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Free Expression is No Offence Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie Published on February 13, 2007 [There are controversial plans to introduce legislation [in the UK] to curb incitement to religious hatred. Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie consider the threat to free speech ]
A MORAL ONUS Monica Ali
There is something deeply compelling about arguments that nobody should be persecuted for their faith. Belonging to any religious group should not turn you into a second-class citizen. Muslims are too often at the bottom of the pile, and they have lobbied hardest for this new provision. Looking back over the decades at the evolution of laws on hate crimes, equal opportunity and discrimination, it seems fitting - a natural next step - to close the "legal loopholes" where religious affiliation is concerned. But though I feel passionately that certain groups in our society are disadvantaged and that more should be done to help them, and though I am instinctively drawn to anything that purports to banish harassment and discrimination, this draft law is anything but enlightened. What's the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that racial group. Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so. My second area of difficulty concerns the broad sweep, vagueness and general impracticality of the law as it is currently written. The bill says that an offence will be deemed to have been committed if "having regard to all the likely circumstances the words, behaviour or material . . . are likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are . . . likely to stir up religious hatred". Good grief! What does this mean? Who is going to decide which circumstances are relevant and whether or not it is "likely" that hatred will be "stirred up"? Going back to my previous example, if I say that I loathe the way Islam is practised in Saudi Arabia because it denies the democratic rights of women, what are the relevant circumstances of my utterance? Are they that I also believe that Muslims should be free from arbitrary arrest and detention, that the underachievement of Muslims within our educational system should be urgently addressed, and that the French were wrong to ban the wearing of the hijab within schools? Or are the relevant or "likely" circumstances that in Britain today hostility against Muslims is on the increase, that any strongly worded criticism is going to inflame those feelings still further and that someone who already has deep-seated prejudice and hatred towards Muslims is "likely" to have that existing hatred thus "stirred up"? Perhaps that sounds a little far-fetched. But when I add a reminder that Polly Toynbee, a serious commentator and longstanding equal-rights campaigner, was recently labelled as Islamophobe of the Year at an award ceremony run by an Islamic group, it sounds nothing of the sort. Finally, just how efficacious would the law be in bringing about harmony? All the evidence suggests not at all. Supporters point out that in 1987, Northern Ireland introduced a local law against incitement to religious hatred. It seems strange that they would even bring that up. Hate-speech laws in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands have not resulted in a decrease in insults directed towards Jews, Muslims, Turks, African immigrants or other minorities. In fact there has been growth in support for the extreme right in those countries. Even if the evidence had pointed the other way, I find I could not sign up. For, as Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters has pointed out, it would not only be the artistic community paying the price. Whose voices will be silenced, she asks? Writers and so on, certainly, "but also the more vulnerable groups within religious communities, like women, who may find the newly strengthened group rights weaken their own position". Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote about a rape in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara. Her play deals with sexual abuse within a religious community and this is a real issue. Less highly charged but no less real is the way women find they "cannot leave oppressive homes because of the stranglehold of culture, religion and enforced mediation by religious leaders". The price of putting this kind of curb on freedom of expression may seem like loose change to some; to others it is a king's ransom. It must be wholeheartedly opposed.
RESPONSIBLE FREE SPEECH? Philip Hensher
The Home Officer Minister initially in charge of the religious hatred legislation currently proceeding through Parliament has said that "wordsmiths" must write and speak with "responsibility". Free speech must be used responsibly. Everyone must understand that. Who decides if speech is being used responsibly? Why, the authorities. Home Office ministers. The rule of law. The authorities in the United States will decide whether protest is a responsible use of free speech. So will the authorities in Iran, who have their own views on responsibility. The necrocracy of North Korea would find absolutely nothing to quarrel with in the notion that speech must be exercised responsibly. Nor would any Chinese regime of the past 50 years. Responsibility is in the eye of the government, the church, the Roi Soleil, the Spanish Inquisition and, no doubt, Ivan the Terrible. Free speech, we generally accept, is subject to reasonable restriction. Criminal libel or racist abuse, for instance, are not generally permitted. The case for "responsible" exercise of free speech, however, is not talking about reasonable restriction; it is different from a parallel exercise taking place at the same time, to draw the lines of "reasonable restriction" more tightly. What talk of "responsibility" does is to insist on restrictions that are universally appropriate. A statement may be perfectly legal, and yet - from this point of view - deplorable because "irresponsible". It is absolutely clear that, in most of these cases, the case for "responsible" free speech is not being made to those who use their power or authority to damage the speechless and the powerless. There might be a case for saying that a powerful newspaper, a government minister, ministers of the church, should not use their voices irresponsibly against those who have no power of response. For instance, it might justifiably be said that the British newspaper which published a story, on no evidence at all, that asylum seekers were killing and eating wild swans was abusing its authority. Similarly, we might deplore, on the grounds of "responsibility", the lie spread, without any medical evidence, by the Roman Catholic church in Africa, that the use of condoms is useless against the transmission of HIV. Such bodies, perhaps, do have a duty to consider the weight of their voices, and exercise their right of free speech responsibly. But that is not what is meant here. In almost all cases, what is being addressed is the free and reckless criticism of governments, of religions, of authority of all kinds. The argument that individuals have, individually, a duty to exercise free speech "responsibly" is not, despite claims, a strengthening of the status of free speech. It is an attack on the idea itself. The progress of free speech has been advanced over the centuries, not just by calm, rational argument, but by excess and irresponsibility. Those who, with increasing noise, are insisting that free speech can only be permitted when it is used "responsibly", are prescribing across the board a range of expression and a range of agreed opinions. That is not free speech at all. If we want to hang on to the free speech of individuals, we must personally insist on continuing the noble and long history of irresponsibility.
PLAYING WITH FIRE Salman Rushdie
Rushdie's work hinges on his many identities--an Indian Muslim who writes in English, whose family left India for Pakistan, and who now lives in England. Midnight's Children (1981), which first brought Rushdie a wide audience and won Britain's Booker Prize, is an allegory about the birth of independent India. Shame (1983) focuses on Pakistan's recent rulers. The Satanic Verses is a complex work whose two protagonists, like Rushdie, are expatriate Indians. The passage describing the birth of a religion resembling Islam are seen as blasphemous by Muslims, and the book has been banned in most Islamic countries. Despite Rushdie's denial of any intentional blasphemy, and his pubic decision in 1990 "to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it," his death sentence remained in force. He as continued to write, however, publishing both the children's tales in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and the essays in Imaginary Homelands in 1991. I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a novelist from the Indian subcontinent, where the supernatural and the mundane coexist in the streets and are considered as being of the same order of reality, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was often difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader, global assault on writers, artists and fundamental freedoms. The aggressors in that matter, by which I mean the novel's opponents, who threatened booksellers and publishers, falsified the contents of the text they disliked, and vilified its author, nevertheless presented themselves as the injured parties, and such was the desire to appease religious sentiment even then that in spite of the murder of a translator in Japan and the shooting of a publisher in Norway there was widespread acceptance of that topsy-turvy view. In spite of all the public calls for violence to be done, not a single person - in Britain or anywhere else - was arrested or charged with any offence. I revisit these bad old days with extreme reluctance, but I do so because now, 16 years later, religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us. People have always turned to religion for the answers to the two great questions of life: where did we come from? And how shall we live? But on the question of origins, all religions are simply wrong. No, the universe wasn't created in six days by a superforce that rested on the seventh. Nor was it churned into being by a sky-god with a giant churn. And on the social question, the simple truth is that wherever religions, with their narrow moralities, get into society's driving seat, tyranny results. The Inquisition results. Or the Taliban. And yet religions continue to insist that they provide special access to ethical truths, and consequently deserve special treatment and protection. And they continue to emerge from the world of private life, where they belong, like so many other things that are acceptable when done in private between consenting adults but unacceptable in the town square, and to bid for power. In today's United States, for example, it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office. But a professed atheist wouldn't stand a popcorn's chance in hell. According to Jacques Delors, ex-president of the European Commission, "The clash between those who believe and those who don't believe will be a dominant aspect of relations between the US and Europe in the coming years." In Europe, the bombing of a railway station in Madrid and the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh are being seen as warnings that the secular principles that underlie any humanist democracy need to be defended and reinforced. Even before these atrocities occurred, the French decision to ban religious attire such as Islamic headscarves had the support of the entire political spectrum. Islamist demands for segregated classes and prayer breaks were also rejected. Few Europeans today call themselves religious (just 21%, according to a recent study); most Americans do (59%, according to the Pew Forum). The Enlightenment, in Europe, represented an escape from the power of religion to place limiting points on thought; in America, it represented an escape into the religious freedom of the New World – a move towards faith rather than away from it. Many Europeans now view the American combination of religion and nationalism as frightening. The exception to European secularism can be found in Britain, or at least in the government of the devoutly Christian and increasingly authoritarian Tony Blair, which tried to steamroller Parliament into passing a law against "incitement to religious hatred" before the May 2005 general election, in a cynical vote-getting attempt to placate British Muslim spokesmen, in whose eyes just about any critique of Islam is offensive. Lawyers, journalists and a long list of public figures warned that such a law would dramatically hinder free speech and fail to meet its objective - that religious disturbances would increase rather than diminish. New Labour is playing with the fire of communal politics, and in consequence we may all be burned.
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