Rasmus Paludan, the founder of a small political party, was sentenced to four months in prison for agitation against Muslims, the Malmo district court said.

A citizen of both Denmark and Sweden, Paludan has several times set Islam’s holy book on fire in public, on occasion also draping it in bacon, causing outrage among Muslims at home and abroad.

While burning religious texts in itself is permitted under Sweden’s far-reaching freedom of speech legislation, agitation against an ethnic or national group, such as insulting and offending Muslims, can be a violation of the law.

Paludan was charged with making lewd remarks about Islam and Muslims as well as about counter-demonstrators.

“The court makes the assessment that at the gatherings (Paludan) expressed disrespect towards, among others, Muslims, and that his actions can’t be excused as criticism of Islam or as political campaigning,” the ruling said.

Paludan, 42, who was also convicted in Denmark on similar charges in 2020, had pleaded not guilty. His lawyer said he would appeal.

The Swedish government, fearing that Koran burnings by Paludan and others could trigger attacks by Islamist extremists, is considering making it possible for police to deny permission for public gatherings if they threaten national security.

Denmark last year tightened legislation to ban public Koran burnings outright.

Paludan’s political party has failed to win any seats in elections in either Denmark or Sweden.

Source: Reuters

Rasmus Paludan, a far-right Danish-Swedish politician known for burning copies of the Quran in Sweden, went on trial Monday, charged with incitement against an ethnic group, according to local media.

Paludan, leader of the Danish political party Stram Kurs (Hard Line), is the first person to face trial in Sweden for Quran burning in the country. The trial took place at a district court in Malmo, but the 42-year-old declined to appear in person, citing safety concerns if he traveled to the southern Swedish city. Instead, he participated via video link from an undisclosed location in Sweden.

According to national broadcaster SVT Nyheter, Paludan is facing two counts of incitement against an ethnic group and one count of insult, related to public gatherings held in Sweden in 2022. In April of that year, Paludan held a rally where he burned copies of the Quran, which led to riots in several cities, including Malmo, Landskrona, Linkoping, and Orebro. Prosecutors allege that statements he made during these gatherings constitute incitement against an ethnic group.

Paludan is also accused of racially motivated verbal attacks against Arabs and Africans at another public event in 2022, for which he faces a charge of insult. If convicted, he could serve up to six months in prison. Paludan denies all charges.

The Quran burnings in Sweden and Denmark, carried out in 2023 under the pretext of free speech, have provoked widespread protests in Muslim-majority countries, including attacks on diplomatic missions.

In response, Denmark passed a law in December making it illegal to burn copies of the Quran in public. Sweden, however, is still evaluating potential legal measures to empower police to deny demonstration permits on national security grounds.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has urged its member states to consider political and economic actions against Sweden, Denmark, and other countries where the Quran is permitted to be burned. The OIC characterized such acts as “aggressive actions that spread hatred and contempt for religions, threatening global peace, security, and harmony.”

Source: Anadolu Agency

The Danish government has said it will explore legal means of stopping protests involving the burning of holy texts in certain circumstances, citing security concerns after a backlash over such incidents that saw the Qur’an desecrated in Denmark and Sweden.

Noting that such protests played into the hands of extremists, the government wants to “explore” intervening in situations where “other countries, cultures and religions are being insulted, and where this could have significant negative consequences for Denmark, not least with regard to security”, it said in a statement from the foreign ministry.

The Danish government noted that the protests had “reached a level where Denmark, in many parts of the world across continents, is being viewed as a country that facilitates insult and denigration of the cultures, religions and traditions of other countries.”

Several recent protests involving desecrations of the Muslim holy book have raised diplomatic tensions throughout the Middle East and the two Nordic countries.

Source: The Guardian

Authors: Maria Lindebæk Lyngsoe and Simon Stjernholm

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 16, pp. 173–191

Publication Date: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Springer

This article advocates for an increased attention to how piously striving Muslims learn about, cultivate, and experience nearness to God. The empirical material is taken from authors’ current research on Danish Muslims’ engagement with Islamic teaching and learning. The Authors examine examples of oral teachings that instruct the audience to be constantly aware of God and address him directly in prayer, examples of how an awareness of God is cultivated and practiced in everyday life, and individual narratives of experiences of being close to or helped by God. With inspiration from the anthropology of Christianity as well as Islam, they propose an analytical model for understanding the process whereby Muslim efforts to draw near to God can ‘work’. Three interrelated dynamics are crucial to this process, and Authors identify each through Their reading of existing scholarship. The dynamics at play are, respectively, a taqwa-infused faith frame, its related semiotic ideology, and a relationship of experienced reciprocal agency with God.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Springer

Author: Emad Mirmotahari

Published in: College Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 80-102

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

In this essay the author explores the place of secularism in Tabish Khair’s novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. More specifically, it is argued that the novel’s narrator, a secular Muslim academic in Denmark, harbors a particular kind of secularism that is explicitly hostile to Islam, a hostility that is borne, in large part, from anxieties about terrorism and xenophobia. The narrator’s version of secularism, however, raises the question of how secularism and post colonialism encounter one another. The novel itself generates a critique of the narrator’s secularism, suggesting that it impairs his ability to achieve the kind of Saidian secular criticism that would recognize Islam (and religion in general) as a central factor of the postcolonial intellectuals that secular academics purport to re-voice and empower.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Johns Hopkins University’s Website

Those “certain groups of women” are Muslim women.

It is ironic that the vote will take place on the eve of International Women’s Day on March 8, which strives for a gender-equal world. Removing a Muslim woman’s right to wear a face veil is not equality.

Why should a Muslim woman who chooses to cover her face because of her faith not be allowed to do so? People of different faiths adhere to different dress codes, yet it is Muslim women who bear the brunt of this policing around the world.

Switzerland is far from the first country to propose laws limiting Muslim women’s choice of attire: France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, Republic of the Congo, Chad, Gabon and Sri Lanka all have laws prohibiting the wearing of religious face coverings. These bans are called a “security measure,” even though women’s role throughout history in political violence is not linked to the clothing they wore.

Source: Washington Post

The Mariam mosque, which opened in Copenhagen in early 2016, welcomes worshippers of both sexes; Friday prayers are reserved for women. Berlin’s Ibn Rushd-Goethe ‘liberal’ mosque opened in June 2017. Prayers are held in German in a building belonging to the Protestant community.

Despite positive media coverage, its female imam, Seyran Ates, a well-known lawyer and human rights militant says she has suffered ongoing threats and lives under police protection.

Source: Radio France Internationale (RFI)

The ban brings Belgium in line with European Union regulations that require animals to be stunned so they can’t feel pain before slaughter. However, Jewish and Muslim religious laws require that animals are conscious when they are killed. Kosher and Halal methods of slaughter involve the animal being killed with a single cut to the neck which severs critical blood vessels. Advocates claim the animal loses consciousness in seconds and it doesn’t suffer during the process.

Approximately 500,000 Muslims and over 30,000 Jews live in the small European country, which has a population of 11.3 million. Leaders of both communities have railed against the new law and are challenging it in Belgium’s Constitutional Court. Most EU countries have religious exceptions to the EU’s stunning requirement. However, Belgium is joining Sweden, Denmark and Slovenia among the nations that do not make allowances; while in Germany and the Netherlands, the exceptions are very limited.

The new law applies to the country’s Flanders region and a similar ruling will come into force in the Wallonia region in August, meaning the religious slaughtering practices will be outlawed across the country.

There are many ways of defining what it means to be religious, but for this analysis, we looked at four common measures of religious observance: religious service attendance, prayer frequency, belief in God and self-described importance of religion in one’s life.

The interactive tool above allows you to see how 34 countries across Europe rank on each of these measures – and by the share of adults in each country who are “highly religious” overall.

Using the combined measure shows that, overall, Central and Eastern Europeans are more likely than Western Europeans to be highly religious. For example, in Armenia and Greece, roughly half of adults are highly religious. Meanwhile, only about one-in-ten people in Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom qualify as highly religious by these criteria.

A similar pattern holds when we look at the four measures of religious commitment individually, with Central and Eastern Europeans generally more likely than Western Europeans to say religion is very important in their lives, they attend religious services at least monthly, they pray every day, and they believe in God with absolute certainty. For instance, half or more adults in Armenia, Bosnia, Georgia, Greece and Romania say religion is very important in their lives, compared with about one-in-ten in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and several other Western European countries.

At the same time, not all countries in Western Europe have low levels of religious commitment, and not all countries in Central and Eastern Europe are at the higher end of the index. For instance, 37% of Portuguese adults are highly religious, significantly more than other Western European countries and in line with Poland. And the Czech Republic and Estonia have religiosity levels similar to Denmark, noticeably lower than those in most other Central and Eastern European countries.

Source: Pew Research Center

Take Denmark, where the government has introduced new laws mandating that children living in “ghetto” neighborhoods must spend 25 hours apart from their parents every week. During this time, they’ll be taught “Danish values,” including Christmas and Easter traditions, and receive Danish language classes.

By regulating life in these neighborhoods, the government hopes to “Westernize” these children and immerse them in Denmarks secular culture and society. They see it as protection of the many at the expense of the few. But the harsh penalties for non-compliance suggest intolerance for any form of foreign teaching, religious education and cultural difference.

Parents who refuse to cooperate will be fined and their welfare payments halted. The fact that these new rules target low-income, predominantly Muslim enclaves betrays the Danish governments fear that the existence of insular Muslim communities will facilitate the development of extremist ideologies.

Denmark is not the only country to target its minority populations and religious freedom in this way. Austria and Belgium have proposed limiting kosher meat slaughter, for example, and several countries — including France and Norway — have banned religious head coverings in schools or among civil servants. Bavaria and Italy have floated legislation that would require crucifixes to be displayed in public buildings.

Source: Politico