Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  Chapter 11 moves from wide international upheaval over blasphemy accusations to more formal efforts to legislate antiblasphemy laws through international fora, particularly the United Nations. This chapter examines a twenty-year campaign driven by authoritarian governments to subject international human rights standards to an undefined version of Islam. The campaign includes the promotion of the 1990 “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” and, in the 1990s, blasphemy-based threats against the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Gaspar Biro, and the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Maurice Glele-Ahanhanzo. The main effort has been the OIC’s push, begun in 1999, to use the United Nations to win official endorsement for a global ban on blasphemy against Islam. First called “defamation of Islam,” then retitled “defamation of religions” at the insistence of other delegations, a resolution had been debated and adopted annually for more than a decade in the United Nations. This effort had been losing support and the resolution was not proposed in the Human Rights Council in March 2011. It is being replaced with an initiative, which also has some Western support, to establish an international religious hate-speech standard, relying on undefined terms such as “incitement to hostility” and “negative stereotyping.”

  Related questions are being debated in Western national law. Many Western countries already accept the principle that their governments should limit religious criticism. Chapter 12 investigates how these countries are creating, amending, and enforcing laws that limit what may and may not be said about religious beliefs. These laws range from literal blasphemy bans, originally intended to protect Christianity, to twentieth-century hate-speech prohibitions, devised primarily as antiracism measures, but which are now increasingly applied to religious categories as well. While largely anachronistic, some blasphemy laws have been used to prosecute offenses against Islam; for instance, in Finland in 2009, a city politician was convicted of “violating the sanctity of religion” for deriding the Muslim prophet and Muslim child marriages. Most European Union countries, as well as the EU itself, affirm that restrictions on speech should protect individuals rather than religions, but the conflation by Muslim complainants of insults to the religion with insults to the individual is widespread, as shown in our case examples. Proceedings brought against actress Brigitte Bardot in France, writer Mark Steyn in Canada, two Christian pastors in Australia, and others, involved complaints arising from speech critical of Islam and not personal insults. Most worrisome about the use of hate-speech laws against religious criticism—which is increasing, although not systematic—is its chilling effect. A growing number of publishers, journalists, filmmakers, and artists are acknowledging that they are shying away from Islamic subjects in their work. At both the national and international levels, it appears the West has begun to answer Muslim demands, not with a unified and principled defense of fundamental freedoms, but with religious hate-speech laws, which are just as arbitrary and vague as Muslim blasphemy regimes.

  While legal strictures on religious speech are dangerous, a more pervasive, and in many ways deeper, problem is violence and threats of violence against those accused of insulting Islam. Chapter 13 sheds light on the effects of this violence not only on politicians and lawmakers but also on ordinary Muslims living in the West, converts from Islam, and others who are intentionally outspoken, defiant against Islamist strictures, attempting to reform ideas, or simply careless with words. A pattern of violent intimidation is becoming familiar in Western society. Such intimidation is especially evident in some Muslim communities, in which threats of violence follow in the wake of whatever words and actions are deemed “insulting to Islam.”

  The gruesome 2004 murder and near decapitation of director Theo van Gogh in Holland, and the related death threats against Somali-born ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, powerfully illustrate this growing trend. The murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, made it clear that he was not enraged for any purely personal reasons. Instead, he declared, “From now on, this will be the punishment for anyone in this land who challenges and insults Allah and his messengers.” The West still remains a relative haven for free debate, for voices of Islamic reform, and for those with unorthodox views of Islam. But Western states and international organizations stand at a crossroads between a robust defense of free speech and a flaccid response to the persistent encroachment of antiblasphemy restrictions, whether imposed through legislation, and court decisions, or enforced outside the reach of law by radical vigilantes.

  Muslim Criticism of Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws

  This book is not a work on Islamic law or history, nor does it analyze the development of apostasy and blasphemy concepts. Our concern is to survey the contemporary use and effects of such accusations and threats. Clearly, however, one of the most important means of combating these threats to individual freedoms of religion and expression is in the war of ideas itself. It is vitally important to show that temporal punishments for purported blasphemy and apostasy are not necessary within Islam and can, in fact, be understood as a departure from and a threat to Islam. There is no consensus on this. For example, Sheikh Qaradawi, perhaps the most widely consulted Islamic authority for the West, equivocates on the issue. Even a Muslim chaplain at Harvard wrote in 2009 that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”2

  In light of such statements, we asked three highly respected Islamic scholars to address this issue, which they did in three original essays included in this book. As committed Muslims, they are known for respect for Islam and they certainly deplore and oppose insults to God and to their religion. But, they argue carefully and strenuously that Islam does not require temporal punishments for blasphemy or apostasy.

  The late Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid’s “God Needs No Defense” serves as the book’s “foreword.” Wahid was the president of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and the head of Nahdatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization. His essay outlines the nature of religious belief itself and argues eloquently that God does not need to be defended from blasphemy. It maintains that blasphemy accusations stem from the politics of early Islam, when apostasy meant desertion from the caliph’s army. In today’s very different world, temporal punishments for blasphemy and apostasy threaten true faith itself, which always includes growing and seeking the truth.

  In chapter 14, “Renewing Qur’anic Studies in the Contemporary World,” the late Professor Abu-Zayd, who was forced to flee Egypt because of his work, emphasizes that blasphemy and apostasy accusations are used “strategically” to prevent the reform of Muslim societies. His essay stresses the diversity in contemporary and historical Islam and outlines the varied modes of interpretation used by Muslims. In particular, while carefully never reducing Islam to history, it emphasizes that we need to understand its historical context: “how it developed in Arabia and other parts of the world.” Only in this way can we understand how Islam should be manifest in our own place and time.

  In chapter 15, “Rethinking Classical Muslim Law of Apostasy and the Death Penalty,” Abdullah Saeed—some of whose writings have been banned in his native Maldives—argues that current human rights discourse is not Western but is shared by many Muslims. Like Abu-Zayd, he emphasizes the need to understand early Islam, especially the “post-prophetic period,” during which apostasy laws were shaped. In a setting of armed conflict, apostasy meant joining a non-Muslim enemy and so threatening the community of believers. Later, the Abbasids curtailed religious dispute lest it undermine their claims to legitimacy, and so apostasy was akin to treason. Since most Muslims do not now live in closed tribes, apostasy is no longer related to desertion or treason and should not be treated as if it were.

  Blasphemy Threats: Interconnecting the West and the Muslim World

  I
n this survey, we seek to cover three things. First, we provide an overview of the actual practice and the consequent dire effects of current blasphemy and apostasy restrictions in some major contemporary Muslim countries. Second, we outline ongoing attempts over the last two decades within the UN system to conform international human rights standards to blasphemy and apostasy restrictions. Finally, we give an overview of the growth of increasing antiblasphemy demands in the West, by force of law and by extralegal threats and violence, imposed on those suspected of insulting Islam. We also examine the consequent chilling of debate and the self-imposed silence taking place within the broader community.

  However, important as these three elements of the survey are, even when considered discretely, it is essential to note that these are not three separate trends. They are deeply interwoven, and their significance is best revealed when their interconnections are seen. For this reason, our survey seeks to elucidate six crucial themes and arguments, each of which stems from reciprocal interaction between the Muslim world and the West.

  First, it will be shown that within the Muslim world itself, laws and violence against those accused of insulting Islam are not in the least limited to what are commonly regarded, at least in the West, as insults or mockery. These strictures include lethal persecution of those, such as Baha’is or Ahmadis, who are though to believe that there has been a prophet after Muhammad. They also justify the persecution and murder of those who convert from Islam to another religion or who simply no longer believe as Muslims. Targets inevitably include Muslim minorities, such as Shias in Saudi Arabia or Sufis in Iran, who are deemed deviant, if not outright heretical. Familiar targets of antiblasphemy laws are Muslim dissidents, liberals, and reformers, especially when they challenge the entrenched power of regimes and organizations that claim to represent Islam.

  The span of specific victims is very broad. A Pakistani Muslim, who tripped onto a stove and accidentally singed himself and a Qur’an, was apprehended by vigilantes and burned to death for his transgression. Egyptian Nobel literature prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz’s realistic portrayals of the complex lives of Cairene Muslims were deemed threatening, and he was stabbed nearly to death. The current Somali campaign seeks to exterminate every Christian in the country. A former Afghan minister for Women’s Affairs and Iranian and Saudi political reformers have faced threats and allegations. When we debate the meaning of “insulting Islam” or “defamation of religion,” we should not do so in an abstract or antiseptic style, but bear in mind who the victims are.

  Second, when countries in the OIC seek to introduce bans on defaming religion or insulting Islam into the international system through the United Nations, or through pressure for domestic legal change in the West, their agenda goes far beyond silencing Danish cartoonists or Dutch political provocateurs or providing so-called protection to individual Muslims in the West, who are already legally protected against violence, personal defamation, and discrimination. In most OIC states, the targets of such suppression are the disadvantaged, the religiously different or nonconforming, and the politically and religiously questioning. If these countries’ pressure to ban religious defamation in the West succeeds, they will have taken a major step in exporting their own system of repression into the free world.

  Third, if the limits on speech that have been debated at the United Nations become human rights law, virtually all critical analysis of anything claimed to be Islamic could be viewed as a human rights violation, one that UN member nations would be bound to silence and punish. The range of items that will be interpreted as “insulting” is likely to be extremely broad and unpredictable. For instance, in September 2005, complaints by some Muslim customers that the swirl on the lid of Burger King ice cream cones resembled the Arabic word for Allah led the fast-food chain to withdraw thousands of ice cream tubs. Nike had similar problems with one of its logos, and an Islamist website claimed that the glass cube built by Apple Corporation outside its midtown Manhattan store was an insult to Islam since it was shaped like the Kaaba, the Muslim shrine in Mecca.3

  More disturbing are bans on longstanding and legitimate subjects of inquiry and debate, including Muslim practices regarding women, non-Muslims, violence, stoning and corporal punishments, and dress. This list must also include criticism of hate-speech laws themselves; such criticisms have already been challenged in Western courts as an example of Islamophobia. It is true that convictions in such cases have been infrequent, but that is not reassuring, because the trials themselves produce a broad chilling effect; there are uncertainties about what specific speech might be prohibited. For example, in 2009, criticism of Islamic veiling of women triggered prosecution in Great Britain but not in France, where the critique was made by President Sarkozy himself. Furthermore, even a successful defense can be disastrously expensive. An Australian lower court convicted two Christian preachers for “vilifying” Islam by, according to the court, selectively quoting from the Qur’an. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the case took three years and cost the defense over $100,000 in legal fees. Even with acquittal, in cases like these, the defendant’s reputation and livelihood may be damaged.

  The publicity stemming from being involved in a legal case of this sort also increases the threat of extralegal violence. This, as we will show, is already a far graver danger in the West than the legal process itself. Among the most prominent Western victims of these attacks and threats are novelist Salman Rushdie, cultural editor Flemming Rose, critical documentarist Theo van Gogh, feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, philosopher Robert Redeker, and Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. Among other victims of laws and threats in the West are Muslims who criticize reactionary interpretations of Islam. Muslim parliamentarians like Naser Khader in Denmark or German Green party politician Ekin Deligoz and prominent Muslim women’s advocates such Mimount Bousakla receive serious threats, as do a myriad of writers and scholars, artists, and journalists.

  The pages that follow reveal that self-censorship for fear of offending Muslims is now becoming common in Western discourse, extending far beyond rude or uncivil language. In 2008, BBC head Mark Thompson warned of “a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam and its relationship to the traditions and values of British and Western society as a whole.” In 2008, publisher Random House canceled the publication of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina because it feared violence by some Muslims. In this case the fears were well founded; in September 2008, the home and office of the British publisher that bought the rights to the novel were firebombed. In 2009, Yale University Press refused to include a photograph of the Jyllands-Posten “Danish cartoons” even though it was publishing a book, authored by Jytte Klausen, that was advertised by YUP itself as the “definitive” study of those cartoons.

  Fourth, if international blasphemy restrictions are accepted, authoritarian regimes will have an additional weapon with which to protect themselves from any criticism from abroad, just as they have often used religious restrictions to ward off criticism domestically. These regimes are seeking a new world consensus on human rights, consistent with the 1990 Cairo Declaration, one that subordinates individual freedoms and rights to particular interpretations of Islamic law. Their simple syllogism is that if they claim to represent Islam, and one cannot criticize Islam, then one cannot criticize them. Already in the 1990s, when UN Special Rapporteurs criticized OIC countries for violations of international human rights standards—standards that those countries previously had accepted—the rapporteurs were threatened for purportedly insulting Islam.

  Fifth, if we accept restrictions on “insulting Islam,” we will betray those dissidents who fight for freedom under repressive regimes in the Muslim world, especially those Muslims for whom Islam holds the promise of political and religious freedom. We betray them by accepting the arguments and rationale, and thus becoming the de facto allies, of their persecutors. This is so whether their persecutors are Islamist governments such as those of Saudi Arabia or Iran, authoritarian regime
s seeking Islamic legitimacy such as that of Egypt, or vigilantes and terrorists who seek to maim and destroy those with a different interpretation of Islam. In accepting these restrictions, we implicitly accept the rationale offered by their persecutors, which holds that the law should stop statements and activities deemed by some to be religiously insulting. In effect, this signals that repressive governments are right to silence dissenters, artists, minority faiths, and others who do not conform religiously. In acquiescing to proposals for legislation banning “insulting Islam”, the West would implicitly embrace a view of Islam and its teachings against which reformers argue and have fought. Muslim reformers are often isolated enough in their own countries; for the West to further ideologically isolate them would amount to a grave betrayal.

  Sixth, by surrendering to Islamic antiblasphemy restrictions, we will undercut our own security. The Muslim world is torn by strife over the meaning and future of Islam. Some of the most strident voices in that struggle press for reactionary forms of Islam, and out of their Islamist ideologies emanate terrorism and other forms of religious violence and repression. If we acquiesce in the legitimacy of repressing religious debate, then we boost those who are or would be our enemies, and we undercut those who are our natural allies. In abiding by such strictures ourselves, we politically disarm ourselves by making discussion, debate, and analysis of Islam and its various interpretations out of bounds.