For the Right to Burn the Quran

If Pastor Terry Jones from Florida were more educated, he would have known Caliph Omar’s infamous dilemma with the Library of Alexandria: either the books within conform to the teachings of the Quran, and so they are useless, or they do not conform to the teachings of the Quran, and so they are harmful. Either way, the conclusion is the same: “I will burn them.” He could have realized how useless and stupid it is to burn the holy book of Islam only to demonstrate the exact same fanaticism and obscurantism of the caliph. Basically, through this gesture, Terry Jones managed to kill the exact message he was trying to convey.

That being said, the message is the only thing that Terry Jones killed. To burn a book is not a crime. It may be a mistake from the moral point of view; it may be revolting from the aesthetic point of view; it may be proof of ignorance, insufficient culture, intolerance or pure folly. But it is not a crime. The act is guilty of poor taste, but it cannot be considered a true infraction. Nevertheless, several American senators, led by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, have condemned the burning of the Quran and have hinted that they could formally condemn Terry Jones’ gesture or that they could organize hearings, which in most cases lead to resolutions or even laws.

Terry Jones’ offense would be that, in one form or another, he was responsible for the massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, where a crowd of Afghans killed 12 people, including compatriot Filaret Motco [a United Nations political affairs officer from Romania]. The tone was set by The New York Times with an article titled “Afghans Avenge [Florida] Koran Burning, Killing 12.” The New York Daily News went even further and accused Terry Jones in an editorial that he has “blood on his hands” and that he “turned freedom of speech into a provocation for murder.” Finally, in a commentary in Time magazine, Joe Klein wrote more or less that “Jones’ act was murderous as any suicide bomber’s” and that the pastor thus won a place in hell. Powerful words full of holy indignation against the fundamentalist clergyman. The problem is that they are directed at the wrong target.

Terry Jones does not have hands stained with blood because he did not kill anyone, and he did not urge anyone to kill. All he did was burn a book. The only one who urged the masses in Mazar-i-Sharif to kill non-Muslims was some other Muslim cleric who urged Afghans at a mosque to kill non-believers. The legal and moral responsibility for the massacre on Sunday therefore belong to those who stormed the U.N. office thinking they could kill, and even to those who gave them blessings for the crime, people whose names no one knows and who would never pay for their savagery. In a world where reason reigns, the Afghan President Hamid Karzai should have asked for the arrest of the Afghans who committed the massacre, not of Terry Jones.

The idea is that Jones should be responsible for these murders, and the moral claim is that there is an illicit causal relationship between the burning of books, even of the Quran, and a crime. But this causality does not exist unless we tacitly accept that Muslims are criminals by nature and the burning of books is the trigger that, once pressed, determines the necessity of an explosion of violence from the entire Islamic world. In other words, we have to accept that violence and crime are integral parts of Islamic culture and any kind of provocation on religion could only receive a bloody answer. But Muslims are not killing machines that are ignited from Florida; neither are they children without discernment, nor a violent collective beast that needs to be managed for fear of provoking it. They are just as responsible for their choices as others who kill are responsible for crimes that they chose to commit.

To argue that Terry Jones’ hands are stained with the blood of those killed at Mazar-i-Sharif and, further, that there is not a difference between the burning of the Quran and a terrorist attack, are expressions of moral relativism that prove arrogance and lack of respect for the victims. Filaret Motco was not killed by Terry Jones but by a band of Afghans fanaticized by a mullah.

In America, Terry Jones is only a pretext. Some of the authors mentioned above and some political leaders from both parties have used the massacre to discuss the freedom of expression. The burning of the Quran is, as bizarre as it appears, protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the U.S., which enshrines the freedom of expression and of the press. This is mainly because, no matter how many times Congress tried to forbid the burning of the American flag, each time, the Supreme Court declared the legislation unconstitutional and that the burning of the flag could be considered a political statement that should be protected by the First Amendment. Now the progressives want to limit the freedom of expression to be able to declare gestures or statements, like those done by Terry Jones, illegal or “offensive,” and some Republicans want to use this to be able to make the burning of the flag or Bible illegal, for example. But once the gates are opened to limit free speech, nothing can stand in the way of abusers in the government or interest groups. Many people today think that forbidding the burning of the Quran is proof of tolerance and respect, but it is not clear if the same people would be as tolerant of forbidding the burning of the Bible. The risk is that diverse groups and minorities would each pick a sacred text that they would proclaim as untouchable. And before we realize, instead of dialog between cultures, we will wake up to a world of fossilized taboos — instead of openness and respect towards differences, a world with a multitude of groups enclosed in their own bigotry.

In principle, the abandonment of the First Amendment would win the respect and goodwill of the Muslim people. But the difficulty is this: if the world’s oldest Constitution merits a modification, the freedom that it guarantees will be diluted and the American way of life will undergo a fundamental change to win the respect and goodwill of the Muslim people.