called on measures to stop the repetition of such acts under the pretext of freedom of expression.
The OIC was founded in 1969 and has 57 members, almost all of them Muslim majority countries.
The resolution referred to previous burnings in the two EU member states. In fact, the latest burning of the Quran took place yesterday when a Muslim migrant from Iraq burned the Quran in front of the Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen). Earlier in June, he committed the same act outside the grand mosque in Stockholm.
A similar protest took place outside Iraq’s embassy in Stockholm on 20 July when he and another person stomped on the Quran but did not burn it. That act led to violent demonstrations in Bagdad against the Swedish embassy and a diplomatic crisis between Sweden and Iraq.
He told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that his intention with the burnings was to ban the Quran because, he claims, it encourages to violence.
In all cases, he had received permission from the local Swedish police authority to burn the Quran in public. According to Swedish court decisions, the burning of books, including those that are sacred to religious communities, is considered as an expression of freedom of expression and assembly and cannot be banned by the police even if it would threaten public order or security.
In the past, the burning of the Quran in Sweden was committed by a far-right politician with dual Swedish-Danish citizenship who incited against Muslim migrants and their religion. This time, the burnings were mostly carried out by migrants to protest against the lack of freedom of expression in their home country or against Sweden’s NATO deal with Turkey.
The burnings of the Quran in Sweden have angered the Muslim world and delayed Sweden’s application for joining NATO. It hardly helped Sweden that the chairperson of the judiciary committee in the parliament last week twitted that Islam represents “an antidemocratic and misogynic religion/ideology which promotes violence” and vilified the Prophet.
The chairperson belongs to the far-right Sweden Democrats which supports the Swedish coalition government without being formally part of it. His tweet prompted other parties to call for his resignation.
Another kind of incident took place in mid-July when a Muslim activist, also from Iraq, planned to burn the Bible outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm. In his application, he had called the burning “a symbolic gathering for the sake of freedom of speech”. By his act, he wanted to draw attention to the previous burning of the Quran outside the mosque in Stockholm.
“I want to show that we have to respect each other, we live in the same society,” he said. “If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here. What I wanted to show is that it’s not right to do it.”
“Permitting the burning of sacred texts is not an exercise in freedom of expression, it is blatant incitement and an act of pure hate. The whole world must join together in clearly condemning this repulsive act.”
In its resolution, the foreign ministers of the OIC member states condemned the “repeated crimes of desecration of copies of al-Mus’haf ash-Sharif (printed copies of the holy Quran), which aroused the wrath of about two billion Muslims all over the world, which represents a dangerous embodiment of the culture of hatred and racism, and a manifestation of Islamophobia.”
They also called on Muslim civil society “to work with their counterparts in those countries where Islamophobic attacks against the copies of al-Mus’haf ash-Sharif and other sacred values take place to resort to local courts and exhaust domestic remedies, before taking their cases to international judicial bodies”.
Furthermore, OIC declared that it has decided “to dispatch an OIC delegation led by the Secretary General to engage the Commission of the European Union to express the strong condemnation of the OIC Member States the crimes of desecration of al-Mus’hafash-Sharif".
The statement calls on “them (?) to take the necessary measures to prevent the recurrence of such criminal acts under the pretext of freedom of expression.”
Asked about the Commission’s reaction to the statement, a spokesperson replied on Tuesday that the EU has well-established relations with OIC. The Commission is in contact with OIC’s secretariat and permanent mission in Brussels to understand its next steps but for the time being it has not received any concrete request for a meeting.
The spokesperson referred to the latest statement (26 July) by High Representative Josep Borrell on the “burning of Quran and respect for community symbols”. The EU reiterated “its strong and determined rejection of any form of incitement to religious hatred and intolerance. Respect for diversity is a core value of the EU. This includes respect for other religious communities.”
“The desecration of the Quran, or of any other book considered holy, is offensive, disrespectful and a clear provocation. Expressions of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance have no place in the EU.”
The statement is “an extremely clear and strong reaction”, the spokesperson said. “We are totally rejecting the burning of holy books.” The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the EU will consider any legal initiative to criminalize the burning of holy books and quoted the text in the statement – “not everything that is legal is ethical”.
There seems to be no updated list of the play of state in the EU member states as regards relevant legislation on the burning of religious texts. The EU upholds freedom of expression, which includes the right to engage in symbolic or political acts, even if they may be offensive to some people. In some countries the burning is considered as hate speech or incitement against minority groups.
In Sweden freedom of expression is anchored in its constitution and cannot be amended without two decisions by the Parliament with elections between them. There is a perception among many that banning the burning of holy books would be a slippery road to blasphemy laws that were common in the past. Laws against blasphemy and apostasy are still common in many of the OIC countries.
M. Apelblat
The Brussels Times
