Turkey’s Cynical Attempt to Use the Latest “Blasphemy” Controversy to Hold Sweden’s NATO Membership Hostage

Far-Right agitator burns a Qur’an near the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm

Yesterday, the far-Right Danish agitator Rasmus Paludan, head of Stram Kurs (Hard Line), burned a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm after a lengthy speech denouncing Islam and immigration. The Turkish government has seized on this latest clash between “blasphemy” and free expression to try to foment further diplomatic pressure against Sweden to accede to Ankara’s demands about the suppression of activities by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist group within Sweden, and the extradition of PKK operatives to Turkey, as the price for Turkey lifting its veto on Sweden joining NATO.

Paludan was last in the news nearly a year ago, in April 2022, when he proposed, as part of his Qur’an burning “tour”, to hold such an event in Malmö, and was prevented from doing so by Muslim protesters throwing stones and clashing with police, which spiralled into four days of rioting over Easter across five cities injured about 400 people, many of them policemen.

Numerous governments of Muslim-majority countries condemned Sweden for adhering to its own laws on free speech by giving a permit and (unsuccessful, as it turned out) police protection to Paludan’s event, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iran’s dependency in Iraq. Within the international system, this kind of interference in another state’s internal affairs is not generally regarded as legitimate, and it is an innovation even in Islamic terms.

In classical Islam, there was disagreement about whether a Muslim in the lands of unbelief was bound by the shari’a. For a long time, this was mostly theoretical: it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to infidel territory and with Islam advancing into Christendom, the only cases that arose were the occasional captive. It became more of an issue after the tenth century as the imperial tide began to turn and Islam was forced back in Iberia and southern Italy, leaving Muslim populations under Christian rule. In general, the ideal remained that Muslims would return to Islamdom as soon as possible, either travelling there themselves or living as best they could until Islamic armies reconquered these zones.

What was never in doubt among any of the various Islamic jurists was that the shari’a could not be applied to non-Muslims living under non-Muslim governments. The fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 calling for the murder not only of Salman Rushdie, who was born a Muslim, but of everybody involved in the printing and distribution of The Satanic Verses, was the first time any claim to such authority was made: “Since then, others, both Muslims and non-Muslims, have followed the same path.”

By this point, Christendom—the West, as we now say—finds itself living under a de facto blasphemy law, where the occasional eruptions of violence against those who test this prohibition are the exception because this very real threat has induced a self-censorship in the media, academia, the arts, and essentially every other field.

What has been clear since Khomeini’s fatwa is that these “controversies” are rarely just about what Westerners would consider ‘religious’ issues; they are also ‘political’. The complication is that these categories even in the West are comparatively modern, and they rely on a belief in secularism, which emerged in the form we have it now over last three-hundred years out of the distinct theological heritage of Latin Christendom and has been universalised by the contingent fact of particularly Anglo-American and broader European hegemony in that period setting the global norms. The whole premise of Islamism, since its major rise after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, has been to undo the spread of Christianised assumptions among Muslims and return them to an understanding of deen (faith) that de-compartmentalises Islam, restoring it as a whole-of-life system encompassing not only personal belief, but practice, custom, authority, and law.

With Khomeini specifically, this is self-evident: in a theocracy, faith is politics, and vice versa, by definition. Then there are cases like the Danish cartoons, published by Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 that were barely noticed until a group of Danish Islamist activists at the “European Committee for Prophet Honouring”, wanting to raise their own profile within Denmark, took the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, added some even more offensive ones of their own, and then travelled around the Muslim world inciting the anger that resulted in the riots of February 2006 that killed dozens of people. This looks cynical, and it was, but the activists recognised no distinction between their politicking and their goal of furthering the faith as they saw it: they wanted greater status within Denmark so they could bring more people to their version of Islam and be better placed to lobby the government to act against Jyllands-Posten and other “blasphemers”.

Even within this context, the cynicism of Turkey’s Islamist-derived Justice and Development Party (AKP) government is breath-taking. A little background is needed.

In May 2022, with the manifest threats to European security in the shadow of Russia’s attempt to eliminate Ukraine, Sweden (and Finland) applied to join NATO—only to find Turkey being obstructionist and raising ever-increasing demands in exchange for lifting its veto. This parochial behaviour from Turkey has been especially outrageous, not only because it takes place at a moment when the Alliance cannot afford this instability and uncertainty, but because the Scandinavian states had already been given assurances by all NATO members, including Turkey, before making their applications. Ironically, the Turkish government has found an ally in none other than the PKK, which, as ever, did its best to inflame the situation, and has continued to do so: an overt PKK demonstration against Swedish membership in NATO took place yesterday next to Paludan’s event.

Sweden has been resistant to the Turkish demands, and now Turkey has seen an opportunity, with Paludan’s carry-on, to pressure Sweden. The Turkish presidential spokesman attacked Sweden for “allowing” Paludan’s “Islamophobia” and the Turkish Foreign Ministry released a statement saying: “Permitting this anti-Islam act, which targets Muslims and insults our sacred values, under the guise of freedom of expression is completely unacceptable”. Soon afterwards, a planned visit to Ankara by Sweden’s Defence Minister, Pal Jonson, to work out the details of a compromise that would see Turkey vote to allow Sweden into NATO was cancelled.

In truth, what is “completely unacceptable” in this situation is Turkey demanding that Sweden break its own laws to censor speech the Turkish government finds distasteful. There is no reason to doubt that the AKP and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are sincerely opposed to Qur’an burnings, but they have also found this a convenient pretext to try to make the Swedish government break other Swedish laws, around the judicial process of extradition, and to hold Sweden’s NATO membership hostage to this demand. Nor can this be disentangled from the domestic angle, providing Erdogan a populist issue—posing as a defender of Islam on the world stage—ahead of the elections in May.

The Swedish government has not helped itself. The Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying, “Freedom of expression is a fundamental part of democracy. But what is legal is not necessarily appropriate. Burning books that are holy to many is a deeply disrespectful act.” In doing this, the Swedes have moved into substantive comments about Paludan, when their simple response should have been that this is no business of Turkey’s and Sweden will not be bullied by a foreign power into breaking her own laws to censor citizens. This can only give credence to the idea animating Turkey’s authoritarian, conspiratorial leadership, namely that any speech which takes place in Sweden is the responsibility of the government.

Within the West, Paludan and people like him will keep staging these provocations for as long as they get a reaction. The way to stop them is for Muslims to cease reacting in this way and giving him what he wants in presenting Muslims as violent and opposed to Western values. In the meantime, all European governments can do is uphold their own laws that protect free expression and firmly reject all efforts by foreign states like Turkey to interfere in these matters to press their own agendas.

POSTSCRIPT: It turned out there was a Russian hand in this event: Chang Frick, a Swedish “journalist” affiliated with Moscow’s English-language propaganda channel RT (formerly Russia Today), proposed the idea for Paludan to burn the Qur’an outside the Turkish Embassy and Paludan’s “application fee for the demonstration permit was paid by Frick”. It has also been reported that Frick “paid for Paludan’s plane ticket to Sweden, but both Paludan and Frick deny it”. The timing seems to have been deliberate, intended to—and succeeding in—scuppering Defence Minister Jonson’s trip to Ankara to arrive at an accord with the Turks over Sweden’s NATO membership. This does not take anything away from Turkey’s agency; it simply means that the Russian government was able to exploit a pre-existing dynamic, which is how active measures work: “they cannot create such fissures, but can widen them.”