Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (38 page)

While Maldivian citizens are stripped of religious freedom, so, too, are the approximately 80,000 migrant workers of many faiths who labor in the country. If not Sunni Muslims, they are restricted not only from practicing their religion but also from importing books and other religious materials. Moreover, the
cramped quarters that the majority of these low-level workers live in make even illegal worship almost impossible.
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These four countries are diverse, but each demonstrates the dangers of blasphemy restrictions. In Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia, one destructive dynamic has been the willingness of larger, often nationalist, political parties to form coalitions, acceding to the demands of smaller Islamist parties in return for their support. A related trend is for those same parties to push for more Islamist policies in order to head off support for more radical elements. Each tactic gives greater political space for more radical currents. In Bangladesh and Indonesia, the central governments have usually been moderating influences, but in both countries they are weak. This has made possible Islamist repression by scattered regional and local governments. In the Maldives, successive governments have used state power to impose a suffocating and restrictive uniformity on a country that is already strikingly closed.

In particular, while Malaysian law creates major problems for those who want to change their religion, the country is also notable for its programs to suppress “deviant” groups, ideas, and even individual words that it thinks its Muslim population might possibly find “confusing.” This claim, echoed in the Maldives, is at odds with the government’s claims that it represents an open, modern Islam. Moreover, it is insulting to its energetic and increasingly educated population, implying that its citizens are not capable of dealing with different thoughts and ideas.

As Sisters in Islam says: “Ignorance is never bliss. By narrowing the space for open dialogue among citizens and squashing their quest for information and to read, the government’s act can be deemed as ‘promoting Jahiliah’ as it will push us into a more suppressed world where we will blindly follow with no questions asked, lest it disrupts our small worldview.…”
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Bans on blasphemy, heresy, “insulting Islam,” and similar purported offenses in the Islamic world aim, in part, to enforce religious conformity and temporal compliance by limiting the range of possible debate and discussion within Muslim societies. However, such restrictions can be fully effective only if the society is kept closed, something that is increasingly difficult for governments to achieve given the spread and accessibility of global media. Moreover, Muslims are currently settling in large numbers in the West, where they are an immigrant minority—an unusual situation in the history of Islam—and hence are often exposed to a much larger range of argument and criticism than previously. These changes, especially when compounded by political manipulation, have produced a series of legal, diplomatic, and violent clashes over claims of “insults to Islam” by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Though often driven by mob or vigilante violence encouraged by religious extremists, these clashes are also the product of organized efforts by Muslim-majority states, and sometimes by Muslim organizations in the West, to shape and use Western laws and institutions to suppress what they consider “insults” to their religion. The conflict now takes place in the United Nations, through direct diplomatic channels, and, increasingly, within Western countries. Legal efforts and violent intimidation directly undermine free speech for a broad and widening range of people, including reform-minded Muslims, those who have left Islam, and non-Muslims who have made controversial remarks ranging from intellectual commentary, critique, and questioning, to slight mockery, to strong condemnation. Death threats and violent attacks against alleged
offenders, as well as against their unlucky conationals or coreligionists, also augment the legal offensive by producing naïve calls for new restrictions on discussing Islam simply for the sake of peace and social harmony. Such a move is not only likely to prove futile but also would enshrine in law the dangerous principle that people have the right to be “protected” from ideas that might offend them. Taken together, these growing pressures for the global enforcement of Islamic blasphemy norms threaten to fundamentally erode individual rights to freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Islamic blasphemy rules first captured global attention with Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and, especially since 2005, they have made a conspicuous return to the world stage.
Chapter 10
describes five cases, international in both origin and consequence, in which blasphemy strictures maintained in Muslim countries have come into direct and explosive conflict with a statement or work produced elsewhere in the world that has been called “insulting to Islam.” Of these cases, the unlikely sounding Danish cartoons controversy of 2005–6 has produced singularly sweeping reverberations. In addition to placing those involved in the cartoons’ publication in permanent danger and taking a toll on Denmark’s economy, mob attacks and assassinations have claimed the lives of over 200 people utterly uninvolved with the “blasphemous” drawings. The experience also left its mark in the minds of Western political leaders and has heavily influenced subsequent discussions, which now often seem to center on how, not whether, to balance freedom and Muslim blasphemy demands. As with other cases, from the Rushdie fatwa onward, the cartoon crisis involved what seems a baffling plurality of motives at the local, national, and international levels—from three Danish imams’ resentment over unflattering coverage in the newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
, to the Egyptian government’s desire to parry a U.S.-led push for democratization in the Middle East. Despite the frequent mischaracterization of the crisis as a spontaneous eruption of rage from the “Muslim street,” members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) played a vital role in drawing and sustaining attention to the cartoons, as well as lending the reaction against them legitimacy and heft. Afterward, when the former Danish prime minister was tapped to lead NATO, Turkey used the cartoons episode to leverage two high-level appointments for its nationals within the West’s most important military alliance. At all levels of this and other blasphemy protests, the political manipulation of religious motives has been prominent.

Incidents like the Danish cartoons crisis are also the result of sustained pressure by a range of actors on three main fronts for the global export of Islamic blasphemy norms. This pressure helps keep the issue alive in the West long after the protest of the month has faded from the headlines.

In the most formal of these efforts, detailed in
chapter 11
, the OIC has sought through the UN and other international fora to win official endorsement for a global ban on blasphemy against Islam. This effort in its current form began with a little-noticed 1999 resolution of the UN Commission on Human Rights that was initially called “defamation of Islam,” then retitled “defamation of religions” at the insistence of other delegations; the resolution represented OIC countries’ growing concern with and reaction to both human rights criticism of their practices and increasing attention to Islamist terrorism. Earlier, these governments had already sought to exempt themselves from established international human rights standards, leveling at least two allegations of “blasphemy” against UN Special Rapporteurs who raised sensitive human rights issues. Though these resolutions predated the Danish cartoons affair and even the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, they gained force in the wake of each incident. From 2006 onward, OIC resolutions have sought to assert that freedom of expression must be limited in the interest of other goals, purportedly including religious freedom.
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“Defamation of religions” resolutions eventually came under heavy fire, not only from Western countries, which usually opposed them, but also from many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights experts. However, so far this criticism has not led to any substantive rethinking but only to a change in terms—the use of “advocacy of religious hatred” as a substitute for defamation. Alarmingly, in October 2009, the United States appeared to lend support to this effort by cosponsoring, with leading defamation-of-religions proponent Egypt, a resolution on freedom of expression that expressed concern about “negative racial and religious stereotyping” and, while not binding, urged states to combat “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”
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Free speech advocates won a small but essential victory when this resolution was dropped from the agenda of the commission’s successor body, the Human Rights Council, in 2011.

The same questions are being debated in Western national law. Indeed, the disputes over wording at UN conferences in New York and Geneva reflect the fact that many Western countries already accept the principle that governments should determine what constitutes acceptable religious criticism. As outlined in
chapter 12
, these countries themselves enforce laws that limit what may be said about religious beliefs. Such laws include literal blasphemy bans, originally conceived to protect Christianity, and hate-speech prohibitions, devised mainly in the last half-century as antiracism measures that are now increasingly used to cover religious categories as well. In keeping with the EU’s stated view that restrictions on speech should aim to protect individuals rather than religions, those
blasphemy laws that remain on the books are usually weakly enforced and, in some cases, are effectively defunct. However, a few have nonetheless been used to prosecute offenses against Islam.

In contrast to blasphemy laws, the use of hate-speech laws is increasing. In practice, the dividing line between the two types of statutes, as well as the corresponding distinction between criticism of a religion and of its adherents, has proved fuzzy and has been rejected outright by some Muslim complainants who claim that any defamation of Islam also necessarily constitutes defamation of Muslims.

Finally, beyond the danger presented by Western legal restrictions, every debate on “insults to Islam” takes place in the shadow of a further problem, one deeply affecting not only politicians and polemicists but also ordinary Muslims living in the West, converts, and others who might make the wrong remark in the wrong place at the wrong time. While officials argue over the permissibility of a legal blasphemy ban, a pattern of violent intimidation, discussed in
chapter 13
, has already in practice established such a ban for large swaths of Western society, as it has done previously in Muslim-majority countries. This intimidation is particularly powerful within some Muslim communities, in which individuals may be targeted for any comment that deviates from extremist orthodoxy.

Together with the shock of international incidents such as the Danish cartoons crisis and the vague threat of legal charges, this intimidation has created a massive disincentive toward talking publicly about Islam, one that also affects Western Muslims’ ability to debate the interpretation of their religion. The wide range of words and people targeted by threats demonstrates that limited legal measures to restrict certain kinds of speech are, to put it mildly, very unlikely to produce social harmony. Rather, as can be seen in Muslim-majority countries that already have such laws, state-sponsored speech bans typically lead to increasing sensitivity and ever-increasing demands to silence ideas that do not conform.
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Despite these pressures, the West still remains a relative haven for those wishing to voice reformist or critical views about Islam, yet it stands at a critical juncture between a renewed defense of free speech and an acceptance of ever-increasing limits on expressing controversial ideas. In light of most governments’ at best ambiguous reaction to the controversies over
Jyllands-Posten
’s cartoons and Geert Wilders’s
Fitna
, ongoing legal proceedings against certain critics of Islam, and a continuing climate of threat, particularly in Europe, facing those of whatever background who discuss matters that Islamist extremists have deemed off limits, it is unclear which way the Western world will turn.

The Satanic Verses, the famous novel penned by Salman Rushdie, was published in 1988. At the time of its release, a few British Muslims protested, mostly peacefully, against a work of fiction they perceived as insulting to Islam. Scattered demonstrations followed, some of them more violent than others. Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, expanded his claimed jurisdiction well beyond Iran’s borders. He issued a fatwa—an Islamic legal pronouncement—saying that it is a duty of Muslims to track down and execute Rushdie, who is a British citizen from South Asia, for his purported blasphemy against Islam
.

Khomeini’s international death warrant drove Rushdie underground. It forced him to maintain constant security protection for nearly a decade. In the meantime, the novel’s Japanese translator was murdered, other translators and publishers were assaulted, and U.S. bookstores and a hotel in Turkey were firebombed. In 1998, the beleaguered author emerged from hiding following a supposed deal between the British and Iranian governments. Rushdie is alive today, but hard-line elements of the Iranian regime continue to proclaim that the fatwa against him is still very much in effect
.

In February 2006, twelve cartoons depicting Islam’s prophet Muhammad unexpectedly triggered angry protests around the world. Although the cartoons had first been published five months earlier, in September 2005, in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, international violence and bloodshed, supposedly representing the spontaneous outrage of the “Muslim Street,” did not occur until the following year
.