Blasphemy Laws by a Different Name
The UK’s hate speech legislation stifles religious dissent.
Salwan Momika grew up in Iraq. After fighting with the Popular Mobilization Forces against ISIS, he fled to Sweden, became a vocal critic of Islam, and burned multiple Qurans. In January he was shot dead in that country—a killing welcomed by Al-Qaeda.
Nobody has yet been charged in connection with the crime, but it clearly took place in the shadow of a long line of murders carried out in recent years on European soil by extremist Muslims against those deemed heretical. These range from cartoonists being gunned down with automatic rifles, to the assassination of teachers and politicians.
In solidarity with Momika, and in protest at what he perceives as a climate of Islamist intolerance in his native Turkey and beyond, Hamit Coskun, a Kurdish-Armenian man, set fire to his own copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in London in February.
Explaining his behaviour, Coskun writes:
Some may say that book-burning is a poor substitute for reasoned debate. I would counter that it was a symbolic, non-violent form of expression intended to draw attention to the ongoing move from the secularism of my country of birth to a regime which embraces hardline Islam.
On June 2, Westminster Magistrates Court convicted Coskun of a “religiously aggravated public order offence” for his protest—specifically “disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress,” motivated by “hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam,” under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986.
Look beyond the legal jargon and the verdict raises unsettling questions about whether Britain is witnessing a return of blasphemy laws (technically abolished in England in 2008) in all but name. It also highlights threats to liberty posed by “hate speech” legislation, which diminishes free speech in the name of preventing supposed “harm” caused by the voicing of certain attitudes and ideas.
Coskun insists he harbours no animus towards Muslims. “The people I’m criticizing are the radical Islamists... I’m not criticizing Muslims, I’m criticizing the religion of Islam itself,” he told an interviewer earlier this month. The presiding judge at his trial, John McGarva, acknowledged as much, noting Coskun’s statement that he has “no problem or prejudice against Muslim people so long as they do not use violence.” But he nonetheless ruled that Coskun’s protest was driven by hatred of Muslims, citing Coskun’s stated belief that (as McGarva paraphrased it) “Islam is an ideology which encourages its followers to violence, paedophilia, and a disregard for the rights of non-believers.”
The logic is circular: hostility to a religion is treated as evidence of hatred towards its followers—hatred that in turn justifies criminalizing the original criticism. The result is a chilling effect: it suggests any protest against Islam could potentially be interpreted as a protest against its followers, and therefore prosecutable under hate speech legislation. The lawful space for scrutinizing that religion, in other words, quietly shrinks.
On top of this, the judgment smacks of victim blaming. Coskun was physically attacked twice during the incident: once by a man with a dagger who emerged from the embassy shouting “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and again by a Deliveroo rider who kicked him while he lay on the ground. Remarkably, these assaults were presented as proof of his guilt. “That the conduct was disorderly is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people,” McGarva declared.
The ruling implies that because some Muslims may react aggressively if their religion is insulted, the police will enforce protection of their religion. This turns secular justice on its head—and sets a deeply troubling precedent.
Coskun’s case isn’t the first of its kind. Others include a man convicted of religiously aggravated harassment for burning a Quran, and a preacher dragged to court for calling Islam “satanic” during a sermon. By contrast, after a convoy of Muslim men drove around London in 2021 screaming “Fuck the Jews, rape their daughters!” over a megaphone while flying a Palestine flag, the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop all charges.
This asymmetry has not gone entirely unnoticed. As Conservative MP Robert Jenrick argued:
Had Coskun torched a Bible outside Apostolic Nunciature (the Vatican’s Embassy) while shouting abuse about Christianity, does anyone seriously believe the CPS would have rushed to press charges? Would the police even have turned up? Their own hate-crime guidance celebrates satire, mockery and irreverence – unless, it seems, the target is Islam. Parliament did not legislate for such religious privilege; officials have conjured it out of thin air.
The context is key here. In the UK we’ve seen teachers forced into hiding for drawing Mohammed, the attempted murder of ex-Muslims in broad daylight, and politicians standing up in Parliament to call—quite openly—for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws. Meanwhile, hundreds of British Muslims fled the country to join ISIS, rape gangs have systematically targeted working-class white and Sikh girls for being “kaffir,” and repeated mass-casualty terror attacks have struck British towns and cities.
In the face of a real threat to secular values, the authorities have tied themselves up in knots—resulting in a so-called “jihadists’ veto,” where the threat of violence restricts free speech.
A central culprit is hate crime and hate speech legislation, which privileges the protection of groups on identitarian grounds over the more sacrosanct principle of individual expression. While, officially, blasphemy laws do not exist in Britain, through this statutory framework they risk being reintroduced by the back door. If criticizing Islam is, according to McGarva’s reasoning, no different from “hostility towards members of a religious group,” then it is very difficult to see how hate speech legislation differs, in practice, from stridently orthodox interpretations of Islam.
It is part of the fabric of a tolerant society to not just tolerate religious practices but to tolerate their critique. That goes for Islam as well. In many Muslim-majority regions people are not afforded this privilege. Sharia courts may hand down the death penalty for “crimes” such as “sharing blasphemous pictures and videos” and “defiling the name of Muhammad.” The intensity of jurisprudence in other parts of the world can’t help but affect European courts, which have a tendency to treat the denigration of Islam with heightened sensitivity. But in the interests of keeping the peace, vital liberal principles are forgotten
The severity of Coskun’s punishment is of course different in this case from what it might be in other parts of the world—he received a fine and a notice on his criminal record—but the sentiment behind his sentencing is disturbingly similar. What Coskun experienced was a “blasphemy” conviction, just under a different name.
A version of this article appeared on Max Klinger’s Substack.
Max Klinger is a lawyer and think tank fellow based in the UK. He writes a regular Substack newsletter focussed on global politics, groupthink and socio-cultural trends.
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Big thanks to the Persuasion team for publishing this. If you are interested in the sort of subject matter I address in this piece, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter as well, where I write about developments in US and world politics regularly. Cheers.
Max, I appreciate the article and agree with you on many of your conclusions, especially the ideal that it is bad to let violence set our laws.
However, I found a few points to be unconvincing arguments, significantly weaker than the rest of the piece. One is the idea that "victim blaming" here is inconsistent or incoherent, where I find the reasoning you present natural, if unpleasant. The other is the section reproduced below:
> If criticizing Islam is, according to McGarva’s reasoning, no different from “hostility towards members of a religious group,” then it is very difficult to see how hate speech legislation differs, in practice, from stridently orthodox interpretations of Islam.
I find it very EASY to see how hate speech legislation differs from stridently orthodox interpretations of Islam — it differs in every way except one!