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I Burned a Quran. The British Government Punished Me for Blasphemy.
Hamit Coskun
June 6, 2025

On February 13, 2025, Hamit Coskun set fire to his copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in London. Coskun—an atheist who fled persecution from the Turkish authorities in 2022—was there to protest Islamic extremism in his home country. For this act, he was assaulted and knocked to the ground by a bystander, kicked by another passerby, and charged with a “religiously aggravated public order offense” by the Crown Prosecution Service. At his sentencing, a UK district judge told Coskun that his protest was “provocative,” concluding that he had been driven by “a deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers. But in the account below, Coskun insists that he was attacking ideas, not people. He warns that the same religious authoritarianism he fled in his home country is now infecting his adoptive country, too. READ MORE