In a period of fewer than two days, the American, French, German, and Italian embassies sent warnings to the embassies of Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland, saying that these countries’ nationals might be subjected to retaliatory attacks by “Islamists”, particularly in Turkey, after a Swedish politician and a Dutchman burnt a copy of the Qurʾan.
The two men, Rasmus Paludan of Sweden, leader of the Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”) party, and Edwin Wagensveld of the Netherlands, leader of the "Pegida" movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident), deliberately staged the burnings. They chose the Turkish embassies in Stockholm and the Hague as their locations. Their intention to burn the Qurʾan was declared in advance in certain terms.
First and foremost, this act is a weak and mixed, and rather childish, political response to what is a purely political act by Turkey: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's disruption of Sweden's and Finland's accession to NATO and intention to use the withdrawal of his veto as a bargaining chip against Kurdish political asylum seekers in the two countries.
The most recent plan is to burn a copy of the Qurʾan in front of the Russian embassy in Copenhagen. Russia is currently at war with Ukraine, and its aggression is why Sweden and Finland have renounced their neutrality and sought to join NATO. As Russia is not a Muslim state, this demonstrates that the burning of the Qurʾan is an act of political theatre directed at Turkey’s President.
There is also no doubt that some Northern European countries, the Netherlands in particular, contain racist movements that wish to have "revenge" on Islamist movements residing in their territories, and they have not shied away from assassinating local members of these movements in the past. Some of the book burners confused the Turkish embassy and the city’s mosque for their gathering spot and could hardly differentiate between them.
The Russian embassy used the incident to goad demonstrators. It condemned the burning of the "Muslim Holy Book" as an act of religious war and as a "public mockery of Muslim sentiments". Nevertheless, it remained silent as to why the embassy of a non-Muslim country was the target of this burning and ridicule. It decried the host state’s disregard for this act, though the state is not responsible for a demonstration by a small part of its citizens.
The policy of Putin’s Russia shares with Erdogan’s Turkey the view that the state is responsible for the actions of its citizens. In its statement, issued on 28 January, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the State of Denmark to prohibit the demonstration and remain vigilant against this "hate crime". It expressed a firm opinion on the supposed meaning of the act, on the policy of the three states (Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark), and on what action they should take.
The act "revealed the dangerous dimensions of religious intolerance and hatred in Europe through the exploitation of the alleged environment of freedom". In spite of all Turkey's warnings, and its "tolerance", they "warn against the poisoning of a whole community" and the incitement of "racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks that occur every day in every part of Europe". In a tweet accompanying the Ministry’s statement, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu equated those who permitted the act with the perpetrators themselves.
The Turkish State is dichotomous. On one hand, the national state represents the people and recognizes the representation of other states. On the other hand, it is a jointly Muslim and Turkish nation and part of the universal Muslim ummah. This second interest justifies the presentation of this consideration (or is it rather a fatwā?) as to what other states may permit, engage in, or prohibit.
The Turkish national state thus permits one of its organs, albeit on behalf of the Muslim ummah, to "warn" other national States against enforcing their constitutions and laws as regards their own citizens and their own territory.
Despite different beliefs, both Russia and Turkey are unanimous in denying political activism: Ukrainian in the case of Russia, and Kurdish in the case of Turkey. Turkey, like an Ottoman "ghāzī" (holy warrior), defeats the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) with the ʿUthmānic Codex as its weapon. In this context, the Qur’an is only a metaphor.
This is not to gainsay any Muslims who want individuals, bodies, or groups to reject the burning of the Qurʾan, and the act’s misguided pretexts. Undoubtedly Islamic bodies have made explicit denunciations of the act without being prompted to mention the duplicitous statements of Erdogan and his foreign minister.
Three days after the first burning, on 21 January, the Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ broadcasted a statement on the incident, and described it as a “crime” which it denounced as a “clear provocation of Muslim sentiments inside and outside the Netherlands… and a service to the extremist groups and terrorist currents [in Muslim countries]”. Were it not for the brief allusion to the Muslims of the Netherlands, the statement would have lacked even the weakest transgression of the Dutch state’s rights of jurisdiction over its citizens.
Those states that deny Western policies their "interference" in matters of sovereignty themselves refuse to invoke human rights and their universality. The observation of the Dār al-Iftāʾ on the "feelings" of the Muslims of the Netherlands tends to invoke ideas of "Muslim human rights" in the Netherlands and beyond, and the Dār al-Iftāʾ is strongly founded upon the preservation of these rights.
The statement writes that: “respect for religious sanctity in general, and religious symbols in particular, is one of the most important rights of nations and peoples”. Should this not say “states”? Secondly, the statement mentions no penalty for such a violator of respect: is it to be limited to blame and defamation or to a gradual punishment?
The Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ tries to tread the lines of human rights and its own legal and procedural body of law. It proposes, with vigor, that the protection of sacred symbols should be a general "duty" of "governments and systems in different parts of the world,” to care for and protect from "intentional violations, distortions, abuse, and racist behavior”.
In the case of Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, for example, who is liable for the (presumed) breach of this duty of respect? Is it the group advocating demonstration? Or the states whose basic laws permit all actions and acts that do not cause direct bodily harm to other citizens, in accordance with their national laws? The Turkish and Russian answer is unequivocal: the state. It is apparently directly responsible for any "ridicule", "hatred" and "intolerance" by even a handful of its citizens because it has not suppressed the demonstration and its publicization, and because it grants its citizens the freedom to such assembly.
Calling out these countries, and before them the USA, which saw a burning incident about 10 years ago, and before that in Denmark in 2006, with the Jyllands-Posten cartoon incident, and before that the case in Britain of Khomeini's fatwā against Salman Rushdie... Calling on these states to prevent their citizens from exercising the "right to insult" is to call them to deny their history and violate their laws.
The authors of the Dār al-Iftāʾ’s statement may have been aware of this and their own weak human rights record, as the statement is unambiguous in identifying the violator, violation, damage, and responsibility. Rather than invoke the vague "duty to respect", they abandoned it in favor of "the foundations and values of modern societies based on citizenship and respect for one another without regard to religion and ideology". It is notable that “modern societies”, the site of the disrespect, are here differentiated from “non-modern” societies, which include a number of Muslim societies.
Thus, the call for a "climate of freedom", which is a "modern" value, with human rights as one of its pillars, and based on values of “co-existence, mutual respect, regardless of race or creed", is a sign of an intention to engage in modern politics. It attributes the abuse of "the sacred" to "far-right currents" and "terrorists". Thus, it avoids lumping in these groups with the state, while imposing liability on the state for some of the groups' actions. It avoids the topic of disregard for freedoms and rights, unlike the statements of Putin and Erdogan.
What the Dār al-Iftāʾ avoids, however, seems to leave it unaware of the relationship of Western right-wing extremism and Islamophobia to Islamist terrorism. Al-Azhar’s recent ruling on the Muslim Brotherhood, as having been terrorists since their foundation in 1928, is not a widespread position in the West, nor does al-Azhar deal with the civil strife these extremist groups are trying to ignite among European immigrant communities.
The equalizing of human rights and the "duty to respect” religious and credal sanctity is irrelevant. Equality may be permissible as a communal obligation, so that states and their authorities may generally take charge of what they do, but it is not permissible as an individual obligation, regardless of what some states and organizations may say. The impossibility of human rights and legal equality is not circumstantial but is dictated by the structure and standards of human rights contexts. Arbitrary assumption of it leads to heavy constraints and many excesses in implementation. To say that the protection of the "sacred" is one of these duties, and should be one, is only the result of overwhelming authoritarianism.
