Enforcing a De-Facto Blasphemy Code in Britain

By Arshad Alam, New Age Islam 2 March 2023 An Alleged Quran Desecration Becomes another Excuse for Muslim Exceptionalism Main Points: 1. An alleged incident of desecration of the Quran was reported from a West Yorkshire school. 2. The student at the centre of the controversy was autistic yet local Muslims forced the mother of this teenager to tender an apology. 3. Similar incidents have happened elsewhere and in all such cases, the Muslim response has been to claim special protection when it comes to their religion. 4. The state has been more than willing to accommodate the voices of the Islamists to the detriment of progressive and liberal voices within the Muslim community. ------- Muslims protest outside Regent's Park Mosque against newspaper cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that first appeared in a Danish newspaper. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images ------ An alleged desecration of the Quran took place in a school in West Yorkshire last week. According to reports, one student, after losing an online game, was asked by his fellow students to bring a copy of the Quran into the school. It is alleged by Muslims that within the school premises, the holy book was torn as it was kicked around by these students. The school authorities put out a statement clarifying that “the holy book remains intact and that our initial inquiries indicate that there was no malicious intent by those involved”. However, as others have pointed out, it does appear that some of the pages of the holy book were scuffed and that some damage was done to the cover. Subsequently, the school suspended four students who were involved in the incident. Ideally, the matter should have ended there. But the Muslim reaction did not. Despite the fact that the main accused in the incident, the boy who brought the Quran into the school, is autistic. It should have been common sense to forgive this child given his challenges but the local Muslim community thought of this as a good opportunity to remind this district of the power of Islam. They escalated the matter to the police and the local authorities despite the school inquiring into the issue. They also held a meeting, in which the mother of the accused child was present, where she pleaded for forgiveness. The incident has not just polarized the local community but is now the subject of major debate in the whole of the UK. Anti-Muslim bigots are having a field day ‘proving’ that the religion and its adherents are not compatible with a democracy like Britain. What could have been handled at a local level by Muslims was allowed to get out of hand. Probably the Muslims themselves wanted it like this in order to showcase their power to enforce blasphemy codes on the rest of the society. This is not even an issue of free speech. Those who are not Muslims are expressing a genuine incomprehension at the inability of the Muslim community to forgive an autistic teenager and the necessity of shaming a mother for no fault of hers. After all, don’t the Muslims claim that Islam is a religion of peace and that forgiveness is one of the highest virtues taught by their religion? So why this attempt to scar the life of a teenager? Or is this another attempt to enforce the religious code of blasphemy across that country? I say this because the Muslim protest almost seems like a pattern. There was the Batley grammar school incident in 2021 in which some teachers were suspended for showing a picture of the Prophet in a discussion about blasphemy. There was a similar outrage from Sunni Muslims, in 2022, who eventually forced the cancellation of The Lady of Heaven, a movie about Prophet’s daughter which showed some of his companions in uncharitable light. Muslims even took offense when Majid Nawaz tweeted a picture of Jesus and Muhammad together to make a point that visual depiction of the prophet was not always forbidden in Muslim history. The way Muslims have reacted in all such issues has amounted to enforcing a de facto blasphemy code. Even PREVENT, the counter terrorism wing of UK, which is often accused of being soft on Islamists, has concede that “violence associated with accusations of blasphemy and apostasy is an area of particular importance” in tackling extremism. What is more depressing though is how the local governments, in all such cases, capitulates to the demands of those Muslims who want to make political capital out of such incidents. The inquiry committee in the Batley grammar school, for instance, categorically stated that, “the actions of the teachers were highly inappropriate”. It further stated that “it was not necessary for staff to use the material in question [pictures] to deliver the learning outcome on the subject of blasphemy”. What the statement basically means is that teachers are no longer free to decide what and how to teach simply because there are Muslim students in the class. What this also means is that in case of any subject related to Islam, teachers would be well advised to self-censor themselves so that they do not end up hurting the religious sensibilities of Muslims. What a loss for the average Muslim student in such classes, as he or she will be deprived of engaging the issue from another perspective altogether. Such responses also assume that the Muslim community is homogenous. This is far from truth. Like in all societies, there are divergent voices on such issues within the Muslim society too. Not all Muslims were asking that the child in West Yorkshire be punished or that his mother tender an apology. Therefore, the response of the local authorities only give succour to the Islamists by making them the representative of all Muslims. By extension, it can be argued that the state authorities are keen to concede the intimidating demands of Islamists to the detriment of progressive and liberal voices within the community. What it amounts to is an infantilizing of Muslims by assuming that they are simply incapable of upholding liberal principles. The more important question though remains the Muslim positioning on the issue of perceived blasphemy. It is not that Muslims as a group should not be asserting their religious rights; certainly, they should. But those rights should be those which does not impinge on the rights of others. Through centuries of struggle against religious absolutism, the British have established a system where critical thinking about religion is encouraged and thought of as a cornerstone of that society. Christianity has made peace with this secular march of the western society. But Muslim narcissism about enforcing the dictates of their religion has reached a point where it is threatening to upset the very core foundations of societies to which they have migrated and in which they wish to integrate. But integration has always been a two-way street. The reluctance of the Muslims to adopt anything of their host society can only mean that they still have miles to go in terms of appreciating multiculturalism and pluralism. ----- A regular contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Arshad Alam is a writer and researcher on Islam and Muslims in South Asia. 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