4. By the Cleansing Flames of Fire: Koran burnings, Racialized Religion and Politized Nostalgia in Sweden
Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions - A Tribute to James R. Lewis - Margo Kitts
Mattias Gardell [+]
Uppsala University
Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism at Uppsala university, Sweden. Working with ethnographic methods and text analysis, Gardell explores the complex terrain shaped by the intersections of religion, politics, racism and violence. His fields of research include radical nationalism, esoteric fascism, Islamophobia, political Islam, human bombs, torture history, hate crime, politicized nostalgia, the entangled history of racism and religion, fascist cultural production, and white racist lone wolf tactics. His list of publications may be found athttps://www.cemfor.uu.se/about-us/researchers/publications-gardell/
Description
This chapter focuses on the burning of the Quran and the Hebrew Bible and the relation between bibliocaust and holocaust. I will begin with the recent series of Quran burnings in Sweden and then revisit history, from the ceremonial Quran burnings in Grenada 1499 via the Nazi bonfires of 1933 back to our time and show how book burnings throughout this history have been used as a way of ridding society of the evil these books were seen as associated with and how this frequently included the people who read and cherished these books.