And how is it that emerald puts out the eyes of snakes?” To the ninth-century theologist Ibn al-Rawandi, it seemed the light that had illuminated the lives of his people for three centuries had blinded them to reality. The philosopher deluged Islam with questions about the truth of prophecy, the contradictions in passages of the Quran, and the illogic of religious rituals. The human race, he argued, had not needed the help of divine revelation to map the movements of the stars, nor to fashion sheep gut and wood into lutes.
Furious contemporaries denounced al-Rawandi and declared him a heretic. The conservative polemicist Ibn al-Jawzi, scholar Sarah Stroumsa records, declared al-Rawandi was worse than the devil because while Iblis defied God, he at least had the decency to address him with respect.
On 30 June, in a gesture that blurred the lines between agitprop and teenage tantrum, the obscure Iraqi-born Christian refugee Salwan Momika set fire to the Quran in Sweden. In interviews, Momika claims to be protecting his new homeland from Islam; his critics have noted he in the past allied with religious extremists against the Islamic State.
The furious response has led some countries to consider if free speech is worth the price. In Sweden itself, some are arguing for a scrapped 1970 law that criminalised the burning of religious texts to be brought back. Even though it might seem expedient in the face of religious rage, reintroducing blasphemy laws would hack at the foundations of liberal democracies.
Like Kanhaiya Lal Teli, brutally murdered for posting a video on social media with purportedly blasphemous content, Salwan Momika might not be a free-speech crusader. But defending his right to express his opinion protects us all.
Also read: 75 years of blasphemy killings in Pakistan. God has a vigilante army
The OIC and blasphemy
For more than a decade now, the member-states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have periodically lobbied for blasphemy to be made a global offence. The OIC argues that the reforms it seeks are linked to hate-speech proscription, extending the protections enjoyed by vulnerable minorities to religions.
Free speech supporters have been unimpressed by the argument. “Flogging and imprisoning people who speak disrespectfully about religion is not a move toward tolerance,” observes journalist Nicholas Goldenberg.
The same OIC states, scholar Paul Marshall notes, have resisted enforcing international norms against egregious violations of human rights purported to be based on Islamic law, like amputation or execution. Even the Taliban’s war on women, which includes evicting them from schools and workplaces, has been handled gently by the OIC.
Little imagination is needed to see that ideologically-bankrupt regimes see profit in positioning themselves as guardians of Islam. In Pakistan, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif organised a day of protest, joined by the opposition Tehreek-e-Insaf. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to “teach the arrogant Westerners that insulting Muslims is not freedom of thought”. Morocco and Jordan recalled their ambassadors to Sweden, while Saudi Arabia issued a stern diplomatic warning.
This kind of language helps governments ward off jihadist opposition. Iraqi mobs stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad, Al-Qaeda called for blasphemers to be beheaded, and the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan described the Quran burning as “an act of war”. The powerful Tehreek Tahaffuz Namoos-e-Risalat anti-blasphemy movement in Pakistan has called for “the spirit of jihad to be rekindled”.
From the case of Pakistan, which saw its first blasphemy killings 75 years ago, it is clear that the state’s use of blasphemy laws has only served to empower religious extremists. In India, similarly, harsh laws against causing religious offensive have served to encourage violence and competitive communalism.
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Islam and heresy
All gods rest on the corpses of earlier ones. In 630 CE, so chroniclers recorded, the warrior Khalid ibn al-Walid entered the temple at Nakhlah, where the tribes of Quraish and Kinanah worshipped al-ʻUzzā. Al-Walid was, chroniclers recount, confronted by a naked, wild-haired Abyssinian woman who cut down nine of his men before she was overpowered, and cut in two. “That was al-ʻUzzā,” the Prophet Muhammad told him, “and never again shall she be worshipped in your land.”
For the most part, though, state violence was not unleashed against freethinkers in the early years of Islam — Al-Rawandi and the great polymath Abu Bakr al-Razi could write fearlessly.
Like other medieval religious systems, the scholar Christine Ames has shown, Islamic regimes became increasingly concerned with heresy and apostasy as polities became more complex, as the state expanded. In the early Muslim community, knowing who belonged was a simple issue. As it expanded and wielded state power, orthodoxy had to be enforced.
The seventh-century caliphate of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan infamously crucified the preacher Al-Harit Bin Sa’id, who claimed to have been the recipient of prophetic revelations. The crucifixion, historian Sean Anthony however notes, only emerged as a subject of historical interest centuries later.
Enforcement of orthodoxy reached its heights under the caliph Harun al-Rashid al-Ma’mun, wrote Ames, who rose to the throne in Baghdad in 813 CE, under the shadow of a civil war with his predecessor and brother. The war against heresy would involve the macabre execution of the Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj, who was allegedly beaten, placed in a pillory, and his hands and feet cut off before he was decapitated.
Arrest, interrogation, book-burning, social exclusion: The tools of the Muslim inquisitor were remarkably those to similar of the Christians. Ibn Hatim al-Tulaytuli, for example, was tried for heresy in Toledo in 1064, and executed by crucifixion. To the east, the caliph al-Qadir relentlessly persecuted the rationalist Mu’tazilites, promoting instead his own traditionalism.
The followers of Muhammad Ibn Karam, hostile to commerce and embracing a culture of voluntary poverty, were also persecuted as heretics. The chronicler Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi, Ames notes, complained that the Karamiyya had “introduced stupidities without precedent”, among them forbidding “prayer in dirty clothes and on dirty ground and with a dirty body.”
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Weaponising heresy
For much of the twentieth century, debates over heresy in the Middle East took a more familiar form, as doddering monarchies and their clerics gave way to modern ideological movements. Liberal democracies, though, were conspicuous by their absence. Ferocious contests pitted various groups of nationalists, communists and, increasingly, Islamists. The slaughter of between 5,000-25,000 people in Hama, at the hands of the secular-nationalist regime of Hafez al-Assad, made the stakes clear to Islamists.
Egyptian Islamist theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi—among the ideological fountainheads of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a survivor of torture at the hands of the country’s socialist regime—thus argued that “apostasy is never just an intellectual stance: it also entails a change of allegiance, an exchange of identity, and a transformation of belonging.”
The apostate, Qaradawi thus argued, “cuts himself off from the community of Islam of which he was a member and with his mind and heart and will join its enemies”.
Iran’s former theocratic ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, successfully used blasphemy as a political weapon, seizing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to represent himself as the defender of Islam against a predatory West. The philosopher Kenan Malik has shown how the war against the book powered a struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for power amongst Islamic diasporas in the West and beyond.
The bloody fallout from the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and Terry Jones burning of the Quran in Florida has led many to question if free speech is worth the price.
François-Jean de la Barre—tortured, beheaded and burnt with a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary nailed to his torso in 1766, on charges of failing to doff his hat to a religious procession—was the last man convicted of blasphemy in France. The statue erected in his memory at the Basilica of Sacré Coeur in Paris is a reminder of the price that has been paid to build societies where people can speak their minds freely.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)