Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  26. Mark Steyn, “Making a Pig’s Ear of Defending Democracy,” Telegraph (U.K.), October 4, 2005; “Banned, Toy Pigs That offend Muslims,” Daily Mail, October 1, 2005; John Brenan, “Toy Pig Ban Climbdown,” Express and Star, October 19, 2005; “School Bans Pig Stories,” BBC News, March 4, 2003; Sarah Harris, “‘Three Little Pigs CD’ Banned from Government-backed Awards for Offending Muslims and Builders,” The Daily Mail, January 23, 2008. In a variation on the theme, Tayside Police in Scotland apologized after a Muslim member of the police board suggested that a postcard with the force’s new number, mailed to local residents, was offensive because it featured a puppy—dogs are unclean in Islam. Other Muslim groups said the picture would not be generally offensive to Muslims; see Martyn McLaughlin, “Apology on the Cards as Police Pup Picture Sparks Warning over Offence to Muslims,” The Scotsman, July 2, 2008, http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Apology-on-the-cards-as.4243889.jp.

  27. Associated Press (AP), “Obama Bans Islam, Jihad from US Security sStrategy,” Boston Herald, April 7, 2010, http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100407obama_bans_islam_jihad_from_us_security_strategy/.

  28. Leslie Gelb, “Only Muslims Can Stop Muslim Terror,” Daily Beast, January 7, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-07/only-muslims-can-stop-muslim-terror/; Joseph I. Lieberman, “Who’s the Enemy in the War on Terror?” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2010; Zuhdi Jasser, “Americanism versus Islamism,” in The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular, ed. Zeyno Baran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 187. This may also have been a factor in the murder of American soldiers. The fellow soldiers of Ft. Hood gunman, Major Nidal Hasan, said that, despite his anti-American rhetoric and open, and illegal, proselytizing, fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim kept officers from filing complaints; see Stephen F. Hayes, “Malign Neglect,” The Weekly Standard, November 30, 2009, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/250ieqfn.asp.

  29. Paul Berman, “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” The New Republic, May 29, 2007, http://www.tnr.com/article/who%E2%80%99s-afraid-tariq-ramadan. See also Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2010).

  30. Berman, “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?”

  31. AP, “Two Chains Reject Magazine with Muhammad Cartoons,” Washington Post, March 30, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902219.html; Pieter W. Van Der Horst, “Tying Down Academic Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2006.

  32. “German Group, Merkel to Honor Controversial Danish Cartoonist,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 8, 2010, http://www.rferl.org/content/Danish_Muhammad_Cartoonist_To_Receive_German_Media_Freedom_Prize_/2151531.html.

  33. Nick Collins, “Rory Bremner ‘Afraid’ to Joke about Islam,” Telegraph, June 21, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7828813/Rory-Bremner-afraid-to-joke-about-Islam.html.

  34. Christopher Hitchens, “Assassins of the Mind,” Vanity Fair, February 2009, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/hitchens200902?printable=true¤tPage=1.

  35. Letter from Bob Flavell of Duxbury, MA, Boston Globe, February 8, 2006.

  36. Nina Shea, “Self-Censoring South Park,” National Review Online, April 27, 2010, http://article.nationalreview.com/432601/self-censoring-isouth-parki/nina-shea.

  37. English companies have restricted the showing of the English flag lest its cross offend Muslims; see Modi Kreitman, “England Afraid to Fly Its Own Flag,” Ynetnews, June 4, 2006, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3258613,00.html. Italian football team Inter Milan ran into problems for using a red cross on their jerseys, even though it is the symbol of the city of Milan. Similar kerfuffles affected Eintracht Frankfurt and FC Barcelona; see “Uproar over Crossed Football Shirts,” Al Jazeera, December 15, 2007, http://english.aljazeera.net/sport/2007/12/2008526103049396918.html; Reuters, “German Soccer Team Shies Away from Cross on Jersey,” FaithWorld blog, March 22, 2008, http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/03/22/german-soccer-team-shies-away-from-cross-on-jersey; Xavier G. Luque, “Los países islámicos retocan el escudo del Barça para no herir sensibilidades,” La Vanguardia, December 15, 2007, http://www.lavanguardia.es/premium/publica/publica?COMPID=53418724457&ID_PAGINA=22088&ID_FORMATO=9&turbourl=false.

  38. “Yale Alums Protest Cutting Muslim Toons,” CBS News, September 8, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/08/national/main5293364.shtml.

  39. Apart from sources referenced elsewhere in this book, for distinctions between and among apostasy, blasphemy, heresy, and disbelief and on the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim in this respect, and on the question of repentance, see also Mohamed Hashim Kamali, Freedom of Expression in Islam, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1997), 212–58. For short overviews of apostasy in Islam, see Ruud Peters and G. J. J. de Vries, “Apostasy in Islam,” Die Welt des Islams 17 (1976–77): 1–25, http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/r.peters/bestanden/apostasy%20in%20islam.pdf; Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 121–59. For debates on apostasy, see Islam Abdul-Aziz, “Apostasy: Scholars Differ on the Penalty” (a report on Proceedings of the 19th Session of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy), May 6, 2009, http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1239888697368&pagename=Zone-English-Living_Shariah%2FLSELayout; Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, “Preserving the Freedom for Faith: Reevaluating the Politics of Compulsion,” Lamppost Productions, July 2009, http://www.lamppostproductions.com/files/articles/PRESERVING%20THE%20FREEDOM%20FOR%20FAITH.pdf; Jamal Badawi, “Is Apostasy a Capital Crime in Islam?” April 26, 2006, http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-Living_Shariah/LSELayout&cid=1178724000686; Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “ The Future of Sharia: Negotiating Islam in the context of the Secular State,” section 2.3b, n.d., http://sharia.law.emory.edu/en/freedom_religion. See also Mohamed Talbi, “Religious Liberty: A Muslim Perspective,” in The New Voices of Islam: A Reader, ed. Mehran Kamrava (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 105–18; Mohsen Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion and Belief in Islam,” in Kamrava, op. cit., 119–42. Others arguing against civil penalties for apostasy include Ahmad Subhy Mansour, Penalty of Apostasy: A Historical and Fundamental Study (Toronto: International Publishing, 1998); see also “The Punishment for Apostasy and Reform in Islamic Fiqh,” 92–116, of Sayyid Al-Qimni, Thank You … Bin Laden!, unpublished English translation of Arabic Shukran … Bin Laden! ed. Abdul Munim Fahmi (Cairo: Dar Misr Al Mahroosa, 2004). Our thanks to Jennifer Bryson for passing on this translation. Mohammad Omar Farooq, “On Apostasy and Islam: 100+ Notable Islamic Voices affirming the Freedom of Faith,” April 2, 2007, http://apostasyandislam.blogspot.com/, gives a listing of and quotations from a wide range of Muslim scholars and organizations opposing civil penalties for apostasy. See also Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 180–87. Olivier Roy notes that in recent years, even fundamentalists have stressed excluding apostates from the community rather than killing them; see his Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 81.

  40. Baran, The Other Muslims, 1.

  41. Scott Helfstein, Nassir Abdullah, and Muhammad al-Obaidi, “Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al-Qa’ida’s Violence Against Muslims,” Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Occasional Paper Series, December 2009. Osama bin Laden has opined: “Aiding America, or the Allawi government [in Iraq] which is apostate [Murtada], or the Karzai government [in Afghanistan], or the Mahmoud Abbas government [in the Palestinian Authority] which is apostate, or the other apostate governments in their war against the Muslims, is the greatest apostasy of all, and amounts to abandonment of the Muslim community. … ” He continued: “Anyone who partic
ipates in these elections … has committed apostasy against Allah”; see “To the Muslims in Iraq in Particular and the [Islamic] Nation in General,” letter from Osama bin Laden, released December 27, 2004 by the Al-Sahab Institute for Media Productions, Memri Special Dispatch No. 837, December 30, 2004, http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sd&ID=SP83704&Page=archives. Thomas Hegghammer argues that Al-Qaeda largely avoided takfiri language before about 2003 but that now it is much more common; see his “The Ideological Hybridization of Jihadi Groups,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 9 (2009): 26–45. Meanwhile, Zawahiri denounced U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad as “the Afghan apostate,” Al Jazeera, June 23, 2006; see also “Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri: Elegizing the Ummah’s Martyr and Commander of the Martyrdom-seekers,” in Laura Mansfield, ed., Al Qaeda 2006 Yearbook (Old Tappan, NJ: TLG Publications, 2007), 190–93. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for a time the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, condemned Shias as “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.” He maintained that Shiism is “patent polytheism” and “other forms of infidelity and manifestations of atheism”; see “Text from Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi Letter” February 12, 2004, Coalition Provisional Authority, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2004/02/040212-al-zarqawi.htm.

  42. This growing practice of mutual takfir has led to broad-based efforts to condemn the practice. Leading Muslim authorities have jointly forbidden the accusation that any adherent to any one of the eight schools of Islamic jurisprudence is apostate, see http://www.amman-message.com/; Mahmoud Al Abed, “Clerics Forbid Takfir,” Jordan Times, July 7, 2005, http://www.jordanembassyus.org/07072005001.htm. Also, the Federación Española de Entidades Religiosas Islámicas, the main body representing Spain’s million Muslims, condemned Osama bin Laden by name for what it termed Al-Qaeda’s attempt to invent legal justifications from Qur’anic and hadith sources in order to defend terrorism, and that by so doing they [Al-Qaeda] had “made themselves apostates”; see Stephen Ulph, “A Fatwa and Defiance at the Madrid Conference,” Terrorism Focus 2, no. 6 (March 16, 2005): http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=27709&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=238&no_cache=1. See also “Religious Scholars Endorse Edicts,” King Abdullah Web site, July 6, 2005, http://www.kingabdullah.jo/news/details.php?kn_serial=3409&menu_id=&lang_hmka1=1.

  43. John Glassie, “Questions for Irshad Manji: In Good Faith,” New York Times, December 21, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21QUESTIONS.html?scp=1&sq=Interview%20with%20Irshad%20Manji&st=cse; DeNeen L. Brown, “‘Muslim Refusenik’ Incites Furor with Critique of Faith,” Washington Post, January 19, 2004, http://www.wash-ingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28039-2004Jan18?language=printer; Irshad Manji, “Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood Should Be the Last Thing to Offend Muslims,” The New Republic Online, June 22, 2007, http://www.tnr.com/article/clerical-error.

  44. Baran, The Other Muslims, 2, 189.

  45. George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 141.

  46. In contrast, the United States has “hate-crimes” legislation but not hate-speech bans or blasphemy crimes, due to the free speech protections in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Incitement to violence is a crime in the United States only when the expression is directed to inciting violence that is likely and imminent.

  47. “Report on the Relationship Between Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Religion: The Issue of Regulation and Prosecution of Blasphemy, Religious Insult and Incitement to Religious Hatred,” adopted by the Venice Commission at its 76th Plenary Session (Venice, 17–18 October 2008), 11, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/religion/IV1.htm.

  48. Ezra Levant, “Rev. Stephen Boissoin’s Conviction Overturned,” blog entry, http://ezralevant.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=HRC.

  49. Grim and Finke, The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Violence in the 21st Century.

  50. Elizabeth Powers, “Liberty for All Free Speech is the American Way,” The Weekly Standard, April 19, 2010. C. Edwin Baker finds that hate-speech regulation has no real effect on curbing “hate”; see Ivan Hare and James Weinstein, eds., Extreme Speech and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  51. In his June 4, 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama pledged to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Lamin Sanneh rightly asks “why Catholic and other religious groups cannot be given the same degree of enforcement of their religious rights”; see “President Obama and America’s New Beginning with Islam: A Response” (unpublished paper, Yale University, June 4, 2009), available through Professor Sanneh.

  52. Robert M. Gates, speech, April 14, 2008, http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1228. As Farr observes, “There is no systematic approach to what ought to be a central task of U.S. national security strategy, namely, understanding the religious wellsprings of Islamist extremism and its origins in places such as Saudi Arabia. There is too little thought given to supporting religious actors capable of altering the climate of opinion that nurtures the terrorists, their extremist religious views, and the export of those views.” See Thomas Farr, World of Faith and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 218. However, traditional Muslims, precisely because they have not pursued a religiously based political agenda, lack a national infrastructure, and their organizations are virtually invisible to state and national governments. Western governments tend to rely heavily in their Muslim outreach on individuals and institutions that are prominent simply because they have Saudi and Gulf support, often espousing views starkly at odds with fundamental freedoms of speech and religion; see Hedieh Mirahmadi, “Navigating Islam in America,” in Baran, The Other Muslims, 29; Nina Shea and James Woolsey, “What About Muslim Moderates?” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2007.

  53. ICCPR Article 20(2), calling for states to ban “incitement to religious hostility,” is commonly cited as the legal authority for mandating laws against religious hate speech, but it was proposed by the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and some other authoritarian states; no Western European state voted for it. See Stephanie Farrior, Molding the Matrix: The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of International Law Concerning Hate Speech, Berkeley Journal of International Law 14, no. 1 (1996): n. 231. Eleanor Roosevelt, representing the United States, warned that it was a provision “likely to be exploited by totalitarian States for the purpose of rendering the other articles null and void.” Upon signing the ICCPR, the United States provided as follows: (1) the U.S. understands that Article 20 “does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States”; (2) “For the United States, article 5, paragraph 2, which provides that fundamental human rights existing in any State Party may not be diminished on the pretext that the Covenant recognizes them to a lesser extent, has particular relevance to article 19, paragraph 3 which would permit certain restrictions on the freedom of expression..” The U.K. delegate echoed this concern: “Unscrupulous governments like nothing better than a moral justification for their actions.”

  54. Christian Caryl, “A Eulogy for Pakistan,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 16, 2011, http://www.rferl.org/content/pakistan_bhatti_washington/2340390.html; Lela Gilbert, “Pakistan and Blasphemy: A Matter of Life and Death,” Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2011, http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=217432; “Pakistani and US Leaders Urge Tolerance, Harmony in Minister Shahbaz Bhatti Memorial Service at the Embassy,” Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan press release, March 10, 2011, http://www.embassyofpakistanusa.org/news474_03102011.php

  INDEX

  Abbasids, 14, 74, 79, 288, 297

  Abdullah, King of Jordan, 122

  Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33

  Aboutaleb, Ahmed, 267, 277, 323

&nb
sp; Abu-Zayd, Nasr Hamid, 8, 13, 34, 76–77, 287–288

  essay by, 289–294

  Afghanistan, 9, 101–116

  Islamic Constitution, 104

  overview, 102

  safe haven for Al-Qaeda, 102

  Taliban activities, 102–103

  Africa, 133–148

  overview 134–135

  See also individual African countries

  Aghajari, Hashem, 55–56, 60

  Ahadi, Mina, 281

  Ahmadi religion, 89

  Ahmadiyyah, defined, 89

  Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, Iranian president, 37