Salwan Momika, the Iraqi man who spearheaded the Quran burning protest in Sweden, was shot dead today. Five men have been arrested for the murder, which was committed in front of an online audience, with the victim livestreaming on TikTok at the time of his killing. While police in Stockholm haven’t formally announced the motive for the crime, Momika isn’t the first critic of Islam to have been brutally murdered in Europe – and I expect he won’t be the last.
Momika had repeatedly received threats, from radical Muslims and Islamic countries alike, following the 2023 Quran burning demonstration, during which he had been attacked. He was initially provided with protection, but local authorities revoked it after a Swedish court charged him with ‘inciting hatred against an ethnic group’. Unfortunately, the court did not cite the one particular ethnicity or nationality that the Quran might belong to. After enacting de facto Islamic blasphemy laws, the Swedish authorities even ordered Momika to leave Sweden, allegedly over errors in his documentation. But he couldn’t be sent back to Iraq given that it is one of over 30 Muslim-majority states that uphold violent penalties for blasphemy against Islam, with the death penalty enforced in a dozen of them.
Killing over blasphemy against Islam isn’t a fringe Muslim belief; that should be evident from the number of states that endorse it, ranging from the newly self-identifying ‘moderate’ Arab states to the likes of Afghanistan and Syria now under jihadist control. Over the past fortnight alone, Iran and Pakistan have sentenced individuals to death over words, with growing persecution over blasphemy being witnessed worldwide, from the incarcerated in Indonesia to the lynched in Nigeria.
In the West, even those engaging in academic studies of Islam are often silenced by intimidation, as recently seen in Hamline University, Minnesota and Batley Grammar School in the UK. Even the decapitated head of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty couldn’t spark any meaningful clampdown of the Islamist blasphemy threats from the leaders of the West who had marched on the streets of Paris proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie’ after the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists over its caricatures of Muhammad in 2015.
Momika’s killing comes soon after the 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. A decade on, dissidents of Islam arguably carrying an even more prominent bullseye on their heads in the West. Denmark, which had witnessed its own violent episodes over Jyllands-Posten’s caricatures of Islam’s prophet, actually passed a law after the Quran burning manifestations in Sweden making Islam an exception over free speech because of security concerns, in effect subjecting fundamental freedoms to Islamist mobs’ approval. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights had denied that insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad comes under free speech, establishing the act as ‘disparaging an object of veneration of a… religious society.’
Sweden, which is now offering generous amounts of money for immigrants to leave the country, decided to find a loophole in its own legal commitment to free speech, including against all faiths, by issuing Momika a hate crime charge, which he was to formally receive at a district court today. With legal excuses already in place to co-opt Islamic law in Sweden, Momika has now been given the sharia penalty for blasphemy in Stockholm, even if extra-judicially.
Like Salwan Momika, his co-protester Salwan Najem has little faith in Swedish authorities protecting him from radical Muslims. ‘I am next’, he posted on X today. One hopes for Najem’s sake that he isn’t, but whoever inevitably is will be killed by the idea that Islam deserves special protection from freedom of speech.
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