Photo Credit: Frankie Fouganthin By Jacob Mchangama In 1793, Thomas Paine launched a furious assault on Christianity with The Age of Reason. “What is it the Bible teaches us?” he asked. “Rapine, cruelty, and murder.” He didn’t stop there. “What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman […]
By Jacob Mchangama In February, 50-year-old Hamit Coskun was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to the Islamic faith after burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. A KC told the National Secular Society that the charges were “plainly defective”, while the NSS accused prosecutors of reintroducing a blasphemy law “by the back door”. […]
From the show A Propos France has marked 10 years since an Islamist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that shocked the country and led to fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion. FRANCE 24’s Sharon Gaffney speaks to Jacob Mchangama, founder of “The Future of Free Speech” think tank and research professor […]
Far-right provocateurs burning Qurans led Denmark to pass a law forbidding “improper treatment” of religious texts. History shows this is a very bad idea. Read the article
In 2017, then–Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen proclaimed: “I’m proud and happy that we live in a country where we have abolished the blasphemy provision and where you’re allowed to be critical—even in satire and cartoons—of religious symbols.” Last week, however, Rasmussen, who is now the minister of foreign affairs, did an about-face. The Quran […]
In TIME, Jacob Mchangama explains how Denmark and Sweden’s plans to criminalize Quran burnings forebode a future in which democratic states willingly yield their fundamental principles to religious dogmatism. “On the one hand, there are good reasons to be critical of book burnings. It is a poor substitute for reasoned debate and will forever be […]
In 1766, Sweden enacted its landmark Press Freedom Act, becoming the first country in the world to implement such protections. In 1770, Denmark outpaced this achievement by formally abolishing all forms of censorship. Despite intermittent setbacks, these pioneering acts cultivated a vibrant culture of free expression. The Scandinavian countries evolved into global symbols of democracy, freedom, […]
Hamline University has received considerable backlash for not renewing the employment of a scholar who showed an allegedly “Islamophobic” image of the Prophet Muhammad during an art history class. The university did so, even though the adjunct professor gave ample warnings before and during the class that the image would be shown. According to an […]
The most surprising thing about the cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in New York is that it has taken more than 30 years for a fired-up fundamentalist to get to Rushdie. Since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa in February 1989, ordering all Muslims to kill Rushdie, the list of people attacked or […]