Kuwait announced this week that it will print thousands of copies of the Quran in Swedish to be distributed in the Nordic country, calling it an effort to educate the Swedish people on Islamic “values of coexistence.” The plan was announced after the desecration of a Quran during a one-man anti-Islam protest that Swedish police authorized in Stockholm last month.
Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said the Public Authority for Public Care would print and distribute 100,000 translated copies of the Muslim holy book in Sweden, to “affirm the tolerance of the Islamic religion and promote values of coexistence among all human beings,” according to the country’s state news agency Kuna.
On June 28, Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi Christian who had sought asylum in Sweden on religious grounds, stood outside the Stockholm Central Mosque and threw a copy of the Quran into the air and burned some of its pages.
The stunt came on the first day of Eid-al-Adha, one of the most important festivals on the Islamic calendar, and it triggered anger among Muslims worldwide. Protests were held in many Muslim nations, including Iraq, where hundreds of angry demonstrators stormed the Swedish embassy compound.
CBS News sought comment from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Kuwaiti government’s announcement, but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.
The U.S. State Department condemned the desecration of the Quran in Stockholm, but said Swedish authorities were right to authorize the small protest where it occurred.
“We believe that demonstration creates an environment of fear that will impact the ability of Muslims and members of other religious minority groups from freely exercising their right to freedom of religion or belief in Sweden,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “We also believe that issuing the permit for this demonstration supports freedom of expression and is not an endorsement of the demonstration’s actions.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution Wednesday condemning the burning of the Quran as an act of religious hatred. The U.S. and a handful of European nations voted against the resolution, which was introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), arguing that it contradicts their perspectives on human rights and freedom of expression.
Those poor trees.
Swedes pilling up Qurans for the winter to save on wood in 1, 2…
Absolutely not since this should be used only as toilet paper : make holy shit.
Edit : About the 30% downVotes… I was just kidding : you can burn them as well.Man, I’m so glad my brief guilt about having this same thought was dissolved when I find it matched the top comment on here…
Ahah I mean it’s an obvious idea, it might be hot now but… winter is coming.
I wonder how they distributed them. There are only about 10 million people in Sweden, so that’s about 1 book per 100 people. If they did just dump a huge pile of books someplace I could absolutely see them all getting burned in a big bonfire.
It’s a strange idea anyway- “Hey! You burned a book we like! Here’s a hundred thousand more of the same book! Don’t, um, burn them, plz.”
Usually they are having them distributed my mosque communities to interested passer-bys in the streets of cities for free.
Pretty strong western bias in this thread
You should have stuck to r/Islam.
I’m agnostic and live in the West, I just think it’s pretty ironic how many of you praise Europeans burning the Curan and make fun of the more mature response to this, and then you defend yourselves saying they’d do the same
This news article was posted in English and it is natural that western European response would be proportionately high.
Wonder what would happen if someone burnt a bible in Kuwait.
I guess: Applause. Or nothing at all.
Christians used to behave like this centuries ago. They grew up. Let us hope our Muslim brothers and sisters can do the same at some point.
I highly doubt they will
Treating people from poorer countries as children or “undeveloped” while not questioning the belief that we westerners are at the center of the world. Also don’t question the inability of other peoples to develop on their own, because we are the only ones who have the brain to do so? Sorry, I’m struggling to wrap my head around western chauvinists.
They are undeveloped, because obviously our culture is superior, everyone should accept it. Ignore the economic part of the “superiority” or the legacy of imperialism.
This is how racism is born, in a nutshell.
Keep in mind, that when Europe was in the dark ages, the Middle East was flourishing, so was China. Northern Europe, now one of the most advanced places on Earth, was once savage compared to the Mediterranean. Today though, the West is far more civilized than the Islamic world.
I did not say that Muslims were incapabable of developing, I made no such racist argument on the basis of genetics or anything else. On the contrary, there are plenty of secular Middle Easterners in the Western world who are very smart and doing just fine.
But sadly, the culture of the Islamic world is by and large savage and medieval by modern, ethical standards. It’s morons like you who would decry when the US executes somebody (very right so) but turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia beheading people.
The West is the center of the world in 2023. But probably it won’t be forever. In fact, a lot of these places are actually changing quite rapidly, it just seems slow from the perspective of a single lifetime. So who knows where they or we will be in 200 years or so.
Actually you’re both generalizing too much (aka prejudicing), IMHO.
For example the largest muslim country in the World is … Indonesia. They’re pretty moderate.
Further, Islam is split in Xiites and Sunites and it’s the latter (which is the majority one in such “wonderful” places as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) that has the most intolerant types (though Iran is majority Xiite and its government is a pretty shit bunch of theocrats).
Generalizing either “good” or “bad” over all Muslims would be like claiming that all Christians are like the ones in the Filipines (were some the faithful will do their own version of Christ’s Via Sacra, complete with getting crucified, to show their faith) or the deep south in the US (no explanation needed ;)) or if trying to make the opposite point go all about how the handful of highly educated Lutherans in Northern Europe are so discrete and unimposing in how they practice their faith.
Really, it’s not Islam, it’s some (maybe most, maybe not) Muslims and it’s religious governments in general (plenty of examples of all religions: for example, look at the current Hindu-nationalists in India) who use religion to control the undereducated (religious belief inverselly correlates with formal education).
And @hopelessbyanxiety@lemmy.world absolutelly, people with very little education tend to be far easy to say with any old bollocks. For example, even though I have a Degree and am a city dweller, my grandmother was illiterate from a crushingly poor farmer background and she actually believed soap operas were real and got very confused when she saw the same actor is different ones. It’s nothing to do with race, it’s to do with not even having the tools to be able to understand things beyond your little local bubble (which in the case of peasents, is really small), so much more easy prey for sophisticated types in positions of authority leveraging “tradition”.
I think you’re falling into the very trap you accuse others of falling into and projecting your own life experience on the “undeveloped” and thinking they can be just as knowing as everybody else: they can’t, not because they don’t have the physical capability but because they didn’t have the opportunities you had at school to acquire the necessary tools to find and understand most information out there, so they are reliant on world of mouth to “understand” the broader world and tend to defer to people in positions of authority (like religious leaders). Even the ones who can read and write are often behind a language barrier which is often very local (just one country or even smaller) and thus unable to see beyond what the (often very controlled) local media shows them.
The baseline of knowledge and even of ability to practice strict rationality of people in the absence of a system of Formal Education is very low, and staggeringly so for those who lived their whole lives in the little village were born in, the latter of which is even most people in most countries (even so called “developed” ones) which is probably why you get most suppory for conservative and even ultra-religious politics from the countryside, not the cities (Turkey is a perfect example).
Mind you, there are plenty of other ways in which people are restricted to information bubbles (even in the English speaking world) and are unable to reason with strict logic and do actual analysis of what they hear, and those often boil down to never having been taught the tools to think in a structured, logical way or to at last do a little logic check for everything you hear, even if coming from the “right people”, hence how you end up with the plenty of supporters of moronic destructive policies, even in the “developed” countries.
glad to know you’re not generalizing, and correct me if i’m wrong but this is how i interpret your reply: some muslim people are really uneducated. Clearly these governements have no intention of educating their people (btw i can see that in a sense in my western country as well, the education system is collapsing figuratevely and physically).
My own conclusion: what you said is true, and we’ll have to see how the situation will turn out. We have no control over our own governments let alone those abroad; unless nato is going to bring peace and democracy yet again. We saw how that turned out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, and probably others that i don’t remember
Yeah, you got my point perfectly (and summarized it much more succintly than I made it ;))
It’s really not about any specific religion, it’s about access to formal education and how certain kinds of politicians in government (mainly authoritarians, but even in Democracies - like Turkey and Hungary once were) will use religion to take advantage of undereducated people who are “believers” because their parents were and society around them tells them they’re supposed to be.
I agree with you that invading a country to bring “peace and democracy” would not even work if it was done genuinelly for those and those reasons alone (people have to want those things and conquer them themselves) but even less so when “bringing peace and democracy” was just a profoundly hypocrite excuse (very much the same shit as Putin’s “freeing Ukraine of Nazis”) for nothing more than greed and dominance.
The problems of access to education and authoritarianism (anchored on religion or not) are connected and I don’t think there are easy solutions for that.
I have no issues with this. I generally agree. Very well said.
Thanks for clarifying that you’re not racist, but its curious that you describe the islamic world as savage, again centering yourself in the west as the enlightened and modern person. And who decided we are at the center of the world? Colonialist slave owners?
I didn’t mean to come across as someone who would turn a blind eye on any atrocities. Its just that the instability, and therefore violence that ravages the Middle East (maybe that’s what you mena by savage?), more often than not comes from coups or the imf restructuring those economies on behalf of the US and the EU. I have no explanation for the Saudis, not sure how they’ve got to that point. I don’t turn a blind eye on this violence, I just try my best to not put such a big group of people in the “bad” box. (at least thats how i make sense of this)
Also i’m 100% sure, at least most of the poor nations have the capacity to develop, and we can see that recently with at least some diplomatic ties being reinstated or made stronger (Iran - Saudi Arabia - Syria - …), and trade routes that escape the sanctions, which affect a really long list of poor countries. For a problem that is out of our control, its weird to expect that everything gets solved in 2 seconds, with rationality and friendship. Does this make sense or should i back this with some sources?
I mostly agree.
As for the backwardness of certain areas, I think that some of it is the result of Europe and North America meddling with them. But also, Europe and it’s offshoots had a lot of geographical advantages, like fetike arable land, that the Middle East (outside if the Fertile Crescent) never did.
Geography is not destiny, but it has a big influence. That might have been why Europe was able to industrialize and rule the world for a while. But the rest of the world is catching up.
I’ve heard something like this, but imo it’s only partly true. Why would anyone want to “rule the world” as you said? To me it seems like the feudal system, from wich colonialism was born, concentrated so many resources in the hands of very few people. It’s not just that europe was regularly ravaged by famines. It was the system on top of the disasters that worsened the scarcity situation, also with kings going to war on a yearly basis. This is the kind of trauma that lasted for centuries, and got embedded in our culture. I mean, to this day the relations of unequal exchange are still standing, as if that was just how trade works.
I don’t see anyone else in history trying to do imperialism, not even china or india in their golden period. And although even them had their own feudal periods, i struggle to believe it was as disastrous as in europe. Their rulers didn’t feel the need to conquer the world
You’re joking right? Let’s look at your examples. China has invaded Southeast Asia something like 17 times throughout its history. It dominated Manchuria and Mongolia for much of its history as well as the Tarim Basin area. The Aryans invaded ancient India and gave its current Indo-European religion as well as many of its current languages. Later, Buddhism was essentially driven out of the Indian Subcontinent, it’s place of origin, entirely as a result of holy wars.
Europe and its offshoots have run the world for the past couple hundred years mainly because for the first time in human history, technology has permitted globally spanning empires, not because their culture was any less expansionist or more ethnocentric than anybody else.
You’re naive, have an extremely limited knowledge of history.
The rest of what you have said seems like disjointed thoughts about how it isn’t fair that the material wealth isn’t evenly distributed on earth. I guess. I don’t really know what point you’re trying to make to me about it though. It’s an objectively true observation.
Every time a muslim country makes progress the US invades them and installs dictators because their biggest nightmare is a middle east that is at peace.
That just sounds like propaganda.
The US meddles a lot more than it should, agreed, but this is just not true.
Oh I’m not so sure about that. Look at the Gulf countries. They are rich. Look at their culture. It is changing fast, but still backwards and brutal compared to the modern West.
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Yeah, try burning a bible in Bumfuck Arizona and see where that takes you.
The only difference is how much of the state machinery the fundamentalist nutjobs hold.
No. They were lynching blacks 70 years ago. The American South has changed profoundly over the last century.
What they dislike are what are current avant garde ideas. Mainstream discussion of trans rights is what, 10 years old? A lot of the most ardent opponents to these ideas would be considered leftist by the standards of the 1970s. These changes seem slow to us. Historically they are not that slow! They’re just difficult to live though.
Trump is crass and corrupt and hurts the feelings of leftists. He’d still be a liberal by the standards of the 1970s, albeit still definitely a crass and corrupt one.
You know who supports beheading or the abolition of alcohol in the modern US? For all intents and purposes no one.
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A lot of tiny groups exist. Nobody supports the KKK. Nobody. There are also micro-sized Nazi movements in Western countries today. Nobody supports them. They are utterly anathema to mainstream morality.
The amount of mental gymnastics you do to defend the Islamic world is a joke. They’ll imprision trans people happily. They’ll imprison gay people happily. But in the West “Muslims” and other minorities are client groups of the elites. So you know, you gotta square the circle. To be fair, there are very open-minded Muslims in the West. But they are sadly a minority in their countries of origin.
Go insult Trump some more. It will make you feel better.
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Mainstream discussion of trans rights is what, 10 years old?
Do you also think gay rights discussion is 20 years old?
In the mainstream, 30 to 40 years. It gained traction a lot slower than the trans rights movement, which has burst into mainstream consciousness rather quickly.
This just means the protest was effective.
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As if we Swedes wouldn’t have mandatory education about the major religions of the world during school already. And I am pretty sure almost every school library carries copies of the quran, just as the bible and some other major scriptures.
Good plan. As they say, the solution to bad speech is more speech.
So they can burn some more? 🤷♂️
Al-Sabah is gonna make the Pikachu face, isn’t he?
They’re… just gonna burn more of it, whether anyone likes it or not.
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Yeah, more people should know about their great prophet, who also happens to be a pedophile.
I bet a million shmeckles that u heard this from someone else and you didn’t actually bother to check for wether its true or not.
The source is Sahíh al-Buchárí, one of the canonical books (or whatever, not sure how it’s called in English) in islam. They “married” when she was 6 and the pedophile prophet himself raped her when she was 9. But hey, at least she was 18 when she finally became a widow!
And thus you owe me a million shmeckles.
I mean that’s trivial to Google.
Yes, that’s generally one of the ways I learn new stuff, by Googling it.
The point is you heard it from someone else and didn’t bother to verify until the other guy called you out for it.
And you know that exactly how? Don’t project your lack of sources for your claims on others, please.
Meh. Who cares. Doubt they’ll find a lot of willing takers. Sweden should have encouraged the raging idiots to burn bibles. Nobody would have fucking cared. It’s all fake outrage and the Qur’an burners all have ties to Russian money. Wonder why…
the quran burner had his family killed by muslims, he’s from Iraq. He doesn’t need russian money to express his hatred for people who killed his family
No, santa clause is off limits. What would we do if the easter bunny wasn’t real?
These concepts must be kept alive, granted special treatment, tax exemptions or… we might forget about them and… well… what are we going to fight about then!?
I wish there’s a similar reaction if one woman is raped or degraded, one gay person beaten or oppressed, one child molested, one dictator suppresses a population or one politician decides against environment, reason and humanity and for greed. But no, a fkn book was burnt. What would Mohammed say about that if he’d live today, hm?
He’d say “don’t care, I have 9 year olds to rape”.
he’d say ‘thats HaLaL’ and then proceeds to rape another 9 year old.
Wait, what would similar reaction actually be? Would they send 100 000 women to Sweden?
The man who burned the quran literally had his family tortured to death by muslims in Iraq
He’s free to burn the garbage as many times as he wises
Weird how all you people don’t even care about that part of this story
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Like, nobody ever says “you people” unless they’re about to commit injustice.
Lmfao what? That’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve read.
He said “all you people”, referring to the media and the comments. He wasn’t referring to any demographic.
Obviously, when “you people” is used to refer to a demographic, it’s followed by something negative. But it doesn’t mean it can’t be used in normal conversation.
This is very much tarring all Muslims with the same brush, no?
Like I’m not denying he has the right to burn the quran if he wants.
But to insist that the actions of some Muslims justify hatred towards all of them is deplorable.
If my family was killed by Christian colonizers, I would probably have some pretty negative feelings about the Bible, too.
It’s not merely the actions of a few. It is the broader community of tacit support for religious doctrine that allows extremism to develop and thrive.
More people should actually read these religious texts to get a better understanding of just how terrible it is to be a “real” Christian or Muslim.
Plenty of people have had atrocities committed on them by Christians. And yet you don’t have people burning bibles outside churches and claiming all Christians are brutal ass-backwards murderers.
I’m pretty sure theres been a lot of christian Bible burnings, theres even YT videos of a few. I cant find anyone claiming all christians are brutal ass-backwards murderers but it probably exist. Not that anyone cares enough to cause a diplomatic issue just for that. Also the “christians” burns other “christians” Bible’s too ocassionally, just because of slight differences. Probably a big reason why nobody cares anymore.
Lol you just don’t hear about it because no one gives a shit.
If these asshole weren’t busy getting sand in their panties, nobody would hear about this one guy either.
I dont know how useful it would be. I’ve read some of the Bible and it seems VERY separated from the morality of real life christians.
If I had relatives killed by extremist Jews (yeah, yeah, just hear me out), would it be okay for me to promote Nazi ideology and idolize the Holocaust? Hate is wrong in every circumstance.
Would it be okay for an angry Palestinian who had their family killed by Israel to burn a Torah?
Or should that Palestinian respect the feelings of the people who follow the ideology responsible for their families death?
It’s a book. Why does it matter?
Didn’t someone from Sweden just try to burn the Torah until they realized Torahs are fucking expensive so they just burned a piece of paper.
I know of at least one instance where they asked for permission to burn torah scrolls outside the Israeli embassy. They got permission, Israel protested and Swedish dept of foreign affairs basically said “We don’t condone the action, but this falls under freedom of expression laws.”
On the day though, instead of doing the burning they instead protested against burning qurans.
Yeah that’s what I am talking about. The protesters just couldn’t afford to burn a Torah Scroll (It’s handwritten on leather and stuff). So they just burned a blank piece of paper instead.
Personally I don’t care what religious text people want to burn but I am just worried it will develop into burning people just like that common phrase.
What ideology did he promote?
Being against Judaism is not the same as being a Nazi whatsoever, so your analogy is just incorrect on a fundamental level. And frankly, it’s so obvious that it feels like a bad faith argument.
And yes, if you had relatives killed by jewish (religion, not ethnicity) people justified by their religion, it would be completely in your right to burn their religious text.
Hell, you’re in your right to go burn any religious texts you want without a reason. (Not recommended in Islamic countries, might lead to a severe case of a death penalty).
Promote Nazis? No. Burn Tora? Yes.
This is burned paper, though. Not quite the same as advocating for burned people. We shouldn’t give human rights to any book. If someone wanted to burn a book they should be free to do so for any reason as long as it’s their book, I guess.
Also, if this would have been a Torah or a Bible used in this demonstration, we wouldn’t even have heard about it, because Muslims seem to be the only ones willing to kill someone for burning paper.
Talk about burning bibles anywhere in rural America and I assure you the threat of jail time is the only thing stopping you from being shot in the street.
Jail time for what crime? Do you have an example of this happening?
I can find one case in 2014 in Arizona. The man burned a bible in front of a Christian-oriented homeless shelter. He was detained on suspicion of one count of unlawful symbol burning.
That seemed like a very strange law, so I looked it up.
A. It is unlawful for a person to burn or cause to be burned any symbol not addressed by section 13-1707 on the property of another person without that person’s permission or on a highway or any other public place with the intent to intimidate any person or group of persons. The intent to intimidate may not be inferred solely from the act of burning the symbol, but shall be proven by independent evidence.
B. A person who violates this section is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor.
If I had to speculate, this law was probably put in place against cross burning by the KKK or similar intimidating acts.
He was arrested on suspicion of unlawful symbol burning, but I can’t find any updates on the case, which likely means he was not prosecuted for it.
I can’t find any more cases besides this and someone being jailed for 11 years for burning a bible. In Egypt.
I think he means “The law against shooting people dead with guns” is what stops people shooting you dead with guns, if you are to mention anything related to bible burning.
However, the info you’ve dug up there is really interesting, thanks!
this guy got it right, but yea thanks for the info dump. I’m sure I can make a trivia night question outta that lol. He also managed to dig up an oddly relevant law as I live in Arizona.
It’s a pretty big leap from burning a holy book (no consequences except hurting people’s feelings) and promoting actual harm against people and idolizing genocide.
Also- you say that like Jewish extremists aren’t currently killing Palestinians.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102728946/a-look-at-jewish-extremism-in-israel
Not okay, but understandable. Two seperate things.
wow…
