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 engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.” No book has been more frequently prosecuted for blasphemy in England. The 19th-century deist reformer Richard Carlile spent years in prison merely for selling it. At one of his trials, the attorney general denounced The Age of Reason as “one of the most abominable, disgusting, and wicked attacks on religion and its author that has ever appeared in the world”. Locking Carlile up, he insisted, was necessary to “protect the lower and illiterate classes from having their faith sapped”.
That world, we like to think, is long gone. The last conviction for blasphemy in England was in 1979 — against Gay News magazine and its editor — and the offence was formally abolished in 2008. But this week a zombified version rose from the grave — not in the name of Christianity, but under the banner of protecting Islam and its followers.
On Monday, Turkish-born Hamit Coskun was fined £240 for a religiously aggravated public order offence. His crime: burning a Quran in front of London’s Turkish consulate, while shouting “Fuck Islam,” “Islam is a religion of terrorism,” and “The Quran is burning.” During his protest, Coskun was stabbed and kicked by bystanders.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).