Islam and Free Speech: A Reply to A. Faizur Rahman
28 October
2020
One has
benefited immensely from the writings of Mr. Faizur Rahman and it is with the
sole intention of taking forward the debate on blasphemy and freedom of speech that I write this rejoinder.
Reading the
article, one gets the feeling that Mr. Rahman is more concerned with presenting
the ‘good’ side of Islam rather than trying to understand and situate the
horrors that accompanied the brutal murder of the French school teacher, Samuel
Paty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To be fair,
the article condemns the murder of Paty, but like most apologist attempts, it
absolves Islam of all responsibility in this motivated and premeditated murder.
The trouble with this obsession with highlighting the good side of Islam is
that most religions (including Islam) do not come only with a good side. Islam
does not come in discrete packages where one can pick and choose the good and
leave out the ‘bad’. Rather it is a ‘structuring structure’ which wants to
influence and direct all aspects of a persons’ life-world. The problem becomes
more acute because in the process of doing this, it also wants to dictate how
non-followers should behave and relate with Islam. And not everything is good
about this desire of Islam to affect and alter the cultural conditions of
people. Some of it may be good, but others are completely undesirable in the
present context.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
The False Binary of the Secular versus Islamic Needs to Be
Broken
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leaving out
the problematic parts of Islam and concentrating on the good parts, as Mr.
Rahman does speak of a certain dishonesty, which has become part and parcel of
Muslim apologia. Nothing good can come out of a debate where the intention is
to ‘defend’ Islam rather than to see how the religion is implicated in things
and events which we no longer hold dear.
Rahman Sb.
approvingly quotes Mustafa Aykol to prove that blasphemy was
‘invented’ as a criminal offence by medieval jurists. More specifically, Aykol
argues that it was instituted by the Ummayads, hinting that most Muslims do not
have high regard for these caliphs. The problem with this argument is that
flies in the face of Islamic history and theology. Most of the Islamic
jurisprudence is the product of Ummayad period. It is also true that rather
than detesting the Ummayads, Sunni Muslims have long held them in high regard,
for the simple reason that unprecedented Islamic expansion took place during
this period. For many Sunni Ulama, this is in fact the golden period of Islam.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In order to
prove the inherent good core of Islam which was corrupted by the Ummayads,
Rahman goes back to the Quran, rightly arguing that there is no punishment
specified against blasphemy in the holy text. While Muslims the world over
revere the Quran as the literal word of God, most of them have second order
knowledge of this text. The large majority depends on translations and
interpretations of the Quran done by various scholars who simplify the message
for the lay believers. The problem is not that the Quran cannot be accessed
directly; the problem is that the text is at places so abstruse that an average
reader becomes befuddled in trying to make sense of it. If this was not the
case, then we would not have had the need to have a separate discipline to
understand the Quran, as we have in most centres of Islamic learning.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Embrace What Is Different:
Quran and Hadith Stress on Building an Inclusive Society
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Quran
is polyphonous; it not just speaks to different contexts but also at times
appears to talk to different sets of audiences. It is not a surprise therefore
that there are multiple readings of the same text; often linked to social and
cultural contexts in which it is read. A Barelwi reading the Quran in India and
a Salafi reading it in Saudi Arabia take very meanings from the same text.
Therefore, trying to locate the Quran as the centre of Islamic experience is
misleading, to say the least. The motivation of the young Chechen who murdered
Samuel Paty cannot be shown to be un-Islamic just because Rahman Sb. thinks
that the young lad did not understand the Quran properly.
We must
also understand that while the Quran is basic to the formation of Islamic law,
it is not the only text which informs the organisation of Islamic worldview.
The biographies of the Prophet and the Hadith (which again was started by the
Ummayads) are very important sources of Islamic law. In fact, the necessity to
collect and compile hadiths arose precisely because the Quran was not
sufficient to provide all the answers for the emerging Islamic caliphate. Not
only were hadiths collected but they were also fabricated in large numbers to
suit the interests of the powers of the day. Despite this, hadith is still an
important source of Islamic law. So while Quran may be silent on the need to
punish a blasphemer, the hadiths are clearly in the affirmative, even
specifying how the person should be killed.
Rahman Sb.
also argues that the prophet of Islam forgave all those who insulted and made
fun of him. Certainly, he is not just relying on the Quran for this information
but also on other sources of law from which we get information about the life
of the prophet. But the same sources also tell us that the prophet of Islam
ordered and supervised the killing of enemies, including women. The assertion
that a general amnesty was declared after Muslims captured Mecca is simply
fallacious. While Mr. Rahman is certainly entitled to his own hermeneutics of
Islam, he must know that he stands on a very weak ground. The hegemonic reading
of the Quran and allied texts, done by important seminaries and disseminated
worldwide argue the exact opposite of what Mr. Rahman intends to do. There is
enough in Islamic texts which justify killing for blasphemy. The dominant
reading of Islamic law from Indonesia to Egypt affirms that a blasphemer must
be killed. Quoting the Quran, and that too, selectively, is certainly not going
to save us from this malaise.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The other
part of Mr. Rahman’s article is an ingenious attempt to wilfully misread the
problem at hand. Throughout the world, there are laws which are anomalous, and
the western world is no exception to this rule. The current problem in France
is not the result of a skewed application of such laws but because of a
resurgent Islamist politics which ends up beheading those who think differently.
There cannot be any discussion on French law without first decoding the
motivations of such killings. And those motivations are purely religious; they
are enacted because the person believes in a particular religious ideology. The
bigger concern therefore should be to counter such tendencies and condemn this
religious motivation. Rather, what we get in Mr. Rahman’s article is to point
fingers at the hypocrisy of French law which does not take into considerations
the feelings of Muslims. Will Mr. Rahman accept India as a Hindu theocratic
state if majority of people in this country feel like having it? Law certainly
should not be hostage to feelings of people, but should be based on rationality
and wisdom.
Mr. Rahman
points to two issues in order to bring out the purported hollowness of France’s
commitment to freedom of speech. He argues that there is a law which protects
citizens (who are alive) from defamation and wants its extension to cover
people who are long dead. Through this, he hopes that those defaming the
prophet by making films and cartoons can be prosecuted. Rahman Sb. completely
misreads the situation. The prophet is no ordinary being; in fact he is not
just a person, but represents an idea. Mr. Rahman is telling us that certain
ideas should be above any criticism. This is a huge expectation. Europe is
partly built on the tradition of critique. And everything is kosher within this
tradition. The sweep of this tradition was such that the critique of Christian
faith was not just done by secularists but also by church officials themselves.
It is only recently that such criticism has been applied to Islam because today
it is an important presence in Europe. If such a law is enacted then it will be
applicable to all religions, which will mean negating centuries of scholarship
against this institution. Or is Mr. Rahman asking for an exclusive law
applicable only to defaming Islam and its prophet? Either way, instituting such
a law would be disastrous for the simple reason that no society has progressed
without ceaseless questioning of the world around them. In fact, one reason why
Muslim societies are regressive is because of the existence of such laws which
prohibit the free exchange of ideas. Certainly this state of affairs is most
conducive for an authoritarian regime. In a fascist state, one doesn’t think;
one just believes.
Rahman Sb.
also points out that although one can offend religious sensibilities, but there
is a European law which criminalises the denial of holocaust, thus the
application of ‘freedom of speech’ is selective and a design to target Islam
and Muslims. This oft-repeated clever argument misses the point that the two
are not comparable.
One is
about a certain set of ideas, the other is about the horrible sufferings of
Jewish people. There is nothing wrong in critiquing ideas or even making fun of
them. Judaism, Christianity and Islam for example, have continuously critiqued
and ridiculed another set of ideas called polytheism. It is rather rich
therefore of Islam to expect to be treated differently by another set of ideas,
in this case, secularism. Ridiculing people or communities, on the other hand,
should and must be severely restricted. Denying the holocaust is not just
getting trapped in conspiracy theories, but is an insult to the lives of six
million Jews who perished due to the madness of racial purity. And it started
with caricaturing of people: Jews were talked about as evil, scheming, pests
and eventually this propaganda became the common sense of a lot of people. When
you reduce a community to the level of pest, there is not much remorse that one
feels when the community is obliterated. Rahman Sb. would do well to remember
that such a law is needed to prevent the recurrence of such brutality. Laws
must be understood in their context and the purpose for which they are made.
There is already a holocaust denying industry and one hopes Mr. Rahman is not
part of this fantasy.
Mr. Rahman
has also suggested that Samuel Paty could have had the same argument in class
without showing those cartoons. We need to understand that the classroom space
is sacrosanct and that teachers must be understood as the only ones who have
the authority to decide what is best suited to his or her pedagogical strategy.
In India and elsewhere, we have teachers being assaulted for teaching what they
deemed fit for the class. I am sure Mr. Rahman would not condone the behaviour
of Hindu right wing mobs who have assaulted teachers, accusing them of hurting
their feelings. If these thugs, whether Hindu or Islamic are to decide what
should or should not be taught in our schools, then we should just say good bye
to all criticality which comes with schooling. The need of the hour is to
protect teaching spaces from such right wing assaults; not to police them, as
Rahman Sb. seems to be suggesting.
Islam
demands respect from others while at the same time being extremely
disrespectful to other secular or religious traditions. Respect is always
earned. Islam needs to earn it through an open embrace of all epistemologies,
be they of different religions or sexual orientations. But in order to do so,
it first needs a deep introspection of its own theological underpinnings which
reeks of supremacism.
Those who
want to ‘rescue’ Islam need not just limit themselves to the ‘inherent
goodness’ of the Quran, but also see how the same Quran has been used to
marginalise, exclude and subdue others.
----
Arshad Alam is a
columnist with NewAgeIslam.com
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-ideology/islam-free-speech-reply-a./d/123299
New
Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism