Police have publicly named a man and disclosed his address after he was charged with allegedly burning pages of the Koran, despite the clear and immediate risks posed to those accused of ‘blasphemy’ by radical Islamists.
The 47-year-old has pleaded guilty to causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, and distress after setting fire to the Islamic holy book in Manchester city centre during a live stream on social media.
At Manchester magistrates’ court, the prosecution said the act had caused distress to a bystander, Fahad Iqbal, who attempted to intervene. In a victim impact statement, Iqbal told the court: ‘I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Koran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.’
Despite his guilty plea, Greater Manchester Police’s decision to disclose the defendant’s personal details has provoked serious concerns given the well-documented dangers faced by those accused of blasphemy. The Free Speech Union believes GMP should have liaised with the Crown Prosecution Service before making these details public. The failure to do so will almost certainly result in a direct threat to his life.
Footage posted on X shows a man standing in the Glade of Light, a memorial for victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, setting fire to pages of the Koran.
Following the arrest, Assistant Chief Constable Stephanie Parker said: ‘We understand the deep concern this will cause within some of our diverse communities and are aware of a live video circulating . . . We made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress, we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.’
During the hearing, the defendant – who was visibly distressed and in tears – was defended by duty solicitor Zoe Earle. District judge Margaret McCormack, while acknowledging defendant’s recent loss of his daughter, told him: ‘The Koran is a sacred book to Muslims, and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress. This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.’ The judge ordered a pre-sentence report, with sentencing scheduled for April 29. As part of his bail conditions, the defendant is banned from posting on social media.
The incident follows a broader crackdown across Europe on acts deemed blasphemous. Social media posts accompanying the Manchester video claim the act was carried out in solidarity with Salwan Momika, the Iraqi-born activist at the centre of a major diplomatic crisis after publicly burning copies of the Koran in Sweden.
Momika, who sought asylum in Sweden, set fire to a Koran outside Stockholm Central Mosque in 2023, triggering protests across the Middle East. His actions led to violent demonstrations, diplomatic protests, and a tightening of Sweden’s laws on public desecration of religious texts. Last week, Momika was shot dead in his Stockholm apartment in what police described as a targeted attack.
In recent years, Sweden and neighbouring Denmark – both historically strong defenders of free expression – have moved to restrict Koran-burning protests under pressure from Muslim-majority countries. Denmark has criminalised the public desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, punishable by up to two years in prison. Sweden, meanwhile, is considering legal measures to curb religiously offensive protests deemed a national security risk, following the successful prosecution of right-wing politician Rasmus Paludan for hate crimes after he burned the Koran during protests in Malmö in 2022.
These legislative shifts follow lobbying from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which has long sought international restrictions on the so-called ‘defamation’ of Islam. In bowing to diplomatic and security concerns, Scandinavian governments have set a perilous precedent, one in which secular democracies prioritise religious sensitivities over individual freedoms.
Blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales in 2008, reinforcing the principle that religious beliefs should not receive special legal protection from criticism. While the Public Order Act 1986 makes it an offence to use threatening words or behaviour intended to stir up religious hatred, Section 29J – which was introduced precisely to prevent the reintroduction of blasphemy laws in another form – explicitly protects expressions of criticism, antipathy, ridicule and even insult toward religions and their adherents.
Yet despite these safeguards, recent cases suggest a shift toward indirect enforcement of blasphemy restrictions via laws concerning public order, hate crime and incitement. In this case, Greater Manchester Police arrested the man on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence. This charge originates under the Public Order Act 1986 – most likely under Section 4A or Section 5 – but is treated as ‘racially or religiously aggravated’ under Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which increases the penalty where hostility toward a racial or religious group is demonstrated or presumed.
Nowhere is this shift more evident than in English schools. In Wakefield, four students were suspended in 2023 after a Koran was accidentally scuffed at Kettlethorpe High School. Though an internal investigation confirmed there was no malicious intent, West Yorkshire Police recorded the incident as a ‘hate occurrence’, and one of the pupils – who was autistic – received death threats, briefly forcing him into police protection.
Also in West Yorkshire, a teacher in Batley was driven into hiding in 2021 after displaying a cartoon of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. This single act, undertaken during a lesson on blasphemy, led to several days of demonstrations outside the school gates, with large groups of Muslim men gathering outside the teacher’s family home. In response, the school swiftly suspended the unnamed teacher pending a formal investigation. Gary Kibble, the headmaster, issued an ‘unequivocal apology’ for the teacher’s use of a ‘totally inappropriate image’. Footage on social media showed police reading out the headteacher’s apology statement to the mob. After receiving death threats, the teacher was put into police protection and remains in hiding nearly four years on. According to his family, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is unlikely ever to return home.
Across Europe, a pattern is emerging. While legal mechanisms are increasingly used to suppress religiously offensive speech, the parallel threat of mob violence ensures that even those who escape prosecution face severe consequences.
Book burnings are crude, deliberately provocative, and a poor substitute for reasoned debate. But as Jacob Mchangama points out for UnHerd, ‘when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message – the essence of free expression’. Given the UK’s legal protections for free expression, the arrest in Manchester raises a difficult question: Are we witnessing the quiet return of blasphemy laws, not only through public-order and hate-crime legislation but also through the ever-present threat of retaliation?
(Photograph: Terry from uk, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Dr Frederick Attenborough Is Executive Communications and Research Officer for the Free Speech Union.
This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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None of the sanctimonious police or judiciary in this case have actually read the Koran to see what it says about ‘tolerance’.
There is nothing racially aggravated about this incident, on that count alone the case should be dismissed. Also why is it acceptable to ban someone from posting on social media?
Why not just cut out the sanctimonious crap of the authorities and let Moslems set up watch committees to police our streets, immediately taking offenders to the nearest mosque and throwing them from the roof – that’s what this is leading to after all? The offended witness also ought to face justice for not quashing the flames himself, seems eminently fair.
”We made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress, we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.’’
But you not so ‘swift’ to arrest PAKISTANI RAPE GANGS were you? And another thing, why was one of your ARMED policemen wearing a face mask?
At Manchester magistrates’ court, the prosecution said the act had caused distress to a bystander, Fahad Iqbal
‘I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Koran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.’
SO F**KING WHAT?
Did Iqbal’s heart break to learn of the gang rape and traffic of thousands upon thousands of young white Christian and Hindu girls?
Was he ‘shocked, disgusted and offended’ by what his coreligionists did to these kids?
I’d say the rape and trafficking of thousands of young white and Hindu/Sikh girls should cause far more ‘distress’ than burning a publication that is personal property wouldn’t you?
“This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.” We certainly are tolerant- we tolerate unlawful incursions through our porous borders, judges keen to dispense differential justice, Islamists preying on our children, stabbings a plenty, streets littered with rubbish, political parasites complying with Soros and WEF diktats, Sharia courts, discrimination against the native population, social disintegration, the highest energy costs in the world, and widespread decay. But hey, Fahad Iqbal must not be upset by witnessing a book burning. Please God let us wake up.
I hope it is not too late Kate but in another 4 years when there is a general election Labour, emulating the Tories open door policy on immigration, will possibly have let in another 4 million people and that may be enough to tip the demographic scales to the point where white Britons will become a minority by 2050. Farage has also said he will not do mass deportations and has a Net Zero migration policy which could in practice see 500,000 whites leave and 500,000 foreigners arrive.
We are up the creek without a paddle it seems.
‘In a victim impact statement, Iqbal told the court: ‘I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this.’
As a victim of this horrendous Labour government, this is the way I feel every day. Whenever I see any of them – particularly Starmer – giving some nonsensical speech announcing some new ‘policy’ obviously designed to heap more misery upon us, I feel all those emotions and more – I feel physically sick, afraid, impotent and furiously angry. And full of hatred, which I don’t want to feel.
They are metaphorically burning my ‘Koran’ – destroying my country and way of life, and destroying my peace of mind. So will we see them in court, or in hiding, or having to answer for their crimes? Pigs might fly.
What did you expect of Starmer? He is only carrying on where the Tories left off. We have uni-party state and that is what happens. The both take their orders from the same puppet masters. It’s the foolish people who simply don’t understand this fundamental process and play musical chair establishment party voting every five years which oils the wheels of this treachery.