Following two inflammatory demonstrations held days ago which saw protesters in Sweden and the Netherlands set fire to and tear up pages of the Quran, Sunni Muslim leaders have urged followers of Islam across the world to boycott Swedish and Dutch goods.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, January 25th, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the Sunni Muslim world’s preeminent religious institution, urged “Muslims to boycott Dutch and Swedish products,” in what is the latest fallout over last weekend’s demonstrations in Stockholm and The Hague where the Islamic holy book was desecrated in the name of freedom of expression, Göteborgs-Posten reports.
The university, in its statement also called for “an appropriate response from the governments of these two countries” which it accused of “protecting barbaric crimes under the inhuman and immoral banner they call ‘freedom of expression.’”
Danish-Swedish political activist Rasmus Paludan, who leads the relatively minor Danish Stram Kurs party, on Saturday set the Quran alight outside the Turkish Embassy in the Swedish capital, ultimately leading Ankara to cancel the planned visit of Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, where he and his Turkish counterpart were set to discuss Turkey’s objections to the Nordic country’s bid to join NATO.
The following day, Edwin Wagensveld, who leads the Dutch chapter of Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicization of the Occident (Pegida), staged an event where he ripped out pages from the Islamic holy book and trampled upon them near the Dutch parliament in The Hague.
In the days which immediately followed the Quran desecrations, protests of varying sizes—from hundreds to perhaps tens of thousands—erupted across the Middle East, including Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq, as The European Conservative previously reported.
Addressing Al-Azhar University’s statements, Jan Hjärpe, Professor of Islamology at Lund University, said that its impact across the Islamic world should not be underestimated since the institution “is the best known of the Sunni universities and has a very strong position in the Islamic world.”
In Sweden, the Quran-burning stunt has divided Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s center-right government, which relies on the support of the national-conservative Sweden Democrats party. Kristersson’s condemnation of the incident has drawn criticism from the Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson, who wrote on social media: “As most people have probably understood, this move from the government is very, very worrying, in my eyes.”
Åkesson continued:
The government should at all times unequivocally stand up for our Swedish freedom of expression. I understand that the aim is not to pour oil on the fire regarding relations with Turkey at a critical time for Sweden. But there is a limit to how a government should express itself, not least because Sweden has a domestic Islamist threat that cannot be underestimated.
I believe, Turkey and Erdogan aside, that it is an extremely dangerous road to go down to “understand” and “feel sorry for” those forces in Sweden who, citing religious dogma, want to abolish our freedom of expression. I will raise this issue with the Prime Minister and let him know how I and the Sweden Democrats view this kind of indifference towards Islamist forces, both inside and outside Sweden.
The Sweden Democrats will never contribute to compromising the foundations of our Swedish democracy because people who have chosen to move here feel offended.
