Daily Times

In Norway, an anti-Islam rally turned violent when the leader of the rally, Lars Thorsen tried to burn the Holy Quran during the protest against Islamization of Europe.

The rally was organized by Thorsen ‘s Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN) in the city of Kristiansand. Before the burning incident, two scripts of Holy Quran had been thrown into the trash. The violence took place when a youth from counter-protesters, attacked Thorsen while he was trying to burn the Holy Quran. SIAN, under Thorsen’s orchestration, has been demonstrating against Islam and Mohammad (PBUH), the most respected and praised a person in Islam who bears sensitive sanctified sentiments of about two billion Muslims all over the world.

This was not an incident like many others have taken place before; rather a mindset. A mindset that shows abhorrence toward a particular religion and its followers. I am an ardent advocate of freedom of speech but when it is precisely practiced against a particular community, it becomes a hate speech that itself is a condemnable act. The anti-Islam narrative which leads to such incidents is based upon the hypothetical misconceptions about Islam.

Either Islamophobics do not know about its teachings, either they mislead others by their own half-cooked conjecture. In this recent case in Kristiansand, Thorsen and his organization SIAN believe Muslims are responsible for bloodshed in the world, they hate other religions and don’t let people live on their own. This is a misconception that theory and history both reject. we see that all wars in the modern era were fought between secular states. The strongest focal empire of Muslims, the Ottoman empire was fallen during the chaos of these wars and divided into small slices of land among nationalist Muslim rulers who helped central powers in this process.

After nine-eleven we observe another war against terrorism which was precisely broken into against Muslims all over the world who were declared terrorists according to the West’s definition. we observed that there was no religious war imposed by the Muslims in the post-colonial era, on the contrary, the Muslims were targetted in any way or other. This phenomenon of hatred did lead some Muslims to militancy but the valuable portion of Muslim Ummah showed indifference, even rejected that. The rest of the Muslim world including their West-leaned rulers were apologetic rather supportive to the west in the war against terror. The freedom of speech, mainly against Islam and its followers, the narrative then soared in the reaction of a reaction called Muslim militancy, and the cycle went on.

The hate speech in the name of freedom of speech is not welcomed by sane minds. When Keran Armstrong, the renowned scholar on comparative religion was asked about the gap between modernity and religion, she made her point on a philosophical approach.  According to her, the freedom of speech should be desired and practiced in a modern or religious  society(no matter what type it is) but when it is practiced as a phenomenon of rejection or negation of a particular belief, It revolves around the point that nothing is sacred and prevented to be insulted or objected upon. when this narrative, without any religious compulsion of the force of implementation, is deployed upon people, it becomes sacred as well which should be admitted and implemented as a religious value is. This contradiction which modernity has in its own spirit makes it a counterpart of religion which naturally clashes to the religion and a clash of civilization occurs.
Prolonging Karen Armstrong’s narrative, we observe this forceful implementation of freedom of speech in the west. It hurts millions of hearts but is admired and desired too. Ironically, no religion hurts other religion’s followers or any people right in heart, but that is orthodox and non-practicable.

This is admirable that when organizations like SIAN and others are spreading hatred against a particular community, Muslims, Europe is observing aggregations to show solidarity with the same under the banner of anti-Islamophobia organizations. Europe has a number of Muslim migrants from Syria and other war-torn countries. The strategy of showing solidarity with them who already are displaced and dishearted will benefit Europe in every measure. Sane minds are farsighted and do not fall into bigotry, rather they win hearts and minds as Islam did in its golden era.

The writer is a columnist and an analyst at a Pakistan based newspaper.