Wherever they burn books: the politics of desecrating the Qu’ran

Posted on Wednesday 8 September, 2010
Filed Under Religion, War on terror

HEINRICH Heine’s famous aphorism has it that ‘wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings’. But because those words are a classic soundbite and not a literal truth, there remains in a liberal democracy the right to burn books.

Dove World Outreach Center – a tiny hardline Pentecostal sect in Gainsville, Florida  - will put the proposition to the test this Saturday, when it is set to incinerate several hundred copies of the Qu’ran.

As someone who was raised in a similar religious tradition, I perhaps appreciate the symbolism involved here more than many readers will. The doctrine of ‘Biblical inerrancy’ to which fundamentalists of this stripe adhere is the only true parallel within Christianity to the veneration in which Muslims hold their sacred text. They know exactly what they are doing.

That just adds to the nastiness of this publicity stunt, which is attracting the same degree of global coverage that was accorded to Westboro Baptist Church’s pickets of funerals of the fags and dead soldiers it believes God hates. Nice one, Pastor Jones; should put a few bums on pews the following morning.

Make no mistake, the consequences will be colossal. If this vile gesture goes ahead, the resultant storm will put the Mo Toons controversy of 2005 – which ultimately led to 100 deaths, mostly Muslims killed by other Muslims – in the shade.

Just because there is a right to do something does not mean that it is advisable to do it. Were my name of any particular standing, I would happily add it to any appeal to Pastor Jones not to proceed.

Yet I also cannot help but be taken by the double standards of some of those getting involved in this controversy. Gen Petraeus warns for safety of US troops in Afghanistan. It was US troops who pissed on the Qu’ran in Gitmo and ripped up its pages in Abu Ghraib.

And of course, some of those who join the inevitable radical Islamist protests will be those who burned copies of the Satanic Verses and firebombed bookshops in London and elsewhere in the late 1990s.

Heine’s comment has always been regarded as prescient, after the bonfires of works by Jewish and other ‘degenerate’ authors in Germany in 1933 marked a way station on the road to the Holocaust.

But Dove World Outreach Centre do not exercise state power. For much the same reasons as al Muhajiroon should not be banned from demonstrating at the funeral processions of squaddies and the English Defence League should not be banned from the streets of British cities, the lesser evil is to tolerate its cretinous intolerance.

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