Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (6 page)

More disturbing are bans on longstanding and legitimate subjects of inquiry and debate, including Muslim practices regarding women, non-Muslims, violence, stoning and corporal punishments, and dress. This list must also include criticism of hate-speech laws themselves; such criticisms have already been challenged in Western courts as an example of Islamophobia. It is true that convictions in such cases have been infrequent, but that is not reassuring, because the trials themselves produce a broad chilling effect; there are uncertainties about what specific speech might be prohibited. For example, in 2009, criticism of Islamic veiling of women triggered prosecution in Great Britain but not in France, where the critique was made by President Sarkozy himself. Furthermore, even a successful defense can be disastrously expensive. An Australian lower court convicted two Christian preachers for “vilifying” Islam by, according to the court, selectively quoting from the Qur’an. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the case took three years and cost the defense over $100,000 in legal fees. Even with acquittal, in cases like these, the defendant’s reputation and livelihood may be damaged.

The publicity stemming from being involved in a legal case of this sort also increases the threat of extralegal violence. This, as we will show, is already a far graver danger in the West than the legal process itself. Among the most prominent Western victims of these attacks and threats are novelist Salman Rushdie, cultural editor Flemming Rose, critical documentarist Theo van Gogh, feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, philosopher Robert Redeker, and Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. Among other victims of laws and threats in the West are Muslims who criticize reactionary interpretations of Islam. Muslim parliamentarians like Naser Khader in Denmark or German Green party politician Ekin Deligoz and prominent Muslim women’s advocates such Mimount Bousakla receive serious threats, as do a myriad of writers and scholars, artists, and journalists.

The pages that follow reveal that self-censorship for fear of offending Muslims is now becoming common in Western discourse, extending far beyond rude or uncivil language. In 2008, BBC head Mark Thompson warned of “a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam and its relationship to the traditions and values of British and Western society as a whole.” In 2008, publisher Random House canceled the publication of Sherry Jones’s novel
The Jewel of Medina
because it feared violence by some Muslims. In this case the fears were well founded; in September 2008, the home and office of the British publisher that bought the rights to the novel were firebombed. In 2009, Yale University Press refused to include a photograph of the
Jyllands-Posten
“Danish cartoons” even though it was publishing a book, authored by Jytte Klausen, that was advertised by YUP itself as the “definitive” study of those cartoons.

Fourth, if international blasphemy restrictions are accepted, authoritarian regimes will have an additional weapon with which to protect themselves from any criticism from abroad, just as they have often used religious restrictions to ward off criticism domestically. These regimes are seeking a new world consensus on human rights, consistent with the 1990 Cairo Declaration, one that subordinates individual freedoms and rights to particular interpretations of Islamic law. Their simple syllogism is that if they claim to represent Islam, and one cannot criticize Islam, then one cannot criticize them. Already in the 1990s, when UN Special Rapporteurs criticized OIC countries for violations of international human rights standards—standards that those countries previously had accepted—the rapporteurs were threatened for purportedly insulting Islam.

Fifth, if we accept restrictions on “insulting Islam,” we will betray those dissidents who fight for freedom under repressive regimes in the Muslim world, especially those Muslims for whom Islam holds the promise of political and religious freedom. We betray them by accepting the arguments and rationale, and thus becoming the de facto allies, of their persecutors. This is so whether their persecutors are Islamist governments such as those of Saudi Arabia or Iran, authoritarian regimes seeking Islamic legitimacy such as that of Egypt, or vigilantes and terrorists who seek to maim and destroy those with a different interpretation of Islam. In accepting these restrictions, we implicitly accept the rationale offered by their
persecutors, which holds that the law should stop statements and activities deemed by some to be religiously insulting. In effect, this signals that repressive governments are right to silence dissenters, artists, minority faiths, and others who do not conform religiously. In acquiescing to proposals for legislation banning “insulting Islam”, the West would implicitly embrace a view of Islam and its teachings against which reformers argue and have fought. Muslim reformers are often isolated enough in their own countries; for the West to further ideologically isolate them would amount to a grave betrayal.

Sixth, by surrendering to Islamic antiblasphemy restrictions, we will undercut our own security. The Muslim world is torn by strife over the meaning and future of Islam. Some of the most strident voices in that struggle press for reactionary forms of Islam, and out of their Islamist ideologies emanate terrorism and other forms of religious violence and repression. If we acquiesce in the legitimacy of repressing religious debate, then we boost those who are or would be our enemies, and we undercut those who are our natural allies. In abiding by such strictures ourselves, we politically disarm ourselves by making discussion, debate, and analysis of Islam and its various interpretations out of bounds.

The relation between Islam and the state varies widely across the world’s forty-plus Muslim-majority countries. The constitutions of eleven of these countries describe their political orders as secular. An additional eleven have no mention of any Islamic or secular nature. Another twenty-two do give Islam some stated constitutional role. Ten of these declare themselves to be constitutionally Islamic states and also say that Islam is the official religion of the state. The other twelve declare Islam the official state religion but do not declare the country itself an Islamic state. Of these latter twenty-two, fifteen declare that Islamic law, principles, or jurisprudence is a source of, or limitation on, legislation.
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There is also variation within these categories. Countries in which Islam has a legal status may also provide for freedom of religion, belief, expression, association, and assembly and also incorporate or reference international human rights standards in their legal systems. Furthermore, in many cases, Islam’s role is limited to certain areas of law, often family and personal status law.

However, despite this continuing variety, the last three decades have seen an increasing radicalization across the Muslim world: in more long-standing regimes, as in Saudi Arabia; in regimes that came to power in a coup or revolution, as in Sudan, Somalia, and Iran; by creeping constitutional or legislative change, as in Pakistan; by provincial-level governments, as in Nigeria and Malaysia; and through local intimidation by Islamists, as in Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Yemen.

This radicalization has produced increasing pressure and attacks in Muslim-majority countries on those accused of having in some way insulted Islam, especially affecting four groups. One group is those, such
as the Baha’is or Ahmadis, who believe, or are thought to believe, that there has been a prophet after Muhammad, and who are thus castigated as heretics. Another is those who leave Islam or convert to another religion, who may be attacked as apostates. The third is Muslim minorities, such as Shias in Saudi Arabia or Sufis in Iran, who are deemed deviant, if not outright heretical. The fourth is Muslim dissidents, liberals, or reformers, especially if they challenge the entrenched power of regimes that claim to be representative of Islam.
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In the following chapters we will survey the myriad threats to and attacks on these groups in Muslim-majority countries, both by the state and (often more commonly) by “society”—from calculated assaults by vigilantes and terrorists to sudden violence from enraged mobs. The dangers come not only in countries that are generally regarded as religiously repressive states, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also in many other countries often regarded as more moderate, such as Algeria, Jordan, or Morocco. To be sure, there remain Muslim-majority countries, such as Mali, in which freedoms of religion and speech are protected, but other traditionally moderate countries, even Indonesia, face increasing problems.

Another feature of current restrictions is that terms such as “apostasy,” “blasphemy,” and “insulting Islam” are invoked without any precision; militias, mobs, and even courts frequently alternate between the terms and come up with new terms of their own, often ones lacking any historical foundation. Whatever particular charge is used, the effect is the same: religious minorities are often threatened and persecuted, critics of the regime may be imprisoned or killed, and debate about the nature of Islam is stifled.

Ali Al-Misaad, a twenty-five-year old Ismaili Shia native of Najran city, was stopped by members of the religious police on June 12, 2002, for listening to music while driving his car. The police told him to listen to the Qur’an instead; they claimed that he then insulted the Qur’an by calling it “boring.” On August 17, he was convicted by Judge Hamed Abdullah Al-Dosary of insulting Islam and sentenced to eight years in prison and 2,000 lashes. He was only released after serving eight months, when well-connected relatives staged an intervention on his behalf
.
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Hail Al-Masri, a Yemeni national, worked as a fruit seller in Jeddah. According to some of his roommates, his real crime was not getting up in time for dawn prayers. When a more hard-line roommate insisted that he do so, Al-Masri became irritated. He told his roommate to leave him alone. But he didn’t stop there. He also criticized the
mutawa’in—
the religious police—and his roommate’s newfound religious fervor. In so doing, he used a slang expression, roughly translated as “damn your religion,” a relatively common phrase. But the roommate filed a complaint with the court, and Al-Masri, who surely never thought he could be executed for the heated words he had spoken to his roommate, readily confirmed that he had angrily told him to leave him alone. Originally, he was sentenced to 600 lashes and two years in prison. Then, on January 7, 2003, a higher court in Jeddah, under Judge Ali al Zahrani, sentenced him to be beheaded on the charge of insulting religion. Astonished at the verdict, Al-Masri tried to flee the courtroom by jumping from the third-floor window, sustaining serious neck injuries
.
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In August 2008
, Gulf News
reported that a Saudi man who worked for The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had killed his daughter because she became a Christian. Using the nickname “Rania,” she had stated in an online posting several days earlier that she was being pressured by her family; they had discovered a cross on her computer screen and Christian articles that she had written. The paper reports that she was burned to death and that her tongue had been cut out
.
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Since its unification in 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been controlled by the Al Saud family, which rules in partnership with the Wahhabi clergy according to an extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam, commonly known as Wahhabism. About 85 to 90 percent of the population is Sunni, about 10 to 15 percent Shia, of whom about one-fifth is Ismaili. Foreign workers, including Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, comprise six to ten million, about one-quarter of the in-country population.
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The government is an absolute monarchy, and the
Majilis al-Shura
(Consultative Council), with members appointed by the monarch, has no significant power. Its legal system is based on sharia, with its jurisprudence ostensibly drawn from the strict Hanbali School of sharia. According to the 1992 Basic Law, the Qur’an and Sunna are the constitution.
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Islam is the official religion, and all nationals must be Muslim. The court system and much of the policing is controlled by the Wahhabi religious establishment. Saudis are denied freedom to choose or change their religion; noncitizens, including Muslims, are strictly controlled. Public practice of all non-Muslim religions is forbidden. Christians and Jews are officially viewed, as taught in government textbooks, as “enemies of the believers,” unless they have a recognized “compact with the Muslims” by which their lives and property are respected, though they must abide by sharia.
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Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and also Shias and Sufis, as well as adherents of other religions, may be regarded as polytheists. The minority Shia community, living mainly in the eastern provinces, also suffers severe discrimination. Wahhabis frequently condemn as heretics, polytheists, and apostates those sects, groups, and movements within Islam that are not Salafi or other extreme Sunnis. The highest Saudi religious official, who was appointed by the government to his post, the late Grand Mufti Bin Baz, condemned Sufis in his government-published writings as “doomed to destruction.” Saudi state religious tracts exported worldwide teach that freedom of thought must be rejected since “[f]reedom of thinking requires permitting the denial of faith.”
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All media are subject to religious censorship, though some officially allowed speech has had more latitude in recent years.

The U.S. State Department reported in 2009 that, often, “mosque speakers prayed for the death of Christians and Jews, including at the [state-sponsored] Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.” Such preachers, who receive government salaries, also often “end Friday sermons with a prayer for the well-being of Muslims and for the humiliation of polytheism and polytheists.”
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