Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide
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Apart from its internal effects of closing down debate within majority-Muslim countries, restrictions on apostasy, blasphemy, and purported religious insult also shape international affairs by strengthening radical Islam and terrorism. In the contemporary conflict of ideas, the key figures are Muslim defenders of freedom. They already labor under the disadvantages of facing opponents who are well-organized and well-funded, as well as violent and vicious in silencing opposition. Worse, blasphemy restrictions further empower reactionaries to kill, imprison, threaten, and otherwise silence Muslim friends of freedom. Hence, if we do not oppose and resist such restrictions, we abandon the allies of freedom.
The Campaign to Internationalize Blasphemy
While the repression we have described in much of the Muslim-majority world is long-standing, the campaign to internationalize it is recent. It made its first major appearance on February 14, 1989, with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning The Satanic Verses. This triggered the assassination of the novel’s Japanese translator, the stabbing of its Italian translator, the shooting of its Norwegian publisher, the burning to death of thirty-five guests at a Turkish hotel hosting its Turkish publisher, and the lifelong need for security for its author. It also prompted a burning-at-the-stake, albeit a symbolic one, and other forms of censorship. Kenan Malik describes how Satanic Verses was destroyed by Muslim protesters in Bradford, England: “The novel was tied to a stake before being set alight in front of the police station. It was an act calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that. The burning book became an icon of the rage of Islam. Sent around the world by a multitude of photographers and TV cameras, the image proclaimed, ‘I am a portent of a new kind of conflict and of a new kind of world.’”15
Many Sunnis, especially those backed by Saudi oil wealth, joined the bandwagon. Supporters ranging from Islamist Leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi—perhaps the most influential preacher in the Sunni world—to Al-Qaeda, to the members of the OIC have held that, henceforth, those living in non-Muslim jurisdictions, whether Muslim or not, can and should be controlled by amorphous and arbitrarily applied Islamic apostasy and blasphemy rules.16 On an annual basis for over a decade within the UN, OIC representatives have called for the international criminalization of blasphemy against Islam, either through defamation or hate-speech bans, in order to end what Pakistan’s envoy Marghoob Saleem Butt calls the “unrestricted and disrespectful enjoyment of freedom of expression.”
This demand is new. In contemporary times, Islamic authorities had not previously insisted that non-Muslim states enforce Islamic rules banning blasphemy and the related sins of apostasy, heresy, and hypocrisy. The practice of forbidding wrong was directed primarily at other Muslims, and certainly not to non-Muslim jurisdictions. Bernard Lewis avers: “[A]t no time, until very recently, did any Muslim authority ever suggest that Shari’a law should be enforced on non-Muslims in non-Muslim countries.”17
The goal of this program is not to penalize defamation of individual Muslims, which is already banned by traditional Western defamation laws, nor to stop discrimination or violence against Muslims, or others, which are already criminal offenses. Rather, it is to criminalize religious and political criticism of particular versions of Islam. Although the proposed bans are often conflated with personal insults, these are not the core of the complaints. Whether called “defamation,” “hate speech,” “incitement to hostility,” or “Islamophobia,” the central issue is criticism against or within Islam. This is clearly evident in the examples that have provoked the most outcry and become emblematic of this movement in the West: the Danish and Swedish cartoons, the Pope’s Regensburg speech, the van Gogh film Submission, Geert Wilders’s Fitna, the false Newsweek story of Qur’an desecration, and, of course, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.18
Those targeted range from Theo van Gogh, murdered in Amsterdam for his film Submission, to Sister Leonella, a sixty-five-year-old Italian nun in Mogadishu, murdered in “retaliation” for the Regensburg speech, to dozens of blameless Christian villagers in Nigeria, burned and hacked to death by Muslim mobs whipped up to strike out against irreverent cartoons in Denmark. In the six years since Scandinavian newspapers published Muhammed cartoons, plots to kill the cartoonists have been intercepted in Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Waterford, Ireland, while a Somalian would-be axe murderer was apprehended inside the home of one of the caricaturists, Kurt Westergaard. Such violence, combined with more generalized intimidation, as well as threats of legal prosecution, has created a broad chilling effect in the West on public negative expression concerning Islam, including expression by reform-minded Muslims.
Developments in the United Nations
Without Western support, the OIC managed to pass UN resolutions each year for twelve years aimed at criminalizing religious blasphemy, or “defamation of religions,” and has now, with Western support, passed resolutions urging states to prohibit religious hate speech. In recent years, Western states have responded to OIC demands by offering more aggressively to enforce the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ article 20(2), a provision calling for religious and other hate-speech bans that was originally included in the covenant at the insistence of the Soviet bloc and other authoritarian states over vociferous objections from the West.
On October 2, 2009, the United States, seeking to “reach out to Muslim countries,” joined with Egypt to introduce a nonbinding resolution urging states to enforce their hate-speech laws, which was adopted by consensus. State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh praised the resolution as among the Obama administration’s most “important successes.”19 Though in the United States, hate-speech crimes have been found unconstitutional, in this resolution, the United States encouraged their enforcement in the rest of the world, which could also lead to efforts to reinterpret the First Amendment at home.20 Several other prominent American leaders, including a senator and a supreme court justice, also voiced hopes for state-enforced limits on expression involving Qur’an burning when in 2010–11 this became an issue in a small Florida church. To date, such views are in the minority, but they could grow as America’s uniquely strong protections of individual freedoms come under increasing pressure.
In its sixteenth session in 2011, the Human Rights Council did not adopt a resolution against defamation of religions—marking the first time the UN’s premier human rights body had neglected to do so since 1999. Sensing defeat—brought on by more energetic Western opposition and the recent shock of the assassinations of Pakistan’s Minister of Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti and Punjab governor Salman Taseer over their opposition to that country’s blasphemy laws—the OIC failed to introduce one. This was a small but essential victory in the defense of individual rights to freedom of expression and of religion. It demonstrated that concerted pushback from the West on this issue can be effective. Whether some version of the resolution will be resurrected in subsequent UN meetings remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the OIC has focused on “hate speech” in its campaign within the UN for worldwide anti-blasphemy bans.
The West has been unsuccessful in promoting its interpretation of hate speech that draws a distinction between the protection of the individual followers of a religion and the protection of the religion itself. The West continues to support international hate-speech bans undeterred, even while OIC diplomats continue to use key hate-speech terms, such as “incitement to hostility” and “negative stereotyping,” synonymously with “defamation” and “blasphemy” against Islam. In fact, one of the OIC’s “Subsidiary Organs,” of which all member states are automatically members, is the “International Islamic Fiqh [Jurisprudence] Academy,” whose official fatwas stipulate that religious freedom requires forbidding anything that might undercut Islam and call for the judicial punishment of apostasy.21
Unless shelved or defeated, these resolutions, however phrased, are likely to be interpreted by UN bodies as blasphemy laws and made internationally binding. Former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick observed that UN
resolutions have a tendency, like “ground water,” to seep into international court opinions whether binding or not and become customary law.22 Politicized international bodies will be authorized to interpret vague hate-speech terms and will be far less scrupulous than Western courts in adhering to fundamental human rights principles. On this issue, the OIC has already reshaped the focus of the UN Human Rights Council, and even the General Assembly, as well as the work of several UN Special Rapporteurs.
If this continues, no longer would the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be understood as obliging states to ensure respect for rights of the individual to freedoms of religion and expression. Instead it would be inverted to mandate the use of state power to coerce individuals to respect specific religions. Western leaders would be in the dock at UN bodies, while Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan, and other states would be legitimized, even lauded, for upholding international human rights, as they, in the name of fighting religious insult, persecute religious reformers and political dissidents. Conversely, there would be no international human rights basis for other nations to come to the defense of such dissidents.
Western Law
Since laws prohibiting blasphemy and heresy against Christianity have become all but obsolete, it seems far-fetched that the West should now be contemplating a retreat from its freedoms on behalf of the demands of some members of another religion. But censorship, book-burnings, and their modern equivalents—blog-purging and the seizure of computer hard drives—are back.
In many Western countries, there are already lawsuits and criminal prosecutions concerning issues involving religion, politics, and society that have customarily been open to debate. Since the mid-1990s, prosecutors in Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada have trawled the websites of anti-immigration advocates looking for evidence that Islam’s Prophet may have been mocked or for some other anti-Islamic comment. The Dutch government has taken the added precaution of establishing a standing “Interdepartmental Committee on Cartoons” to monitor irreverent treatment of Islam. In France, Canada, Norway, and Italy, publishers, editors, and authors have been tried for inciting religious hostility and insulting religious sensibilities with their critiques of Islam and Muslim immigration. In Austria, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted for her lecture before an anti-immigration political party criticizing Muslim practices she observed abroad. In Germany, a man was convicted for the sacrilegious treatment of the word “Koran,” not the Islamic sacred text itself. Despite France’s “laïcité” system of strict separation of religion and politics, national icon Brigitte Bardot, in her animal-rights advocacy, has been convicted and fined five times under hate-speech laws for denouncing Islamic slaughter practices, as well as for other derogatory statements against Muslim matters.
As in much of the Muslim world, the ambiguity of such laws erodes due process and basic principles of fairness. An Australian lower court found two Christian pastors guilty of “vilifying” Islam in a private religion class and issued a lifelong gag order against their speaking about the Qur’an. Under Norway’s hate-speech laws, a handful of political organizations are empowered to bring legal complaints against negative commentary on Islam. A British jury was instructed to ignore whether or not impugned assertions were factually correct. A Helsinki court ruled that an argument made by the defense in a Muslim blasphemy case was inadmissible because “[l]ogic and so-called arguments of reason have no true significance in debating religious questions.”
These problems have led to growing legal criticism in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, including by some disillusioned former proponents. Amir Butler, of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, no longer favors religious hate-speech laws because “at every major Islamic lecture I have attended since [hate speech] litigation began against Catch the Fire Ministries, there have been small groups of evangelical Christians—armed with notepads and pens—jotting down any comment that might be later used as evidence” against the speaker. Vilification laws thus become “a legalistic weapon by which religious groups can silence their ideological opponents, rather than engaging in debate and discussion.”23 Alan Borovoy, an architect of Canada’s human rights commissions and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, now laments that, when he labored to create the commissions, “we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech.… No ideology—political, religious or philosophical—can be immune.… A free culture cannot protect people against material that hurts.”24
Nevertheless, the effort to punish anti-Islamic hate speech is moving forward in both regional and international systems. In 2008, the Council of Europe issued new hate-speech guidelines for the entire region, which specified that, in addition to the offending author or artist, those to be prosecuted will include “those who have directly or indirectly contributed to the circulation of such statement or work of art: a publisher, an editor, a broadcaster, a journalist, an art dealer, an artistic director or a museum manager.”
Although so far there have been few convictions, these laws, and the cases they give rise to, chill speech and are a measure of the diminishing value placed by society on freedom and fairness. Western democracies still subscribe to the fundamental importance of freedom of expression. Yet free expression is itself compromised, perhaps fatally, by religious hate- speech bans. To understand why, one has only to look at the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission vague and subjective standards, which state that, with respect to religion, “there is no right to offend,” that “gratuitously offensive” speech is not protected, and that there is a new “right of [religious freedom of] citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings.”
Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Official Lexicons
Apart from attempted legal prohibitions, governments have sought to regulate language and themes that could possibly touch on Islam.25 In a 2005 report, England’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, criticized prison staff in Wakefield for wearing tiepins showing St. George’s cross, the national flag of England, claiming that they could be “misconstrued” as symbols of the Crusades. Some local Muslims found Ms. Owers’s concerns “petty.” Indeed, some manifestations of this repressive impulse have been comical, with educators and officials in the United Kingdom continually scrapping pig themes and stories. Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra and other Muslims responded that neither they nor “the vast majority of Muslims” had any objection, and that while Islam forbade Muslims to eat pork, “there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs”—in fact, such acts by authorities actually worsened the situation of British Muslims: “Every time we get these stories Muslims are seen more and more as misfits.”26
In 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department instructed their employees to avoid the words “salafi,” “wahhabist,” “caliphate,” and “jihadist” as offensive to Muslims when used by non-Muslims. On the advice of unidentified Muslim consultants, the word “liberty” was also dropped in favor of “progress.” That year, the U.K. Home Secretary also dropped the term “Islamic terrorism” and instead instituted “anti-Islamic activity.” In 2009, the U.S. Homeland Security secretary dropped “Islamic terrorism” in favor of “man-made disasters.” The May 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy document, which in previous years had said, “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century,” dropped any reference to “Islamic extremism.”27
Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Religions, points out that this creates security challenges: “[T]he failure to nail the problem squarely by name … leads Washington to think of American solutions to terrorism more so than Muslim ones.” Senator Joseph Lieberman noted that dropping such words detracts from “important policy questions about how to combat the ideological dimensions of the war that is taking place within Islam.” Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser asks, “If our government officials cannot even employ the te
rms ‘Islamism’ or ‘Salafism’ in their discourse, it remains entirely unclear how they will be able to facilitate this contest of ideas [with Islamist extremists].”28
Threat, Violence, and Fear
Even apart from the effects of the law, some who dare to discuss Islam have to change their names or go into hiding. Many come from Muslim backgrounds, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled the Netherlands after her coproducer van Gogh was assassinated and a death threat against her was staked with a knife to his corpse. Writer Paul Berman notes:
When I met Hirsi Ali … she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. [Ian] Buruma himself mentions in Murder in Amsterdam that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination. I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in Il Corriere della Sera—and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of [Tariq] Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding.29