A court has sentenced a 27-year-old man to one year in prison for burning a Qur'an in Villerbaune, a city in eastern France.

According to broadcaster France 3, the convicted man entered the prayer hall of the Erreahna mosque in the early hours of 2 June.

According to a witness and the CCTV security cameras of the mosque, the man stole a copy of Islam's holy book before morning prayers. He went out into the street and burned it in front of the mosque before fleeing.

Hours later, the Rhone Mosque Council said it was “an act of Islamophobia of shocking cowardice”, which the Islamic federation considered particularly serious given other offences against Muslims in France in recent months.

The mayor of Villeurbanne, Cédric Van Styvandael, “clearly condemned this new act of Islamophobia” on his social media profiles.

Tried for “degradation committed on grounds of race, ethnicity, nation or religion”, the defendant told the court that he was “not Islamophobic” and that he was “a victim of his illness”, a paranoid schizophrenia that was diagnosed around a decade ago. The man had been under enhanced guardianship for two years.

“I understand that my gesture was very serious”, he further said, according to the media. “For me, it was just a book, I wasn’t targeting Muslims themselves”, he told the judge.

There is no blasphemy law in France. The burning of sacred religious books is not a specifically defined offence.

Qur'an burnings in Europe

Other countries in Europe have had to decide how to react to the burning of Qur’ans. In 2023, the parliament of Denmark voted a law to make it illegal to burn or destroy “writings with significant importance for a recognized religious community”.

Sweden also had to decide how to the public burnings of Qur’ans. An Iraqi at the centre of an international controversy was killed by Islamists the night before the verdict by the Stockholm District Court was announced. He has been investigated for investigated for “inciting hatred against an ethnic group”.

Christians in the Nordic countries have joined the public debate about the limits of religious freedom, freedom of speech and the criticism or religious ideas.