Convicted for Burning a Quran

On Monday, 50-year-old Kurdish-Armenian asylum seeker Hamit Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge, London on February 13, 2025. Coskun came to Britain after enduring seven years of torture and imprisonment in Turkey. Westminster Magistrates Court delivered the verdict, ruling he was “motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam, based on their membership of that group”. During the protest against President Erdoğan and Jihadism, Coskun shouted “f*** Islam” and “Islam is [a] religion of terrorism”. In his rucksack was a t-shirt with “Islam is a terrorist ideology. The Quran should be banned” printed on it.

During the protest, a man emerged from the neighboring building and attacked Coskun. Despite being caught on film, and saying “You’re a f***ing idiot … burn the Quran… I’m going to f***ing kill you now”, the unnamed man has denied wielding a knife during the attack. He will not be tried until 2027, for reasons undisclosed due to reporting restrictions. A passing Deliveroo cyclist also stopped to kick Coskun while he lay in the street. We have no word on whether this vital contribution to Britain’s GDP has been charged with assault.

Rather, the fact that Coskun was attacked by the man allegedly wielding a knife and the passing delivery driver was seen as proof, by the Crown Prosecution Service, that “There were likely to be Muslims in the location who would suffer harassment alarm or distress” in the vicinity of his protest, therefore warranting his conviction. If you get attacked for offending Islam in Britain, then the courts and the Crown Prosecution Service will blame you for it.

Coskun was originally charged with “intent to cause against the religious institution of ISLAM harassment, alarm or distress” under section 31(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. His charges were changed, after Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick wrote to the Chief Inspector with complaints. But Coskun may as well have been condemned for apostasy by one of Britain’s 85 known Sharia courts, because his persecution amounts to the enforcement of an Islamic blasphemy law.

Philip McGhee, acting for the Crown Prosecution Service, insisted that Coskun was not being prosecuted for the burning of the book, but for his disparaging remarks about Islam. “Nothing about the prosecution of this defendant for his words and actions has any impact on the ability of anyone to make any trenchant criticism of a religion”, McGhee said. Because, of course, no chilling effect at all results from being assaulted, arrested, charged, and convicted for protesting acts of terror and the ideology which disproportionately inspires them. “I fell into a deep sense of hopelessness, encountering such treatment in a country like England, which I truly believed to be a place where freedoms prevail, was a real shock to me”, Coskun told the Free Speech Union — who, together with the National Secular Society, paid for Coskun’s legal and security fees, and will help to appeal the verdict. Coskun told the Telegraph that he intends to tour the UK, burning Korans in other cities “whether he wins or loses his case”.

During his trial, Coskun was subjected to an absurd cross-examination, and challenged on why he burned the entire Quran rather than just passages he found objectionable:

Q: You have referred to passages which you say promote terror – we have seen the size of the book. Those passages are a minority of the content?

A: No.

Q: You refer to 50 passages.

A: 50 plus.

Q: Somewhere between 50 plus and 70 per cent you object to – but not the rest.

A: Important passages.

Q: But there are passages which peace-loving followers of Islam adhere to?

A: Islam is terrorist and terrorists act on the Koran.

Q: You burned the book?

A: Yes.

Q: Not about a selective choice of passages you object to – you just wanted to burn it.

A: Those passages are enough for it to be burned as a whole book.

We know, of course, that had he just burned select pages, he would have been prosecuted for impugning the protected reputation of Muslims nonetheless. Like Lucy Connolly, who underwent a struggle-session for her views on immigration during her appeal hearing, any opinion that is not unreservedly pro-Diversity is proscribed in Britain.

The prosecution complained that “There was no need for him to use the ‘F’ word and direct it towards Islam.” Is obscenity directed at a set of ideas one does not care for enough to warrant a criminal conviction? Of course not. The Convoy for Palestine, which drove through Jewish areas of North London in May 2021, waving Palestinian flags and shouting “F*** their mothers, rape their daughters” on film, had their charges dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service, who said there is “no longer a realistic prospect of either defendant being convicted”. It seems that Islam and its followers get special treatment by the British state.

Delivering his verdict, Judge McGarva cited Coskun’s refusal to distinguish between Islam and Muslims for his decision to convict him:

“You believe Islam is an ideology which encourages its followers to violent paedophilia and a disregard for the rights of non-believers.

You don’t distinguish between the two. I find you have a deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers. That is based on your experiences in Turkey and the experiences of your family.”

Is Judge McGarva to be considered an authority on Islamic scripture? Can he enlighten us as to how stoning women to death for adultery, owning sex-slaves as that which “the right hand possesses”, or the Prophet marrying Aisha when she was six years old, is in keeping with British values? Or is he convicting Coskun according to a liberal misinterpretation of Islam as one among many equal religions to choose from a multicultural buffet? Will he express similar outrage over the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, who subjected English girls to torture, branding, forced conversions, and Quran readings, motivated by racial and religious hatred, and who have gone largely unpunished?

Coskun is not the only person fleeing Islamic persecution to be mistreated by Western institutions. “Maria”, a pseudonymized Christian woman fleeing forced conversion in her home country, had her asylum application rejected by a member of the Home Office’s 700-person Islamic Network. As Conservative Woman wrote last week:

“A female Muslim Home Office investigator rejected her claim, accused Maria of making it all up, and misinterpreted passages from various international reports and Home Office country reports to make it appear that Maria’s country was safe for Christians.”

The Islamic Network has been described by one civil servant as “an Islamic lobby group inside the Home Office [which] represents a serious threat to the Government’s aims in combating Islamic extremism and granting asylum to those fleeing Islamic countries over religious persecution.”

Britain’s institutional timbers have been rotted through by Islamist ideological capture. Our common law legal system and civil service, once par excellence, are enforcing an Islamic blasphemy law, and regard Muslims as a race — an Ummah — worthy of special protections against the host majority population. The government seeks only to accelerate this, by building a new working group to “provide a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia”, adopted as guidance for future public order offences. It contains authors of the previous All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims definition: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” This self-referential definition is designed to conflate religion and race, and ensnare Islam’s critics in a net of censorship. Any of us who object to the sectarian takeover of Britain’s institutions by a religion anathema to our traditions will be treated like Coskun very soon.

It is the job of politicians to defeat these insidious incursions on the English liberty of free speech. Rupert Lowe MP has tabled a motion in Parliament, “recognising that in a free society, no religion or belief system, including Islam, should be immune from criticism, debate, satire or offence”. As of yet, only five other MPs have signed. More must stand on principle against the provision of special treatment to a religion which would not afford us the same courtesy. Likewise, the Public Order Act 1986, Malicious Communications Act 1988, Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Communications Act 2003, and all other legislation responsible for over 12,000 arrests every year for public and online speech must be repealed and never replaced. It is the role of civic society, not the state, to determine what constitutes distasteful speech.

But most of all, it is the fault of the failed, unwanted policies of mass third-world immigration and the subsequent management strategy of multicultural appeasement that violent, sectarian Islam is in Britain in the first place. It didn’t have to be this way. We could reject it as a set of beliefs and customs wholly inappropriate for how we want to run our country. We can and should stop importing it. We should deport all illegal immigrants, foreign prisoners, and those incapable of and unwilling to assimilate to our reasserted way of life. Otherwise, Islam will go from the de facto to the express belief system of the British state.