Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (67 page)

In Saudi Arabia, reformers Ali al-Domaini, Abdullah al-Hamid, and Matrouk al-Faleh were arrested after they circulated a petition advocating the creation of a
constitutional monarchy. Charges against them included “incitement against the Wahhabi school of Islam” and “introducing ‘Western terminology’” in their calls for reform. An Interior Ministry spokesman said they had issued “statements which do not serve the unity of the country and the cohesion of society … based on Islamic religion.”

Some of the most striking examples are from Sudan, which has used accusations of religious speech and thought crimes to try to quash a wide variety of political opponents. Because of his criticism of the regime, Mohamed Mahmoud Taha—perhaps the country’s leading Muslim scholar, as well as the leader of the opposition Republican Brotherhood—was executed in 1985 for apostasy, although there was no such provision in the penal code. In the 1990s, Sudan threatened UN Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro, a Hungarian lawyer, with allegations of blasphemy because of his reports on human rights in the country. In the most sweeping apostasy fatwa in modern times, in 1992, the Kordofan government declared jihad on the Nuba region, and, in 1993, six government-sponsored Muslim clerics in Kordofan declared: “An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate; and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.” This fatwa declared that the Nuba non-Muslims could be wiped out as they were barriers to Islam and that Nuba Muslims were now apostates who not only could be but also should be killed. Hence, half a million people were sentenced to death. Subsequent conditions in the 1990s prompted human right organizations to declare the Nuba mountain region a site of genocide.

Similar political attacks also occur in Muslim countries regarded as more moderate, such as Malaysia. In 2008, legal complaints were lodged against Raja Petra Kamaruddin, a member of the Selangor royal family, editor of the website
Malaysia Today
, and perhaps the country’s most prominent political blogger. One of the alleged offenses was that his article, “I Promise to Be a Good, Nonhypocritical Muslim,” insulted Islam. He was held without charge in a prison camp for two months.

Malaysia also reveals how religious demagoguery erodes self-critique and moderation. In speaking about the Malaysian government’s proposal to criminalize Christians’ use of the word “Allah,” on the grounds that it gave offense to Muslims, Marina Mahathir, daughter of Malaysia’s former long-time prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, noted that “the furor over religious language will feed on itself.… It’s only a few people who are inflamed about it.… But if you keep stoking … sooner or later more and more people will think, ‘Oh, maybe we should be upset as well.’”
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Former finance minister Tengku Razaleigh agreed: “In a complex multiracial society a party and a government whose primary response to a public
issue is sunk in the elastic goo of ‘sensitivities’ rather than founded on principle, drawn from sentiment rather than from the Constitution, is already short of leadership and moral fibre.” Razaleigh added, “ ‘Sensitivities’ is the favored resort of the gutter politician. With it he raises a mob, fans its resentment and helps it discover a growing list of other sensitivities. This is a road to ruin.”
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Malaysia is also notable in the degree to which the government maintains that it must repress alternative viewpoints because its Muslim population is not capable of dealing with different thoughts and ideas.

When these countries’ populations are insulated from alternative viewpoints, they can become ever more pliable, thus perpetuating the system. The 2003 UN Arab Human Development Report, commenting on the fact that more foreign books had been translated by Spain in one recent year than by the entire Arabic-speaking world in the last thousand, noted: “In Arab countries where the political exploitation of religion has intensified, tough punishment for original thinking, especially when it opposes the prevailing powers, intimidates and crushes scholars.” Such repression also affects journalists, artists, filmmakers, human rights activists, teachers, dissidents, politicians, religious minorities—all who are perceived as challenging the prevailing order.

Whatever the particular accusations used, the effect is the same: religious minorities are threatened and persecuted, critics of the regime are imprisoned or killed, and debate about the nature of Islam is stifled. As Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam stated: “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….”
¹⁴
If Islam cannot be discussed, much of the country’s law and politics has been placed beyond discussion and, therefore, beyond reform.

Apart from its internal effects of closing down debate within majority-Muslim countries, restrictions on apostasy, blasphemy, and purported religious insult also shape international affairs by strengthening radical Islam and terrorism. In the contemporary conflict of ideas, the key figures are Muslim defenders of freedom. They already labor under the disadvantages of facing opponents who are well-organized and well-funded, as well as violent and vicious in silencing opposition. Worse, blasphemy restrictions further empower reactionaries to kill, imprison, threaten, and otherwise silence Muslim friends of freedom. Hence, if we do not oppose and resist such restrictions, we abandon the allies of freedom.

While the repression we have described in much of the Muslim-majority world is long-standing, the campaign to internationalize it is recent. It made its first major
appearance on February 14, 1989, with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning
The Satanic Verses
. This triggered the assassination of the novel’s Japanese translator, the stabbing of its Italian translator, the shooting of its Norwegian publisher, the burning to death of thirty-five guests at a Turkish hotel hosting its Turkish publisher, and the lifelong need for security for its author. It also prompted a burning-at-the-stake, albeit a symbolic one, and other forms of censorship. Kenan Malik describes how
Satanic Verses
was destroyed by Muslim protesters in Bradford, England: “The novel was tied to a stake before being set alight in front of the police station. It was an act calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that. The burning book became an icon of the rage of Islam. Sent around the world by a multitude of photographers and TV cameras, the image proclaimed, ‘I am a portent of a new kind of conflict and of a new kind of world.’”
¹⁵

Many Sunnis, especially those backed by Saudi oil wealth, joined the bandwagon. Supporters ranging from Islamist Leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi—perhaps the most influential preacher in the Sunni world—to Al-Qaeda, to the members of the OIC have held that, henceforth, those living in non-Muslim jurisdictions, whether Muslim or not, can and should be controlled by amorphous and arbitrarily applied Islamic apostasy and blasphemy rules.
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On an annual basis for over a decade within the UN, OIC representatives have called for the international criminalization of blasphemy against Islam, either through defamation or hate-speech bans, in order to end what Pakistan’s envoy Marghoob Saleem Butt calls the “unrestricted and disrespectful enjoyment of freedom of expression.”

This demand is new. In contemporary times, Islamic authorities had not previously insisted that non-Muslim states enforce Islamic rules banning blasphemy and the related sins of apostasy, heresy, and hypocrisy. The practice of forbidding wrong was directed primarily at other Muslims, and certainly not to non-Muslim jurisdictions. Bernard Lewis avers: “[A]t no time, until very recently, did any Muslim authority ever suggest that Shari’a law should be enforced on non-Muslims in non-Muslim countries.”
¹⁷

The goal of this program is not to penalize defamation of individual Muslims, which is already banned by traditional Western defamation laws, nor to stop discrimination or violence against Muslims, or others, which are already criminal offenses. Rather, it is to criminalize religious and political criticism of particular versions of Islam. Although the proposed bans are often conflated with personal insults, these are not the core of the complaints. Whether called “defamation,” “hate speech,” “incitement to hostility,” or “Islamophobia,” the central issue is criticism against or within Islam. This is clearly evident in the examples that have provoked the most outcry and become emblematic of this movement in the West: the Danish and Swedish cartoons, the Pope’s Regensburg speech, the van Gogh film
Submission
, Geert Wilders’s
Fitna
, the false
Newsweek
story of Qur’an desecration, and, of course, Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
.
¹⁸

Those targeted range from Theo van Gogh, murdered in Amsterdam for his film
Submission
, to Sister Leonella, a sixty-five-year-old Italian nun in Mogadishu,
murdered in “retaliation” for the Regensburg speech, to dozens of blameless Christian villagers in Nigeria, burned and hacked to death by Muslim mobs whipped up to strike out against irreverent cartoons in Denmark. In the six years since Scandinavian newspapers published Muhammed cartoons, plots to kill the cartoonists have been intercepted in Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Waterford, Ireland, while a Somalian would-be axe murderer was apprehended inside the home of one of the caricaturists, Kurt Westergaard. Such violence, combined with more generalized intimidation, as well as threats of legal prosecution, has created a broad chilling effect in the West on public negative expression concerning Islam, including expression by reform-minded Muslims.

Without Western support, the OIC managed to pass UN resolutions each year for twelve years aimed at criminalizing religious blasphemy, or “defamation of religions,” and has now,
with
Western support, passed resolutions urging states to prohibit religious hate speech. In recent years, Western states have responded to OIC demands by offering more aggressively to enforce the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ article 20(2), a provision calling for religious and other hate-speech bans that was originally included in the covenant at the insistence of the Soviet bloc and other authoritarian states over vociferous objections from the West.

On October 2, 2009, the United States, seeking to “reach out to Muslim countries,” joined with Egypt to introduce a nonbinding resolution urging states to enforce their hate-speech laws, which was adopted by consensus. State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh praised the resolution as among the Obama administration’s most “important successes.”
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Though in the United States, hate-speech crimes have been found unconstitutional, in this resolution, the United States encouraged their enforcement in the rest of the world, which could also lead to efforts to reinterpret the First Amendment at home.
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Several other prominent American leaders, including a senator and a supreme court justice, also voiced hopes for state-enforced limits on expression involving Qur’an burning when in 2010–11 this became an issue in a small Florida church. To date, such views are in the minority, but they could grow as America’s uniquely strong protections of individual freedoms come under increasing pressure.

In its sixteenth session in 2011, the Human Rights Council did not adopt a resolution against defamation of religions—marking the first time the UN’s premier human rights body had neglected to do so since 1999. Sensing defeat—brought on by more energetic Western opposition and the recent shock of the assassinations of Pakistan’s Minister of Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti and Punjab governor Salman Taseer over their opposition to that country’s blasphemy laws—the OIC failed to introduce one. This was a small but essential victory in the
defense of individual rights to freedom of expression and of religion. It demonstrated that concerted pushback from the West on this issue can be effective. Whether some version of the resolution will be resurrected in subsequent UN meetings remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the OIC has focused on “hate speech” in its campaign within the UN for worldwide anti-blasphemy bans.

The West has been unsuccessful in promoting its interpretation of hate speech that draws a distinction between the protection of the individual followers of a religion and the protection of the religion itself. The West continues to support international hate-speech bans undeterred, even while OIC diplomats continue to use key hate-speech terms, such as “incitement to hostility” and “negative stereotyping,” synonymously with “defamation” and “blasphemy” against Islam. In fact, one of the OIC’s “Subsidiary Organs,” of which all member states are automatically members, is the “International Islamic
Fiqh
[Jurisprudence] Academy,” whose official fatwas stipulate that religious freedom requires forbidding anything that might undercut Islam and call for the judicial punishment of apostasy.
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Unless shelved or defeated, these resolutions, however phrased, are likely to be interpreted by UN bodies as blasphemy laws and made internationally binding. Former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick observed that UN resolutions have a tendency, like “ground water,” to seep into international court opinions whether binding or not and become customary law.
²²
Politicized international bodies will be authorized to interpret vague hate-speech terms and will be far less scrupulous than Western courts in adhering to fundamental human rights principles. On this issue, the OIC has already reshaped the focus of the UN Human Rights Council, and even the General Assembly, as well as the work of several UN Special Rapporteurs.