On November 5, in the shadow of the presidential election in the United States, Rasmus Paludan, the Danish-Swedish lawyer and party leader, was convicted of agitation against ethnic group. Since the end of 2020, Paludan has toured Sweden and burnt several copies of the Qur’an with the purpose of criticizing Islam, with both peaceful counterdemonstrations, violent riots, and political consequences both at a national and international level as consequences. For instance, in January 2023 Paludan burned a Qur’an outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm. The act provoked the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, who made it clear that he would not approve Swedish NATO membership if Sweden continued to accept the burnings of the Qur’an. Besides its global impact, the burnings of the Qur’an developed into an internal political affair. Sweden raised the threat level on its five-grade scale to four, indicating it was highly likely Sweden would become a target of terrorism.

In Paludan’s defense, his lawyer stated that he had intended to criticize a religion (Islam) and not a group (Muslims). The issue was widely debated in media, since the accusation of agitation was contrasted to Paludan’s right to freedom of speech, a fundamental law in Sweden. We might not have seen the last of this debate on the Qur’an burnings legal implications; it is still possible for Paludan to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The burning of religious scriptures is not something new but occurs regularly and globally. One reason for this, according to biblical scholar James Watts, is that religious scriptures combine two characteristics that are rarely seen together: they are easily accessible physical objects, and they are considered by many to constitute direct access to the divine. Today, controversies about sacred scriptures revolve not primarily around interpretations of their meaning, but around the objects – the function of physical scriptures as symbols of religions, cultures, and groups. Destroying religious scriptures often arouses deep antipathies, fueled by memories of political and religious oppression. History offers many examples, including SS soldiers dragging Torah scrolls out of synagogues during World War II and burning them in the streets.

Paludan’s Qur’an burnings are not isolated incidents but must be seen as part of a larger current, where criticism of Islam, Muslims and the multicultural society risks turning into Islamophobia. This becomes clearer if, as we do, you examine the debate that followed Paludan’s rampage in the Swedish media. In this debate, actors tend to compare how “we” react to desecration of “our” religious scripture (the Christian Bible) and how “they” react to desecration of “their” religious scripture (the Muslim Qur’an). The Bible is contrasted with the Qur’an, and if the former is considered compatible with Swedish, modern, and even secular values (such as freedom of speech and equality), the latter is portrayed rather as the enemy of these values. This contrast is not new but confirms what we have seen in our previous research on how religion and religious scriptures are discussed in various public forms and forums.

Even in more right-wing populist and right-wing extremist circles, both the Qur’an and the Bible have an important function in reinforcing a worldview of “us” and “them.” This is evident, for example, in Hannah M. Strømmen’s research on how the Bible is portrayed as a common ground for the West’s portrayed superior civilization, while the Qur’an is demonized as anti-Western, anti-modern, and violent. The Bible is mobilized as an exclusive possession of an exclusive people, which means that Islam, with its own religious scripture, becomes “the other” who should be left out. Qur’an burnings are a violent way of identifying the enemy as a Muslim – without doing violence to Muslims – in a form of performative populism, where the religious scripture is an important prop for creating an “us” that exercises the freedom to burn “their” sacred text (Strømmen 2021).

Based on this, it can be concluded that the patterns that emerge in the debate that followed the Qur’an burnings in 2022 confirm both our own and others’ previous research: Religious scriptures become part of the essentialization of “the other” and risk leading to expressions of problematic stereotypes, in this case Islamophobia. Posing with the Bible in full swing, like Donald Trump in the now iconic picture from St. John’s Church in Washington, or burning the Qur’an to show criticize Islam, are actions that contribute to spreading a populist worldview. In the media debate, we identify a constructed binary between a good-hearted, cool, Bible and a barbaric, burning, Qur’an. While the Qur’an is lit up in the public squares of Sweden, the Bible risks being used as fuel.

– Hanna Liljefors and Linnea Jensdotter