You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (15 page)

Such moments of solidarity were rare. Ali’s fellow artist Sooreh Hera was not so fortunate after she tried to confront religious hypocrisy. ‘They condemn homosexuality, but in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia it is common for married men to maintain relations with other men,’ she said as she explained her project. ‘Works of art can be provocative. It is not an artist’s job just to paint flowers. Art should shine a light on social issues.’ She photographed gay Iranian exiles wearing masks of Muhammad and Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, sitting half-naked in modern bedrooms. The director of her Dutch gallery loved her protests against the execution of gays by the Iranian regime – Such a transgressive critique of hegemonic power structures! So edgy! So fizzing with contemporary relevance! – until he realised that ‘Certain people in our society may perceive them as offensive,’ and removed them from the show. Hera went into hiding, after receiving charming emails along the lines of ‘We’re going to burn you naked or put a bullet in your mouth.’ Like Khader, she was well aware of the international reach of her enemies, and feared that agents of the Iranian state might target her. The Dutch government and the left-wing press refused to support her. ‘Freedom of expression has become an illusion in Europe,’ she said. ‘We think we have freedom of expression, but in fact we live under a sort of hidden censorship.’

Because it was fighting a religious culture war and targeting newspapers, artists and novelists who offended it, radical Islam posed the greatest threat to freedom of speech of the anti-liberal movements. There is no guarantee that others will not imitate its tactics. In the summer of 2011, a British literary festival cancelled an event featuring an Islamist speaker after the English Defence League threatened to disrupt the meeting. Maybe I should not make too much of an isolated event, but the white extreme right could not have failed to have noticed that the habit of agreeing to the demands of menacing men had become ingrained in cultural bureaucrats. Religious radicals could dictate who spoke and wrote, so why shouldn’t they do the same?

If the fears of feminists, artists, politicians and writers seem remote from ordinary life, consider the case of Deepika Thathaal, who like many girls did not dream of growing up to be a painter or a novelist, but a pop star. She started as a child singer in her native Norway. By seventeen, she was doing what teenage girls do, rebelling against authority, dressing in skimpy outfits and listening to the music of her day. Her second album, released in 1996, was a sensation in Norway. She mixed the influences of Asian music, Massive Attack and Portishead, and looked stunning as she did it. She thought she was on a smooth path to success, until the intimidation began.

Her parents had to change their phone number because of the hate calls. Five men burst into her school calling her ‘a slut, a whore, a prostitute’. The confused teenager could not see why they were upset. ‘I had the first brown face to appear on the front of the showbiz magazines. They ought to have been pleased.’ She was attacked on the street and on stage during a concert in Oslo. She moved to London, where she decided to relaunch her career as Deeyah, ‘the Muslim Madonna’. With a naïvety that could make you weep, she thought Britain would be a safer and better country than Norway because she had visited it as a child, and been impressed to see Asian women in Western clothes. Performers like her would be freer here, she reasoned, because immigrants had had longer to integrate.

‘I first realised that something was wrong when my new manager told me that there was no competition. No other Muslim woman was doing what I was doing. He thought it was great, but I wondered, “Why am I the only one?”’

She soon found out. In 2006, she released a single, ‘What Will it Be’. ‘We don’t take it lightly when you threatenin’ women/How you have so much hate and faith in religion?’ she sang on the video as she danced in a bikini top. To pile offence on offence, she supported women’s refuges and campaigns against ‘honour killings’.

British religious reactionaries forced her to hire bodyguards. Middle-aged men spat at her in the street and phoned her to say they would cut her to pieces not just because of her clothes, she told me, but because the sight of a woman making any kind of music was anathema to them. Callers demanded that Asian music channels ban her videos, and the channels’ abject managers agreed. A spokesman for the Islamist organisations the Labour government, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice were appeasing condemned her by saying women should not draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

‘It was just the same in Britain as it was in Norway,’ Deeyah said. She moved to an American city where no one knew her to find peace of mind and the time to pull herself together.

Deeyah talks as if liberal Europe had betrayed her, a common feeling among dissidents. Naser Khader, whose defence of gay rights and freedom of speech would once have marked him as a leftist, has given up on the liberal left and has joined the Danish conservative party. Gita Sahgal, who organised the pro-Rushdie demonstrations in Parliament Square in 1989, went on to work for Amnesty International. She and the organisation seemed natural allies. Sahgal was a feminist. Amnesty International was the world’s pre-eminent liberal campaign group. She resigned in 2009 because she could no longer tolerate Amnesty allying with Islamists. Liberal-leftists in Europe and North America assume that good people will always recognise the inherent goodness of the liberal left and join it. I would not count on that happening with the coming generation of dissenters from Muslim backgrounds. The most radical voices – to use ‘radical’ in its true sense for once – have good reason to turn away. The first principle of liberalism, a principle that predates the Enlightenment, was freedom of conscience. No man should have the power to force others to accept his religion. Europe had hundreds of politicians, activists, intellectuals, writers, artists and exiles who found that freedom denied to them as they tried to criticise religious beliefs. Beyond Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were many others whose cases rarely made the papers. They had come to Europe because they wanted freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. When they tried to exercise those rights, they were threatened, attacked or forced to go into hiding. Mainstream society, which could cry so piteously for the persecuted in far-off lands, did not even know their names, let alone find the courage to defend their liberties.

Attempting to define ‘chutzpah’, and finding that ‘gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible guts, presumption plus arrogance’ did not quite capture the awe the word carried with it, the Yiddish linguist Leo Rosten tried again. Chutzpah, he said, is ‘that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan’.

The skill of the practised chutzpahean lies in his ability to manipulate his listeners’ guilt. He knows that no one wishes to be accused of picking on the vulnerable, and so will make you forget that the self-made orphan is a murderer, and the self-anointed victim an oppressor.

From Salman Rushdie on, Islamists have supplemented the threat of violence with appeals to the sometimes irritating but often well-justified arguments for fair treatment made by the politically correct. They have claimed that they are the victims of racism or religious phobia, and said that democratic countries must punish or ostracise those who affront their prejudices or question their faith. It is a breath-catching demand, because blasphemy is a victimless crime. What has the blasphemer injured? Is it religious ideas? If so, must we protect ideas from criticism as we protect children from abusers? Are we to regard concepts as persons who can suffer physical harm and financial loss? Perhaps the tender feelings of believers are the victims. If so, is their faith so weak that mockery and doubt can threaten it? Or maybe the defendant stands accused of insulting whatever god or gods the faithful follow. If that is the case, are the delicate deities in question so thin-skinned that their ‘self-esteem’ can only recover if their followers perform human sacrifices and present them with the corpses of their critics?

In practice, the injured party on whose behalf the state brings its action or the terrorist kills his victim is the tribe or imagined community. Blasphemy is the means by which it enforces group identity by condemning internal critics as heretics and apostates, and silencing sceptical outsiders. The religious transfer legal rights from individuals, where they belong, to abstractions such as faith or God. The ‘insults’ and ‘offences’ they penalise are vague and subjective. Given the impossibility of defining what they mean with anything like the clarity we expect in law, let alone of demonstrating real physical or financial harm, the ‘crime’ of blasphemy gives censors, judges and poisonous nuisances enormous leeway. Reviewing the blasphemy laws not just of the Islamic world but also of Poland and Greece, the human-rights group Freedom House said in 2010 that blasphemy allowed extremists to cement a mobbish alliance between Church and state. ‘No matter what the political environment, blasphemy laws lend the power of the state to particular religious authorities and effectively reinforce extreme views, since the most conservative or hard-line elements in a religious community are generally the quickest to take offence and the first to claim the mantle of orthodoxy. Virtually any act has the potential to draw an accusation and prosecution’ – a sentiment that M.F. Husain and Sherry Jones would have agreed with.

Religious freedom – including freedom from religion – requires freedom of speech. Restrict freedom of speech, and Christians can persecute Muslims and Jews for denying that Jesus was the son of God. Muslims can persecute Jews and Christians for denying that Muhammad was God’s messenger. Jews can persecute Christians and Muslims for saying that Christian and Muslim doctrines superseded theirs. And every religion can persecute free-thinkers.

To cite the most striking example, the United Nations Human Rights Council demanded in 2009 that member states forbid the ‘defamation of religion’. The council is a sick joke, which has included Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and many another dictatorship among its members. Its proclamations are a regular source of shame, but its attack on freedom of speech was its nadir. The UN did not say that states should forbid persecution on religious grounds – if it had, China and Saudi Arabia would have been in the dock – but that they should forbid criticism of religion. It gave no definition of the meaning of defamation, but Pakistan, the promoter of the motion, said it was against the ‘negative stereotyping of religions [and] the frequent and wrong association of Islam with human-rights violations and terrorism’. Irony is always lost on the authoritarian mind, and the representative of Pakistan could not allow himself to remember that Islamists were reducing his country to a failed state by using religion to justify human-rights violations and terrorism.

Clearly floundering as he tried to find a moral justification for censorship, he went on to say that the motion must be passed, because laws against the defamation of religion were needed to protect religious minorities from ‘discrimination and acts of violence’. The insincerity behind the worthy sentiment was plain to see. As Pakistan talked of the need to end discrimination, its judiciary and Islamist terrorists persecuted Christians, and Shia, Ahmadi and other ‘heretical’ versions of Islam.

The most notorious case was that of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. The police arrested her after she argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried, saying that she was impure. A mob surrounded the police station in her village in the Sheikhupura district of the Punjab. Its leaders told the authorities that she had insulted Muhammad. For this blasphemy, the court sentenced her to death. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, who denounced the death sentence as the work of a ‘black law’. He and his wife visited Asia Bibi in prison, and promised that she would receive a presidential pardon. Taseer’s fellow politicians, from the president downwards, could not emulate his bravery. Fearing a religious backlash, they abandoned him. (One went so far as to say that not only would he not soften or repeal the blasphemy law, he would personally kill anyone who blasphemed.) Their cowardice left religious talk-show hosts free to run a hate campaign against Taseer. A police constable, charged by the state to protect him, then pumped twenty-six bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.

Once you concede ground to religious extremists, their demands grow more impertinent. The supporters of Taseer’s killer did not claim that the governor had blasphemed by asserting that the Koran was the work of men, not God, or that he had insulted the Prophet Muhammad. He was murdered for criticising the workings of a lethal blasphemy law, and urging judicial restraint. He had not blasphemed against God, only blasphemed against blasphemy law, but for that small ‘offence’ he had to die.

Pakistan’s use of the language of victimhood to sweeten repression was not a one-off. In 1990, the foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference launched the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. It established Sharia as ‘the only source of reference’ for the protection of human rights in Islamic countries, thus giving it supremacy over the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Both documents claim to protect freedom, but the former is a sickly and deceitful alternative to the latter. On 10 December 1948 the United Nations responded to the gas chambers and saturation bombings of the Second World War and the crimes of Stalin and Hitler by stating that ‘disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’. Article 1 of the Declaration consists of the straightforward statement that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ Article 1 of the Cairo Declaration of 1990 is a more shifty piece of prose: ‘All human beings form one family whose members are united by submission to God and descent from Adam,’ it asserts, as it at once distances itself from universal brotherhood by limiting membership of the human family to those who believe in God and submit to Him. If the Cairo Declaration had upheld human rights, the appeal to religion would have mattered less. Instead, the drafters offered human rights with one hand and then snatched them away with the other. Article 2 says: ‘Life is a God-given gift and … it is prohibited to take away life except for a Sharia prescribed reason.’ The Declaration says that safety from bodily harm is a guaranteed right, and ‘it is prohibited to breach it without a Sharia prescribed reason’. Murder and torture are prohibited, except when Sharia says they are not. The Declaration asserts the right to free speech, and then removes it from those who ‘violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith’. Its authors produced a human-rights declaration that from the point of view of free speech offers no protection against terrorists killing cartoonists, or courts passing death sentences for blasphemy, or ayatollahs ordering the murder of novelists for apostasy.

The Islamic states’ hypocrisy shows that in our time opposing religious censorship means concentrating on authoritarian Islam. You can find many examples of appalling Jewish and Christian attitudes towards women and gays. Orthodox Judaism is a misogynistic creed, and Christian Africa is one of the most dangerous places in the world for homosexuals. In the past, Judaism and Christianity threatened freedom of speech as a matter of course. But their censorious power in the rich world has largely been contained by secularism – which is not to say that extremist Jews and Christians do not want to see it rise again. Israel has a blasphemy law. America does not, but it has a legal campaign group called the Alliance Defense Fund that employs Christian lawyers to force schools and libraries to censor when it can. As I have argued, the West underestimates the threat Hindu nationalism poses to Indian writers, academics and artists. When all the exceptions have been made, however, Islamic states and paramilitaries are in a league of their own when it comes to religious censorship.

Given the ethnic spread of the faith, their targets will usually have brown skins; yet a large section of white Western liberal opinion does not recognise that it is truly racist to refrain from condemning the clerics who seek to oppress them. Half-educated academics and gutless politicians maintain that, on the contrary, it is racist to argue that human rights are universal. They instruct us that formerly colonised peoples should have different human rights, even if these turn out on close examination not to be human rights at all. The chutzpah of the authoritarian regimes and movements which maintain that it is bigoted to criticise religious bigotry is dazzling. More dazzling still is the eagerness of fercockt Western putzes to go along with them.