Standing in the sunshine with friends in a park overlooked by Stockholm mosque, Sofia said she was becoming tired of the debates around freedom of expression that followed Qurâan burnings in the Swedish capital.
The 36-year-old, who works in adult education, said she felt as if her religion was often cast as the problem, rather than the people behind the burnings.
âWe are born and raised here over several generations, but they [the government] donât talk about Muslims as if we are part of Sweden,â she said. âWe contribute. We are lawyers, doctors, journalists, healthcare, normal people who are part of Sweden.â
In the latest of a string of protests in Sweden and Denmark in which copies of the Qurâan have been burned or otherwise damaged, two men set fire to the Qurâan outside the Swedish parliament on Monday. The burnings have prompted a domestic debate about the limits of Swedenâs exceptionally liberal freedom of expression laws and intensified a diplomatic row between Sweden and Muslim countries around the world.
âItâs called a âQurâan crisisâ,â Sofia said. âItâs not a Qurâan crisis, this is a ⊠racism crisis.â
The two women standing either side of her voiced their agreement.
âThey turn it on us as if itâs a crisis that Muslims have, but we havenât gone and burnt somebodyâs book,â Sofia added.
Salwan Momika and Salwan Najem, the two Iraqi men responsible for Mondayâs burning, also burned a Qurâan outside Stockholm mosque on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in June.
On Tuesday, Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, accused outsiders of exploiting the countryâs freedom of expression laws to spread hate and of âdragging Sweden into international conflictsâ. He also blamed disinformation for the outrage around the burnings.
Kristersson ruled out reducing Swedenâs legal protections for freedom of expression â which are among the strongest globally â but said his government would consider changes that would allow police to stop Qurâan burnings if they posed a threat to national security.
Chafiya Kharraki, a 45-year-old teacher, said she did not buy Kristerssonâs claim that disinformation was to blame and that she thought Sweden needed to âtake responsibility for its actionsâ.
âIt is real life events that have caused the outrage,â she said. âPeople wonât take it, they wonât swallow it. It is not OK.â
Her friend, who did not want to be identified, said there was no need to change the law, but that it was a question of interpretation. She feared that plans by the government â a minority-coalition run by the Moderates with the support of far-right Sweden Democrats â to look at changing public order laws could pose a threat to democracy.
âFascists are fascists, you canât wait for them to be something else. The Sweden Democrats and this minority government is driving its agenda and we arenât even being spoken of,â the woman said. âBurn the Qurâan and then they can say Islamophobia is bad but they have no plans to stop Islamophobia.â
Imam Mahmoud Khalfi, a spokesperson for Stockholm mosque, where 600-700 people come to pray every day, said: âEvery time, you wait for this absurdity that nobody supports to be put to a stop. Itâs just negative and has dangerous consequences.â
Khalfi said he had received lots of phone calls in recent months from people who wanted to talk about their feelings about the Qurâan burnings, which he said had ânothing to do with freedom of expressionâ.
According to a new poll, the recent burnings may have helped to extend the oppositionâs lead to 11 percentage points, their biggest since last Septemberâs election.
Near the mosque in Södermalm, people were making the most of the sun after days of rain, sitting outside with a drink or watching their children play. While there was widespread condemnation of the Qurâan burning among those the Guardian spoke to, there was disagreement over the best way to prevent it from happening.
Nora, 16, said she did not understand the burnings, which she described as unnecessary. Asked whether they should be banned, the student sighed. âThatâs a hard one,â she said. âFreedom of expression is really important to a certain degree, but when it starts to violate other people itâs not right.â
Rather than changing Swedenâs freedom of expression laws, she suggested using hate speech laws differently. She said she had seen a lot of support for Qurâan burning on social media, but was strongly against it. âI donât support it at all because it is basically violating another group of people. I donât know how you can support that.â
For Inge Zurcher, 79, however, a ban made sense. âItâs awful. It shouldnât be allowed,â she said, adding that the government did not âunderstand what damage theyâre doing to Sweden and to Muslimsâ.
Tal Domankewitz, 39, a tourist guide, said there should be limits to Swedenâs freedom of expression laws. âThere are some cases where you have to think again and not let it happen. It has to be limited.â
Meanwhile, Abdi Ibrahim, 44, a social worker, said the burnings were ruining Swedenâs reputation in the world. âIt feels like most people have the same perception, that freedom of expression is good but that it should not violate others. You can express your views in another way.â
Iman Omer, 20, a Muslim, who was out and about with her sister Monica, said it should be possible to classify the Qurâan burnings as a hate crime. âI understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries,â she said. âItâs such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesnât seem to learn from its mistakes.â
How is anyone harmed by someone else destroying their own property? Just ignore it and the phenomenon will go away. Trying to make it go away by force and control will have the opposite effect. It creates a great weakness that needs to be defended.
I think part of it is that Muslims donât perceive it as a criticism of the Quran or Islam as a religion, but rather an attack on them as Muslims in society. And thatâs probably what Paludan intended. Burning the Quran has taken a new meaning: âMuslims are bad, we donât want them hereâ. Of course the interpretation is always in the mind of the person.
Iâm against banning. I think itâs a slippery slope and banning the burnings is a poor way to deal with it. For me, as a person who once upon a time used to be a Muslim, the best response to quran burnings is to ignore them and move on with oneâs life. It will be challenging for Muslims who perceive it (and rightfully so from their own angle) as an attack against them as a religious and/or ethnic group, especially when performed directly in mosque areas, or during Muslim holidays, a sort of âin your faceâ gesture.
I hope the Muslim community in Sweden will learn from this experinece. So far, the Easter Riots have not been repeated this year despite many Quran burnings taking place and that is already a good step. Muslim Swedes realize that if a few do harm to the community, it will reflect poorly on them, and that the best way to go is to stay calm and rational, even when your own experinece is so different that you may feel that non-muslim Swedes âdonât get itâ.