New Qur’an-burning incidents are taking place in North European countries. After a Danish politician last week burned the Holy Qur’an in front of the Turkish embassy in the Swedish capital Stockholm, a similar scandal emerged in The Netherlands. The Swedish state protected this deliberate attack on a religious faith’s most fundamental holy book, allowing the goal to be achieved. The attacks on the Qur’an were then further expanded when a Flemish politician joined anti-Islam demonstrations. This person tore apart the Holy Qur’an in front of the parliament building, positioning the state and politics against other nations’ religious faiths. The resulting picture is extremely critical. The representatives of a few states gather to display animosity towards other people’s religions, and the state supports this. There are signs that similar incidents will continue. We are clearly facing a situation that requires deep contemplation.
Further instigating animosity and grudge against a religion’s fundamental source through the state and politics is a major event. This is something new. It is not easy to categorize this as an orientalist approach. It might perhaps be considered as a new stage in orientalism. As the despicable attack on Islam’s fundamental source in North European is directly associated with Türkiye, the political and social results concern us more closely. As known, the Qur’an burning ritual was carried out in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm following Türkiye’s demand from Sweden to extradite the anti-Türkiye terrorist organization members.
Certain groups in Türkiye brought into question the terrorist organizations emerging in the Islamic region in order to trivialize the Qur’an burning incidents. Such approaches revealing that those whose worldview is centered around the West are in great despair shows the degree of detachment from reality. They wasted no time bringing up the bad “representations” of Islam due to this event. This thus gave rise to a strange situation like the accusation of the Muslim world from the alliance of North European countries. Those like columnist Taha Akyol, who hold responsible Russian President Vladimir and Russia for the Qur’an burning sessions in pagan rituals need to be noted. Liberal conservatives are also taking advantage of this event to accuse the Muslim world. We must ask here whether the causality principle was disregarded for a moment, or whether this is a habit.
The Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) matter was not discussed in detail in Türkiye. This applied to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as well. Naturally, this gave rise to ambiguity with respect to the July 15, 2016 events. Despite this, anti-Türkiye sentiment standing out as an obvious factor in pagans’ Qur’an-burning sessions may lead to questions about ambiguity. The pagan rituals started in North European countries when Türkiye demanded the terror organization members from Sweden. As a requirement of the causality principle, these two organizations had to be brought to question. In other words, contrary to the artificial causality relationship created between the pagan rituals and reasons such as the Islamic world’s backwardness, bad representatives, and lack of unity, FETÖ and PKK are directly involved in the rituals. But what sort of effect will these events have on these two organizations? Holding Putin responsible as someone looking at the events from outside might be comforting, yet the results of being a part of the Qur’an-burning session must be contemplated. It can be said that they are trying to add a mass dimension to the events and pave the way to political paganism.
Taha Akyol says, “escalating tensions will serve the PKK and islamophobics,” and warns those whom he identifies as “political Islamists,” claiming they are trying to create opposition “to Western law’s equality, freedom, and human rights norms”: Don’t generalize saying “the West is anti-Islam.” If only this is all Akyol said. But he also says go and attack China and India, stand up to Russia. One does not need to be a text analyst to interpret these words as, don’t attack the West, fight against the East – because this is all directly stated.
I don’t use the political paganism term to be interesting. It would be wrong to ambiguate the new situation emerging in North European countries within the Christian Europe generalization. Anti-Islam and anti-Türkiye sentiment is at the center of the events. It would be a mistake to identify this as a religious movement within Christianity. The politicization of paganism, on the other hand, cannot be explained with terms from the Enlightenment era, such as the conflict between religion and science.
