freedom of expression. a deeper view.

Muslims did not resent the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad (Pelican, 1971) or V.S. Naipaul’s puerile Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). Shelves of libraries and bookshops are full of books sharply critical of Islam and its Prophet. Muslims were outraged because Rushdie chose consciously and deliberately to insult, not criticise, the faith. That was the issue then and it remains the issue still.

The Economist harked back to the 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” by Bernard Lewis, tutor to Dick Cheney. It was not the West that was ignorant of Islam but others. “Ignorance of the way the West works in many Muslim countries makes rabble-rousing easy” (September 15, 2012). A week later it criticised President Mohamed Morsy of Egypt. “He surely also knows that Western respect for free speech means that it is not always possible to prevent individuals from insulting Muhammad or, for that matter, Jesus or Moses or many other figures whom people hold sacred. A new set of insulting cartoons in France are also covered by free-speech laws. It was oddly ignorant—or downright dishonest—of the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mr Morsy’s close comrade, to say that denial of the Holocaust is illegal in the West: it is not in America, though in Germany, for obvious historical reasons, it is.”

It is The Economist that is being dishonest. It knows or ought to know that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not protect group libel or hate speech. It ought to understand that denial of the Holocaust cannot be as offensive to Western minds as denigration of leaders of their faith is to Eastern minds (“The Economist’s Secret”, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2012, an expose by Alexander Zevin, a historian at the UCLA).

Waldron’s book is by far the ablest contribution to an honest debate. He rejects the American view that “the people who are targeted should learn to live with it. That is, they should learn to live their lives, conduct their business, and raise their children in the atmosphere that this sort of speech gives rise to…. Often, in the American debate, the philosophical arguments about hate speech are knee-jerk, impulsive and thoughtless.” It is a good refutation of the arrogant self-indulgent American self-perception of exceptionalism.

When nearly a century earlier Lord Macaulay protested in Parliament against the way the blasphemy laws were then administered, he added ( Speeches, page 116): ‘If I were a judge in India, I should have no scruple about punishing a Christian who should pollute a mosque.’ When Macaulay became a legislator in India, he saw to it that the law protected the religious feelings of all. In those days India was a plural society; today the United Kingdom is also.”

This is precisely what some European countries and some people in the U.S. are not prepared to accept vis-a-vis Muslims: a plural society which can accommodate people whose world view differs from theirs.




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