Pakistan condemns desecration of Holy Quran in Sweden
Such wilful incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence cannot be justified under pretext of freedom of expression and protest, a Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement.
“Under international law, states are duty bound to prohibit any advocacy of religious hatred, leading to incitement of violence. The recurrence of such Islamophobic incidents during the last few months in the West calls into serious question the legal framework which permits such hate-driven actions.
“We reiterate that the right to freedom of expression and opinion does not provide a license to stoke hatred and sabotage inter-faith harmony,” the statement said.
It added Pakistan’s concerns about the incident are being conveyed to Sweden. “We once again urge that both the international community and the national governments must undertake credible and concrete measures to prevent the rising incidents of xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred,” it added.
Who was behind the Quran burning and why did he want to do it?
An Iraqi critic of Islam burned a copy of the Quran outside Stockholm’s main mosque on Wednesday, after Swedish police dropped their earlier opposition to his planned protest. What’s the background to the decision?
“We are going to burn the Quran,” he told the TT newswire before carrying out the act. “We are going to say ‘wake up Sweden. This is democracy and it will be in danger if they say we can’t do it’.”
“We are not fighting against Muslims, but against their thoughts. We are not against Muslims, we are on their side,” he said.
Momika has said previously that he believed the Muslim religion had such a negative impact that the Quran should be banned globally.
Police in February banned Momika from buring the Quran outside Iraq’s embassy on the grounds that doing so risked causing a public disturbance, as happened across Sweden in Easter 2022. It also banned an anti-Nato group from burning the book.
But in April, an administrative court overturned the ban, ruling that the right to assembly and the right to protest are both protected under Sweden’s constitutional laws, unless they pose a concrete security threat.
“The opportunities available to refuse permission for a public gathering are very limited. The administrative court does not consider that the threat presented as the basis for the Police Authority’s decision to deny the permits is sufficiently concrete and connected to the gathering in question,” Eva-Lotta Hedin, a lawyer, told TT at the time.
This meant that the police had no justification for stopping the protest.
“The permission for today’s gathering has been given out in consideration of the fact that the Court of Appeal has rejected those decisions,” Helena Boström Thomas, a police spokesperson, told TT. “The basic rule is that an application for permission to hold a public event should in general be accepted.”
At least at the time of writing, the burning of the Quran in central Stockholm on Wednesday did not cause anything like the level of disruption caused in Easter 2022, when a series of Quran burnings carried out by the Danish extremist Rasmus Paludan in areas with high immigrant population led to riots across Sweden.
A journalist from TT estimated that only around 200 people attended the burning, with one woman saying the Lord’s Prayer and waving around a cross, one man being seized by police and those supporting the burnings shouting at those supporting the mosque.
Outside the mosque, elderly Muslim men stood, pleading with younger Muslims not to be provoked.
“Just go inside the mosque, don’t give him any attention. The Quran is in your hearts,” one said.
What happened last time the Quran was burned?
The decision by the Danish extremist Rasmus Paludan to burn the Quran outside the Turkish embassy at the end of January led to Sweden’s talks with Turkey’s government over Nato membership being put on hold, and Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan saying that his country will not back Sweden’s membership of Nato unless burning copies of the Quran is made illegal.