Introduction
The issue of rights has become a major concern in contemporary philosophy. Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists emphasise how the language of rights has been constructed historically, and how it must continue to be recreated against contemporary events. Political philosophy is able to bracket off comparing social and economic systems by concentrating on analysing fundamental human rights, and beyond human rights there is the question of animal rights and the rights of the planet.
Salman Rushdie's right to blasphemy is one human rights issue that appeared to unite western intellectuals in a way almost unparalleled in recent times. Almost without exception support for him was heard from leading intellectuals, writers and artists. This was not simply support against Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, but full and unconditional support for his right to blasphemy and a general demand that the current law be repealed without exception.
The International Committee for the Defense of Salman Rushdie and his Publishers and most of the liberal establishment are pressing for the complete abolition of the blasphemy law without replacement. Their arguments are poor, and only succeed due to their repetition and lack of publicity of opposing views.
As a tolerant liberal I believe the current blasphemy law should be repealed, but replaced by an extended and strengthened blasphemy law. I believe this is the clear lesson to be learned from the Satanic Verses affair, and offers if not an escape at least an unexplored path from Salman Rushdie's current tragic situation.
The Effects of the Dispute
To put the dispute in context, let us first consider two clear effects of the dispute.
Firstly, the polarisation of the Muslim community in Britain, the stereotyping of a "Muslim" as extemist, violent and irrational, an increase in racial tension and attacks. A good example of this is contained in an article written by The Observer's Beirut correspondent Julie Flint when she visited Bradford. She records that following the publication of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa there was a huge rise in attacks on mosques, hate mail being sent to leading Muslims, 'Rushdie Rules' scrawled on walls, taunts of 'Rushdie, Rushdie' and racist attacks where young Asians were beaten up by thugs shouting 'Salman Rushdie is our leader'. The moral is clear: racism may have been inside many whites, but the Salman Rushdie affair brought it out.
Secondly a slow cultural trend that has been developing since the end of the Second World War of replacing the Jews with the Arabs as western figures of hate has now accelerated. Just as in the past anti-semitism was found in all areas of western culture and thought - from Shakespeare and Martin Luther to Dickens and Nietzsche - so now Mulsims are now having almost exactly the same hate language applied to them, even from western "intellectuals" and "artists".
Fay Weldon writes in her pamphlet Sacred Cows:
The Koran is food for no-thought. It is not a poem on which society can be safely or sensibly based. It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police - and the thought-police are easily set marching and they frighten... You can build a decent society around the Bible... but the Koran? No.
Similarly Conor Cruise O'Brien in a review published in The Times in May 1989 writes:
Muslim society looks profoundly repulsive... It looks repulsive because it is repulsive... A westener who claims to admire Mulsim society, while still adhering to Western values is either a hypocrite or an ignoramus, or a bit of both.
Palestinian literary critic Edward Said has observed "the transference of a popular anti-Semetic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target". Karen Armstrong the writer and historian has also discovered "the frightening fact that the hatred we used to allow ourselves to feel about the Jews is now being transferred in toto to the "Arab"'.
The Syrian writer Rana Kabbani concludes:
There has been a transfer of contempt from Jews to Muslims in secular Western culture today. Many Muslims share this fear: indeed, one has written 'the next time there are gas chambers in Europe, they'll be no doubt who'll be inside them'".
These words were written in 1989. No one could have guessed that by 1994 we'd have had ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Europe.
Freedom of Speech?
So we might point out that even if their arguments were sound, these defenders of Salman Rushdie's right to blasphemy are being politically naive in encouraging this climate of racism, and denouncing Muslim outrage with such holy zeal. It is to judge the merit of these arguments that we now turn.
Freedom to blaspheme, it is argued, is part of freedom of speech. The Observer for examples argues that "the right... to create and publish a book has been fought for too painfully to be tossed aside in the desire for a quieter life. Those who ask that it should be are forgetting their own history - from Socrates to Stalin... Mr Rushdie must have the right to publish his book and the freedom to publicise it. He is entitled to nothing less".
Really? Freedom of speech has been about two important freedoms: freedom to speak the truth and freedom to express your beliefs. We defend the freedom of the press to publish facts the authorities would rather not be known, and we defend political and religious groups' right to express their beliefs. Clearly free speech is a positive freedom. We do not defend the right to libel, to incite racial hatred, right to slander or right to use threatening language. If by "blaspheme" we mean to insult, ridicule and mock a belief someone holds very dear this is certainly not a positive, liberating freedom of speech. It sounds much more like the language which is generally today not tolerated by the law.
It is relevant to note that whilst the law against heresy was revoked in the ninteenth century, the law against blasphemy was retained. This distinction is important. Historians must of course have the right to present to us what they believe to be the historical Jesus - and if this presents a Jesus very different from the traditional Christ of faith this may be heresy but it is not blasphemy. Literary critics may study the Koran and discuss it as a literary text rather than an imspired book. Again, their views on the Koran may be heresy, but they would not be blasphemy.
The right to heresy means the right to state the truth, the right to explain why you don't agree with another's belief, the right to defend a belief that contradicts another's deeply held faith. It also means the right to explore a faith beyond the boundries of dogma and tradition. Such a right is clearly a positive right and an important aspect of freedom of speech. Supporting a law against blasphemy does not mean suppressing anything that disturbs another's faith, or attempting to resurrect a law against heresy. It does mean preventing taunting, ridicule and mockery of another's faith, with the obvious effect of creating distress, upset and beyond that even anger.
Thus the claim that by defending the right to blaspheme we are defending the right to free speech is false. The right to blasphemy is not at all central to the issue of free speech, and it would be quite safe to ban it and leave freedom of speech stronger than ever.
A Language of Liberation?
Next, Rushdie and other artists have argued that blasphemy is a language of dissent and liberation, Rushdies writes of The Satanic Verses that "it dissents... from imposed orthodoxies of all types... it dissents from the end of debate". Blasphemy, it is argued, is a language of the oppressed and a strategy of overthrowing an oppressive ideology.
This argument ignores the history of blasphemy. Rather than originating from dissidents and revolutionaries, the language of blasphemy has always originated from the rulers and oppressors in their attacks on the oppressed. The language of blasphemy has always been used to demonise enemies of the state and polarise society against heretics and "unbelievers". It is a language designed to divide, and has typically been used by the Christian Church to separate Jews, Muslims, Witches, Heretics and anyone else it wanted to persecute from the rest of society.
Muslims have emphasised that they are not opposing criticism, but the obscene and violent language Rushdie uses against their religion. They object to the constant stream of insults: calling the prophet Muhammad a homosexual, having Muhammad ask God for permission to fornicate with every woman in the world, saying the Prophet's wives are whores, calling the Prophet a devil's name, calling the Koran the Devil's work and so on. Such insults in the mouth of a BNP supporter would make their nature unequivocal; just because Rushdie uses them doesn't turn them into poetry.
So blasphemy isn't a language of liberation, but rather one of oppression, designed to create outsiders, dehumanise them, and so legitimize turning them into victims. This is something the language of blasphemy succeeds in doing today as effectively as it has done in the past.
An Impossible Law?
The final argument for the right to blasphemy is that the blasphemy law is 'unsatisfactory and archaic'. Ever since Mary Whitehouse used it to prosecute Gay News in 1977 there has been a campaign to abolish the law. The Committee Against Blasphemy Law attracted considerable support, and in 1979 the Bernard Williams Committee recommended is abolition in its Report on Obscenity and Film Censorship. In 1985 the Law Commission in its report Criminal Law: Offenses against Religion and Public Worship recommended the abolition of the law 'without replacement', and in 1989, following the attempt by Muslims in Britain to use the law against Penguin Books for publishing Satanic Verses, Tony Benn presented a bill to the House of Commons to abolish the offense of blasphemy and received support from MPs from all parties.
The case against the current blasphemy law is indeed overwhelming. It only defends Christianity- as the Muslims in Britain discovered Islam is not included - and due to historical developments in Christianity such as law is almost totally unnecessary.
Firstly, much self-censorship occurs. Whilst few people in Britain are practising Christians, even those who don't believe in God 'blaspheme' in the sense of deliberately mocking God or insulting Christ - it is just not part of acceptable 'social' behaviour. The same is true in the media.
Secondly Christianity has become much more 'internalised' than other religions. The development of Puritanism made the conscience the 'true Bible', removing the 'holy' from mere outward expressions of religion and making religion much more subjective and personal. This means even a film like The Life of Brian can avoid being straight blasphemy since in making clear Brian is not Jesus is can quite morally mock the fanatical and zealous side of religious and political belief.
Finally modern Christian theology, in developing this 'internalised' religion, has accepted what in the past would have been 'heresy' and 'blasphemy' - that Mary wasn't a virgin, that Jesus didn't perform miracles, that he didn't physically rise from the grave and so on. Christianity has been able to adapt itself to accomodate quite a degree of blasphemy and devise strategies that allow most of it to fall short of its target.
Having reviewed Christianity and blasphemy, it is now clear that none of this applies to Islam. There is certainly no self-censorship in Britain that stops the Koran, Allah or Muhammad being mocked; Islam has had no period of internalisation, and no period of developing a 'modern', subjective Islam. The insults hurt Muslims, they are offended and upset, and feel the law should protect them.
Further, the consensus in favour of the blasphemy law being repealed without replacement is a manufactured consensus. The pamphlet put out by the International Committee The Crime of Blasphemy - Why it should be Abolished for example correctly mentions that the Law Commission Report in 1985 recommended that the law be repealed without replacement. What it fails to mention is the unusual fact that the five Commissioners disagreed amongst themselves. Whilst they all agreed on the defects in the present law, two commissioners put their names to a Note of Dissent, which argued for the replacement of the blasphemy law with legislation which offered protection to all religions. They wrote:
If scurrilous attacks on religious beliefs go unpunished by law they could embitter strongly held feelings within substantial groups of people, could destroy working relationships between different groups, and where religion and race are intimately bound together could deepen the tensions that already are a disturbing feature in some parts of this country. It is for this reaon that our Working Party recommends that the protection of the law must be extended to all religious beliefs.
Lord Scarman in the House of Lords judgement on the Gay News case makes a similar point.
My Lords, I do not subscribe to the view tha the common law offense of blasphemous libel serves no useful purpose in the modern law. On the contrary, I think there is a case for legislation extending it to protect the religious beliefs and feelings of non-Christians. the offense belongs to a group of criminal offenses designed to safeguard the internal tranquility of the kingdom. In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings and practises of all but also to protect them from scurrility, vilification, ridicule and contempt.
Conclusion: A Path for Rushdie to Follow
This battle for the right to blasphemy has brought nothing but sorrow. It has increased racial tension, encouraged the steryotyping of Arabs and Muslims, led the battle for freedom of speech up a blind alley, failed to bring the "liberation" it promised, and confused the debate surrounding the blasphemy law. Salman Rushdie can surely only see his book The Satanic Verses has a curse. Such a past has little to recommend it being extended into the future.
Nevertheless I sympathise with Salman Rushdie - obviously with his tragic circumstances but also with his objective of creating a new language with which to explore religion, Spirit and the infinite. His articles such as Is Nothing Sacred? hold out a promise which his work so far has failed to deliver. Surely an important part of this block is his insistance on utilising blasphemy as his main tool for religious creation. Such ceremonies as he is able to perform with such jagged shaped words fail to open doors to other worlds, and instead conjure up sickening demons from ancient depths of evil.
An untested path for Rushdie to follow is to revoke his claim to blasphemy, and to stare this idol full in the face with no misty dreams between them. Such a revelation would perhaps bring forth words suitable for his predicament. He should then move on to explore the possibilities of a creative heresy - open, loving and generous - and discover the art such a rich atmosphere contains.
© John Mann 1999