Sara Mats Azmeh Rasmussen is a Syrian-Norwegian author, freelance writer, lecturer and human rights activist. She was born in 1973 and grew up in Damascus, Syria, in a Sunni Muslim family with deep roots in the capital. In 1995 she immigrated alone to Norway, and in 1997 she was granted political asylum. She was later granted Swedish citizenship.
In her first book, the autobiographical novel, Skyggeferden (The journey of a shadow, ebook: ), she describes the deep impact of her cultural journey. Azmeh Rasmussen's journey was not only cultural but also politically ideological and religious. Her conversion from Islam to Christianity took place in Damascus, and she was baptized even at the risk of her life. A few years later, she became a secular humanist.
Academic background
Sara Azmeh Rasmussen studied law at the University of Damascus. She has a candidatus magister in international cultural studies, Islam and Arabic culture, at the University of Oslo. As a student in Oslo in the West Asia and North Africa program, she was connected to the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, and she also studied moral philosophy and gender studies.
Fascism and anti-Semitism
For three years as a young university student, Azmeh Rasmussen was a member of the far-right Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which she believed posed solutions to social problems and provided her with a sense of community. She left the party when she was 20.
She has become a commentator on anti-Semitism. At a lecture she gave at the annual conference for the organization With Israel for Peace (MIFF), she talked about two forms of anti-Semitism in West Asia: political (secular) and religious. She also spoke of the demonization of Jews in Arab and Muslim culture.
In 2012, she reopened the debate about an anti-Semitic book on sale in the Islamic Association's bookstore in Oslo. She claimed that its content was just as dehumanizing as Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda and demanded that the book be removed from the shelves. The leader of the Islamic Association answered that the book should be read in the context of the political conflict. In response, Azmeh Rasmussen read a few lines from the book on a live television debate. "All countries shun Jews as the sick shun his illness" was an example.
Freedom of expression
Azmeh Rasmussen has been involved in the debate around freedom of expression since 2006, when she participated in a debate arranged between Norwegian cartoonists together with Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper, Jyllandsposten.
Periodically, she has challenged demands for censorship through cartoons and paintings. During the period of unrest that prevailed in France after the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published drawings of Muhammad, Azmeh Rasmussen expressed her full support for the magazine's editorial choices. She published her own cartoon with the text: "If you don't like to be drawn, cover yourself with a veil, prophet!" In the cartoon the Muslim prophet stands beside three women, one of them unveiled and with hairy legs. Since Azmeh Rasmussen did not find a medium in Norway that was willing to publish the cartoon, she started a blog where she laid out the artwork and two explaining articles, one in Norwegian and one in Arabic. In Norwegian media this was reported without publishing the cartoon, but in France, it was published in various newspapers and websites.
The day after the 2015 terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, Azmeh Rasmussen hung up copies of her prophet drawing around in Stockholm and wrote the following on her blog "I am Charlie, you will be drawn, prophet!"
In 2013 she painted a version of The Scream, the world-famous painting by Edvard Munch, in which God is screaming in front of a background of Arab flags and a crescent. Two female figures dressed in black veils stand in a static position. In the sea, a man wearing red trunks swims on his back.
Azmeh Rasmussen posted a hundred copies of the cartoon on both sides of the entrance to the Stockholm Central Mosque. At the same time, she sent a video letter to major Islamic centers and universities in the world "God is screaming in the Middle East", in which she called for new interpretations that liberate women from pre-modern patriarchal norms. She described the edict to wear the veil as a misinterpretation of a single verse of the Qur'an. She also criticized marginalizing worship practices where women have to go through the side doors and pray in the gallery behind the curtains, while men go through the front door and pray in the mosque's large main hall.