In recent weeks, the Danish Hard Line party has burned several copies of the Quran to protest the spread of Islam and celebrate freedom of speech.
After Danish politician Rasmus Paludan's Hard Line party launched a Quran-burning tour across Sweden, 15 Muslim congregations have voiced their desire to change Sweden's laws to ban the mockery of religion. They've indicated that this should specifically include the burning of holy scriptures.
“We do not want it to be legal in Sweden to burn holy scriptures such as the Quran, the Bible and the Jewish scriptures, and that at the same time it should be forbidden to mock the various religions,” Imam Hussein Farah Warsame told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The Quran-burnings have also been condemned by multiple Swedish politicians across the political spectrum, as well as Archbishop Antje Jackelén.
“To burn books is barbaric. Not least books that many hold as holy,” the council wrote in a statement, warning that these actions “stoke polarization between people, and counters integration efforts”. “We express our strong sympathy with the Muslim believers in our country,” the Christian leaders concluded.
Since the end of August, the anti-Islamic ethno-nationalist Hard Line party has burned several copies of Quran.
On August 30, a riot broke out in the southern Swedish town of Malmo, where at least 300 people had gathered to protest against anti-Islam activities, police said.
Protesters were throwing objects at police officers and car tyres had been set on fire, a police spokesman said. Earlier in the day, a copy of the Quran had been burned in Malmo by right-wing extremists.
The demonstrations had escalated in the same place where the Quran had been burned, the spokesman added.
Daily Aftonbladet said several anti-Islam activities had taken place in Malmo on Friday, including three men kicking a copy of the Quran between them in a public square.
Meanwhile, at an anti-Islam protest on Saturday in Oslo, Sweden — held by the far-right group Stop the Islamisation of Norway (SION) — a protester tore out pages of the Quran and spat on them..
Sweden's Islamic community has been growing through mass immigration starting from the 1960s. A 2017 Pew Research estimate suggested that Muslims account for 8.1 percent of the Swedish population of roughly ten million – a figure which is growing owing to continued immigration and current demographic trends that include lower birthrates among ethnic Swedes.