In response to the burnings of the Koran, Ahmad A, a Muslim man, had requested authorization to burn a Torah on Saturday July 15, in front of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm… In the end, the young man did not do so, but took the opportunity to start a debate on the limits of free speech in Sweden.
2 mins
With our correspondent in Stockholm, Carlotta Morteo
Surrounded by a cordon of police and a swarm of journalists, the young man is a little intimidated.
” It is a response to people who burn the Quran. I want to show that freedom of expression has limits that we must take into account “, he explains.
Read alsoA man burns pages of the Koran in front of a mosque in Sweden, indignation in Turkey
Of Syrian origin, this 32-year-old refugee says he is a practicing Muslim. And it is because he is a Muslim that he will not burn, either today or ever, the sacred text of the Jews, the Torah.
” I want to show that we have to respect each other, we live in the same society. What I wanted to show is that it is wrong to burn sacred books. If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Koran… there will be war here “, he underlines.
For him, as for Anne Slotte, a Swedish Catholic who came to observe the scene, burning religious books is a drift of the law on freedom of expression.
” Freedom of expression means discussing, debating, disagreeing. But what is the meaning of burning a book? Do you symbolically burn believers? The authors of the text? The substance of what is written? It’s too blurry. So the simplest interpretation is that you want to burn Jews or Muslims… she says.
The debate over the book burnings is tearing apart Swedish society, which wants to protect the right to blasphemy without falling into incitement to hatred.
Read alsoKoran burned in Stockholm: OIC calls for “collective measures” to prevent such acts