Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (5 page)

This survey of Muslim countries provides insights into the wide range, significance, effects, and baleful consequences of laws and vigilante actions against those accused of insulting Islam in the Muslim world. It is only against this background that the dangerous possibilities such restrictions pose to the rest of the world—either through the United Nations or by direct pressure on Western governments—can be seen.

In
part III
, “The Globalization of Blasphemy,” we give an overview of attempts to transplant restrictions on “insulting Islam” to the West. These instances have occurred in particular Western countries and in the United Nations,
taking place in commissions, conferences, courts of law, or in the streets through vigilante action. Some of the larger and more famous examples in the West have had such a complex and long-lasting international backlash and effect that they must be treated as special cases. These are detailed in
chapter 10
and include the continuing affair of
The Satanic Verses
, renewed when author Salman Rushdie was given a knighthood by the British government. We also focus on the so-called Danish cartoons crisis of 2005–6, which continues to reverberate when the images are republished or forbidden to be printed, as in 2009 when Yale University Press censored them and other images from a book detailing the cartoons crisis itself. Other examples include the
Newsweek
account of a Qur’an flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, a report which was later disproved; Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial speech at Regensburg; and Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders’s provocative film,
Fitna
. One feature of these upheavals was that they frequently involved political manipulation. For example, the Danish cartoons were first published in September 2005 and later republished, even in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia, without any outcry. It was only in January 2006, following a decision by the OIC in its Mecca meeting to make an issue of the caricatures, when riots, violence, and boycotts erupted and some 200 people were killed.

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.

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.”
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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.

In 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.
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