Quran Desecration and Freedom of Expression
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Aug 2023
Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service
17 Aug 2023 – This is a revised version of responses to questions addressed to by Javad Arabshirazi, a journalist in Iran, on the issues raised by recent Quran Desecration incidents in Scandinavia. The earlier online publication of this interview.
Q#1: As you know, over the past month, the Quran has been subject to acts of desecration multiple times in Sweden and Denmark. What is your take on these acts?
As a first line of response, I would interpret these acts of desecration as an aspect of the assault by right-wing extremists on secular democracy in Europe. The fact that Sweden was the principal site of these incidents involving the Quran are significant as Sweden was the previously viewed as the most progressive social democracy in Europe with a generally permissive atmosphere, but not a breeding ground of extremist political movements, although quite conformist in its skepticism about religion. The anti-migrant right (but not the desecrating extremists) have emerged from most recent national elections with great influence, although not currently governing the country.
A more proximate cause seems connected with a far-right reaction of anger and fear to the leverage displayed by the Muslim majority state of Turkey in relation to Sweden’s governmental effort to join NATO almost 75 years after the alliance was formed, an undertaking itself indicative of this Swedish swing to the right. The motivation for these desecration incidents from this perspective should be viewed as directed both at the Swedish Government for its apparent willingness to bargain with Turkey on the issue, tarnishing its right-wing credentials by doing so and at Islamist Turkey encroaching on European cultural space in the sensitive sphere of freedom of expression.
Of course, these explanatory remarks are highly conjectural on my part, but they do seem consistent with the behavioral patterns of these extremist fragments (the most prominent leader of these events was a Danish-Swedish lawyer and political extremist, Rasmus Paludan, head of the Danish Strum Kurs (hardline) political party, managed to win only 1.8% of vote in the last Danish election. This weak electoral showing was not enough to qualify the party for seats in Parliament. In response to his role in these embassy provocations, Turkey has issued an arrest warrant charging Paludan with responsibility for a desecration incident posing security threats to the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.
In general, anti-Islamic extremism is both an internal and international challenge to the European Union, which wants to ensure peace and stability within Europe without giving rise to blowback effects in Muslim majority countries that take offense. For instance, Qatar, although not targeted in Sweden, removed all Swedish products from its largest market, Souq Al Baladi, and a number of other states have withdrawn their ambassadors from Sweden as expressions of Islamic solidarity. The EU remains reluctant to challenge by recourse to law freedom of expression standards that prevail in several of its leading member states. Josep Borrell, the EU minister for foreign policy, summed up the official response accurately, although elliptically, by saying on the subject of Quran desecration, ‘Not everything that is legal is ethical.’
A similar approach was evident in the July vote at the UN Human Rights Council of a resolution condemning the desecration of the Quran by the negative votes of the leading European states (UK, Germany, France, joined by the USA). Although these governments publicly deplored the Quran desecration they refused to support the HRC resolution, which was claimed to be an unbalanced text, endangering freedom of expression, and unacceptably close to prohibiting all forms of blasphemy. The overall vote on the resolution of the 47 HRC members was 28-12 (with 7 abstentions). Most HRC members from Africa, as well as China, supported the resolution. The HRC’s official release described the resolution this way:
“The Human Rights Council July 12th adopted a resolution in which it condemned and strongly rejected any advocacy and manifestation of religious hatred, including the recent public and premeditated acts of desecration of the Holy Quran.”
The body of the resolution called upon states to enact national laws reflecting these sentiments, but overall it seems unlikely to have the slightest effect on the 12 states voting against the resolution.
Q#2: How can we stop such acts and help promote interfaith respect and peaceful coexistence among followers of various faiths?
There is a paradox present: The harder efforts are made to stop this highly objectionable behavior by Islamophobic and right-wing extremists groups the greater is their temptation to persist in such action. In the short-term what these groups seek is public recognition and media attention, not power or authority. These are displays of symbolic politics at its worst as it champions ethno-religious supremacy as the alternative to coexistence with dark and evil forces. Quran desecration also serves as a recruiting strategy that attracts those deeply dissatisfied with their lives and receptive to blaming the Islamic other.
And then there is counter-pressures from dogmatic secularists not to alter behavior in response to outcries from foreign religious sources. Such secularists, whether openly or not, seek to insulate from governmental interference anti-religious speech and symbolic acts, however hurtful, even when coming from extremist sources. In the current historical setting of Europe, desecration acts especially those directed at theocratically governed states such as Iran, and more recently, Turkey, enjoy a high level of silent approval from a hostile populace. What is often criminalized and harshly punished as blasphemy in some Muslim majority states, for instance, Pakistan or Bangladesh, is celebrated as protected speech in the secular West.
Inter-faith dialogue if conducted at high enough levels at least promotes a better understanding of cultural and religious differences among countries and civilizations, but the root cause is ethnically and religiously driven extremism, which at its worst sets the stage for autocratic, and even fascist styles of governance, which happened in post-World War I Europe. A further step in moderating such tensions is to mount a major international effort to improve the material conditions in the least developed countries that would have an almost automatic effect of discouraging massive migratory flows now arising from impoverished societies, conflict zones, and climate disaster, disproportionately situated in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The political resonance of Quran burning is emotionally linked for many in the West to the backlash against these patterns of migrating peoples fleeing from alien cultural traditions for economic, political, and ecological reasons. We should appreciate that most people do not leave their homelands unless national living conditions become intolerable and more opportunities seem worth pursuing elsewhere.
With the planet challenged currently by ecological and geopolitical threats to species survival, only ways of acting on a global scale to improve procedures of conflict resolution and inter-governmental cooperation can have any chance of weakening incentives of extremists and those most acutely alienated to carry out attacks against scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities.
Q#3: Who or what group do you think is behind the affronts? Or who or what group benefits from them?
As suggested throughout, these affronts to Islam emanate from the extreme right by individuals drawn to fascist beliefs and practices as historically contextualized in relation to time and place. For Hitler and Nazism it was Jews as a people, in the United States those seeking to restore white supremacy it is African Americans, and after 9/11 attacks in 2001 it was Islam while for Donald Trump it has become migrants, especially those entering the country unlawfully.
Extremists tend to flourish in national settings where their acts, while superficially condemned, are congruent with the beliefs and biases of large parts of the population. I feel the danger in Europe arises from the extreme right gaining further political strength through such acts of demonization. The rise of secular populism and its autocratic leaders around the world has produced the suppression of religious freedoms and political participation of Muslims even in many countries within the Arab world, and most pronouncedly in Modi’s India with its drive to achieve Hindu supremacy and even in Myanmar where the military leadership in alliance with the Buddhist majority has ruthlessly suppressed Muslims in the federal state of Rakhine where the Muslim minority, the Rohingya people mostly live.
Q#4: Swedish and Danish officials have deplored the desecration of the Quran, saying, however, that they cannot prevent it under constitutional laws protecting freedom of speech. What are your thoughts on this as an international lawyer?
Although there is some support for the view that desecration of the Quran and other holy books violate international law, and a July 25 UN General Assembly Resolution drafted by Morocco and adopted by consensus so declares, it is not regarded by most governments in the West as obligatory and would encounter strong resistance if implemented in national criminal codes and operational practices. The emphasis of the resolution is suggested by these words, deploring ”all acts of violence against persons on the basis of their religion or belief, as well as any such acts directed against their religious symbols, holy books, homes, businesses, properties, schools, cultural centers or places of worship, as well as all attacks on and in religious places, sites and shrines in violation of international law.”
There is an underlying jurisprudential problem that is rarely discussed. In the West, meaning in Western Europe and North America, the separation of church and state followed upon decades of religious warfare within Christianity. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 onwards until the present the dominant political tradition in various formats has embraced the separation of church and state, including seeking to make the legal order autonomous, that is, resistant to overt religious oversight and direct interference. To be sure, there have been inconsistencies on the level of practice, especially on such symbolic issues as the reproductive rights of women and the character of conscientious objection to obligatory military service. In contrast, it is my understanding that Islamic values reject such a separation, believing strongly that the law should reflect the precepts of religious guidance or oversight.
In any meaningful sense, I do not think international law is strong enough in relation to these issues at the interface of human rights, sovereign rights, and the sanctity of religious values and practice to impact on behavior at the level of nation states. Perhaps, the struggles for species survival will build enough support for trans-civilizational unity on behalf of the global public good, which has been put forward by some, including myself, as a unique instance of ‘a necessary utopia.’ In the interim, there will be clashes of the sort embedded in diverse ways of handling the desecration of the Quran, the scriptures of other faiths, and holy sites and objects generally. In fashioning responses, we must be careful not to fuel the passions and dark ambitions of such extremists by giving them media feasts that promote their dark designs and feed their sense of self-importance..
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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.
Go to Original – richardfalk.org
Tags: Denmark, International Law, Quran, Scandinavia, Sweden
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