Abid Raja has long been an outspoken, controversial but popular politician for Norway’s Liberal Party (Venstre). Now he’s under special protection by Norway’s domestic intelligence agency PST, after being threatened during a presentation of his latest book that once again challenges honour and fear in the Muslim culture.
Raja, a former culture minister in Norway’s former Conservatives-led government, grew up in Oslo as the son of immigrants from Pakistan. He later studied law and went into politics as a liberal Muslim, eventually becoming a government minister in charge of culture and sports, and a vice-president of the Norwegian Parliament.
He also started writing. His earlier book Min skyld (My fault) revealed domestic violence in his childhood home with an abusive father and a tradition of arranged marriages that Raja ultimately rebelled against. It became a best-seller over the insight it provided into a Muslim home, and then one of his sisters wrote a book of her own after she’d broken out of an arranged marriage with a highly abusive husband.
Earlier this fall Raja released another book entitled Vår ære og vår frykt (Our honour and our fear), written after his mother’s death and a reconciliation with his father who’d returned to Pakistan. That re-opened doors into Raja’s large extended family, and prompted him to travel around Europe visiting various relatives and studying integration issues first-hand.
Raja has always been a major proponent of integration on both sides, urging immigrants to integrate into their new homelands’ culture and urging residents of their new country to accept them. He’s been critical of Muslims who cling to traditions from their homelands that often involve patriarchy and oppression of women. Raja is known for fighting hard to marry the woman he loved (also a Pakistani-Norwegian, with a doctorate degree in psychology) instead of a cousin from abroad. He also learned to ski, even competitively, and has otherwise engaged broadly in Norwegian culture.
Full integration and women’s rights remain a theme in his new book and it’s clearly sparked opposition. Raja was taking part in a book festival at the Furuset library in Oslo just before the weekend, when a man in the audience suddenly rose from his seat, started shouting and appeared to be storming towards the stage. He was restrained by others before he reached Raja.
“He was very aggressive,” Raja told state broadcaster NRK after the incident. “There were two others who stepped in and prevented him from coming up to me on the stage.”
Raja confirmed on Saturday that he’d been assigned two bodyguards from PST (Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste) and shared his calendar with them for the coming week. He said he was also grateful “that the police responded as quickly as they did, to what he described as “a threatening situation” aimed at preventing freedom of expression. His alleged potential attacker left the library and hasn’t been identified.
Library officials have confirmed that a second man in the audience also stood up later in the program and objected to Raja’s criticism, but Raja didn’t feel he posed any real threat. Raja was ready to file an official complaint against his first opponent, however, who clearly disliked Raja’s sometimes harsh criticism of the Muslim faith he grew up with, especially when it’s used to reject gender equality and acceptance of sexual minorities.
Other Muslims involved in integration issues in Norway think Raja is too provocative, too negative towards many other Muslims and preoccupied with promoting himself. There’s been a lot of criticism from Muslims including Abdullah Alsabeehg of the Labour Party, who thinks Raja generalizes far too much. He suggested in newspaper Aftenposten recently that Raja’s book is “a gift to right-wing extremists,” and stresses how there are huge differences among Muslims themselves. Other Muslims, both young and old, think Raja has taken up what’s a “painful” theme among many.
Raja also thinks the incident at the library on Friday shows how difficult it still is to debate such issues. “It’s frightening to see how freedom of expression and democracy can be strangled in this manner, especially by angry men with immigrant background,” Raja told NRK. He worries that many other moderate Muslims, or liberal Muslims like himself, don’t dare engage in such “difficult” debate.
There were around 200 people at the library’s literary gathering last week. Jørn Johansen of the library’s staff called the incident “uncomfortable, unplanned and unwanted” and that library employees reacted quickly. Security guards were also called in, he said. The event, called the “Groruddalen literature festival” and held in an area where many Muslims in Oslo live, had otherwise proceeded calmly.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
