The defence had said Hamit Coskun should be protected to "express his personal criticism of Turkey and its stance on Islam" - and argued a c
Published: Jun 2, 2025
A man has been found guilty of an offence after burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London, in a case that sparked debate over the freedom of expression.
Hamit Coskun was accused of shouting "f*** Islam" and "Islam is religion of terrorism" as he held up a burning copy of the holy Islamic text in Knightsbridge, London, in February.
Today, at Westminster Magistrates' Court, he was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence.
Delivering the verdict, district judge John McGarva said: "Your actions in burning the Koran where you did were highly provocative, and your actions were accompanied by bad language in some cases directed toward the religion and were motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion."
He ordered Coskun to pay a £240 fine, with a statutory surcharge of £96.
The National Secular Society (NSS), which paid his legal fees jointly with the Free Speech Union (FSU), called it a "significant blow to freedom of expression".
In a statement issued through the FSU, Coskun said the decision would "deter others from exercising their democratic rights to peaceful protest and freedom of expression".
He vowed to "continue to campaign against the threat of Islam".
"Christian blasphemy laws were repealed in this country more than 15 years ago and it cannot be right to prosecute someone for blaspheming against Islam," he said.
"Would I have been prosecuted if I'd set fire to a copy of the bible outside Westminster Abbey? I doubt it."
The 50-year-old had denied using 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", contrary to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986.
He had also pleaded not guilty to an alternative charge of using disorderly behaviour "within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress", contrary to section five of the Public Order Act 1986.
The charges were alternative, meaning only one or the other would apply, but not both.
Prosecutors had said Coskun had written on social media he was protesting the "Islamist government" of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had "made Turkey a base for radical Islamists and is trying to establish a Sharia regime".
Mr Erdogan, who has been in power for over 20 years, leads the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which, while created from former Islamist movements and maintaining a strong religious base, describes itself as a conservative-democratic party and has strongly denied being Islamist.
Barrister Katy Thorne KC, defending, last week argued the prosecution was effectively trying to revive blasphemy laws, which were abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2021.
Coskun, who has both Kurdish and Armenian heritage but was born in Turkey, travelled from his home in the Midlands and set fire to the Koran on the afternoon of 13 February, the court heard last week.
Footage aired in court showed another man confronting Coskun, allegedly holding a knife and saying: "It's my religion, you don't burn the Koran."
The recording appeared to show Coskun backing away and using the burning Koran to fend off the attacker, who is alleged to have slashed out at him again.
The defendant, an atheist, believes he was protesting peacefully, and that burning the Koran was a right under his freedom of expression, the court had heard.
NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said: "The outcome of this case is a significant blow to freedom of expression and signals a concerning capitulation to Islamic blasphemy codes."
It establishes a "heckler's veto" that "incentivises violent responses to suppress views deemed offensive", he said.
Mr Evans added: Social cohesion is best achieved not by restricting rights, but by fostering their free exercise."
Blasphemy laws were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. They remain in place in Northern Ireland.
The FSU and NSS said they would appeal against the verdict.
An FSU spokesperson said: "Religious tolerance is an important British value, but it doesn't require non-believers to respect the blasphemy codes of believers.
"On the contrary, it requires people of faith to tolerate those who criticise and protest against their religion, just as their values and beliefs are tolerated."
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The rules of any religion apply ONLY to those who follow it.
Hamit Coskun's freedom of expression includes the right to express views that offend, a judge rules.
Published: Oct 10, 2025
A man who was fined for burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London has won his appeal against his conviction.
Hamit Coskun, 51, shouted abusive comments about Islam as he held the flaming book aloft in Rutland Gardens, Knightsbridge, on 13 February.
In June, he was found guilty at Westminster Magistrates' Court of a religiously aggravated public order offence and fined £240.
At Southwark Crown Court on Friday, Mr Justice Bennathan said that while burning a Quran might be something "many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive", the right to freedom of expression "must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb".
Knife attack
The judge added: "We live in a liberal democracy. One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so.
"The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us."
Turkish-born Mr Coskun said he had come to England "to be able to speak freely about the dangers of radical Islam" and was now "reassured that - despite many troubling developments - I will now be free to educate the British public about my beliefs".
During Mr Coskun's Quran-burning protest, a man emerged from a nearby building and slashed at him with a large knife, later telling police he was protecting his religion. The attacker, Moussa Kadri, 59, was given a suspended jail sentence last month.
Mr Coskun's appeal hearing was attended by shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick who said that while he did not agree with what Mr Coskun had done, he did not believe it was a crime.
Campaigners argued that Mr Coskun's conviction was akin to blasphemy laws being reintroduced "by the back door, inadvertently, by our court service".
Blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021.
[ CCTV captured Moussa Kadri (in the black jacket) attacking Mr Coskun outside the Turkish consulate ]
In June, Mr Coskin was convicted at Westminster Magistrates' Court of a religiously aggravated public order offence of using 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", contrary to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and section five of the Public Order Act 1986.
Convicting him, District Judge John McGarva said Coskun's conduct had been "provocative and taunting" and told him "you have a deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers".
The Free Speech Union said that the overturning of the conviction sent a message that "anti-religious protests, however offensive to true believers, must be tolerated".
Lord Young of Acton, director of the union, which helped fund Mr Coskun's legal case, said: "We're delighted.
"Had the verdict been allowed to stand, it would have sent a message to religious fundamentalists up and down the country that all they need to do to enforce their blasphemy codes is to violently attack the blasphemer, thereby making him or her guilty of having caused public disorder.
"Instead, the crown court has sent the opposite message - that anti-religious protests, however offensive to true believers, must be tolerated."
The National Secular Society said the judgment was "an important victory for freedom of expression", describing Mr Coskun's protest as a "lawful act of political dissent".
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"Free speech is the bedrock on which all our other freedoms rest."Defending the fundamental right that protects all other rights.Make a Dona
In 1742 David Hume boasted that: “Nothing is more apt to surprise a foreigner than the extreme liberty which we enjoy in this country of communicating whatever we please to the public”. Voltaire saw 18th-century Britain as a paradise of tolerance and freedom that stood in stark contrast to despotic France. Today foreigners are more likely to be shocked by Britain’s determination to eviscerate that proud tradition.
The nation that gave us John Milton’s Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has failed to learn the lesson of the Rushdie affair: when a vicious theocracy in a foreign country put a death warrant on a novelist for writing a “blasphemous” book.
Ever since then, on that fateful day in February 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, Britain has been haunted by the threat of Islamist violence. This past week marks a continuation of that sinister moment.
Earlier this year, Hamit Coskun burned a Koran and shouted profanities against Islam outside the Turkish consulate in London. His protest targeted what he called the “Islamist government of [president] Erdogan,” accusing Turkey of harbouring “radical Islamists.”
Local Moussa Kadri responded by threatening to kill Coskun. He retrieved a bread knife from his home and launched a frenzied attack. He slashed at Coskun, knocked him to the ground; and kicked and spat on him until bystanders intervened.
Yet last Monday, 59-year-old Kadri received a suspended sentence of just 20 weeks. Judge Hiddleston emphasised that Kadri was “clearly deeply offended” by Coskun’s Quran burning.
Framing Kadri’s brutal assault on Coskun as somehow mitigated by offended religious feelings gets things exactly backwards. A religiously motivated attack on a provocative but peaceful protester isn’t just an assault on a person: it’s an attack on the right to criticise religion itself. In any society that claims to value free and open debate, that right must be jealously guarded.
But the damage to free speech goes further. The same legal system that let Kadri off with a slap on the wrist went on to convict his victim, Coskun, of a religiously aggravated public order offence. The sentencing judge found that Coskun’s protest was “motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam”, even though Coskun insisted that he was targeting Islam as a religion and Turkish president Erdogan’s Islamist policies.
In essence criticism of religion was transformed into hatred against Muslims: “blasphemy” turned into hate crime. Worse still was the judge’s logic in deeming Coskun’s protest “disorderly”. This was “no better illustrated,” he said, than by the fact that it provoked “serious public disorder” when Coskun was attacked by two different people.
In other words: being violently assaulted turned Coskun’s peaceful protest into a crime, while Kadri, who resorted to violence because he was offended, escaped prison altogether.
Even if technically within sentencing guidelines, the combination of Kadri’s leniency and Coskun’s conviction sends a disturbing message: offend religious sensibilities and you risk punishment not only from the state, but from violent Islamist vigilantes, whose actions the courts seem to excuse if their outrage is sincere enough.
This is a profoundly dangerous development in open democracies, where the hard-won right to offend religion is under severe pressure from the “Jihadist’s veto”.
The warning signs are clear. Britain is part of a wider Western trend of nations facing Islamist violence against freedom of expression. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Danish Cartoon affair, which triggered terrorist attacks and forced cartoonists underground for the “crime” of depicting the Prophet Muhammed; the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were gunned down for irreverent cartoons of the prophet; the fifth anniversary of the beheading of Samuel Paty, a French teacher murdered for showing those same cartoons in a civics class; and only three years since Rushdie himself was nearly killed on stage by a knife-wielding fundamentalist who, like Kadri, claimed that offending speech had “attacked Islam”.
The contrast with America is telling. Despite a previously clean criminal record, Mr. Rushdie’s assailant received the maximum punishment of 25 years in prison. The sentencing judge made it clear that he viewed the assault as an attack against freedom of expression when he said that “We all have the right to have our own ideals…We all have a right to express them. But when you interfere with someone else’s ability by committing a violent act…we need to send a message through the judiciary that it just will not be tolerated”.
It would be fitting if British law reflected the same ideals, rather than collapsing the fundamental distinction between words and violence. Britain once inspired the world with its forceful and principled defence of free speech. Unless it rediscovers that principle, it will end up legitimising the very forces determined to silence it.
Moussa Kadri has been spared jail after attacking an anti-Islam activist with a knife.
By: Hugo Timms
Published: Sep 24, 2025
In central London in February, Turkey-born asylum seeker Hamit Coskun was attacked with a knife and violently assaulted. His assailant, Moussa Kadri, swung at him multiple times with a bread knife. ‘I’m going to kill you’, Kadri said, before kicking and spitting on Coskun as he fell to the ground. Yet it is the victim of this harrowing assault, not his attacker, who committed the more serious crime in the eyes of the English justice system. Because prior to being attacked, Coskun had burned a copy of the Koran.
If there were any doubt that the UK now has both a two-tier justice system and Islamic blasphemy laws, then the cases of Kadri and Coskun surely put this to rest.
Back in June, Coskun was convicted of a ‘religiously aggravated public-order offence’, after he burned the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in protest against Turkey’s President Erdoğan. In Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Coskun was found guilty and fined £240. Worse, the judge cited the knife attack and held it up as proof that Coskun’s Koran-burning had led to public disorder. Apparently, he had all but brought this violence on himself.
The contrast with Kadri’s treatment could not be more stark. In sentencing him yesterday at Southwark Crown Court, the judge bent over backwards to minimise the seriousness of the attack. Kadri, who pleaded guilty to common assault and possession of a bladed weapon, was spared jail. He was instead fined just £150 and handed a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months. The judge accepted he had merely lost his ‘temper and self-control’ as a result of being ‘deeply offended’.
The judge even saw fit to lavish praise on Kadri during the sentencing. Apparently, it was a ‘tragedy’ that he had ended up before the court despite leading such a productive life. He was a ‘loved husband and father’, a ‘hard worker’ and a man whose colleagues ‘cannot praise highly enough’, we were told.
The message sent by these two court decisions is chilling. The English justice system has made it clear that it will punish blasphemy against Islam. Worse, it considers physical violence – even slashing at someone with a knife – to be an almost understandable response to those who besmirch Islam’s honour. So much so that attacking a blasphemer attracts a smaller fine than the act of blasphemy itself.
The British justice system has taken a dark turn. It is not only criminalising those who blaspheme against Islam – it is also putting a target on their backs. It has given a green light to the use of violence to silence Islam’s critics. This cannot be allowed to stand in a secular, democratic country.
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A knife wielding Muslim man who attacked a free speech anti-Islamist anti-extremism protester who was burning a Quran outside the Turkish embassy has been let off, in my opinion, with a suspended sentence and community service hours.
Moussa Kadri who slashed at Hamit Coskun with a blade in broad daylight gets a measly 20 week suspended sentence. No jail time, just a bit of unpaid work and a few rehabilitation sessions.
Meanwhile, Coskun, who dared to exercise his free speech, is dragged through the courts, labeled a hate monger, and treated like a criminal for burning a book. The judge found Coskun guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offense in June, noting his actions in burning the Quran were highly provocative and that he was motivated, at least in part, by hatred of Muslims.
But in my view, it's very clear what the conviction of Coskun meant. The judiciary seems to want to introduce blasphemy laws with no vote in parliament through the back door specifically for Muslims. The attacker, Mr. Kadri, didn't just lose his temper, nor did he call the police. He came flying out of a building threatening to kill Mr. Coskun, shouting, "I'm coming back and I'm going to kill you now." He then went to grab a knife and slashed at Mr. Coskun repeatedly. He then proceeded to chase him down the street in Nightsbridge where Mr. Coskun fell to the floor and was repeatedly kicked and then spat on.
What do you think Mr. Kadri's reasoning for this was? Well, he told police, "I want to protect my religion." The judge told Mr. Kadri, "The knife could have caused serious injury, even if you never had any intention to stab him, your actions were wholly unacceptable. When armed with a knife, there is always a possibility of serious injury or death."
Well, after hearing that, you'd expect a tough line and punishment for Mr. Kadri, wouldn't you? No. The judge saw no reason for an immediate custodial sentence, having observed the mitigation and accepted his remorse. So there you have it. A dangerous knife wielding thug who threatens to kill somebody, violently attacks them in public all because they were offended, now will not see a minute behind bars.
Just remember Lucy Connelly only wrote a tweet. Yes, a tweet. Lord Toby Young of the Free Speech Union nailed it. He said this, "This sends a green light to any Muslim who wants to enforce an Islamic blasphemy by taking the law into their own hands."
Well, at his trial, Mr. Coskun argued that he had been protesting against the Islamist government of Erdigan, the president of Turkey, not individual followers of Islam. And the judge ordered Coskun, who fled his home country of Turkey two and a half years ago to escape persecution, to pay a fine of only £240 with a statutory charge of £96.
But let's talk about the knife crime epidemic while we're at it, shall we? Because the judge in Mr. Kadri's case had previously called the use of blades a curse on our communities. Yet here we are letting a man who wielded a knife in a vicious attack stroll out of court without a day behind bars. Over 50,000 knife crime offenses were recorded in England and Wales last year. And what do rulings like this show? They show that our spineless justice system is the most dangerous part of our society. And this ruling, in my very strong opinion, is the most dangerous ruling I've seen in Britain to date.
And do you know what I'm worried about coming next? And I'm sure you are at home, too. Islamophobia laws. An adviser to the attorney general has already warned a definition of Islamophobia could deter police from investigating Muslim offenders. Think about the impact it could have on activist judges and lawyers. There must be proper punishment for those who decide to attack another person with a knife in our country. Regardless of whether they are offended or not, it doesn't matter. Free speech and the right to peaceful protest, no matter how offensive it is to your religion or to your values, is part of British society and our culture.
Stephen Knight: We've been-- we're kind of recording this now with a backdrop of a man just having been convicted I think for a religiously motivated public order offense for burning a Quran in the streets of London. Now the judiciary have gone to pains to argue this is not related to blasphemy in any way, but it feels like a distinction without a difference to me and I just wanted to get your opinion on the plight of this gentleman who's now been convicted for it.
Andrew Doyle: Yes. His name's Hamit Coskun. Yeah. It's a blasphemy law. Yeah, of course it's a blasphemy law.
He engaged in a peaceful protest against the Turkish regime, the Erdoğan regime, which he perceives to be Islamist and to be sewing the seeds for Islamist radicalism. And his protest was outside the Turkish consulate. The location of the protest was taken as evidence by the judge that this was-- he was trying to cause alarm and distress, that he knew that Muslims would be present. Where else is he going to protest against the Turkish government than outside the Turk Turkish consulate? It's the most it's the best place for that protest. The fact that that's used in never done against him is astonishing.
But the most incredible thing is he burnt his own copy of the Quran, which anyone is has a right to do. As a liberal, you oppose people who burn other people's books. And you support someone's right to dispose of their own book how they see fit. And if this person wants to do it as a protest against a belief system that he does not support and actually thinks is pernicious, which is his right to believe, then that's his business. That's not nothing to do with the state.
It is outrageous that he was even arrested for it. He wasn't calling for violence or engaging in violence. This was a peaceful protest. The only way it could be proven in court that it wasn't a peaceful protest is if it fulfilled the criteria of intending to cause alarm and distress.
And by the way, the Crown Prosecution Service original wording for the charge said that would it was intended to cause alarm and distress against the institution of Islam. Not against Muslims, against the institution of Islam, against the faith. They had to change the wording because the Crown Prosecution Service had basically just invented their own law. They'd literally written it as a blasphemy law that does not exist. That's the Crown Prosecution Service. That's how deep the institutional capture goes.
The most disturbing, and this is the craziest thing, is that the prosecution hinged on the idea that this was likely to cause public disorder. Right? This guy burning his Quran was then stabbed by a knife wielding maniac and then kicked while he lay on the floor, kicked and spat on by another guy, some Deliveroo driver or something. And those two attacks were taken as evidence that he'd caused public disorder. This is so crazy.
So, I did a tweet as Titania McGrath saying that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump proves that Donald Trump is guilty of inciting violence.
Knight: Oh my god.
Doyle: This is a a judge saying what Tatania said. I mean, and using Tatania's logic. I'm not saying he read the tweet, but he may as well have. using Tatania's logic to prosecute someone to victim blame, say "you need to be prosecuted for someone attacking you." It's the equivalent of saying, "wasn't your skirt a bit short?"
Insults are not violence and the law must not protect offended feelings
By: Helen Pluckrose
Published: Jun 20, 2025
Hamit Coskun, a Kurdish-Armenian asylum seeker has been found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London while insulting Islam. The disorder occurred when he was attacked with a knife, knocked to the ground and kicked by Moussa Kadri, enraged by the insulting of his religion. Coskun was fined £240. Kadri was charged with assault.
Discussion of this on social media has revealed a range of opinions, some of them typically unhinged. Others, however, have been better reasoned. Some people have argued that it was right for Mr. Coskun to be prosecuted because he had been deliberately and publicly trying to provoke Muslims with gross insult of their religion and ‘desecration’ of their holy text. This is the “Well, what did you expect to happen?” defence of violence which is no defence at all. One can expect unjustifiable responses to things to happen and those responses remain unjustifiable. Often the point of provoking them is to highlight the problem of their likelihood and bring this to public attention.
Other people have responded that Mr. Coskun’s traumatic experiences and those of his family members in the name of Islam that occured in Turkey justify his extreme antipathy to the religion and his actions should be regarded with compassion and not prosecuted. This is well-intentioned, undoubtedly, but ‘making excuses’ for Coskun’s protest rather misses the point. Good responses have been made to this that one should not need traumatic personal experiences to be permitted to be harshly critical of any religion or any set of ideas either publicly or privately. Commenters have also pointed out that to prosecute Mr. Coskun on such a charge amounts to the de facto reinstatement of blasphemy laws.
What stands out to me is the alarming reasoning of the judge in the case which seems to tie directly into an illiberal shift in our cultural norms in which people are no longer expected to take responsibility for managing their own emotions and the line between expression of ideas and violence has become blurred. Several commentators have been trying to bring people’s attention to bear on this particular aspect of the case and the dangerous precedent it sets, including the consistently principled Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
There’s a particularly disturbing element to this case. Namely, the judge’s justification for the conviction. The “disorderly” nature of Coskun’s protest, the judge said, “is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.”
That’s right, a man’s violent attack on another was cited as evidence of the victim’s guilt.
We must not underestimate the alarming and deeply regressive nature of the reasoning used here. It’s the same one that has been used to justify things like the “Gay panic defence” in which someone seeks to mitigate a violent assault or even murder of a gay man. The attacker claims he was not responsible for his own behaviour because the gay man had so shocked and traumatised him by indicating that he was attracted to him or even just being openly gay in his presence leading him to think he might be. “He produced these violent emotions in me. It’s not my fault.” It is the same reasoning that has been used to excuse rape or sexual assault on the grounds that the assaulted woman was dressed scantily or behaving flirtatiously causing the rapist to lose control of himself and be unable to prevent himself from inflicting terror, pain and violation on another human being. “She evoked great sexual arousal in me. I couldn’t help it.” In both cases, the violent individual seeks to exonerate himself from having any responsibility to manage his own emotions and not inflict on them on other people. He blames the victim.
This is the same reasoning that has been used as one justification for blasphemy laws impacting religious minorities, atheists and dissidents for much of history and still does in many parts of the world today. Blasphemy laws have historically been defended on the grounds that they insult God and can lead others away from God, thus damning their own souls and making the blasphemer a danger to society. In more secular times where the existence of God is not regarded as objectively true and the right to disbelieve has been established and is also the position of at least half the population , many nevertheless continue to consider religious beliefs deserving of a special kind of respect and protection. It is regarded as particularly offensive to insult or mock deeply held religious beliefs or beliefs considered ‘sacred.’ Secularists have long stood against this position and argued that religious beliefs are entitled to exactly the same degree of protection and respect as any other kind of belief which is to say, none at all. Your right to hold your beliefs, express them and live according to them is protected. The right to make other people do so or to speak of your religion with deference and respect does not exist.
It is not that it is untrue to say that people can feel deeply and genuinely hurt, offended, disgusted or outraged by somebody else saying or doing something critical or insulting of their most cherished and sacred beliefs. It is demonstrably true that they can and do, sometimes to the extent that their instinct is to react violently. This kind of extreme emotional response is undoubtedly a facet of human nature. I read an interview with a 17-year-old boy who had taken part in the murder of Farkhunda Malikzada in Afghanistan in which she was beaten, bludgeoned, run over with a car and set on fire by a mob following a (false) allegation that she had set fire to a Quran. He said that some kind of madness of rage had consumed him in which he felt that this young woman must be utterly destroyed and eradicated from the world.
It is precisely because this kind of violent, unreasoning rage and hatred of those who offend our sacred beliefs is one of the darkest and most destructive facets of human nature and is unlikely to ever be removed from our psychology that we must defend societal expectations that they will not be indulged or tolerated. To be a citizen of a liberal democracy in which you are allowed to hold, express and live by your own beliefs and maintain a system in which this is protected, you must commit to the responsibility of managing your own emotions if somebody else insults or mocks those beliefs (or simply does not share them).
Well-intentioned people who want us all to live and let live in mutual respect and understanding often look askance at those of us who defend the right to insult religion; most commonly Islam but occasionally Christianity. “But why would you want to burn Qurans or grossly insult Islam or draw crude cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?” they ask. “Surely, the motivation behind that can only be hatred of Muslims and a wish to cause them distress?” While some people assuredly do hate Muslims simply because they are Muslims and wish to cause them distress and are deeply unpleasant people, I’d suggest most of us don’t actually want to do any of that at all. We simply want to know that we can without anybody being injured, murdered or having their property set on fire. We need to know that Muslims will commit to the same responsibility held by everybody else to manage their own feelings of hurt, disgust or outrage rather than making it the responsibility of everybody else to ensure that they never feel that way. This commitment is central to preserving the foundations of a liberal society in which people with different religious or political beliefs can live together.
In a discussion last year with a very nice young British Muslim who genuinely held values of religious tolerance and universalism (as well as some ideas about karmic energies being repaid in one’s own lifetime that I am fairly sure are not Islamic), I nevertheless found him unreceptive to the idea that tolerating the insulting of religion was a good thing. British Muslims, he said, needed to respect that they are living in a predominantly Christian country and be good citizens of it and good neighbours. They should be respectful of Christianity and of Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and all religions existing on this island but, at the same time, they had the right to expect the same courtesy in return. Violence could never be justified as a response to insulting religion but the law should prosecute deliberate, provocative insult to any religion. This, he believed, was the way to achieve a harmonious religiously diverse society. It is my perception that this is a common feeling among Muslims and a considerable number of non-Muslims in my country. Of course, violence is an unacceptable response to insulting religion but insulting religion is also hateful and divisive and just unnecessary. We should do something about it.
This troubles me considerably even though I recognise that the motivations for it are not straightforwardly authoritarian or, at least, not perceived as such by proponents of it. On a broader cultural level, it’s not even specifically about protecting religion and punishing religious dissidents. It’s about protecting feelings and punishing people who disturb the peace. This is a peculiarly British thing that is often misunderstood by Americans who misconceive it as a straightforward manifestation of authoritarian wokeness and are then confused that we have also prosecuted people for insulting British soldiers and calling the (conservative) Prime Minister a ‘coconut’ due to his lack of wokeness, as well as rounding up republicans so they could not protest the coronation of the King.
National quirks involving a dislike of ‘making a scene’ aside, however, the UK is following (and sometimes leading) an alarming trend across the Anglosphere towards conflating language with violence and expecting society to ensure that nobody has hurt feelings rather than expecting the offended individual to manage their own feelings of offendedness themselves. This ties in with what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have called “the rise of victimhood culture.” In their model, as it pertains to insult, we have historically lived in an ‘honour culture’ where insult was taken very personally and responded to with violence to preserve one’s honour. This gave way to a dignity culture in which we understood that insults were generally better off ignored or responded to with words, and only when material harm was done should punitive action be taken and then through legal means. Their contention is that this is now giving way to a ‘victimhood culture’ in which insults are again regarded as intolerable and taken very personally and the ‘go to’ response to this is to appeal to third party authorities to punish the offender. In a Victimhood Culture, the status of ‘victim’ bestows prestige which then incentivises positioning oneself as a victim and does considerable harm to the expectations, norms and even laws of a liberal democracy which are based on a dignity culture.
I find this model of changing social norms and expectations very plausible, especially around issues of insult and the perception of a moral imperative to punish people for hurtful or offensive words or ideas and perceiving them as directly harmful, rather than expecting the individual to take responsibility for their own feelings of hurt or offense. The combination of Victimhood Culture’s approach to dealing with insult and the Honour Culture approach to dealing with it which typically underlies the Muslim objection to insults of the religion or its prophet make for a particularly toxic mix that present a legitimate threat to the continued existence not only of Dignity Culture but the liberal norms and expectations that produced it.
What Manning and Campbell describe as Dignity Culture is, I would argue, one manifestation of the philosophical principles of liberalism in practice. In order to have a society that values individual liberty, resolves conflict without violence and enables the free exchange of ideas that have been so productive of the development of scientific knowledge and human rights, we must protect those fundamental liberal principles. Although many people regard liberalism and the corresponding concept of the “Marketplace of Ideas” as too soft and cerebral a way of managing conflict and defeating bad ideas to be effective, it is nothing of the kind and history bears testament to this. The expectation that people will tolerate ideas they don’t like and criticism of ideas they themselves hold sacred, including in ways that are harsh, uncompromising, insulting or mocking and manage their feelings of outrage or hurt themselves either privately or by responding only with counterargument is a tough one. It is fundamentally difficult for humans to separate words and ideas from physical harm and tolerate the former while having no tolerance for the latter. We have never achieved this perfectly and probably never will. Nevertheless, a culture that has this expectation firmly rooted in its collective psyche and shared cultural norms will do much better at resolving conflict and enabling people with different ideas to coexist peacefully than one that does not. Given that there has never been a time or place in which a society of humans have not held different ideas and engaged in conflict over them, we would do well to protect this expectation uncompromisingly.
The case of Hamit Coskun is a symptom of a wider cultural problem that it is vital we recognise and address as it is. Arguments about whether Mr. Coskun was being deliberately insulting, whether he should have known this would be received badly by some Muslims and whether his own lived experience and those of his family offer some mitigation for his actions are utterly irrelevant to this larger issue. Mr. Coskun could be a delightful chap making an entirely warranted peaceful protest against some specific ideas or a hateful individual who wishes harm upon all Muslim people and the larger issue would remain unchanged. We should be able to be confident that we live in a society where people understand that they are expected to tolerate ideas they find hurtful or offensive, that they are not physically harmed by them, have no right of protection from them and that they have the responsibility to manage their own feelings about them themselves. The judge in this case utterly failed to recognise this important standard and we should be worried about that.
