issues

This page considers some issues regarding the shape and regulation of blasphemy.

It covers -

• introduction - questions about blasphemy and sacrilege in the age of the internet
• blasphemy on the net
• culture wars - more about reinforcing constituencies than persuading the indifferent?
• Islam - cross-cultural conflicts and uncertainties
• laughter in the dark?

     introduction

As the preceding page noted, characterisations of blasphemy and responses by governments and individuals have changed over time.

In the West secularisation has seen governments extend protection in principle to all Christian denominations (rather than to an established church) or to regard blasphemy law as no longer appropriate, with action against offensive statements being instead treated under restrictions on vilification. In other parts of the world blasphemy law has variously been seen as a curiosity or as something that is a central feature of a national legal code. States such as Pakistan have accordingly strengthened their blasphemy provisions over the past twenty years and have actively prosecuted offenders. Prosecutions have also occurred in states such as Malaysia with provincial governments of a theocratic bent.

     blasphemy on the net

As with defamation, blasphemous expression online poses several challenges.

The first is simply that the net offers a new mechanism for the communication of expression.

A corollary is that many people consider that online necessarily equals free, with offensive text, audio, video and graphics somehow being situated outside any law. Action by Italian police, noted later in this profile, to summarily take down web pages that they considered breached Italian law, is a reminder that the net is bounded

A third challenge is that the net offers access by a global audience: "everyone has an opportunity to be horrified or bored". In the past exposure to offensive content has generally been localised and restriction (when it occurred) had a local basis.

Access to content via the global information infrastructure allows audiences in different locations to be offended, with potential conflicts about whether a legal offence has occurred and which jurisdiction has responsibility. Those conflicts are not merely 'north-south': the European Union for example faces difficulties as Greek authorities prosecute German and other satirists who have offended Greek religious sensibilities.

More broadly the internet enables access to content across borders and thereby fuels extra-legal action such as boycotts, death threats and violence across the Middle East in response to satirical cartoons in a Danish newspaper. In the past few people in Jeddah would have seen such cartoons, few Western audiences and publishers outside Denmark would have accessed the cartoons and been able to quickly republish them in responding to an "Islamic assault on free speech".

     culture wars

Considering prosecutions - and debate about - blasphemy as terrain in national/international 'culture wars' allows several conclusions.

One conclusion is that responses to blasphemy, online and off, illustrate conflicting stances on free speech, the role of the state and secularism in regions such as Northern Europe and the Middle East. They also illustrate unawareness of or merely disregard for sensitivities and potential impacts such as trade boycotts and terrorism. Restrictions in states such as Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia have been labelled as symptomatic of obscurantist and theocratic regimes (or broader cultures) that are associated with systemic human rights abuses and a politics of resentment.

Critics in the West have accordingly commented that free speech is a fundamental human right and that publishers have a duty not to suppress content that might be offensive to audiences in their own country or in other nations. Loss of trade or even loss of life is a cost of free speech and a liberal society.

A second conclusion is that much of the agitation in Western states has been about reinforcing constituencies rather than converting oponents or persuading a largely indifferent public at large. In Australia and the UK, for example, action by Christian fundamentalists against supposedly blasphemous films, plays and graphic works has had little support in recent years from government or the wider community.

Pickets and rallies for example have not secured a large participation and arguably have aided marketing of the offensive works. Statements by religious figures, although pitched on behalf of the general community, have in fact been addressed to 'true believers' and arguably served to reinforce perceptions among those believers that they are an elite under threat from the hostility or merely indifference of their fellow citizens.

A final conclusion is that the evolution of blasphemy law from overtly preserving society as a whole to merely protecting individual sensitivities (specifically Christian sensitivities) undermines the legitimacy of the law's political and social objectives. Offence is subjective and inevitable: should one person's distress prevent access by others and require punishment of the author/publisher in circumstances where the expression does not lead to public unrest. If unrest does occur, should that be addressed through public order provisions rather than by suppression of the offensive content?

     Islam

2006 saw protests, boycotts and death threats in several nations during 2006 over publication in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper of cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammed. That activity echoed agitation against author Salman Rushdie, including fatwas calling for his death as a blasphemer and the assassination of one of his translators.

It highlights cross-cultural issues that pose challenges for law and for practice in Western economies, for example suggestions that publishers should engage in self-censorship of content that is legally permitted but that would be regarded by other nations as offensive.

In essence, Mohammed is regarded by Muslims as the 'supreme fulfilment' of a line of figures that included Abraham, Moses and Jesus. In memorising and reciting verses sent by Allah (which became the Koran) he completed and perfected the teaching of God throughout history. Characterisation of Mohammed as the messenger of Allah encompasses belief that all his actions were willed by God and that rejection or criticisism of Mohammed is to reject and criticise Allah.

Mockery or criticism of the Prophet is therefore regarded as blasphemy, something that as noted later in this profile is punishable by death in some Islamic states. Islam has traditionally prohibited images of humans and animals - sometimes denounced as idolatry and subject to iconoclasm - and although Islamic artists have depicted Mohammed in illuminated manuscripts and paintings the Prophet's face (and hands) have been veiled or left blank.

     laughter in the dark

UK journalist Matthew Parris commented on calls for self-censorship (whether from fear of terrorism and trade boycotts or out of respect for different cultures) by commenting

Those protesting against publication are not really doing so because they themselves do not wish to see these pictures. They do not want you or me to see them either. They do not want anyone to see them. They do not want them to exist.

Devising a means by which access to the images will be granted only to those who positively seek it is unlikely to satisfy the objectors, and nor should it: their religion has instructed them to keep God’s world unpolluted by such pictures and the sentiment and opinion that accompany them. This they believe to be their God’s demand. I’m afraid we really do have to decide whether the demand is reasonable.

He continued that

... Faiths make demands and assert truths that are not compatible with the demands and truths of other faiths. To assert one must be to deny the others. ... People of faith and people of none cannot escape attaching themselves to claims that are inherently offensive — and at the deepest level — to other people.

But offence implicitly offered, and offence actually taken, are two different matters. On the whole Christians, for example, take offence less readily than Muslims. The case for treating them, in consequence, differently is obvious, but we should be wary of it. It means groups are allowed to be as thin-skinned as they wish: to dictate for themselves how delicately we must tread with them — to create, as it were, their own definition of respect and require us to observe it. Those who do this may not always realise that that they create serious buried resentments among those of fellow-citizens who are more broad-shouldered about the trading of insult. ...

I am not happy that we should allow any group to define the terms on which we deal with their issues, however genuinely or deeply felt. They for their part should not suppose that the self-censorship they induce in the rest of Britain does them any favours in the end. It does not make us sympathetic, only wary of complaint.

Nevertheless, a conclusion some draw is that for the sake of a quiet life we might as well refrain from voicing criticisms we may feel towards any supersensitive group or cause, because our private thoughts, our private arguments, and those of our readers, remain our own, and uncensored. Others draw the conclusion that we should at least avoid gratuitous insults — the "damn your God" as opposed to the "I doubt His existence" expressions — because they hurt real, decent people. ...

He concluded that

The approach is tempting. It avoids hurt. But it overlooks, in the evolution of belief, the key role played by mockery. Many faiths and ideologies achieve and maintain their predominance partly through fear. They, of course, would call it "respect'. But whatever you call it, it intimidates. The reverence, the awe — even the dread — that their gods, their KGB or their priesthoods demand and inspire among the laity are vital to the authority they wield.
Against reverence and awe the best argument is sometimes not logic, but mockery. Structures of oppression that may not be susceptible to rational debate may in the end yield to derision. When people see that a priest, rabbi, imam or uniformed official may be giggled at without lightning striking the impertinent, arguments may be won on a deeper level than logic.

Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette 2007) more feistily argued that believers in the divine authority of competing sacred texts are "ultimately incapable" of leaving nonbelievers alone. Religion

does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made.

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