This week, British courts have faced criticism for reintroducing blasphemy laws.
During a protest, the Kurdish-Armenian atheist Hamit Coskun protested President Erdogan by shouting “fuck Islam” and “Islam is a religion of terrorism” while holding the Koran aloft.
Initially, Coskun was charged with harassing the “religious institution of Islam”. However, the charge was later revised following intervention from free speech advocates. On Monday, Westminster Magistrates’ Court found him guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence of using disorderly conduct — with the offence deemed religiously aggravated due to hostility directed, at least in part, toward followers of Islam.
What this amounts to is a de jure Islamic blasphemy law, imposed by stealth. No one is surprised, of course — only outraged. How could they be surprised? The easy myths continue to war wage against the difficult truth of life in neocommunalist Britain; we already had Islamic blasphemy laws. The only exceptional thing about Coskun’s case is that it is a de jure reification of a de facto reality. In areas with large Muslim populations who can exert influence on authorities, blasphemy laws already exist.
Perhaps the most infamous example is the case of the Batley Grammar School teacher who, in 2021, who showed a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad during a religious studies lesson to spark discussion on free speech and religious sensitivity. Protesters gathered outside the school, the teacher was suspended and he was ultimately driven into hiding after receiving death threats. He was cleared of wrongdoing by an internal investigation and an independent review led by government adviser Dame Sara Khan found he had been let down by the council, police and the trust running the school. It called the protests a “harrowing example” and called the teacher a “victim of freedom-restricting harassment”. He remains in hiding to this day.
The question for any nation with a large Muslim population when it comes to blasphemy laws is; what other choice do you have?
Two years later, in Wakefield, a 14-year-old autistic boy was accused of “damaging” a copy of the Koran by scuffing it and received death threats as a result. This was the result of a dare — the other children involved also received death threats. Police were called to investigate, and a child suspected of issuing the death threats was identified. Rather than facing formal action, the individual was given “words of advice” by an officer. The scuffing, meanwhile, was recorded as a non-crime hate incident. One of the boys’ mothers appeared at a news conference alongside police in the local mosque, apologising for her child’s “disrespectful” behaviour and seeking forgiveness from the community.
Given the religious basis of Islamic conceptions of law, the question for any nation with a large Muslim population when it comes to blasphemy laws is; what other choice do you have?
The Islamic conception of law is fundamentally different to the western one. In Western legal systems, a crime is typically defined as an act (or failure to act) that violates a statute or regulation enacted by a legitimate authority. They violate the laws established by the state or society, which are then subject to legal prosecution by governmental authorities and are categorized according to their level of severity and possible harm, resulting in a range of corresponding punishments.
In Islamic jurisprudence, by contrast, criminal behaviour is:
… any conduct or demeanor that violates the fundamental principles and proscriptions enshrined within the Quran, the Hadith (the recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, and the consensus of Islamic scholars (ijma). Crimes are perceived as transgressions against the established principles of divine order and moral norms, hence causing disruption to the overall equilibrium and societal welfare.
Given the religious foundation of Islamic jurisprudence, many secular countries have had to find a way to accommodate it. Britain has developed a quiet dual legal system, applying to Sharia courts the same parallel mechanism that exists for Jewish Beth Din courts and Anglican ecclesiastical tribunals. Sharia courts are permitted to issue legally binding decisions in areas like marriage, divorce, and inheritance, provided both parties consent. With 85 Islamic councils currently operating, Britain has since been called the “Western capital” of Sharia courts, which have also begun to influence the secular system; a High Court judge recently referenced a sharia council fatwa in a critical life-or-death decision involving a five-year-old girl, Tafida Raqeeb, who is in a vegetative state. It is also estimated that around 100,000 Islamic marriages have taken place in the UK, many of which are not officially registered with civil authorities. Predictably, the women involved in subsequent divorces — which must also be carried out in Sharia courts — do not receive the standard of justice they could expect in a British court.
But of course Sharia courts do not — and by definition cannot, since they are designed only for the Ummah — deal with the blasphemy of an atheist like Coskun. But since Islamic conceptions of law are rooted in religious teachings, they impel the criminalisation of conduct that contravenes the core tenets and prohibitions set out in the Quran. With Sharia courts unable to reach beyond their intended religious community, the impulse to defend these religious imperatives has instead manifested itself through attempts to introduce a form of blasphemy law into British law.
The most prominent attempt, so far, has been the definition of Islamophobia proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims — formally adopted by Labour’s National Executive Committee in 2019.
The definition uses the language of the progressive left, shielding Islam from criticism by presenting it as a measure against bigotry. The group defined Islamophobia as “rooted in racism” and “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” That means, in practice, that voicing concerns about immigration from Muslim-majority countries, describing grooming gangs as predominantly Muslim, or offering philosophical critiques of Islamic doctrine could all be construed as Islamophobic.
Whilst the government has stopped short of adopting the definition, Angela Rayner has since launched a working group on Anti-Muslim Hatred that will provide a non-statutory definition of Islamophobia — which will be chaired by former attorney general and Conservative MP Dominic Grieve KC, who wrote the forward to the original Islamophobia APPG report.
Some attempts to resurrect a blasphemy law (with Britain abolishing its blasphemy laws in 2008) are less subtle. Last November, Labour MP Tahir Ali asked Sir Keir Starmer whether he would introduce laws to ban “desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of Abrahamic religions.” In response, the Prime Minister stated we must tackle “Islamophobia in all its forms” — essentially conceding that the state has a duty to prevent criticism of Islam.
But again, we return to the problem situation; what other choice is there? A recent forecast has indicated that the Muslim population in the UK, currently at around 7 per cent, is projected to rise to over one in ten within the next 25 years, and could make up nearly 20 per cent of the total population by the end of the century. As the Muslim population grows, calls for blasphemy laws will only grow stronger; we can call Coskun’s case a line in the sand, but the thing about lines in the sand is that they usually wash away in time.
