Back when I was a foolish student, I joined a right-wing debating club at Yale University. The Connecticut city of New Haven, home of Yale, has been identified with the global left ever since it gave shelter to three of the men who had abolished the British monarchy in 1649 and signed the execution warrant for Charles I.
As a way of sticking two fingers up at the left-wing tradition which dominated Yale’s history, the young men who founded our club thought it a grand lark to gather every year at an isolated cave associated with these parliamentarian radicals. There they would ritually burn a biography of Oliver Cromwell.
The book burning made me deeply uncomfortable. Not because I thought our little ritual was likely to demolish single-handedly the entire edifice of East Coast liberalism, nor because of my own sneaking admiration for Oliver Cromwell and anyone with the guts to take down the British monarchy. I was embarrassed simply because book burning is embarrassing.
There’s something pathetic about pretending you can combat an idea by merely setting light to the pages on which it is given printed form. Our whole gathering was sophomoric, performative and harmless.
Five centuries after the Pope ordered the public burning of Martin Luther’s books, book burning is still being used as political performance. Unlike the papal attacks on Luther, however, or the Nazi Nuremberg bonfires of “degenerate” texts, contemporary book burnings in Europe are rarely the act of people in power.
Instead, the most recent book burnings to make the news in Europe have been stunts by those who feel themselves marginalised in the face of religious oppression. Whether they face consequences – fines, prison or even death – seems to depend entirely on whose books they dare to burn.
In 2017, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi named Shneur Odze burnt a Christian Bible that a missionary had placed in his synagogue. The police did not get involved. In 1989, far more notoriously, 1,000 Muslim protesters gathered in front of Bradford City Hall and cheered the burning of a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Not one person was prosecuted, although the Public Order Act 1986 was already in force banning “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour against another person”.
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This month, that same law was used to fine Hamit Coskun, a Turkish secularist who protested against Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s religiously conservative government by burning a copy of the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London.
Coskun is the second case of Quran burning to be prosecuted in recent weeks. Martin Frost, a Manchester man who blames Islamism and Hamas for the death of his daughter in the Israel-Hamas conflict, is awaiting trial after burning a Quran near Manchester’s Glade of Light memorial.
Coskun and Frost each framed their book-burning as a protest against Islamist violence; both were prosecuted on the basis that Muslim bystanders complained about the emotional impact of watching the incident.
Neither defendant is accused of violence, but the judge who sentenced Coskun ruled that his conduct could be proved to be “disorderly” on the basis that it provoked two other people to assault him. As the Conservative MP Nick Timothy has argued, this judge “found him guilty because of the violent reaction of those offended by his actions”.
This week, Timothy introduced a private members’ bill which aims to protect those, like Coskun and Frost, who criticise a religion, even when they cause offence. The proposed bill would extend existing protections offered to religious critics under Section 29J of the Public Order Act, which prevents the police from charging religious dissidents with religious hate.
Timothy’s bill is widely supported by many in Britain and America who see men like Coskun and Frost as principled campaigners standing firm against a growing theocratic Islamist presence in European politics. Frost has already won sympathisers by claiming to act in solidarity with Salwan Momika, a refugee recently shot dead in Sweden.
Few causes have galvanised anti-Islamist feeling like the murder of Momika, a survivor of Isis violence from the Christian region of Ninevah, who was murdered after live-streaming his own burning of a Quran. He left behind a colleague, Salwan Najem.
You might think the Swedish state would support Najem in the face of such illiberal violence. Instead, they convicted Najem of hatred against “an ethnic group”, on the basis of his participation in the Quran burnings. Both Sweden and its neighbour Denmark had come under huge international pressure to prosecute such incidents. Turkey tried to block Sweden’s entry into Nato; Denmark found its bid for a place on the UN Security Council threatened. In October 2023, two Swedes were killed by an Isis sympathiser in Brussels.The Swedish government, which previously argued that book burning constituted a free speech act, found ways to prosecute Momika for hate speech.
The Danish government, which argued that it was seeking to stop terrorists targeting Danes, pushed through a new law making it illegal to desecrate religious texts.
The National Secular Society (NSS) has championed Frost’s case. Both they, and Timothy, are rightly concerned about the creeping imposition of blasphemy laws – especially after a Labour MP, Tahir Ali, called last year for laws “to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”.
Liberals such as the NSS, however, should be cautious before turning book burners into heroes. Momika is accused of taking part in sectarian violence in Iraq; google Rabbi Odze, and you’ll get some colourful reading indeed. Burning religious texts is rarely the refuge of thoughtful men.
Yet Keir Starmer should take note of the strength of feeling behind Timothy’s campaign. The rising online fury about Coskun’s case is not going to go away, turbocharged by The Spectator and America’s The Free Press, which both gave Coskun a platform to make his case. The Conservative Party has already begun sending fundraising emails to members vowing to fight back against “blasphemy laws”; Kemi Badenoch hit the airwaves this week banging the drum.
At the heart of these cases is the haplessness of the British justice system when faced with the job of distinguishing between people who cause offence and those who threaten violence. Previously Starmer has shown he can walk this line judiciously. Recent proposals to prevent protesters gathering outside religious buildings, if “the purpose of those organising the protest is the intimidation of others”, should be applauded by anyone appalled by the sight of rioters gathering outside mosques, or “pro-Palestinian” activists shouting at Jewish children attending synagogue classes. Such cases clearly involve an implicit threat of violence.
The Government should be able to distinguish between the threat of violence and a speech act. Burning a book is a speech act. It may be an offensive speech act, but the freedom to cause offence is protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Islam, like Christianity, accepts adherents from any ethnic background: there is therefore no basis for the continued judicial trend to define attacks on this faith as “ethnic” hatred. Contemporary book burning is often the last refuge of the sad, the lost and the powerless. Those who respond with violence are surely the true threat to our civic life.
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