Religious intolerance and the open society|Joseph Long
Forty years ago, in 1979, when “The Life of Brian” was released, not many in Britain – apart from Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and a certain Bishop of Southwark – had ever considered it offensive when Jesus was being referred to as “a bloody do-gooder” who ruined the career prospect of an “ex-leper” in the “begging business”. Forty years on, one would, still, most definitely get away with calling Jesus a “bloody do-gooder” in public; one, however, might wish to be extra careful when it comes to parodying anything that is related to Islam: publishing a novel that draws inspiration from the life of Muhammad and calling it “The Satanic Verses”, as Sir Salman Rushdie did in 1988, would probably guarantee one a “fatwā” (an Islamic death warrant); depicting Muhammad in the form of a caricature one might end up having twenty Kalashnikov bullets in one’s body, as the twelve victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting did in 2015.
It is generally considered a less perilous business to be a middle-school teacher than a provocative novelist or a satire cartoonist – not anymore, it seems. Samuel Paty, a French teacher who had shown to his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had elicited the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015, was killed and decapitated by Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim Russian refugee of Chechen origin, last Friday (October 16). It was reported that Anzorov was urged to the task by a Muslim parent of a child at the school.
When Sir Salman Rushdie was issued a “fatwā” ordering his execution by Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran in 1988, and when the Charlie Hebdo magazine was attacked in 2015, the extenuation given was that which along the lines of “why provoke in the first place?” or “one should not ‘insult the religious sentiments’ of Muslims”.
In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that defaming Prophet Muhammad does not fall within one’s freedom of expression. In the landmark decision, the ECHR upheld the blasphemy conviction in 2011 of an Austrian woman, referred to as E.S., who called the Prophet a paedophile, for “disparagement of religious precepts” – a crime in Austria – and judged that it “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate”. The decision, unsurprisingly, was met with substantial controversy: all E.S. did was hold seminars presenting her view that Muhammad was a paedophile, citing that Muhammad’s third wife Aisha was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at their consummation – a widely accepted fact even amongst some of the most conservative of Muslims. The Prophet was in his early fifties when he married Aisha. Given the historical fact, Muhammad was, by any standard, a paedophile – if someone who would marry a six-year-old girl and have sex with her when the latter turns nine could be defined as one; if the Prophet were living in modern England he would probably be spending the rest of his life in Wakefield Prison. Yet because of the religious sensitivity of the issue and the inability of some Muslims to handle the fact that their prophet had sex with a nine-year-old girl, E.S. was ordered to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days behind bars for merely stating an historical fact (which is in essence the same as stating that the Battle of Agincourt was won by the English or that the Normandy landings happened on June 6, 1944). The ECHR upheld that order and decided that it had not violated her rights.
The decision of the ECHR to rule against calling Islam’s Prophet Muhammad a paedophile as protected by free speech is emblematic of the peacemongering attitude, often accompanied by white guilt, towards the vociferous and emphatic disaffection of a small minority of religiously conservative people with a pluralistic and resolutely secular society; this buttresses the growing intolerance which is contemptuous of the rights of others in society to freely express themselves. This intolerance on the part of some conservative Muslims towards polemics is often overlooked, not least because it is often disguised as an antithesis of “Islamophobia”: those who dare to speak up against their intolerance would often be labelled as criticising Islam as a religion. The murder last week of Samuel Paty further highlights the urgency of the western world to reflect upon its peacemongering approach towards the growing intolerance of those religious conservatives who harbor a hostile view on a pluralist and open society. An open society which we treasure so dearly would eventually cease to exist if we failed to stand up to intolerance, and to overcome our fear to put it into action.
(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong. He is a Philosophy graduate of King’s College London and has been a member of the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom since February 2020.)
---------------------------------
Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app:
bit.ly/2yMMfQETo download the latest version,
Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play