Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  Islamic blasphemy rules first captured global attention with Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and, especially since 2005, they have made a conspicuous return to the world stage. Chapter 10 describes five cases, international in both origin and consequence, in which blasphemy strictures maintained in Muslim countries have come into direct and explosive conflict with a statement or work produced elsewhere in the world that has been called “insulting to Islam.” Of these cases, the unlikely sounding Danish cartoons controversy of 2005–6 has produced singularly sweeping reverberations. In addition to placing those involved in the cartoons’ publication in permanent danger and taking a toll on Denmark’s economy, mob attacks and assassinations have claimed the lives of over 200 people utterly uninvolved with the “blasphemous” drawings. The experience also left its mark in the minds of Western political leaders and has heavily influenced subsequent discussions, which now often seem to center on how, not whether, to balance freedom and Muslim blasphemy demands. As with other cases, from the Rushdie fatwa onward, the cartoon crisis involved what seems a baffling plurality of motives at the local, national, and international levels—from three Danish imams’ resentment over unflattering coverage in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, to the Egyptian government’s desire to parry a U.S.-led push for democratization in the Middle East. Despite the frequent mischaracterization of the crisis as a spontaneous eruption of rage from the “Muslim street,” members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) played a vital role in drawing and sustaining attention to the cartoons, as well as lending the reaction against them legitimacy and heft. Afterward, when the former Danish prime minister was tapped to lead NATO, Turkey used the cartoons episode to leverage two high-level appointments for its nationals within the West’s most important military alliance. At all levels of this and other blasphemy protests, the political manipulation of religious motives has been prominent.

  Incidents like the Danish cartoons crisis are also the result of sustained pressure by a range of actors on three main fronts for the global export of Islamic blasphemy norms. This pressure helps keep the issue alive in the West long after the protest of the month has faded from the headlines.

  In the most formal of these efforts, detailed in chapter 11, the OIC has sought through the UN and other international fora to win official endorsement for a global ban on blasphemy against Islam. This effort in its current form began with a little-noticed 1999 resolution of the UN Commission on Human Rights that was initially called “defamation of Islam,” then retitled “defamation of religions” at the insistence of other delegations; the resolution represented OIC countries’ growing concern with and reaction to both human rights criticism of their practices and increasing attention to Islamist terrorism. Earlier, these governments had already sought to exempt themselves from established international human rights standards, leveling at least two allegations of “blasphemy” against UN Special Rapporteurs who raised sensitive human rights issues. Though these resolutions predated the Danish cartoons affair and even the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, they gained force in the wake of each incident. From 2006 onward, OIC resolutions have sought to assert that freedom of expression must be limited in the interest of other goals, purportedly including religious freedom.1

  “Defamation of religions” resolutions eventually came under heavy fire, not only from Western countries, which usually opposed them, but also from many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights experts. However, so far this criticism has not led to any substantive rethinking but only to a change in terms—the use of “advocacy of religious hatred” as a substitute for defamation. Alarmingly, in October 2009, the United States appeared to lend support to this effort by cosponsoring, with leading defamation-of-religions proponent Egypt, a resolution on freedom of expression that expressed concern about “negative racial and religious stereotyping” and, while not binding, urged states to combat “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”2 Free speech advocates won a small but essential victory when this resolution was dropped from the agenda of the commission’s successor body, the Human Rights Council, in 2011.

  The same questions are being debated in Western national law. Indeed, the disputes over wording at UN conferences in New York and Geneva reflect the fact that many Western countries already accept the principle that governments should determine what constitutes acceptable religious criticism. As outlined in chapter 12, these countries themselves enforce laws that limit what may be said about religious beliefs. Such laws include literal blasphemy bans, originally conceived to protect Christianity, and hate-speech prohibitions, devised mainly in the last half-century as antiracism measures that are now increasingly used to cover religious categories as well. In keeping with the EU’s stated view that restrictions on speech should aim to protect individuals rather than religions, those blasphemy laws that remain on the books are usually weakly enforced and, in some cases, are effectively defunct. However, a few have nonetheless been used to prosecute offenses against Islam.

  In contrast to blasphemy laws, the use of hate-speech laws is increasing. In practice, the dividing line between the two types of statutes, as well as the corresponding distinction between criticism of a religion and of its adherents, has proved fuzzy and has been rejected outright by some Muslim complainants who claim that any defamation of Islam also necessarily constitutes defamation of Muslims.

  Finally, beyond the danger presented by Western legal restrictions, every debate on “insults to Islam” takes place in the shadow of a further problem, one deeply affecting not only politicians and polemicists but also ordinary Muslims living in the West, converts, and others who might make the wrong remark in the wrong place at the wrong time. While officials argue over the permissibility of a legal blasphemy ban, a pattern of violent intimidation, discussed in chapter 13, has already in practice established such a ban for large swaths of Western society, as it has done previously in Muslim-majority countries. This intimidation is particularly powerful within some Muslim communities, in which individuals may be targeted for any comment that deviates from extremist orthodoxy.

  Together with the shock of international incidents such as the Danish cartoons crisis and the vague threat of legal charges, this intimidation has created a massive disincentive toward talking publicly about Islam, one that also affects Western Muslims’ ability to debate the interpretation of their religion. The wide range of words and people targeted by threats demonstrates that limited legal measures to restrict certain kinds of speech are, to put it mildly, very unlikely to produce social harmony. Rather, as can be seen in Muslim-majority countries that already have such laws, state-sponsored speech bans typically lead to increasing sensitivity and ever-increasing demands to silence ideas that do not conform.3

  Despite these pressures, the West still remains a relative haven for those wishing to voice reformist or critical views about Islam, yet it stands at a critical juncture between a renewed defense of free speech and an acceptance of ever-increasing limits on expressing controversial ideas. In light of most governments’ at best ambiguous reaction to the controversies over Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons and Geert Wilders’s Fitna, ongoing legal proceedings against certain critics of Islam, and a continuing climate of threat, particularly in Europe, facing those of whatever background who discuss matters that Islamist extremists have deemed off limits, it is unclear which way the Western world will turn.

  10

  Islam and Blasphemy on the International Stage, 1989–2011

  The Satanic Verses, the famous novel penned by Salman Rushdie, was published in 1988. At the time of its release, a few British Muslims protested, mostly peacefully, against a work of fiction they perceived as insulting to Islam. Scattered demonstrations followed, some of them more violent than others. Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, expanded his claimed jurisdiction well beyond Iran
’s borders. He issued a fatwa—an Islamic legal pronouncement—saying that it is a duty of Muslims to track down and execute Rushdie, who is a British citizen from South Asia, for his purported blasphemy against Islam.

  Khomeini’s international death warrant drove Rushdie underground. It forced him to maintain constant security protection for nearly a decade. In the meantime, the novel’s Japanese translator was murdered, other translators and publishers were assaulted, and U.S. bookstores and a hotel in Turkey were firebombed. In 1998, the beleaguered author emerged from hiding following a supposed deal between the British and Iranian governments. Rushdie is alive today, but hard-line elements of the Iranian regime continue to proclaim that the fatwa against him is still very much in effect.

  In February 2006, twelve cartoons depicting Islam’s prophet Muhammad unexpectedly triggered angry protests around the world. Although the cartoons had first been published five months earlier, in September 2005, in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, international violence and bloodshed, supposedly representing the spontaneous outrage of the “Muslim Street,” did not occur until the following year.

  On February 10, 2006, thousands of Muslims across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East set out from Friday prayers to demonstrate against the cartoons. Some of their protests ended in violence, despite calls by many religious leaders for them to remain peaceful. Egyptian demonstrators invoked the name of Osama bin Laden and burned a Danish flag.1 Thousands in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, called for the destruction of Denmark, Israel, George Bush, and America.2 In Karbala, Iraq, around 10,000 demonstrators burned Danish flags and called for breaking off Iraq’s relations with Denmark.3 Hamas organized a protest in which about 500 children trampled a Danish flag, carried a coffin bearing the word “Denmark,” and demanded a boycott of Danish goods.4 Police quelled riots in Hyderabad, India, with batons and tear gas.5 Kenyan security forces used tear gas to keep hundreds of protesters away from the Danish embassy in Nairobi.6 Pakistan and Afghanistan saw many of the worst riots. The cartoons continue to be both vilified by Muslims and, from time to time, defiantly republished by advocates of free expression. All told, the Danish cartoons crisis has so far cost at least 241 lives internationally.7

  Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was no stranger to controversy when, in November 2007, he announced that he had begun work on a film to illustrate “the intolerant and fascist nature of the Koran.”8 In January 2008, he announced a March release date for his film titled Fitna, an Arabic word meaning strife or discord. He stated that Fitna would link the Qur’an directly to violence and depict it as “the latest test to Western democracies since Nazism and communism.”

  In the aftermath of Fitna’s appearance online, angry protests, threats, acts of vandalism, and accusations of blasphemy reverberated around the globe. Egyptian, Moroccan, and Bangladeshi cabinet ministers denounced the movie, with the latter calling it “mentally retarded.” Sudan, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia spoke out against it, calling for boycotts and threatening various consequences. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said that “insults to other religions could never be justified on the basis of freedom of expression” and demanded that the Dutch government bring charges against Wilders. On April 6, more than 20,000 people attended a Jamaat-e-Islami rally in Karachi to protest both Wilders’s film and the Danish cartoons reprint.9

  In Afghanistan on April 18, 2008, a roadside bomb killed Lieutenant Dennis van Uhm, son of newly appointed Dutch chief of staff Peter van Uhm. A Taliban spokesman claimed to have known van Uhm was in the vehicle and that the attack was part of an “operation against the Dutch”; “first it was because they have occupied our country and secondly it was in retaliation to the Dutch insult to our great prophet Muhammad.”10

  Introductory Remarks

  In the following chapters, we describe blasphemy and hate-speech restrictions in the West, enforced either by the state or by vigilante action and mobs. We also describe the efforts by governments in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and others, either through the United Nations or by direct pressure, to persuade or force Western governments to apply the same denial of freedom of speech and of religion as do OIC members. Some of these events and pressures are described in chapter 11 on the United Nations, in chapter 12 on legal developments in the West, and in chapter 13 on private violence. However, some of the major crises and developments concerning blasphemy and apostasy—reactions to the novel The Satanic Verses, the Danish and Swedish cartoons, the pope’s lecture at Regensburg, and the doings of Geert Wilders—spill over these boundaries. They play out in the Muslim world and the West, the United Nations, and other international bodies, and they involve not only law but also mob violence, vigilantism, and terrorism. Hence, they need to be described here as a whole.

  The Satanic Verses

  Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the publishers of his novel on February 14, 1989, while also declaring February 15 a day of mourning over Satanic Verses’ “poisonous and insulting subject-matter concerning Islam, the Koran and the blessed prophet.” The ayatollah called for “all zealous Moslems to execute [Rushdie and others involved with the novel] quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islamic sanctity.” He promised that anyone who was killed while complying with his edict would go directly to paradise. For the more earthly-minded, the 15th Khordad Relief Agency also offered a bounty for anyone who killed Rushdie: $2.6 million for an Iranian; $1 million for a foreigner.11

  A densely written work of magical realism, Rushdie’s novel had drawn attention of a decidedly nonliterary nature by touching on Islamic theology in several areas. The phrase “Satanic Verses” was derived from the story itself, which speaks of the tenth-century historian and Qur’anic commentator Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir Al-Tabari. Al-Tabari’s view, considered heretical by most Muslims, was that some of the verses Muhammad included in the Qu’ran, and then retracted, had come from Satan rather than the Angel Gabriel.12

  The most controversial material in Rushdie’s book involved a short section concerning a man called Mahound, a derogatory term for Muhammad that originated from medieval polemics against Islam. In his account of Mahound’s story, Rushdie presents the origin of the verses in question as a case of opportunistic deception rather than diabolical intervention; he suggests that Mahound’s revelation was the product of artifice. He also observes that Mahound seemed habitually to receive revelations suspiciously convenient for his own purposes at the moment. This substory has been interpreted as an attack on Islam, although Rushdie himself has called that an oversimplification. In fact, many who have protested the novel have not read it or even been familiar with its content.

  The Mahound sequence also depicts a brothel in Mecca called The Curtain—which translates to Al-Hijab—with twelve prostitutes who assume the names and some of the features of Muhammad’s wives. In other sections, the book contains an unflattering portrayal of Ayatollah Khomeini and a story that has been taken as a metaphor for the Iranian Islamic revolution. For the most part, Rushdie’s attitude toward his subject matter is not entirely clear, particularly because the Mahound and Iranian sequences appear only as the dreams of one of the central characters. But the work does appear consciously intended to challenge Islamic doctrine. Indeed, Verses includes one passage in which Mahound accuses a character named Salman of “blasphemy.”13

  Once the novel was proclaimed sacrilegious by many Muslim leaders, demonstrations ensued. There were violent protests in India (where the controversy over the novel and its prohibition began) and in Pakistan shortly before Khomeini’s fatwa. The book was banned in Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Pakistan, and South Africa, among others. Already in November 1988, the grand sheikh of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, one of the most respected scholarly figures in the Muslim world, had called on British Muslim groups to seek legal means of suppressing the novel. He also asked that the OIC take action.14 In late December, three Muslim ambassadors met with Britain’s Home Minister. />
  Initially, Saudi Arabia took the lead in sponsoring denunciations of the novel.15 Saudis and Saudi-backed organizations played a prominent role in anti-Rushdie efforts in Britain, which were considerable. Following publicity (though likely without authorization) from these organizations, Rushdie began receiving death threats in October 1988. A public burning of the novel, organized by the Bradford Council of Mosques, led local booksellers to withdraw Verses and 8,000 Muslims to demonstrate in London in late January 1989. Threats also targeted Rushdie’s U.S. publisher, Viking Penguin.16

  Then, on February 14, 1989, came the Iranian fatwa, which has received a mixed response from Muslims. Sayed Abdul Quddas, who had orchestrated the Bradford book-burning, said he was ready to act on the ayatollah’s decree and declared, “every good Muslim is after [Rushdie’s] life. He has tortured Islam and has to pay the penalty.” On February 15, Rushdie’s French publisher, Christian Bourgois, suspended publication of the book due to security concerns. In the United States, B. Dalton and Barnes and Noble initially refused to sell the book at all, although they later reversed their decisions. Waldenbooks agreed to sell it only from storerooms. On February 28, two California bookstores, and the offices of a newspaper that had published an article defending the book, were firebombed.17