In 1793, Thomas Paine launched a furious assault on Christianity with The Age of Reason. “What is it the Bible teaches us?” he asked. “Rapine, cruelty, and murder.” He didn’t stop there. “What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.” No book has been more frequently prosecuted for blasphemy in England. The 19th-century deist reformer Richard Carlile spent years in prison merely for selling it. At one of his trials, the attorney general denounced The Age of Reason as “one of the most abominable, disgusting, and wicked attacks on religion and its author that has ever appeared in the world”. Locking Carlile up, he insisted, was necessary to “protect the lower and illiterate classes from having their faith sapped”.

That world, we like to think, is long gone. The last conviction for blasphemy in England was in 1979 — against Gay News magazine and its editor — and the offence was formally abolished in 2008. But this week a zombified version rose from the grave — not in the name of Christianity, but under the banner of protecting Islam and its followers.

On Monday, Turkish-born Hamit Coskun was fined £240 for a religiously aggravated public order offence. His crime: burning a Quran in front of London’s Turkish consulate, while shouting “Fuck Islam,” “Islam is a religion of terrorism,” and “The Quran is burning.” During his protest, Coskun was stabbed and kicked by bystanders.

The presiding judge accepted the prosecution’s argument that Coskun’s comments were “motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam, based on their membership of that group”. This is a questionable conclusion. It’s true that during interviews with police and the magistrate, Coskun made inflammatory and inaccurate claims, such as saying Muslims are responsible for 99% of rapes. But he also repeatedly maintained that he did not “have a problem with Muslims”, only with what he saw as Islam’s violent doctrinal legacy. In his view, the Quran justifies terrorism. That may be provocative, even offensive, but it is not the same as calling all Muslims terrorists and does not, by itself, justify the judge’s conclusion that Coskun harboured a “deep-seated hatred” of both Islam and Muslims.

Coskun’s protest was also plainly political. It took place outside the Turkish consulate, not a mosque. He posted on X that he was burning the Quran to protest “the Islamist government of Erdoğan who has made Turkey a base for radical Islamists and is trying to establish a Sharia regime”. As a Kurdish-Armenian whose relatives suffered under the Armenian genocide, Coskun’s anger at Islamist authoritarianism is deeply personal. Yet despite that political context, the judge treated his criticism of Islam — as a belief system and as implemented by Erdogan’s regime — as indistinguishable from hatred of all Muslims.

Perhaps most disturbing was the judge’s logic in justifying the conviction. “That the conduct was disorderly,” he argued, “is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.” In other words: because Coskun was violently attacked for a protest that was provocative but non-violent, his speech became the offence. This is not justice — it is capitulation.

Coskun’s prosecution is just the latest example of the “jihadist’s veto”, where violent threats or actual violence effectively criminalise criticism of Islam, even in secular democracies without formal blasphemy laws. In 2025 alone, at least four people including Coskun have been convicted for desecrating the Quran, such as in Denmark and Sweden. The number might have been five but Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee who also burned a Quran, was shot dead in January, days before receiving his sentence for incitement to hatred. His co-defendant was still fined.

That criticising Islam is uniquely dangerous in 21st-century Europe should be a reason to defend freedom of speech more robustly, not to curtail it. British Christians learned to live with Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. British Muslims must learn to live with criticism of their religion, too.