What Are the Limits?
Writers and artists are entitled to freedom of expression, but at the same time they should consider other people’s right to be different and not to be hurt or affected by the irresponsible exercise of freedom of expression.
In other words, writers and artists should fully respect other people’s cultural values and sentiments and their right to subscribe to other belief systems.
Therefore, the right to free speech is perhaps a suspect virtue. In other words, writers and commentators may have the right to say what they want and artists, to express what they think or feel curious about. But they are morally obligated to maintain some degree of checks and self-censorship, and consider the socio-religious values and conventional morality that people cherish in a given cultural setting.
A book or an artistic piece that insults people’s long-held views, beliefs, convictions and cultural practices and thus can potentially incite violent street demonstrations and can cause death/s is perhaps better not to be produced at all.
Perhaps, the debate, whether or not freedom of expression is absolute, may remain a contentious issue for a long time. However, it is almost certain now that Muslims are currently the primary victims of a conceivable hypocrisy in the free speech discourse.
While Muslim societies are maligned for a perceived lack of freedom of expression, Muslims do not have equal right to freedom of expression. The following discussion may clarify this more.
Free Speech Hypocrisy
Prominent scholars who are opposed to laws against Holocaust denial include many prominent western non-Muslim academics and commentators. It is perhaps their legitimate intellectual right to seek to decriminalize the denial of the Holocaust and such an academic stance does not harm any.
However, if the list of prominent commentators against the laws against Holocaust denial included eminent Islamic scholars, the reaction of Western establishments and mainstream, dominant media would have been understandably different.
Let us examine another example. Soon after the tragic fall of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, the British writer and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013) made a characteristically iconoclastic statement. She said: “It was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as the Americans think.”
She refused to toe the line with Western political and media establishments and exercised her right to take a divergent view.
But imagine if an Islamic scholar of Lessing’s stature took such an unconventional intellectual stance! What would be the repercussion and media outcry!
Criticizing Charlie Hebdo
In the wake of the recent Charlie Hebdo tragedy, many commentators showed the courage to critique the magazine’s editorial policy of exclusively maligning Islam and Muslims. Again, if the majority of the commentators critical of Charlie Hebdo were Muslims in such a sensitive time, many Islamophobic analysts would have jumped to the conclusion that the followers of Islam are pathologically anti-freedom of expression and that something is seriously wrong with the religion.
Also bear in mind the fact that Russian rulers’ proscription of over two thousand titles has not provoked the trial of their religion. But Islam is regularly on trial for any reported misdeeds committed by any of its followers.
Moreover, most often the slogan of free speech is actually an excuse for free license to denigrate Islam and to caricature its adherents. For the sake of a healthy intellectual culture globally, the dismantling of hypocrisy and double standard in the discourse of free speech is a crying need and long overdue.
References
Milton, John. “A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing”. In The Works of John Milton, vol. 1. London: Millar, 1753.
Nitisor, Andrea-Tereza. “Speaking the Despicable: Blasphemy in Literature.” In Ali Riaz ed. (Re)Reading Taslima Nasrin: Contexts, Contents & Constructions (pp. 109–23). Dhaka: Shrabon Prokashani, 2009.
Petley, Julian. Censoring the Word. London: Seagull, 2007.
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