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Profane

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ProfaneSacrilegious Expression in aMulticultural Age

EDITED BY

Christopher S. Grenda, ChrisBeneke, and David NashForeword byMartin E. Marty

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S

University of California Press, one of the most distinguisheduniversity presses in the United States, enriches lives aroundthe world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, socialsciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported bythe UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributionsfrom individuals and institutions. For more information, visitwww.ucpress.edu.

University of California PressOakland, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataProfane : sacrilegious expression in a multicultural age /edited by Christopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, DavidNash.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-520-27722-9 (cloth, alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-520-95822-7 (electronic)1. Blasphemy. 2. Swearing. I. Grenda, Christopher

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Contents

List of IllustrationsForewordMartin E. Marty

Introduction: On the Modern Confluence of Blasphemy,Free Expression, and Hate SpeechChristopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, and David Nash

PART ONE. CREATING SPACE FOR SACRILEGIOUSEXPRESSION

1. Thick-Skinned Tolerance: Satire, the Sacred, and the Rise ofthe ModernChristopher S. Grenda

2. The Productive Obscene: Philip Roth and the Profanity LoopJacques Berlinerblau

3. Defaced: The Art of Blaspheming Texts and Images in theWest

David Lawton

PART TWO. SACRILEGE AND DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT

4. Blasphemy and Free Thought in Jacksonian America: TheCase of Abner KneelandPaul Finkelman

5. Secular Blasphemies: Symbolic Offense in ModernDemocracyRobert A. Yelle

PART THREE. CIVILITY, THE SACRED, AND HUMANRIGHTS

6. Muslim Political Theology: Defamation, Apostasy, andAnathemaEbrahim Moosa

7. Protesting Sacrilege: Blasphemy and Violence in Muslim-Ma-jority StatesRon E. Hassner

8. The Indonesian Blasphemy Act: A Legal and Social AnalysisAsma T. Uddin

9. Profound Offense and Religion in Secular Democracies: AnAustralian PerspectiveElizabeth Burns Coleman

10. Blasphemy versus Incitement: An International LawPerspectiveJeroen Temperman

Afterword: Blasphemy beyond ModernismDavid NashList of Contributors

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Index

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Illustrations

FIGURES

3.1. Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary3.2. Myra Hindley3.3. Maurizio Cattelan, HIM3.4. Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Body3.5. Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Blood3.6. Alan Schechner, Self Portrait at Buchenwald: It’s

the Real Thing3.7. Alan Schechner, Bar Code to Concentration Camp

Morph3.8. Alan Schechner, The Legacy of Abused Children:

From Poland to Palestine3.9. Theo van Gogh, still from Submission

3.10. Gérard Garouste, Passage (Autoportrait)

TABLES

7.1. Occurrence of cartoon riots in Muslim-majoritystates

7.2. Cartoon protests and riots in states with significantIslamist movements

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ForewordMARTIN E. MARTY

Blasphemers, profaners, and producers of the sacrilegiousare to be found in most cultures, especially those that holdreligion in high regard. Readers of this book will soon learnthat attacks on and undercuttings of religions acquire manynames, usually in terms of what they oppose, and what theyoppose changes so often that the attackers are usually verybusy people.

Because I am a historian of religions, I had to ask why theeditors and authors gave me the privilege of helping to in-troduce their volume. We scholars of religion don’t usuallyemploy inflammatory words such as blasphemy or profane-ness, instead preferring abstract terms to deal with suchphenomena. Secularization had long been one such term,perhaps because it sounds neutral. Yet while it is still athome in some scholarly discourse today, it almost alwaysgives harbor and encouragement not merely to nonreligionbut also to whatever might subvert religion.

The authors in this collection venture far from the con-ventional boundaries of the study of religions. They do so inpursuing the logic of their respective disciplines as well asin crossing disciplinary boundaries as their subjects andcontexts demand. When I began work in this field three

score years ago, one of its key areas was described as a dia-lectic of belief and unbelief. Ever since I began to publish,“unbelief” has been a specialty of mine. It showed up in adoctoral dissertation, later spruced up and published as TheInfidel: Freethought and American Religion (Cleveland:Meridian Books, 1961) and tidied up still further as TheVarieties of Unbelief (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-ston, 1964). Official Catholicism established a Vatican Sec-retariatus Pro Non Credendibus, which held conferences inwhich I participated in Rome and Baden bei Wien in 1976.Out of the Rome conference came a book, The Culture ofUnbelief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971),and later the two-volume Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Buffalo:Prometheus Books, 1985). Terms such as blasphemy andprofaneness did not appear in any of these, though theywere clearly vital to “the culture of unbelief.”

Significantly, in the post–World War II era, Westernscholars played up the conflict between belief and unbelief,thus accenting the cognitive and intellectual dimensions ofreligious expression. What stunned me as I read Profanewas how time bound and culture bound that imagined con-flict was. Contributors to the present collection do justice tothe doctrines and the intellectual substance of religious be-lief over against unbelief. But recent generations of schol-ars, including authors in this book, are not content to con-sider the propositional or dogmatic sides of belief and itsantagonists. They want to get closer to their religious andantireligious subjects and tease out the meaning and signi-ficance of blasphemy and profaneness.

None of their terms are novel. Blasphemy has alwayserupted and interrupted where religious cultures are vi-brant and their importance taken for granted. In previouseras and other cultures, it was easier than now—as

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evidenced in the chapters ahead—to define, censor, legis-late, or police the blasphemer. But it is the fact of the pro-tean, viscous, and sometimes elusive character of the blas-pheming violators that draws attention and demands in-quiry now.

Similarly, the profane has been observed, isolated, and in-quired about as long as there has been a well-defined un-derstanding of “the sacred,” however described. The pro-fane (pro-fanum, “across the threshold of the sanctuary”) issimpler to discuss when it manifests itself in a homogenousreligious culture, where the sanctuaries are readily identifi-able. In this book, however, the authors have to deal withmultireligious expressions that may have little to do withstate-sanctioned sanctuaries. They find such expressionsnewly invigorated in an age of images. For an introductionto this perspective, explore the ubiquitous digital phenom-ena that, as David Lawton’s chapter 3 explains, challengetraditional textual expressions. How is the blasphemer cen-sored when he or she is not easily taken captive as a speci-men for study? Every day, social media generates countlessopportunities for public dissent or affirmation—such asFacebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button and Twitter’s“Retweet” option—which can subvert religious authority inan instant.

As for sacrilege, the term survives, but it demands differ-ent approaches than it might have when the sacred wasmore easily isolated and defined. Many of the followingpages revisit historic inventors and purveyors of sacrile-gious phenomena, but the volume’s contributors are busiestwhen they deal with contemporary expressions. Sacrilege,as Christopher S. Grenda shows, thrives on satire (seechapter 1). Satire abounds in popular and high culturealike. As this foreword is being written, wildly popular

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comedians host late-night news shows that regularly andderisively feature religious topics. So far as I can tell, reli-gious viewers make up no small part of their audiences.What does it mean when such iconic figures display ambi-valence or casual irreverence toward religion? Comic por-trayals may have corrosive effects on religious communit-ies, but these communities are too fluid, kinetic, and vul-nerable to provide a stable object of sacrilege. Yetsomething important, perhaps even something sacred, isbeing subverted.

The word communities in that sentence points to a reveal-ing and appropriate notice explicit in Grenda’s and Law-ton’s essays and implicit in others: blasphemy is an assaulton community. Blasphemy has always been most effectivelyproscribed when community boundaries have been sharplydefined and church-state authority robust. It was not diffi-cult for Grand Inquisitors or their less grand inferiors tolocate, censor, punish, or kill those who were seen as un-dercutters of the Catholic imperium in all its forms or ofProtestantdom when it emerged. It was easy for Puritans,empowered by the laws of England and New England, topursue and punish blasphemers. There was then little diffi-culty in naming the blasphemer and pointing out how heror his expressions jeopardized community.

The authors in this book, however, know that at least in“Western Culture,” where church and state have beenlargely separated and where civil constitutions recognize avast number of religious communities and expressions asbeing protected by law, pursuing and punishing the sacrile-gious is a more fraught exercise. This does not mean thatputative or alleged violators have disappeared. The targetshave merely changed and the goal posts moved. Which is tosay that in any study of blasphemy, profaneness, unbelief,

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or sacrilege, the scholar has to be discerning and, becausereligion in some form or other is usually a target, has to atleast provisionally determine what is religious and what isnot.

The readiest location in which to find the alternative toconventionally studied religion in pluralist societies is notthe established sanctuaries but different kinds of publicgathering, witness, testimony, and celebration. The mostobvious and most obviously powerful among these appear inwhat Robert Bellah and whole schools of political scientists,sociologists, and theologians have called “civil religion”(see especially Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus96, no. 1 [1967]: 1–21). Such an entity, evident in Muslim-majority states as well as secular democracies, is at home incountries such as the United States, which disestablishedreligion centuries ago, substituting for it the veneration of“the people” and its national symbols.

To observe examples of all this, students of this subjecthave to make at least tentative and preliminary stabs at de-fining religion and locating where its power resides in thepresent and the past century. To see in the previous centuryhow instant, efficient, and radical was the censorship ofthose who were viewed as violating the sanctity of a nation,a race, or a culture, one need only consider Fascism,Nazism, Communism, or other repressive forms of govern-ment. In the past century, millions were imprisoned or ex-ecuted for their blasphemy against such sacralized politicalmovements. Irreverence directed at the swastika, thefasces, the hammer and sickle, the red star, or the crescenthas been the beleaguered object of our modern inquisitorsand imprisoners.

Today the civil definition of “the sacred” is most assidu-ously and self-consciously analyzed in what Marshall

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Hodgson, in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and Historyin a World Civilization (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1974), calls Islamdom. Salmon Rushdie and othertargets of Muslim outrage make unsurprising appearanceson the pages devoted to Muslim-majority states. Drawing onhistoric texts, especially the Qurʼan, Muslim governmentsor movements make daily news because of their intolerancefor obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy. Violators of thenorms of community, be they legal or cultural, know thatthey invite death when they bring their causes to the openfield known as “the public.” Ebrahim Moosa (chapter 6) andRon E. Hassner (chapter 7) chronicle this well in the suc-ceeding pages.

In the introduction, the editors observe how their subjecthas reemerged from the shadows and is now the object oflively global media attention. Some of the awakened in-terest in blasphemy occurred because historians in theWest, who had long regarded “secularization” as the domin-ant paradigm, had to reconsider their working assumptions.They had been neglecting the religious voices all along. Butthen came events that provoked more considered responses.An illustration: In 1988, when I was charged to colead a six-year, five-volume study of militant fundamentalisms in thevarious religions, my colleague R. Scott Appleby and I mon-itored differing understandings of religion in various cul-tures. Fresh in our minds were the American military andgovernmental leaders who did not know what to make of thelethal potential of some movements behind the 1979 Irani-an revolution. When we asked military, political, and intelli-gence leaders how that revolution, which helped to unseatthe James Carter administration and embarrassed the Un-ited States, had surprised American officials, we en-countered various responses, including the argument that

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the leaders had routinely overlooked religious elements inMuslim-majority states and movements. The United States,we heard from the apologists, knew much about Iranianeducation, business, military affairs, music, and more. Toparaphrase the thrust of the feeble explanations for intelli-gence failures, “the only thing we paid no attention to wasreligion, because everyone knows that religion has no powerin the modern world.”

Several years later, Appleby returned from domestic andworld travels with word that the State Department and theCentral Intelligence Agency, which had once virtually ig-nored religion, had now “gotten” it. The reawakening of“strong religions,” the tragedy called 9–11, and the eventsthat headlines cover daily have brought religion, includingthat which opposes blasphemy, profaneness, and sacrilege,unequivocally to the fore. Certainly the place of religion ingovernmental, diplomatic, and military affairs assures thatits study will remain urgent for an indefinite future.

My reading led me to approach this book for the light itthrows on grand and often ominous movements of our time.That is where its findings and proposals will likely have thegreatest impact. But I have to confess that as I read, Ifound another reason to encourage others to do the same:that is, for the way that the people about whom the authorswrite generate genuine curiosity and enjoyment in learning.For sixty years I have generally devoted my attention tomostly settled-down, orthodox, staid, and spent or half-spent religious sects, cults, denominations, and movements.For me, dealing with unbelievers, blasphemers, and profan-ers has produced few dull moments. But I cannot assumethat those who have less reason to write or read the historyof religious movements share that spirit. Let me invitethem, then, simply to notice how often, from ancient times

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to postmodern ones, it is the heretics, the unbelievers, andthe blasphemers who make the religious story come alive.They may do so simply by giving expression to aspects ofhuman aggression. The blasphemer may attack one sacredfront, then, when it wanes, move on to another. This is inthe spirit of John Dewey’s trenchant observation that peopledo not shoot at targets because they are there. They set uptargets to make the act of shooting more meaningful.

On the other hand, sometimes the satirist acts in a spiritof vocation and hope. The poet W. H. Auden observed thatwhile the comic may be a pessimist—think of gallows hu-mor, for example—the satirist (see chapter 3) is a kind ofoptimist (Auden, introduction to The Selected Poetry andProse of Byron [New York: New American Library, 1966]).He thinks that by poking desperate fun at the pretentiousor the self-assured holders of power, he might persuadethem to reconsider their place and/or be toppled. A cartoon-ist friend of mine suggested that being a satirist was a cher-ishable and enviable profession. He said, “I get up every dayknowing that I am professionally called to be an equal-op-portunity assailant,” taking on people on both sides of everypolarizing issue. In the period when my work focused on“the infidel,” I could not help but notice how much morefun the Mark Twains and Voltaires had than did their soberand contented clerical targets.

Thus, the authors of the following chapters regularlydemonstrate that they are having a good time grapplingwith the charmingly obstreperous, emphatically fallible, andoften outrageously imaginative characters who have sonettled people in power and provided fresh openings forthought about the most pressing, philosophically rich, andoften downright entertaining issues of earlier times, as wellas our own.

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IntroductionOn the Modern Confluence of Blasphemy,Free Expression, and Hate Speech

CHRISTOPHER S. GRENDA, CHRIS BENEKE, ANDDAVID NASH

A minor legal revolution occurred in 2008. That year, theUnited Kingdom decriminalized blasphemy as a common-law offence.1 Though little debate preceded the move,which passed as a minor amendment to a broader bill forcombating crime and disorder, this was no exercise in sym-bolism. Just a few years earlier, a parliamentary committeehad affirmed blasphemy as an offense of “strict liability,”meaning that the intent of the accused was not relevant forprosecution.2 An English newspaper editor was successfullyprosecuted under this standard near the end of the 1970s,and in 1996 the British government surprised a filmmakerby censoring his film for blasphemous content. TheEuropean Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld both de-cisions.3 Thus, with the passage of the 2008 statute, a longepoch of blasphemy prosecution appeared to have ended.

Yet concerns over contemptuous and disparagingspeech—especially about religion—have proved more vexedand intractable than earlier observers could have anticip-ated. An ostensible relic of bygone eras, blasphemy has

reemerged as an explosive transnational phenomenon. Vi-olent reactions to the low-budget American film trailer TheInnocence of Muslims and to Danish newspaper cartoonsdepicting the Prophet Mohammed, the indictment of theDutch politician Geert Wilders for his cinematic critique ofIslam, and a spate of blasphemy-related murders inPakistan and Syria have refocused world attention on thelegitimate scope of free expression in religious matters.While the Islamic world has been the scene of the most con-spicuous eruptions, tensions between critical expressionand religious incitement smolder across the globe.European and Australian legislation against disparaging re-ligion or ridiculing religious persons and a UnitedStates–backed United Nations resolution against “hostilitytoward religious believers” underscore the world’s frac-tured understandings of both the sacred and thesacrilegious.

Humans have been uttering profane words—and punish-ing them—for millennia. But these recent incidents signaluniquely modern currents rippling across the contemporaryworld.

The U.K. story is a case in point. Amid the uproar over theDanish cartoons, Parliament unwittingly took a step towardthe abolition of blasphemy prosecution by legislatingagainst a new form of offensive speech. The 2006 Racialand Religious Hatred Act criminalized incitement to reli-gious hatred, defined as “stirring up hatred against personson religious grounds.”4 In enacting this new law, Parlia-ment commenced a movement from the criminalization ofolder offenses of blasphemy (contempt of deity) and sacri-lege (disparagement of religion) to prohibitions on the new-er offense of religious hatred (inciting hostility or violenceagainst religious persons).5 The transition was not

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completed until the abolition of the Common Law of Blas-phemous Libel in 2008, which capped a process fraughtwith lingering unease about the abolition of blasphemyrestrictions.

Other Western democracies have similarly shifted theirapproach to profane expression. In the decades after WorldWar II, many formerly Christian countries replaced or re-vised blasphemy laws protecting established churches andprescribed beliefs with laws protecting the religious beliefsof all citizens, or hate speech legislation protecting reli-gious believers or persons. The German criminal code in-cludes both types of provisions, one protecting all religionsagainst insult and another protecting religious personsagainst hatred and assaults on their dignity.6 Austria’s pen-al code prohibits the “disparaging of religious precepts.”7

Ireland’s Defamation Act of 2009 criminalizes “blasphem-ous matter” that is “grossly abusive or insulting in relationto matters held sacred by any religion.”8

The enactment of these European strictures has coin-cided with broader transnational efforts to shield Islamfrom criticism.9 Since 1999, the fifty-seven-state Organiza-tion of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has sought a United Na-tions resolution criminalizing hatred against religious be-lievers and protecting religion by defining “the defamationof religions” as a human rights violation.10 To date, liberalproponents of free speech have successfully blocked its ad-option. A revised 2011 resolution veered closer to the con-temporary European legal formulas that seek to protect re-ligious persons, prohibiting “discrimination, incitement toviolence, and violence against persons based on religion orbelief.” As a consequence, the latest OIC effort has drawnsignificant support from both Europe and the UnitedStates.11

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There are substantive differences between the way thatsecular European regimes approach irreverent speech andthe way that Muslim-majority countries approach it.Whereas Muslim-majority regimes protect the establishedfaith of the state, contemporary democratic regulationstend to protect a broad range of religions or their adher-ents. Punishments also diverge. Western and Western-in-spired democracies generally rely on the deterrent effectsof fines, probation, or suspended sentences (with a criminalrecord), while blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority statesprescribe imprisonment, corporal punishment, and even ex-ecution.12 Iran’s penal code from 1991 states that “anyonewho insults the Islamic sanctities or any of the imams . . .should be executed if his insult equals to speaking dispar-agingly of Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise, should be im-prisoned from one to five years.”13 Pakistan’s relevant crim-inal code, developed in the 1980s, similarly protects Islamicsanctities with penalties for blasphemy that include longimprisonment and capital punishment.14 Sudan’s 1991criminal code guards both religion and religious believers,punishing insults against religion or expressions of con-tempt for adherents with imprisonment, fines, and flogging.The code also prescribes death for apostasy from Islam.15

Yet these stark legal fault lines obscure something morefundamental and more tenacious in human affairs: a nearlyuniversal substratum of esteem for singularly veneratedand inviolable things. Across regions of the globe, religiouscultures, and regime types, societies invariably single outprivileged aspects of social life for unique recognition andprotection against profanation. These sacred objects rangefrom dominant religions (in, e.g., Iran, Pakistan, andSudan) through sanctities more generally (in, e.g., Ireland,Austria, and Germany) to the personal dignity of religious

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believers (in, e.g., the United Kingdom, Australia, andCanada) and sensibilities concerning national symbols (in,e.g., the United States).

Whatever the objects protected, most societies strive tomanage the social effects of derisive expression. The meansof identifying offenders are often similar as well. Whereverthey exist, restrictions paint irreverent speech in broad, im-precise strokes. Vague concepts such as insult, offense, ri-dicule, contempt, hostility, disparagement, and incitementgenerate captious legal formulas with the potential to en-trap activists, artists, dissidents, writers, populists, andeven the occasional social media malcontent, whether theyintended to blaspheme or not.

The improbable modern convergence of speech regula-tion is crystallized in the widespread invocation of “defama-tion.” Its traditional meaning in democratic societies fo-cuses on individual persons. Civil prosecution of defamationpenalizes expression only when it is shown to harm a per-son’s reputation and livelihood. Many thus view the cam-paign by the OIC and others to criminalize the defamationof religions as an attempt to change the meaning of theconcept. Yet as Robert A. Yelle indicates (chapter 5), thepersonally affective way many Muslims identify with theProphet Mohammed may predispose them to view derogat-ory speech about the religious figure as violating their per-sons, a verbal form of attack. Elizabeth Burns Coleman sug-gests a correspondingly symbiotic relationship between be-liefs and person among some Aboriginal Australians(chapter 9).

The conviction that defamation should extend beyondmatters of personal reputation and livelihood to encompasscommunal esteem, as Jeroen Temperman points out(chapter 10), poses serious practical and legal challenges

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for liberal regimes premised on free speech.16 Whatever itsimpact, advocates of an encompassing conception of defam-ation remind us that religious persons may not be as easilyabstracted from religious belief as secular advocates of cen-sorship suggest.17 As the ECHR declared in 2005, “believersmay legitimately feel themselves to be the object of unwar-ranted and offensive attacks” when their beliefs are insul-ted.18 On this view, religious identity—what makes individu-als religious persons—is nearly always entwined with belief.That tends to distinguish it from racial and ethnic iden-tity.19 But the fact that it is relatively independent ofphysiology or skin color does not make religious identityless constitutive of a person’s sense of self or, as the ECHRsuggests, less deserving of protection from public ridiculeor disparagement.20

These fine distinctions make the criminalization of reli-gious hate speech a delicate endeavor in liberal democra-cies. The relatively mild speech restrictions enacted in theCanadian province of Manitoba illustrate the challenge in-trinsic to distinguishing religious beliefs from the peoplewho hold them. Prohibiting “the publication of a libelagainst a race, religious creed or sexual orientation,” Man-itoba’s criminal code Section 19(1) seemingly protects reli-gion (rather than religious persons). Yet the provision de-scribes the prohibited libel as that which is “likely to exposepersons belonging to the race, professing the religiouscreed, or having the sexual orientation to hatred, contemptor ridicule.”21 Like speech codes in other Western states,Manitoba’s statute makes provision for irreverent expres-sion about religion and seems to prohibit only verbal hostil-ity against the persons of religious believers.22 However,the law curtails expression about religion that is “likely toexpose” religious believers to hatred or ridicule without

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specifying the nature of the exposure (the degree of immin-ence and proximity) or its extent (the degree of intensityand persistence) and without identifying how and when ri-dicule of religion becomes ridicule of the religious person.We have here more an allusion to a distinction than a clari-fication of it, requiring future definition by governmentprosecutors, judges, and regulators, often in the heat ofprosecution itself.

The Manitoba law’s imprecise formulation reflects itscomplex purpose, which is to shield vulnerable groups bycriminalizing vile and inciting speech without endangeringfree expression. Balancing both aims by distinguishingcriminal expression from noncriminal expression is a diffi-cult task. Australia has encountered a similar conundrum.The state of Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act of2001 singles out “persons” for special protection in prohib-iting a statement about “religious belief or activity” that“incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsionor severe ridicule of” religious adherents.23 The issue thereis not simply how and when ridicule of belief incites ridiculeor hatred of believers but subtle degrees of expression,namely when seemingly permissible expressions of con-tempt or ridicule become severe contempt and serious ri-dicule, which are criminal. Sensing these difficulties, thechief executive of the Equal Opportunity Commission ofVictoria attempted to clarify the law as prohibiting ad hom-inem vilification but not offense.24 But if ad hominem vili-fication resulted in demonstrable harm, it would amount tostandard defamation and thus not require the 2001legislation.

The legal and ethical quandaries arising in Manitoba andVictoria resonate in liberal, diversity-friendly democraciesacross the globe. Exactly when does expression become

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criminal? When do spirited, open debate and criticismreach such a degree of derision and incitement as to re-quire criminalization? Who should adjudicate when strongdisagreement is interpreted as contempt? Are liberal statesequipped to craft definitive legal answers to these ques-tions? And then we confront the problem whose urgency hasbecome evident over the past quarter century: what hap-pens when such judgments about expression are madeacross national and cultural boundaries?

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF BLASPHEMY

In 1988, the Western world received the first intimationthat blasphemy might be revived in new, harrowinglytransnational form. That was the year Salman Rushdie’sThe Satanic Verses, a whimsical and determinedly impudentrewriting of core Qurʼanic themes, touched off a culturaland political firestorm.25 The novel, Rushdie explained, ad-dresses Islam’s “revelation from the point of view of a secu-lar person.”26 By the time he published it, he had alreadyacquired widespread renown in the English-speaking worldfor literary and political irreverence. The Satanic Verseshad a truly global impact, marking the rise of profanationas a conspicuous international phenomenon.

Neither moderate nor conservative Muslims were amused.Islamic authorities regarded The Satanic Verses as derogat-ory for a number of reasons, including its substitution of“Mahound” for the name of Islam’s holiest prophet and“Jahilia” for its holy city of Mecca. Brash threats and occa-sional violence ensued. Five months after the book’s public-ation, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwacalling for “all zealous Muslims to execute” Rushdie, a res-ident of London, along with all “publishers who were aware

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of its contents.”27 The British Muslim Action Front simul-taneously called for Rushdie’s prosecution under England’sexisting law of blasphemous libel. However, because Eng-lish law protected only the Church of England and its ver-sion of Anglican Christianity (as the church established bylaw), Rushdie was immune from prosecution in the UnitedKingdom.28

As a secular, left-leaning British author who was born inIndia and raised a Muslim, Rushdie embodied a new era, inwhich relatively isolated worlds of speech regulation andheightened religious sensibilities made increasingly regularand uneasy contact. One source of this change is technolo-gical. Electronic media now transmit offense as rapidly asimage and text—nearly as fast, in other words, as profanewords are uttered. Objects of religious indignation and of-fense can be distributed, recontextualized, and summonedat the click of a mouse.

The global flood of electronic media has occurred in con-junction with a worldwide renaissance of religion and reli-gious politics in the past half century, a phenomenon thatPeter Berger calls “the desecularization of the world.”29

Despite regular forecasts of its demise, faith thrived inmany regions in the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies. More importantly, devotedly literalist and pros-elytizing forms of faith flourished. This was true amongAmerica’s Christian evangelicals as well as in northernAfrica and southern Asia, where an energized postcolonialgeneration of Muslim activists rejected Western secularismin favor of religiously informed political movements and re-ligious nationalism.30 In some cases, such as Iran, the reli-gious dimension was explicitly revolutionary. In others,such as Pakistan, it was grafted on to the older postwar sec-ular state.31 Though such religious movements promised a

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return to undefiled beginnings, as the overextended termfundamentalism suggests, their ideologies often proved cul-turally innovative and politically fecund. In many instances,they ended up tethered to authoritarian regimes that crim-inalized expression critical of both religious sanctities andpolitical authorities.32 These movements have not alwaysbeen without humor, and many have proved commerciallysavvy, but they are generally less inclined than their lan-guishing liberal counterparts to accommodate the twenty-first-century onslaught of digitally paced ridicule andraillery.

Adding to the disruption that the cascading rush of elec-tronic media and religious politics caused was the ethnicand religious diversification of the world’s democracies.Vigorous multinational migration has provided the demo-graphic foundation for a thorough transformation of di-versity’s value and social function. Both secular and reli-gious variants of multiculturalism gained traction, espe-cially in Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, andIndia.33 As multiculturalists and new minorities challengedentrenched commitments to nationalism and individual-rights liberalism, they also fostered emphatic expressions ofidentity difference.34 Public spaces that had been relativelyhomogenous became sites for the assertion of religious andethnic distinctness.

While spirited defenses of cultural assimilation and thepriority of national identity have been common in Europeand America over the past few decades—and bouts of xeno-phobia hardly unknown—modern rights-protecting stateshave largely responded to the new social realities by accom-modating diversity, especially religious diversity, throughpolicies of social recognition and cultural tolerance.35 Oneconsequence has been the replacement of blasphemy laws

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premised on the sacred character of a specific religion withprohibitions on the disparaging of all religions and/or hatespeech legislation premised on the dignity of persons asmembers of religious groups. In the wake of the Rushdie af-fair, Britons debated whether the offense of blasphemyshould be retained, repealed, or extended to protect all U.K.religions equally rather than just the established church.An interfaith group of English religious leaders belongingto the World Conference on Religion and Peace issued astatement advocating equal treatment “in our multi-cultur-al society” by extending the blasphemy law so that “allminority religions will be fully protected.”36 Likewise, in2002, the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmonypetitioned Parliament to extend “existing religious offences(notably blasphemy) laws” to “all major faiths practiced inthe United Kingdom” so as to “promote better understand-ing in our multi-cultural and multi-faith society.”37 The lo-gic behind the proposed expansion of England’s blasphemylaw was mainly secular (criminalizing inciting irreverence)and multicultural (equally protecting the beliefs of all ad-herents, native and immigrant). The denouement camewhen Parliament criminalized incitement to religioushatred against any group, in 2006, and then, two yearslater, abolished its blasphemy law.

The coincidence of digitally accelerated technologicalchange, surging religious politics, and Western multicultur-alism has laid the groundwork for a reconsideration of free-dom—and its appropriate limits—in Western democracies.Early modern demands for liberty of conscience sought tolimit state powers in religious matters, especially the gov-ernment’s capacity to impose religious uniformity. The FirstAmendment to the U.S. Constitution, for example, forbidsCongress from making any “law respecting an

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establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercisethereof.” This “negative” liberty, as Isaiah Berlin famouslytermed it, presumed a high degree of individual autonomyand what Christopher S. Grenda calls “thick-skinned toler-ance” (see chapter 1).38 The implications of such rights, theproducts of countless travails, were that (1) individualswere free to express political and religious opinions and (2)those who objected would not respond with violence. In oth-er words, conceiving religious liberty in negative terms hasusually implied the toleration of unwelcome speech aboutreligion.

The concurrent postwar development of multicultural andauthoritarian movements has resulted in a two-sided offens-ive against this negative liberal doctrine of free speech, nowoften criticized as insufficiently attentive to cultural differ-ences. Recent moves to restrict blasphemy derive from a“positive” conception of liberty.39 In contrast to negativeliberty, positive liberty sanctions state efforts to support ahospitable social environment for the maintenance of iden-tities and exercise of beliefs, which may be enhanced bylimiting certain kinds of critical expression.40 This per-spective informed a 2008 report of the European Commis-sion for Democracy through Law that examined regulationsthroughout Europe. Its title, “Analysis of the Domestic LawConcerning Blasphemy, Religious Insult and Inciting Reli-gious Hatred,” points to the proximity of blasphemy andhate speech restrictions. Citing the Austrian penal code,which prohibits the “disparaging of religious precepts,” thecommission explained “the constitutional freedom of reli-gion by taking it as both a positive and a negative right vis-à-vis the state. The positive aspect of the freedom leads to aconstitutional obligation to protect religious feelings in or-der to guarantee religious peace.”41 Roughly a decade

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earlier, the ECHR, referencing Articles 9 and 10 of theEuropean Convention on Human Rights, made a similarpoint more succinctly: “The manner in which religious be-liefs and doctrines are opposed or denied is a matter whichmay engage the responsibility of the State.”42

These multicultural restrictions on expression, and themore positive conceptions of liberty accompanying them,have resulted in the occasional confluence of efforts bydemocracies to protect minority groups within their bordersand efforts by authoritarian societies to limit criticism andcurtail minority rights within theirs. What both enterprisesshare is a presumption that dignity is inseparable from re-spectful characterizations of groups and nations, whichsatire, derisive rhetoric, denigrating images, and otherforms of critical expression threaten.43 As the secretarygeneral of the OIC explained in 2012, “Freedom of speech isone thing, but usage of your freedom should not be to of-fend others or advocate hate speech or provoke to viol-ence.”44 To be sure, democratic efforts often seek to pro-tect minority identities rather than a hegemonic religionand thus are distinguishable from traditional and authorit-arian blasphemy laws in fundamental ways. Yet being demo-cratic, such efforts still require majoritarian authority forlegal enactment and/or the status of a majoritarian socialnorm to be effective, what John Stuart Mill called “the as-cendancy of public opinion.”45

THE SCHOLARSHIP ON SACRILEGIOUS EXPRESSION

Until recently, scholarly discussions of blasphemy and thecensoring impulses that motivate it have tended to treatthese phenomena as curious vestiges of a remote past,moldy legal constructions that have outlived their

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ideological infrastructure. In the aftermath of the Rushdieaffair, for example, the American scholar Leonard W. Levyexpanded an earlier and less ambitious history46 into amuch larger and widely cited volume, Blasphemy: VerbalOffense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). The latter examinescases of verbal offense from ancient origins through themodern English-speaking West, concluding with Khomeini’sfatwa against Rushdie and the pluralist question of the day,“Should all religions be protected or none?”47 Yet even inexploring contemporaneous authoritarian and multiculturalinterests in blasphemy regulations, Levy presented blas-phemy as a relic of a distinctly traditional and predomin-antly Christian practice. He thus offered a hopeful forecastof blasphemy’s ultimate demise.48 His contemporaries sawmatters progressing along similar lines. While some em-ployed newer methodologies to explore the social texture ofblasphemy as a practice structuring community life, theyalso tended to treat it as the residue of an outdated and pa-rochial world view.49

Scholarship since the turn of the millennium has evincedan awareness that blasphemy can no longer be understoodprimarily as the fading pulse of Christian medievalism. In-stead, human aversion to the sacrilegious seems more andmore like a durable palimpsest on which many differentkinds of culturally specific needs are inscribed. It reflectsboth deep individual longings and tireless collective desiresto protect the sacred and restrict expression that threatensit. Different cultural traditions—and different eras withintraditions—yield alternately robust and retiring approachesto speech restriction. Yet over time and across cultures wecan discern historical patterns in the formation and applic-ation of blasphemy laws as repeated efforts are made to

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mark off sacred and inviolable realms of life for special re-cognition and protection.

By almost all accounts, we are living through an espe-cially restive era of both irreverent expression and speechregulation. Paul Marshall and Nina Shea have not only ex-amined the severe penalties inflicted on those who have de-filed Islamic sanctities in countries such as Pakistan andIran but also explored how the European Commission onHuman Rights and the ECHR have punished authors andcensored their works in order to protect humanrights—“namely, ‘the right of citizens not to be offended intheir religious feelings.’”50 David Nash has suggested that“the blasphemy industry is poised for significant growth”and notes the prodigious human capacity to offend and in-cite.51 Scholars, however, do not agree on the value of un-restricted speech. In fact, the philosopher Elizabeth BurnsColeman and the sociologist Kevin White argue that blas-phemy regulations foster an inclusive pluralism in multicul-tural Australia. They conceive of laws against defamation assecular instruments for recognizing and sheltering the di-versity of sacred perceptions, that is, for “protecting differ-ence.”52

Profane enters these churning cultural and legal watersby treating blasphemy as a constituent feature of modern-ity—not an aberration from it—just as it was a constituentfeature of earlier forms of social organization. The volume’stripart structure points to the multifaceted relationshipbetween blasphemy and modernity, which cuts across timeand space and thus resists reduction to a “problem” uniqueto any particular culture, religion, or geopolitical region.

Part 1 investigates struggles to create space for sacrile-gious expression in Western culture and society. Christoph-er S. Grenda opens the section by examining conflicts over

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religion-related expression in early modern Europe andNorth America. His chapter suggests that the Enlighten-ment’s great iconoclasts, such as David Hume, along withits orthodox Christian exponents, such as John Wither-spoon, developed modern conceptions of toleration by turn-ing satire into an agent of religious tolerance. Of course,much Enlightenment sacrilege appears tame by today’sstandards. In their chapters on modern sacrilege, JacquesBerlinerblau and David Lawton chart the self-consciouslyprovocative nuances of late twentieth- and early twentieth-century artistic expression. Both draw attention to theaudience-dependent character of sacrilege. Exploring theexuberant obscenity of Philip Roth’s fiction, Berlinerblaucontends that the author’s brilliant and irreverent tales un-leashed a cycle of incendiary responses that demonstratehow frictions between profane authors and outraged audi-ences generate creativity. Lawton posits a similarly product-ive dynamic between producers and consumers of profaneimages. Modern visual art, he concludes, demands thatviewers engage the feelings of disorientation and offensethat blasphemy provokes. Like Grenda and Berlinerblau,Lawton illuminates the paradoxes surrounding conflictsover expression in Western societies committed to freedomof conscience and free speech. Collectively, the three au-thors make the case for blasphemous expression, thoughnot simply by recourse to a liberal doctrine of free speech.Rather, they suggest that expression’s disruptive power hasthe capacity to undermine, transform, and constructivelyengage cultural forms and institutions that have grown ri-gid with time.

Part 2 focuses on the United States as the world’s firstmodern democracy with a rights-laden secular constitutionand a vibrant religious culture. It is presented here not as a

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beacon of liberal free speech but as a democratic nation be-set by persistent conflicts over religion-related expression.Paul Finkelman’s chapter offers a case study of the some-times unsettling ways that democratic norms and liberalvalues are reconciled with religious speech restrictions.Charges of sacrilege, Finkelman contends, cannot be re-duced to controversies over religious belief. Rather, as theearly nineteenth-century case of the famed “infidel” AbnerKneeland reveals, they often reflect wider concerns overgender, marriage, labor relations, and ethnicity. Suchcharges have proved remarkably durable. As Robert A. Yelleshows in his account of late twentieth-century Americanconstitutional and political development, solicitude for thesacred has hardly disappeared in the United States. Rather,it has assumed striking new forms. Yelle’s analysis of theMilitary Valor Act demonstrates how reverence for sacredobjects and principles can animate predominantly secularand civic institutions. The larger point of these studies isthat, far from the exclusive preserve of overtly religious na-tions, fierce contests over profane expression have longvexed democratic societies—and at multiple stages in theirdevelopment.

In Part 3, Profane stretches decisively outward to offer aglobal perspective on twenty-first-century blasphemy andits regulation. The section’s first three chapters exploreblasphemy in both Islamic history and modern Muslim-ma-jority societies. Ebrahim Moosa opens with a sweeping sur-vey of Muslim political theology that highlights a long-run-ning debate among Muslims about how to relate the com-mon good “to the order of salvation.” His analysis re-sembles Yelle’s in suggesting that tendencies toward thecreation of rigid conceptual barriers between secular andsacred reflect secularization theory’s myopia and

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complacency. Without discounting these broad continuitiesin Muslim political theology, Ron E. Hassner emphasizesthe diversity of Islamic political systems. He shows how theinternal dynamics in specific Muslim polities elicited asprawling range of popular responses to the 2005 Danishcartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. AmongHassner’s notable findings is that the controversial imagessparked violence in just nine of fifty-two Muslim-majoritystates. He concludes that the violence correlated stronglywith the existence of “radical groups [that] enjoyed thefreedom to organize and protest the cartoons but lackedstate protection of their sacred values.” Asma T. Uddin’schapter scrutinizes the implementation of blasphemy law inthe largest Muslim-majority democracy, Indonesia (whereviolence occurred in the wake of the Danish cartoons). Con-trary to its stated goal of fostering national unity and pro-moting human rights in a postcolonial era, Uddin contends,the recently upheld Law on the Prevention of Blasphemyand Abuse of Religion has divided the country, stifled reli-gious expression, and ostracized Indonesian religiousminorities.

The dilemma confronting many modern, multicultural na-tions is this: how can the conflicting demands of individualrights and aesthetic freedom be reconciled with public civil-ity and community peace? Democracies striving to both cul-tivate social inclusion and protect expressive liberties donot have an easy task before them. Elizabeth Burns Cole-man’s chapter takes up Australia’s struggles to reconcilethese competing ends by unpacking a peculiar and fascinat-ing controversy over the powers reputedly contained in anAboriginal musical instrument, the didgeridoo. What hasemerged in the controversy is a potent defense of Aborigin-al knowledge as sacrosanct—and therefore immune from

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critical inquiry. Some Australian multiculturalists thus in-sist that the majority simply refrain from criticism of Abori-ginal religion. Coleman embraces this position and recom-mends an approach premised on self-censorship and vigor-ous politeness codes. But is this a viable solution? Can crit-ical expression be substantively curtailed without jeopardiz-ing rights to speech, press, and assembly? That is the ques-tion which Jeroen Temperman probes in his chapter, on in-ternational speech regulation and the threat it poses to freeinquiry and expression. As Temperman sees it, national andinternational bodies will have to be extremely circumspectin managing the alleged harm that speech causes. Demo-cracies are best served, he argues, by punishing only “themost heinous forms of incitement to (religious) violence,”thereby avoiding the perils of a capacious regulatory netthat ensnares lesser forms of critical expression.

CONNECTING THEMES

Profane poses more questions than answers. It considersprofane expression and its regulation from multiple per-spectives, ranging across the fields of history, political sci-ence, literary and religious studies, international relations,law, and communications. Because the ideological conflictsunder consideration are unavoidably global, the approach iscomparative, examining the dynamics of blasphemy acrosscultural and geopolitical boundaries. While bearing in mindthe traces of earlier taboos and restrictions, these chaptersalso reveal how resolutely modern the regulation of blas-phemy and irreverence is, and how constitutive of modernideologies and regimes. The patterns that the chapters re-flect are enduring yet peculiarly modern. And the questions

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they raise seem increasingly vital to the prospects for hu-man flourishing.

All of Profane’s contributors explore the diverse and oftendiscordant values that animate contending appeals torights. Some of them, critical of regulations on expression,indicate how such efforts invariably muster social and polit-ical power against nonconforming individuals and dissent-ing ideas. They make the case for blasphemous expressionby exploring the creative work accomplished through pro-vocation. Others are more attentive to grievances arisingfrom historical experience and keenly aware of how wordscan intimidate and humiliate. They help explain the censor-ing impulses that underlie national and transnational civil-ity and multicultural projects.

Part of the chapters’ yield is that the censoring of insult-ing or inciting irreverence is a culturally specific endeavor,one that discloses a nexus of underlying assumptions aboutmodern social organization. Scholars and policy makerssometimes rely on the adage that seemingly intractable cul-tural divisions can be resolved via “global dialogue.” This isan alluring notion, but as these chapters show, sharp differ-ences over the nature of rights and the local fabric of cul-tural sensibilities often render such projects less productivethan hoped. At present, global dialogue is likely to embodyand exhibit more than it can possibly adjudicate.

Of course, any society worth inhabiting will hold somethings sacred. Yet a society that respects fundamentalfreedoms of expression must permit a measure of sacrilege.This is the inexhaustible paradox of our democratic andmulticultural age. Blasphemy charges are fueled by apowerful human aversion to our own irreverent tendenciesand ignited by the blasts of intercultural exposure thatmodern societies generate. The resulting conflicts may not

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be remediable by the usual appeals for engagement. But thefact that the future tends to unfold in surprising ways, hum-bling the confident and the righteous alike, suggests thepractical wisdom of understanding the conflicts and ac-quainting ourselves with the values that inform them.

NOTES

1. Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, Section 79, “Aboli-tion of Common Law Offences of Blasphemy and Blasphemous Li-bel,” Subsection 1: “The offences of blasphemy and blasphemous li-bel under the common law of England and Wales are abolished.” Ac-cessed December 4, 2012, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/4/sec-tion/79. It should be noted that the English Blasphemy Statute of1698 had been abolished in the context of the Criminal Justice Actof 1967.

2. The committee explained in 2003 that “all that matters iswhether the accused did in fact publish the material that is the sub-ject of prosecution.” See Select Committee on Religious Offences inEngland and Wales, First Report, ch. 3, “The Law as It Stands,” April10, 2003, accessed September 14, 2012, www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200203/ldselect/ldrelof/95/9505.htm.

3. The first case, Whitehouse v. Lemon, AC 658 (1979), involvedDenis Lemon, the editor of a newspaper with a primarily homosexualreadership. In what became known as the Gay News case, he wasconvicted of blasphemous libel for publishing a poem by JamesKirkup that indicates sexual encounters between Christ and theApostles and depicts a sexual encounter between a Roman soldierand the body of the crucified Christ. Lemon was fined five hundredpounds and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment, which wassuspended for eighteen months. The sentence but not the fine wasreversed on appeal. (For more on this case, see ch. 5.) In the secondcase, the British Board of Film Classification refused to certify NigelWingrove’s Visions of Ecstasy because of its probable blasphemousnature in depicting the erotic encounters of St. Teresa of Avila(shown apparently erroneously as a young woman) with the crucifiedChrist. Appeal was made to the European Court of Human Rights,

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which upheld the law. In doing so, it invoked the “margin of appreci-ation,” which enables individual states to maintain laws that reflecttheir cultural norms—thus suggesting that a conception of blas-phemy was, at that time, still a part of British culture and its as-sumptions. Wingrove v. United Kingdom, 24 EHRR 1 (1997).

4. Racial and Religious Hatred Act, Section 1, “Hatred againstPersons on Religious Grounds,” accessed December 5, 2012, www.le-gislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/1/section/1/enacted. Similar measureshad been proposed earlier but not passed. As a precursor, see theAnti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001, Section 39, “Reli-giously Aggravated Offences,” accessed December 5, 2012, www.le-gislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/24/contents. This 2001 act amendedthe Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, whose Article 31 (accessed June15, 2012, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/31) now in-cludes a section on “religiously aggravated public order offenses,”defined according to sections 4, 4A, and 5 of the Public Order Act of1986 (accessed June 17, 2012, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64), which specifies “threatening, abusive or insulting words.”

5. Blasphemy, as irreverence of deity, and sacrilege, as insult ofreligious belief or sanctities, are two species of the same genus. Al-though technically distinct, they are functionally synonymous, andthe word blasphemy is often used—as throughout much of thistext—to represent both offenses.

6. See the German criminal code, Section 130(2)1, “Agitation ofthe People,” accessed August 31, 2012, www.iuscomp.org/gla/stat-utes/StGB.htm#130; Section 166(1), “Insulting of Faiths, ReligiousSocieties and Organizations Dedicated to a Philosophy of Life,” ac-cessed August 31, 2012, www.iuscomp.org/gla/statutes/StGB.htm#166. Though the latter statute is not applied often, au-thorities employed it in 2006 to prosecute a German citizen for dis-tributing toilet paper imprinted with the words “Koran, the HolyKoran” to media outlets and mosques. The defendant received aone-year suspended prison sentence and was assigned three hun-dred hours of community service. See “Suspended Prison for Ger-man Who Insulted Koran,” Expatica, February 23, 2006, accessedJune 10, 2012, www.expatica.com/de/news/local_news/suspended-prison-for-german-who-insulted-koran-27912.html; “GermanCharged for Koran–Toilet Paper Effort,” 6ABC.com, February 10,

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2006, accessed June 10, 2012, http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?sec-tion=news/entertainment&id=3894273. It is worth noting that sec-tion 166(1) seeks to be nondiscriminatory between religious andsecular viewpoints, protecting philosophies of life as well as faiths.

7. European Commission for Democracy through Law, Annexe II:Analysis of the Domestic Law Concerning Blasphemy, Religious In-sult and Inciting Religious Hatred . . . , October 22, 2008, 11, ac-cessed June 16, 2012, www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2008)026add2-bil. Section 188 of the Austrian PenalCode is on p. 10 and states that whoever “publicly disparages ormocks a person or a thing, respectively, being object of worship or adogma, a legally permitted rite, or a legally permitted institution ofa church or religious society located in Austria in a manner capableof giving rise to a justified annoyance is liable to imprisonment for aterm not exceeding six months or to a fine.” Austrian authoritieshave applied this law to protect the majority Catholics as well asminority Muslims. In the former case, authorities banned a film ver-sion of Oskar Panniza’s Das Liebeskonzil in 1993. In the latter, theyconvicted an Austrian woman in 2011 for saying, “Mohammed had athing for little girls.” The woman was fined. See Howard Friedman,“Austrian Appeals Court Upholds Conviction for Denigrating MuslimReligious Beliefs,” Religion Clause (blog), December 27, 2011, ac-cessed June 16, 2012, http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2011/12/austrian-appeals-court-upholds.html.

8. See Section 36 of the Defamation Act (2009), accessed Decem-ber 20, 2012, www.irishstatutebook.ie/2009/en/act/pub/0031/sec0036.html: “(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemousmatter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon convic-tion on indictment to a fine not exceeding €25,000. (2) For the pur-poses of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous mat-ter if— (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abus-ive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion,thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adher-ents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends by the publication orutterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

9. Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Politic-al Rights (1966), accessed October 15, 2012, www.ohchr.org/en/pro-fessionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx, prohibits “any advocacy of

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national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement todiscrimination, hostility or violence.” United Nations debates overproposed resolutions regarding religion have invoked similar prin-ciples to meet new challenges (see n. 11).

10. The title of a draft of the resolution was “U.N. Human RightsCouncil Resolution Combating Defamation of Religions” (availableat http://eclj.org/PDF/OICDefamationofReligionsResolu-tion03-12-09.pdf).

11. Quote from United States Commission on International Reli-gious Freedom, “USCIRF Welcomes Move Away from ‘Defamation ofReligions’ Concept,” press release, March 24, 2011, accessedDecember 6, 2012, www.uscirf.gov/news-room/press-releases/3570.For a firsthand account of the negotiations over the resolution, seeAustin Dacey, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred inan Age of Human Rights (New York: Continuum Books, 2012), 1–14.See also Robert Evans, “Islamic Bloc Drops U.N. Drive on DefamingReligion,” Reuters, March 25, 2011, accessed December 6, 2012, ht-tp://in.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/idINIndia-55861720110324.

12. The Iranian dissident and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi has cri-ticized such protections in “Islamic states such as Iran, Saudi Ara-bia, Pakistan, and so on.” See her speech at the Oslo Freedom For-um (May 9–11, 2011), accessed July 3, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSj4QFBml0g.

13. See Mission for Establishment of Human Rights in Iran,“Islamic Penal Code of Iran,” Book 5, “Ta’azirat [Punishments NOTSpecified in Shari’a] and Deterrent Punishments,” Chapter 2, “In-sulting the Religious Sanctities or State Officials,” Article 513, ac-cessed July 1, 2012, http://mehr.org/Islamic_Penal_Code_of_Iran.pdf.

14. See Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, Silenced: How Apostasy andBlasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011), 83–100; United States Department of State,International Religious Freedom Report 2003, Pakistan section, ac-cessed July 3, 2012, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2003/24473.htm.Saudi Arabia, a more traditional dynastic regime, possesses a lesssystematized penal code but a well-documented record of blasphemyprosecution. See the 2010 Annual Report of the United States Com-mission on International Religious Freedom, accessed July 2, 2012,www.uscirf.gov/images/ar2010/saudiarabia2010.pdf, as well as

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reports from international news agencies such as Reuters, e.g.,“Saudi Arabia Considers Law against Insulting Islam,” July 15, 2012,accessed July 16, 2012, http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/15/saudi-islam-law-idINL6E8IF2CY20120715.

15. Section 125 reads, “Whoever by any means publicly abuses orinsults any religion or its beliefs or sacred symbols or seeks to excitecontempt or scorn against its followers shall be punished with im-prisonment for a term which may not exceed six months or with fineor with flogging which may not exceed forty lashes.” For this andSection 126, accessed December 18, 2012, see www.ecoi.net/file_up-load/1329_1202725629_sb106-sud-criminalact1991.pdf.

16. It resembles democratic laws that acknowledge the subjectiveperceptions of victims of assault, though without an imminent phys-ical threat (or even the advocacy of such a threat), a crucialdifference.

17. Since religion is directly involved, a religiously informed viewof the relationship between religious belief and religious persons isarguably as valid as a secular view.

18. See I.A. v. Turkey (2005), accessed January 7, 2013, ht-tp://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-70113.The case involved the publication in Turkey of The ForbiddenPhrases (1993). “I.A.” is the pseudonym of the director of the pub-lishing house who was prosecuted in Turkey for blasphemy. The pro-secution originally resulted in a two-year prison term, which wascommuted to a fine but appealed to the ECHR. The European courtupheld the conviction with the following reasoning: “28. Pluralism,tolerance and broadmindedness are hallmarks of a ‘democratic soci-ety.’ʼ . . . Those who choose to exercise the freedom to manifest theirreligion . . . cannot reasonably expect to be exempt from all criti-cism. They must tolerate and accept the denial by others of their re-ligious beliefs and even the propagation by others of doctrines hos-tile to their faith. . . . 29. However, the present case concerns notonly comments that offend or shock, or a ‘provocative’ opinion, butalso an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam. Notwithstanding thefact that there is a certain tolerance of criticism of religious doc-trine within Turkish society, which is deeply attached to the prin-ciple of secularity, believers may legitimately feel themselves to bethe object of unwarranted and offensive attacks through the

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following passages: ‘Some of these words [in the Qurʼan] were,moreover, inspired in a surge of exultation, in Aisha’s arms. . . .God’s messenger broke his fast through sexual intercourse, afterdinner and before prayer. Muhammad did not forbid sexual inter-course with a dead person or a live animal.’ 30. The Court thereforeconsiders that the measure taken in respect of the statements in is-sue was intended to provide protection against offensive attacks onmatters regarded as sacred by Muslims. In that respect it finds thatthe measure may reasonably be held to have met a ‘pressing socialneed.’”

19. The reasoning of religious hate speech prohibitions is groun-ded in the reasoning of racial hate speech prohibitions. Yet as thetext above and the following note suggest, it is not self-evident howto transfer that reasoning from race to religion in order to protectthe psychological well-being and sense of equality of religious per-sons without that protection involving their sense of religious iden-tity, the locale of religious belief. For a discussion of race, see MariJ. Mastuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Vic-tim’s Story,” in Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, AssaultiveSpeech and the First Amendment, ed. Mastuda, Charles R. LawrenceIII, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (Boulder,CO: Westview, 1993), 24–25, listing a range of harms including fear,nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis,suicide, and devastating damage to “one’s self esteem and sense ofpersonal security” (25).

20. Consider the dynamic as a diagram with religious belief in-forming religious identity, which defines a person as a religious per-son (belief identity person). Relevant statutes, such as the 2006British law noted earlier in this introduction or the Manitoba lawthat it considers next, seek a way to sever this equation, a point inthe diagram where belief, identity, and person are clearly distin-guished for the purposes of speech prohibitions and prosecution.The difficulty, at least in part, stems from the fact that these typesof hate speech prohibitions are largely grounded in concerns withrace and racial hatred. That poses a difficulty because the racial dy-namic does not entail a set of beliefs at its core, and thus concernsabout race can perhaps more successfully inform the protection ofpersons from hostility and hate without infringing on ridicule or

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contempt of beliefs. Moreover, since the concept of religious hatedoes entail beliefs at its core—the beliefs informing the religiousidentity that make a person a religious person—it may be a mis-nomer to describe religious hate speech laws as protecting persons.They seem, more accurately, to protect religious identity.

21. Manitoba Defamation Act (C.C.S.M. c. D20), Section 19(1),“Libel of Race, Creed or Sexual Orientation,” accessed July 2, 2012,http://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/d020e.php. For generalcommentary, see Marshall and Shea, Silenced, 230: “In both politicsand law, the distinction between blasphemy bans and hate-speechlaws has become increasingly blurred”; Eric Heinze, “CumulativeJurisprudence and Hate Speech: Sexual Orientation and Analogies toDisability, Age, and Obesity,” in Extreme Speech and Democracy, ed.Ivan Hare and James Weinstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009), 267: “In recent jurisprudence, blasphemy laws have oftenbeen maintained precisely insofar as they serve the same aims ashate speech laws—prohibiting speech likely to be found offensive orunduly disruptive.”

22. Consider the United Kingdom’s Racial and Religious HatredAct, discussed above. Its Section 29J, “Protection of Freedom of Ex-pression,” permits significant speech critical of religion, allowing“ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs orpractices of their adherents.” Its Sections 29A and B, “Meaning of‘Religious Hatred’” and “Use of Words or Behaviour or Display ofWritten Material,” restrict expression in relation to religious per-sons, prohibiting “hatred” against such persons in the followingterms: an individual who uses “threatening words or behaviour, ordisplays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an of-fence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred.” AccessedDecember 5, 2012, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/1/schedule.In considering the permissibility of religious criticism under the Ra-cial and Religious Hatred Act, it is important to note that this actamended parts of the Public Order Act of 1986. Section 5 of the1986 act (accessed December 5, 2012, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukp-ga/1986/64/section/5) was not amended and remains binding. Itcriminalizes the causing of alarm or distress by the use of “threaten-ing, abusive or insulting words.” Freedom of expression thus

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remains notably curtailed as a threat to public order rather than aform of hatred.

23. Racial and Religious Intolerance Act (2001), Section 8, “Reli-gious Vilification Unlawful,” accessed June 17, 2012,www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act/rarta2001265/s8.html.

24. See “Muhammad Cartoons ‘Legal’ in Victoria,” Age, February7, 2006, accessed July 18, 2012, www.theage.com.au/news/national/muhammad-cartoons-legal-in-victoria/2006/02/07/1139074213332.html.

25. See Richard Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatol-lah, and the West (New York: Carol Publishing, 1990); JeremyWaldron, “Religion and the Imagination in a Global Community: ADiscussion of the Salman Rushdie Affair,” Times Literary Supple-ment, March 10–16, 1989, reprinted as “Rushdie and Religion” inWaldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1981–1991 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134–42.

26. Shrabani Basus, “Of Satan, Archangels and Prophets,” inter-view with Salman Rushdie, Sunday (India), September 18–24, 1988,in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (Syra-cuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 33.

27. For the text of the fatwa, see Appignanesi and Maitland, Rush-die File, 68.

28. See “Bid to Prosecute Rushdie Is Rejected,” New York Times,April 10, 1990, accessed July 3, 2011, www.nytimes.com/1990/04/10/books/bid-to-prosecute-rushdie-is-rejected.html.

29. Peter L. Berger “The Desecularization of the World: A GlobalOverview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religionand World Politics, ed. Berger (Washington DC: Ethics and PublicPolicy Center, 1999), 1–18; Berger, “Religion and Global Civil Soci-ety,” in Religion in Global Civil Society, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–22. See also DavidWesterlund, ed., Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Re-surgence of Religion in Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); JohnWitte Jr., “The Rights and Limits of Proselytism in the New ReligiousWorld Order,” in Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and WorldPolitics, ed. Thomas Banchoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2008), 106, describing “a great awakening of religion around theglobe. . . . In the former Soviet bloc, for example, numerous

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Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths havebeen awakened. . . . In postcolonial and postrevolutionary Africa,these same mainline religious groups have come to flourish in nu-merous conventional and inculturated forms, alongside a bewilder-ing array of traditional groups. In Latin America, the human rightsrevolution has not only transformed long-standing Catholic andmainline Protestant communities but also triggered the explosion ofnumerous new Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Traditional movements.Many parts of the world have seen the dramatic rise of a host of newor newly minted faiths—Adventists, Baha’is, Hare Krishnas, Je-hovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Scientologists, Unification Churchmembers, among many others.”

30. Rajeev Bhargava, “Rehabilitating Secularism,” in RethinkingSecularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and JonathanVanAntwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92–93: “Thecontemporary crisis of secularism started with the establishment ofthe first modern theocracy in Iran and spread to Egypt, Sudan, Al-geria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chad, Senegal, Turkey, Afgh-anistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh”; Juergensmeyer, New Cold War?Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1994).

31. For the secular conception of the state of Pakistan at its in-ception in 1947, consider the comments of its first president, Mo-hammed Ali Jinnah, to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan: “Youare free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go toyour mosques or to any other place of worship in this State ofPakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that hasnothing to do with the business of the State. As you know, historyshows that in England, conditions, some time ago, were much worsethan those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and theProtestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some Statesin existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposedagainst a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in thosedays. We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination,no distinction between one community and another, no discrimina-tion between one caste or creed and another. We are starting withthis fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizensof one State. . . . Now I think we should keep that in front of us as

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our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would ceaseto be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the re-ligious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual,but in the political sense as citizens of the State.” From “Mr. Jin-nah’s Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan,”August 11, 1947, printed in Dawn (Pakistan), Independence DaySupplement, August 14, 1999, accessed July 3, 2012,www.pakistani.org/pakistan/legislation/constitu-ent_address_11aug1947.html/.

32. Such movements instrumentally combine select parts of tradi-tion with modern techniques of mass communication, recruitment,mobilization, and social organization. With these, they build an in-stitutional infrastructure of education, social services, and politicsfusing religious identity with modern forms of nationalism ortransnationalism. They thus represent an alternative to traditionaldynasticism or Western-inspired secularism. Consider Abdullah A.An-Na’im, “The Politics of Religion and the Morality of Globaliza-tion,” in Juergensmeyer, Religion in Global Society, 30: “The idea ofan Islamic state, as presently advocated by fundamentalist move-ments, has no precedent in more than fifteen centuries of Islamichistory.” The modern dimensions of fundamentalism in its manyvarieties are well studied. See, e.g., the volumes of the Fundamental-ist Project, launched by the American Academy of Sciences and ed-ited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby: Fundamentalisms Ob-served (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Fundamental-isms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Fundamentalisms andSociety: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (Chica-go: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Accounting for Fundamental-isms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994). See also Gabriel A. Almond, Appleby, and Em-manuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalismsaround the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

33. The political dynamics of India partly revolve around the com-petition between a revival of forms of religious nationalism and at-tempts to rejuvenate the secular strains of its postindependencepolitics with theories of multiculturalism. See Rajeev Bhargava, ed.,Secularism and Its Critics, repr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 2011); T. N. Srinivasan, ed., The Future of Secularism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

34. Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 134: “Supporters of mul-ticulturalism have strongly attacked liberalism.”

35. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multicultural-ism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Prin-ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 63. For the differentways that secular states regulate and interact with the religions oftheir society, see Alfred Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms ofModern Democratic and Non-democratic Regimes,” in Calhoun,Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, Rethinking Secularism, 114–44,identifying four models just among modern democracies: separationof church and state (France and the United States), established reli-gion (Denmark or Norway), positive accommodation (Netherlandsand Germany), and principled distance (Indonesia and India). Forrelated but different models of secularism, see Ahmet T. Kuru, Secu-larism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States,France, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),which distinguishes French “assertive” secularism from American“passive” secularism: “Assertive secularism requires the state toplay an ‘assertive’ role to exclude religion from the public sphereand confine it to the private domain. Passive secularism demandsthat the state play a ‘passive’ role by allowing the public visibility ofreligion. Assertive secularism is a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ whereaspassive secularism mainly prioritizes state neutrality toward suchdoctrines” (11). As Kuru points out, though, France’s assertive secu-larism allows for significant state funding of religious endeavorssuch as education.

36. The joint statement was signed by representatives of six reli-gions in Britain, “Canon Gordon Wilson (Christian), Rabbi Albert H.Friedlander (Jewish), Mr B. Konnur (Hindu), Dr Syed Aziz Pasha(Muslim), Professor Harmindar Singh (Sikh), Mr Pankay Vora(Jain).” It was published in the Independent (London), March 17,1989, and appears in Appignanesi and Maitland, Rushdie File,125–26. Likewise, a 1990 report by England’s Commission for RacialEquality—“Law, Blasphemy and the Multi-faith Society”—sought to

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promote mutual respect and tolerance by prohibiting the denigra-tion of any religious belief.

37. See “Submission from the Muslim Council for Religious andRacial Harmony,” July 5, 2002, accessed March 11, 2012,www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200203/ldselect/ldrelof/95/95w61.htm.

38. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essayson Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72.

39. Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” in TheIdea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–93.

40. The notion of a supportive social environment is emphasizedthroughout Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Galeotti, Toleration as Recog-nition; Gutmann, Multiculturalism; Susan Mendus, ed., The Politicsof Toleration in Modern Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2000). More generally, see Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, eds.,Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000); Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, Justice and thePolitics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1990).

41. European Commission for Democracy through Law, Annexe II:Analysis of the Domestic Law Concerning Blasphemy, Religious In-sult and Inciting Religious Hatred, 11. See also n. 7, above.

42. Otto-Preminger Institut v. Austria, 19 EHRR 34, 56 (1995),quoted in Select Committee on Religious Offences in England andWales, First Report, appendix 4, April 10, 2003, accessed June 17,2012, www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200203/ldse-lect/ldrelof/95/9516.htm.

43. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, last visited January 28,2014, www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, states that “recognition ofthe inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of allmembers of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justiceand peace in the world.” The same principles have animated sub-sequent agreements, such as the International Covenant on Civiland Political Rights (1966), and were eventually incorporated intothe ideologies that sustain democratic multiculturalism.

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44. See Jaweed Kaleem, “At United Nations, Organization ofIslamic Cooperation Calls for Ban on Insulting ProphetMuhammad,” Huffington Post, September 30, 2012, accessedDecember 15, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/30/united-nations-organization-of-islamic-cooperation_n_1927166.html. OICsecretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s language resembles thatused by the multicultural New Zealander Jeremy Waldron in TheHarm in Hate Speech (2012), though Waldron recommends tolerat-ing mere verbal offense.

45. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859), 3.18.46. Leonard W. Levy, Treason against God: A History of the Of-

fense of Blasphemy (New York: Schocken Books, 1981).47. Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the

Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, repr. ed. (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 551–67.

48. Ibid., 569.49. Alan Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from

the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eric Rauth (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2002; originally published as His-toire du blasphème en occident [Paris: Éditions Albin Michel,1998]), 2–4, describing the “‘practice’ of blasphemy” as revealing “awhole complex of attitudes” about “the deeper structures of com-munities.” Cabantous thought that such a structural approach pre-cluded a longue durée treatment of the subject: “I do not think itpossible to write a history of blasphemy that embraced the entirecourse of monotheistic religions, from Moses to Salman Rushdie”(7). See also David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1993), 5: “Blasphemy is a concept distinctive toJewish and Christian traditions,” with cases such as Islamic denunci-ations of The Satanic Verses being part of “a false identity” offundamentalism.

50. Marshall and Shea, Silenced, 35–60, 83–100, 233. See alsoDacey, Future of Blasphemy, 8, explaining that “years beforePakistan had introduced its resolution [at the UN Human RightsCouncil] combating the defamation of religions, the European Courtof Human Rights in Strasbourg had already invented and enshrinedin human rights law a ‘right to respect for religious feelings.’”

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51. David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 247.

52. Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Kevin White, “Negotiating theSacred in Multicultural Societies,” in Negotiating the Sacred: Blas-phemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, ed. Coleman andWhite (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2006), 2:“A society’s reaction to and management of blasphemy and sacrilegegoes to its core, for it defines how it relates to its constituentgroups, protecting difference or leaving the vulnerable to cope ontheir own.” Similarly, see Jon P. Gunnemann, “Property and SacredOrdering in Global Civil Society,” in Juergensmeyer, Religion inGlobal Civil Society, 91–113.

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PART ONE

Creating Space forSacrilegiousExpression

CHAPTER 1

Thick-SkinnedToleranceSatire, the Sacred, and the Rise of theModern

CHRISTOPHER S. GRENDA

Satire has a long history. Its epochs of wit have long tendedto offend. The sixteenth-century Dutch humanist DesideriusErasmus invoked that history in prefacing The Praise ofFolly (1509): “But those who are offended at the lightnessand pedantry of this subject, I would have them considerthat I do not set myself for the first example of this kind,but that the same has been oft done by many considerableauthors.” He cited distinguished forebears, such as famedauthors of Greek and Roman antiquity, to whom he mighthave added Geoffrey Chaucer, whose satirizing of religiousfigures in The Canterbury Tales (1475) resembled his ownwitty criticism of contemporary religion. Erasmus voiced hiswit in satirical oration: “Satire and panegyric, distant be, /Yet jointly here they both in one agree.” He believed thatthe satirical style engaged public attention: “So does the

humour of the age require, / To chafe the touch, and so fo-ment desire.” The mocking manner was no mere pomp butintegral to critical commentary: “The mould o’ th’ subjectalters the success; / What’s serious, like sleep, grants writsof ease, / Satire and ridicule can only please.” Erasmus waspleased to identify the father of his protagonist, Folly, asthe author of the universe forever overturning all thingssacred and profane: “Plutus . . . the primary father of theuniverse; at whose alone beck, for all ages, religion and civilpolicy, have been successively undermined and re-estab-lished.” Uncertain that all would delight in satire, Erasmusresorted to historical assertion: “Wits have always been al-lowed this privilege.”1

Though Erasmus satirized contemporary religion, the ob-jects of satire have varied throughout history. Planetarythinking engaged Galileo’s wit.2 Aesthetic appraisal drewRembrandt’s ire.3 Rebellious politics and literary stylespurred John Dryden’s scorn.4 Entire social classes have in-cited ridicule, from Alexander Pope’s and Mark Twain’sjeers at aristocracy to Sinclair Lewis’s and W. B. Yates’s de-rision of the middle class.

Among all wit’s objects, though, the target of Erasmus’swit—religion—has proved particularly appealing and endur-ing. The French humorist Molière resembled Chaucer inparodying pretensions to piety so well, in the title characterof Tartuffe (1664), that contemporaries began to use thename as a synonym for “hypocrite.” The English pamphlet-eer Ralph Wallis was less subtle in Room for the Cobler ofGloucester and His Wife: With Several Cartloads of Abomin-able Irregular, Pitiful Stinking Priests (1668). He echoedErasmus in ridiculing religion’s seduction by worldly pompand power:

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Room for Prelates, here comes a Company;Room for Prelates, and ev’ry Coat-Card;Archbishops and Bishops, Archdeacons and Deans;Room for Prelates, and for the Black Guard.Cathedrals and Chapters, with Anthems and

Raptures,And all the Hierarchical Rabble,With all of that sort, that makes as good sportIn the Chore, as a Fool with his Bable. (4)

The history of religious satire entered a new, definingphase near the start of the eighteenth century. Though in-herited forms of ridicule persisted, satire in cultural andpolitical debates about religion began to inform an emer-ging discourse of religious toleration that was recognizablymodern.5 Such satire was not without danger. Prosecutionsfor seditious and blasphemous libel continued in the Age ofEnlightenment. Nevertheless, the use of irony, humor, andridicule in quarrels over religious texts, practices, and be-liefs was intertwined with the development of modern sens-ibilities in tolerating sectarian differences. This novel formof tolerance differed from earlier forms of humanist for-bearance which had extended the range of permissible doc-trinal views within a catholic church. Erasmus himself pro-posed an inclusive ecclesiology accommodating diverseviews of nonessential doctrinal matters, called adiaphora.The purpose of such an inclusive ecclesiology was to incor-porate believers into one church, not to permit denomina-tional sectarianism or heterodox views of essential doc-trines such as original sin or the divinity of Christ.6

Erasmus’s catholic vision continued into the post-Reforma-tion era of confessional sovereignties with similar proposalsfor indulgent unity, or concordia, advocated by DutchArminians,7 the Saxon Samuel Pufendorf,8 and the

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Latitudinarians of England.9 Separately, though, the out-lines of a more discernibly modern tolerance, which drew aharder line between civil and ecclesiastical concerns andmade room for individual expressions of conscience, beganemerging with force in the mid-to-late seventeenth century.“The civil state and Magistrate are merely and essentiallycivil,” Roger Williams declared in 1652, with the outward“bodies and goods of the people the proper or adequate ob-ject of the civil Magistrate.”10

Contemporaries often expressed the modern notion oflimiting state authority to civil matters in terms of restrict-ing the state’s penal power to the outward things of personsand property, not the inward things of conscience and be-lief. This modern notion was intended to allow the practiceof denominational and confessional sectarianism in sover-eign societies. It circulated widely in the decades and gen-erations after the mid-seventeenth century.11 As the QuakerWilliam Penn affirmed in 1679, “Civil Interest is the Found-ation and End of Civil Government.”12 By the turn of thecentury, many described the sectarianism that “everyChurch is Orthodox to itself” as a fact to be accommod-ated.13 Such toleration, to be sure, remained a radical posi-tion for some time.14 Religious minorities throughoutEurope and North America continued to suffer exclusionfrom public institutions or prohibitions on their very exist-ence.15 Yet sectarian diversity persisted. Religious minorit-ies, especially in the Anglo-American world, graduallygained enough security in their social status to demand notmerely the right of worship but the abolition or reform ofdiscriminatory laws such as religious taxes and test oaths.16

In conjunction with notions of toleration, the literati ofthe English-speaking public sphere used satire to scrutinizethe communities, beliefs, and practices of the increasingly

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diverse religious landscape, just as they did in examiningother dimensions of social life, such as politics, art, and so-cial hierarchy.17 Charges of blasphemy remained a realthreat. Yet wit, humor, and even ridicule in debates aboutreligious systems and institutions were integral to Enlight-enment conceptions of tolerance. Raillery regarding theuses and meanings of religion, and tolerance of religiousdifferences, in other words, were related endeavors. Bothwere refined forms of expression, exhibiting the cultivationof the self in wit and noncoercion and the civility of the pol-is in letters and nonpersecution. The practice of satiricaltolerance informed the belletristic culture of freethinkersand aesthetics as well as the civic endeavors of sectariansand orthodox Christians. It thus helped shape the eight-eenth century’s burgeoning republic of letters, creatingcivic space for contending trends in religious beliefs andpractices and for related disputes over pedagogy and rights.It fostered the rendering of critical judgment by conceivingof the self more as an expressive agent of moral discern-ment than as a protected identity. It thus crafted, and be-queathed, a particular type of tolerance, a hearty, thick-skinned liberality able to accommodate substantive moraldifferences.

FREETHINKING AND CHRISTIAN SATIRE AROUND1700

The satirical republic included moral judgments as disson-ant as those of Ralph Wallis and Charles Blount. Both wereRestoration-era Englishmen who lived under penal lawsthat prohibited religious worship outside the Church ofEngland (though Blount lived just beyond the Act of Tolera-tion [1689], which ended corporal punishment for orthodox

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Protestant dissent). They berated the established churchbecause the state had invested it with financial resourcesfor its parishes and ecclesiastical courts and with culturalauthority in education and print licensing. Blount’s scornwas palpable in “The Deist: A Satyr on the Parsons” (c.1686):

Religion’s a Politick Law,Devis’d by the Priggs of the Schools;To keep the Rabble in aweAnd amuse poor Bigotted Fools.

And they, for good vitualls and Bubb,Will bellow their Nonsense aloud,And rant out a Tale of a Tub,To fright the ignorant Croude.18

Wallis was similarly anticlerical, though with a prophetictone portending the demolition of episcopal structures:

Come down ye Bishops, fear a fall,Your Kingdom ’gins to shake,The hand is writing on the wall,Which makes your knees to quake;

Of all this Pomp and glorious train,Which caused God to frown,Which sin of yours he doth so hate,That sure you must come down;

For sure the Word of God isTrue, and do it not forget,He will pluck up, I say to you,Those plants he never set.19

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Blount and Wallis differed in their backgrounds and so-cial standings. Blount was an English country gentlemen;Wallis a nonconforming pamphleteer. Though Wallis hadbeen a freeman of London before the restoration of the Stu-art monarchy in 1660, his publications were illegal there-after, and he suffered arrest on at least one occasion.20 Thetwo also differed in their religious views. Blount was a deistcritical of traditional, orthodox religion. Wallis was an or-thodox Christian who, unlike deists, believed in the divinityof Christ and original sin. Despite such differences, the twosimilarly ridiculed the established church as vulgar in itsworldliness. They also viewed it as an entrenched obstacleto their respective programs of cultural reform, deism andChristian evangelism.

Deists rejected much of orthodox Christianity for naturalreligion, forswearing revelation beyond what natural philo-sophy revealed about nature’s God.21 Though not monolith-ic, deists criticized biblical text, disputed Christ’s divinity,disavowed miracles, and portrayed Christian doctrines onhuman nature, sin, and redemption as disingenuous theolo-gical schemes promoted by a professional class of publiclyfunded clerics. They called such schemes “priestcraft.”22

Blount portrayed established religion as a political tool,nonsense devised by well-fed thieves to “keep the rabble inawe.” Deists viewed such religion as entrenched in publicinstitutions, through which it distorted thought and moral-ity and thus impeded human flourishing and cultural pro-gress. Its claims of revealed truth, they maintained, encour-aged intolerance and suppressed the expression of con-science and opinions; its focus on sin fettered moral striv-ing and the cultivation of virtue; its featuring of hell andmiracles furthered fear, ignorance, and passivity; and itssuspicion of freethinking hindered advances in science.23

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Deists used these depictions of orthodox Christianity asrhetorical weapons in their battle for cultural stewardshipas they sought to emancipate society from orthodoxy’s he-gemony. For them, orthodox Christianity, as one scholarnotes, was “a fundamental obstacle to the improvement ofhumankind and the amelioration of social and political in-justices.”24

In contrast, Wallis’s ridicule of established religion andits intolerance was grounded in religious motives that werethoroughly orthodox. Similar to Blount, he viewed Eng-land’s church as using pomp and ceremony for temporalgain, but he proclaimed the living God as liberating societyfrom episcopal structures. In this, he evoked biblical im-agery of an active God promoting cultural renewal bypulling down the moral and institutional structures of hu-man iniquity.25 His social vision grew from his orthodoxy,which warranted restricting state power to civil things be-cause of the low moral condition of governing authorities.“The Magistrates power extends no further than to the out-ward man, to require obedience in Civil things,” he pro-claimed, because “neither can Great men (as we see) reformthemselves” nor “undertake to sanctifie, justifie, or glorifiea soul.” “What is the Magistrates place then?” Wallis con-tinued. “Doth not this derogate from the honour of a Magis-trate, if his power extend only to temporal things?” Wallis’sanswer referenced the command to political obedience inRomans 13, declaring, “Whereas the Apostle bids, Submit&c. he means only in Civil things.”26

The discourse on civil things reflected vital cultural un-dercurrents. Wallis and Blount titled their respective worksMagna Charta and Oracles of Reason to suggest programsof cultural renewal that would remedy the ills they associ-ated with established religion.27 Satire was an essential tool

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of their programs and remained so for many after England’sAct of Toleration. Not only did various forms of intolerancecontinue to thrive in parts of Europe, with FrenchHuguenots and German Palatinates still fleeing their home-lands for England and elsewhere, but the Toleration Act it-self was merely a provisional suspension of penal lawsagainst select English dissenters. It allowed their worshipas second-class subjects but was neither universal nor irre-vocable. Daniel Defoe parodied the fragility of the situationin The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702). Raised adissenting Presbyterian and educated at a leading dissent-ing academy,28 he wrote the work in the voice of a HighChurch Tory Anglican advocating the persecution of Eng-land’s sectarians. “Her Majesty did never promise to main-tain the Toleration to the destruction of the Church,” he ex-claimed. “I am not supposing that all the Dissenters in Eng-land should be hanged or banished. But as in case of rebel-lions and insurrections, if a few of the ringleaders suffer,the multitude are dismissed.”29 The work was a hoax. Itmocked religious intolerance by satirizing the contempor-ary revival of Tory Anglicanism and its call for a robust con-fessional culture. The hoax was so subtle, though, thatreaders were confused when Defoe’s authorship was re-vealed. Authorities, however, used this revelation to placehim in the pillory for seditious libel.30

Defoe had been less subtle in ridiculing intolerance inThe True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1701). He began with areligious proverb, “WHEREVER God erects a house of prayer /The Devil always builds a chapel there.” Identifying “thelargest congregation” as the Devil’s, Defoe derided Tory as-pirations to confessional uniformity and the suppression ofreligious nonconformity:

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With uniformity of service, heReigns with a general aristocracy.No non-conforming sects disturb his reign,For of his yoke there’s very few complain.31

Satirical expression through the early decades of the eight-eenth century aimed not only at institutions of establishedreligion or programs of intolerance but also at the deepersocial structures of behavioral norms and habits. Dis-courses on social behavior proliferated in a process of eval-uating the manners most appropriate for a post–GloriousRevolution social order.32 “Manners” and “refinement” be-came important touchstones, with satire being a means ofscrutinizing social norms and promoting cultural reform.“Satire, if you can / Their temper show, for manners makethe man,” Defoe exhorted.33 Such critics understood howthe established church and the royal court had shaped Eng-lish culture to date, and they sought new cultural and insti-tutional means of achieving a more tolerant—postpuritanand post-Tory—society.34 Christian satirists such as Defoeadvocated the manners of a nonsectarian Protestantism in-dependent of social status. “The end of satire is reforma-tion,” he explained, but “all our reformations are banters,and will be so till our magistrates and gentry reform them-selves by way of example.” England was “a nation thatwants manners,” “ill-natured and uncivil.”35 Others, criticsof Christianity, sought refinement in coffeehouses, clubs,and theaters characterized by politeness and toleration, anaesthetic and freethinking counterpoise to the church andthe court.36

Central to these eighteenth-century experiments in re-finement was the cultivation of the self in a revised culturalorder. Whig thinkers viewed the self and the polity as

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exchanging domineering patterns of religious coercion andintolerance for sociable discourses of wit, irony, humor, andridicule. Satire pervaded such projects as they became cent-ral to the many strains of Enlightenment conceptions of re-ligious toleration.

The role of satire in shaping toleration was evident inAnthony Ashley Cooper’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners,Opinions, Times (1711). Cooper, like Blount, was a countrygentleman, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and a former mem-ber of Parliament.37 His essays constituted, according toone scholar, “a foundational work in English Deism”38 andwere widely reprinted throughout the eighteenth century.39

Though Shaftesbury eschewed the aggressive tone of manydeists, he similarly criticized contemporary Christianity,viewing it not just as a corrupt institution but as an inferiorcultural system whose teachings on human nature inhibitedhuman flourishing and social development.40 As an altern-ative, he offered a freethinking vision of a natural religionaimed at rehabilitating human nature and restoring naturalvirtue while, in his words, “asserting thus zealously the No-tion of a religious Liberty, and mutual Toleration.”41

Shaftesbury also contributed a distinct moral philosophy,an aestheticism in which virtue was a performance art to beadmired for its beauty. The performance involved charac-ters in dialogue exhibiting the refined manners of politeconversation. The manners were the philosophy, less prov-ing moral truth through knowledge and logic than display-ing it in the communal affections of sociable selves.42 Itwas a “moral Painting, by way of Dialogue,” as Shaftes-bury’s Philocles character notes in his “Recital of CertainConversations.”43 The philosophical method was itself a so-cialization process. It used literary characters to draw read-ers into a community of sociable exchange whose manners

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formed common moral standards for shaping the characterof its participants, both fictitious and real. “We polish oneanother, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sortof amicable Collision,” the Third Earl explained.44 The dia-logue’s common moral sense inheres in the display of wit’sassorted hues—raillery, humor, irony, and ridicule—asShaftesbury details in Sensus Communis: An Essay on theFreedom of Wit and Humor: “One of those principal Lightsor natural Mediums, by which Things are to be view’d, in or-der to a thorow Recognition, is Ridicule.”45 His objects ofridicule included confessional uniformity,46 religious intol-erance,47 and Christian revelation.48 He undermined beliefin the accuracy of biblical text49 and mocked popular un-derstandings of its basis for morality,50 all “without fearingwhat disturbance I might possibly give to some formalCensors of the Age.”51

Shaftesbury also celebrated the virtue of ridicule in A Let-ter Concerning Enthusiasm. It was particularly useful forevaluating personal beliefs, “for in the manner we may con-ceive ’em, they may peradventure be very grave and weightyin our Imagination; but very ridiculous and impertinent intheir own nature.”52 He also advised “applying the Ri-dicule”53 in dialogue to subject conventions to humorouscensure, calling them “Cowards” who “are so afraid to standthe Test of Ridicule.”54 Shaftesbury viewed such raillery asreplacing older relations characterized by religious domin-eering. Polite wit undermined the solemnity that sustainedolder habits by displaying the more tolerant sensibility ofcritical humor.55 Wit’s wisdom was “never to punish seri-ously what deserv’d only to be laugh’d at,” an indulgencethat Shaftesbury modeled by mocking the apostolic authorof the Christian epistles.56 The Third Earl also applaudedthe theatrical jeering of religious inspiration in “a choice

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Droll or Puppet-Show at Bart’lemy-Faire.” Prophets wereparodied “upon the Stage” as puppets, “being not in theirown power, but (as they say themselves) mere passive Or-gans actuated by an exterior Force.”57 He labeled such hu-mor the “Bart’lemy-Faire Method.” Critical in its parodyand polite in its tolerance, it superseded the need for penallaws in religion. Shaftesbury thus recommended that themagistrate dispense with the “supernatural Charity” of the“saving of Souls” to focus on the administering of temporalaffairs.58

In seeking to restrict the magistrate’s authority, Shaftes-bury expressed important developments regarding the stateand toleration. His focus on temporal affairs resemblesWallis’s argument about civil things. Neither was a philo-sopher examining the origins of political authority, thoughboth articulated a vision of good government through reli-gious satire. By ridiculing prominent religious practices, in-stitutions, and beliefs, they encouraged greater tolerance ofreligious worship and sects, the one from a freethinkingperspective, the other from orthodox conviction.

SATIRE BEFORE REVOLUTION: NOT FOR THEMULTITUDE

Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks enjoyed significant influencethroughout the eighteenth century, promoting religious cri-ticism, moral sense philosophy, and literary dialogue. Italso advanced an ongoing debate about expressive mannersthat was entwined in the period’s contests over religioustoleration. Respondents to Shaftesbury’s essays, even be-fore they were compiled in Charactersticks, included theWhig Edward Fowler, in Reflections upon a Letter Concern-ing Enthusiasm (1709), and the Tory Mary Astell, “the first

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English feminist,”59 in Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry afterWit (1709). Both decried Shaftesbury’s influence in promot-ing wit and ridicule in discussions about religion. “Wit,Liberty, and Ridicule reign; and yet we lie in all our vicesand Maladies,” Fowler bemoaned.60 Shaftesbury’s Letter is“industriously spread in the Nation,” Astell lamented, eventhough many “reckon it a very poor, incoherent, contradict-ory, senseless, Piece; weak in every thing but Malice to Reli-gion, and even to GOD Himself.”61

Opponents viewed Shaftesbury as encouraging a form ofexpression that tended to promote disorder. “Let it be re-member’d,” Astell warned, “that it is of the very Essence ofWit to be out of Rule, and above all Measure.” Measure re-strained expression; wit freed it to subvert social conven-tions. “Method is a Restraint, not to be suffer’d by FreeWriters in a Free Nation,” Astell complained. “So Free thatnot any thing is sacred enough to be Privileg’d; not ourLaws, nor our Religion, not our Sovereign, nor our GOD.”62

Fowler thus advocated that “with regard to things truly sac-red, or of the greatest Importance, [wit] ought strictly to beForborn or Restrained.”63

Restraint had potential legal implications. Since the lapseof the Licensing Act in 1695, the English press was freefrom the prior restraint of licensing but not immune frompostpublication prosecution for libel.64 In Rex v. Taylor(1675), Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale had declaredChristianity part of English common law and the Church ofEngland part of the English constitution.65 The result wasamorphous notions of seditious and blasphemous libel in-dictable at common law,66 as Defoe experienced.67 Shaftes-bury argued that the threat of prosecution was reason formore wit, as an authorial method of legal evasion: “If Menare forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain

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Subjects, they will do it ironically. If they are forbid tospeak at all upon such Subjects, or if they find it really dan-gerous to do so; they will then redouble their Disguise, in-volve themselves in Mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly tobe understood.”68 Wit disguised its author as it exposed itssubject, as in feigning Christian orthodoxy while subvertingbiblical authority.69 Wit thus maintained privacy in the pro-cess of publicity. Shaftesbury published his “essay on thefreedom of wit and humour” as “a letter to a friend.” Theguise of personal correspondence covered his promulgat-ing, through several published editions, the freedom of witenjoyed in private clubs: “For you are to remember (myFriend!) that I am writing to you in defence only of theLiberty of the Club.” “The Publick is not, on any account, tobe laugh’d at,” at least not “to its face.” Wit disguisedlaughter from “the Multitude” as it criticized standing insti-tutions and conventions for the sophisticated.70 It was in-tended for highbrow consumption.

The English cleric Thomas Woolston employed “this clan-cular and subtil Method” of writing to his own detriment,being convicted of blasphemous libel in 1729.71 In Six Dis-courses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727–30), he mocksbiblical miracles as “the grossest Absurdities,” commentingon Jesus casting demons into swine, “If any Exorcist in thisour Age and Nation” had done likewise, “our Laws andJudges too of the last Age, would have made him to swingfor it.”72 Critics denounced this “profane Ridicule of themost Sacred things.”73 Yet Woolston had cloaked his ri-dicule in allegorical exegesis, a hermeneutics with patristicroots, to suggest that Jesus’s miracles were “propheticaland parabolical Narratives.”74 His counsel even raised thispoint at trial, arguing that the defendant intended only to“shew, That the Miracles of our Saviour were to be

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understood in a Metaphorical Sense, and not as they wereLiterally Written.”75 Critics, however, viewed the eruditeveneer as evidence of dissembling intent. Edmund Gibson,the bishop of London, decried Woolston’s “BlasphemousManner” while noting “the Duty of the Civil Magistrate atall time, to take care that Religion be not treated either in aludicrous, or a reproachful manner.” Because Woolston’smanner deceived, Gibson continued, it subverted all stand-ards, striking “at the Foundation of all Religion, and ofTruth, Virtue, Seriousness, and good Manners; and by con-sequence at the Foundation of Civil Society.”76 The justicepresiding over the case agreed, citing Rex v. Taylor to re-mind defense counsel, “Whatever strikes at the very root ofChristianity, tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil gov-ernment.”77

The deist Anthony Collins responded to Woolston’s pre-dicament by popularizing Shaftesbury’s method and argu-ment. Collins satirized the orthodox view of the Christiangospels as literal fulfillments of Hebraic prophecy, clothinghis ridicule in exaggerated piety.78 He tied his endeavor toreligious toleration, citing Pierre Bayle and John Locke andadvocating “that universal liberty be established in respectto opinions and practices not prejudicial to the peace andwelfare of society.”79 Yet this argument assumed the pointin dispute by supposing that ridiculing religion did not sub-vert social order. Making the supposition explicit, Collinsauthored A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony inWriting (1729), which shows that even Anglican divineshave long used wit in debating religion. Lest that fail toconvince, he articulated Shaftesbury’s argument that reli-gious intolerance is reason for more ridicule of religion.80

In this, Collins exhibited a form of what Jacques Berlin-erblau calls the profanity loop (see chapter 2)—countering

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intolerance of wit with yet more satire and ridicule. Collinspresented this strategy as a biblical command, invoking“the noble Sarcasm of Elijah”; “the Psalmist” who sugges-ted “laughing to scorn, and deriding the greatest men uponEarth”; and “the following Sarcasm or Irony” about human-ity’s fall into sin in Genesis 3:22: “This Passage shews, thatthe whole Affair of the Fall . . . was a very entertainingScene.”81 Original sin, the orthodox view of human nature,was a subject of humor.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume employed similarhumor more subtly.82 In his A Treatise of Human Nature(1739–40), Hume describes irony as “conceal’d strokes ofsatire.” Though “the open declaration of our sentiments iscall’d the taking off the mask,” he explains, “the secret in-timations of our opinions is said to be the veiling of them.”The veil mitigates offense: it “moves not my indignation tosuch a degree, as if [one] flatly told me I was a fool.”83 Suchplayfulness also informs Hume’s essay “Of Miracles,” whichhe withheld from the Treatise but included in An EnquiryConcerning Human Understanding (1748). Therein, he de-scribes advocates of the use of reason in religious mattersas pretend Christians. In good humor, he dons their maskto profane revelation, asking readers to consider “thePentateuch, which we shall examine, according to the prin-ciples of these pretended Christians, not as the word ortestimony of God himself, but as the production of a merehuman writer and historian. Here then we are first to con-sider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorantpeople, written in an age when they were still more barbar-ous, and in all probability long after the facts which itrelates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and re-sembling those fabulous accounts which every nation givesof it origin.” The irony is conspicuous in its guise. Hume

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proceeds as if merely describing the biblical accounts of theFall, the Flood, and the Covenant, refraining from irony un-til his concluding thought: “Upon reading this book, we findit full of prodigies and miracles. It gives an account of astate of the world and of human nature entirely differentfrom the present: Of our fall from that state: Of the age ofman, extended to near a thousand years: Of the destructionof the world by a deluge: Of the arbitrary choice of onepeople, as the favourites of heaven; and that people thecountrymen of the author.”84

Hume combined satire and “the principles of toleration”in his Natural History of Religion (1757). He emphasizedthat toleration “proceeded from the steady resolution of thecivil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts ofpriests and bigots.” And he decried “a religion (and we maysuspect Mahometanism of this inconsistence) which some-times painted the Deity in the most sublime colors” and“sometimes degraded him nearly to a level with humancreatures.” His irony, regarding a religion of divine incarna-tion in human form, was again reserved for his conclusion,“Happily this is the case with Christianity that it is freefrom a contradiction, so incident to human nature.”85

Hume was long conscious of the importance of politeness,even before he was denied an Edinburgh professorship oncharges of heterodoxy. He intentionally avoided militanttones. He thus found writing in dialogue an inviting style,because it allowed significant license under cover of literarycharacters.86 In “Of a Particular Providence and of a FutureState,” Hume’s first-person character relates “a conversa-tion with a friend who loves sceptical paradoxes; where,though he advanced many principles, of which I can by nomeans approve, yet as they seem to be curious, . . . I shallhere copy them . . . in order to submit them to the judgment

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of the reader.” The conversation begins with shared admira-tion of “freedom and toleration” against “creeds, confes-sions, or penal statutes” and culminates in the friend’s un-dermining of reasoned arguments for divine benevolence,nature’s deity being “both uncertain and useless.”87 Thefriend’s severing of morality from religion was Hume’s do-ing and implied, contra the Woolston case, that religion wasnot a necessary social foundation.88 Hume voiced the sameargument through the skeptical Philo in his Dialogues Con-cerning Natural Religion, begun in the early 1750s and pub-lished posthumously in 1779.89 Hume’s dialogues were notunlike Shaftesbury’s in important respects. The ease oftheir give-and-take exhibits a degree of license, a tolerantpicture of free exchange and opinion laced with irony andridicule.

Orthodox Christians also used satirical wit in dialogue toadvance the case for toleration. From British North Amer-ica, the Yale-educated Jonathan Dickinson exposed legal in-equities resulting from the ensnaring of religion in humanpower and vice. He was an orthodox evangelical who pro-claimed original sin and imputed righteousness in workssuch as The Nature and Necessity of Regeneration (1743).He was a founding trustee and the first president of the Col-lege of New Jersey (1746), later Princeton University,which, unlike contemporary English universities, disclaimedsubscriptions of faith for enrollment.90

Dickinson’s 1732 work The Scripture-Bishop embodiesthe English tradition of religious nonconformity, which hadlong maintained biblical warrant for an ecclesiology of cler-ical peers rather than bishops. In simulated astonishment,Dickinson recalled past persecutions for resistance to thepower and pomp of English episcopacy: “Having read theecclesiastical Story of our Kingdom since the Reformation, I

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was surpriz’d to find such Clouds of Sufferers for Noncon-formity to Prelacy and Ceremony. What a dark Scene.” Hecontinued, “How severe were the Persecutions after theRestoration,” when many “were stript of their Estates, lan-guished and died, in Prisons, for preaching the Gospel.”91

Dickinson’s work is a dialogue, a literary affectation ofprivacy. It mimics a “free and unreserv’d converse” amonggentlemen “without the interruption, or observation of oth-ers.” Its purpose was to publicize the predicament of itsprotagonist Eleutherius, whose name means “liberator” inGreek. “Eleutherius was a Gentleman of a plentiful Sub-stance, a liberal Education,” Dickinson explained, “and pos-sess’d those ministerial Qualifications as would have in-titled him to some of the highest Preferments in the Epis-copal Church, had he consulted his promotion in the choiceof his Profession, and declared himself for the national Es-tablishment.” Yet Eleutherius was Presbyterian, not Anglic-an. “This being a matter of great grief to some of his ambi-tious and aspiring Friends, whose Heads ran much upon hisPromotion, occasion’d him a Visit from one of them, a Cler-gyman of the establish’d Church” named Praelaticus.92 Thevisit from this ambitious friend of the establishment, al-lured by worldly advance and power, is the occasion of thedialogue.

Though Dickinson’s provincial New Jersey lacked a reli-gious establishment,93 he used the literary forms of the im-perial literati to criticize English constitutional inequities.On those literary forms, Hume commented, “All polite let-ters are nothing but pictures of human life”; authors “placeopposite characters in a proper contrast; and alluring us in-to the paths of virtue by the views of glory and happiness,direct our steps in these paths.”94 Dickinson did not useviews of glory and happiness but described Eleutherius in

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terms of the unjust denial of glory. Despite eminent quali-fications, Eleutherius was denied worldly advance for non-conformity. “I cannot conform to the legal Establishment,”he exclaimed as a provincial minority.95 Hume suggestedthat polite letters were to coax readers toward virtue;Dickinson used letters to define vice as inequitable treat-ment for religious belief, a policy that he associated withthe imperial center of the British Empire. Local represent-atives of England’s Whig regime responded. James Wetmoreof New York authored Eleutherius Enervatus, warning about“the Subversion of all Government, civil and ecclesiastic-al.”96 John Beach of Connecticut reproached Dickinson’s“design to propagate this brutish noise.”97 “Establishedclergy,” Dickinson rejoined, “every where exact their Salary,from those of other Persuasions.”98

Dickinson’s views resembled those of the Scottish provin-cial John Witherspoon, who was also an orthodox Christianand a subsequent president of Princeton. Before immigrat-ing to New Jersey, Witherspoon was involved in heated de-bates among Scottish Presbyterians. The nature of those de-bates is evident in his Practical Treatise on Regeneration(1764), wherein he criticizes how “the new birth is a sub-ject, at present, very unfashionable,” even “held in deri-sion.”99 Witherspoon led the “popular,” or evangelical, wingin the Church of Scotland against the so-called moderates,who downplayed experiential piety and traditional doctrinein favor of benevolence and the common good.100 In enga-ging with the moderates, Witherspoon satirically debatedreligious practices and beliefs in Ecclesiastical Character-istics (1753), whose title is mockingly suggestive of Shaft-esbury’s, and A Serious Apology for “The EcclesiasticalCharacteristics” (1763).

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Ecclesiastical Characteristics was first published in Glas-gow and then circulated widely, with enlarged editions ap-pearing in London (1754), Glasgow (1754 and 1755), Edin-burgh (1763), Rotterdam (n.d.), and Philadelphia (1767).101

Witherspoon called it “a satire upon clergymen of a certaincharacter,” explaining that “a satire that does not bite, isgood for nothing,” for “it is essential to this manner of writ-ing, to provoke and give offence.” The satirized clerics wereself-styled British “moderates,” whom Witherspoon viewedas corrupt in their “open solicitation of ecclesiasticalpreferment” and their partisan favoring of those who en-dorsed their refashioned morality. The new morality embod-ied the aestheticism of Shaftesbury, the poet Mark Aken-side, and the moral sense philosophers Francis Hutchesonand David Fordyce (at the Universities of Glasgow and Aber-deen, respectively). Witherspoon viewed such polite authorsas offering “a pretended theory of moral virtue” that pro-moted aesthetic sensibility over consciousness of sin, thebeauty of benevolence and social harmony over the experi-ence of redeeming grace.102 At stake was stewardship ofthe church, schools, and culture, as moderates sought totransfer the traditional religious virtues of “modesty andother bastard virtues of the same class,” Witherspoonjeered, into “the opposite column, that is to say the columnof vices.”103

Witherspoon viewed the new morality as having contemp-tuous and authoritarian streaks. The contempt concernedcommon standards. Aesthetic sensibility was “not to be con-fined to common forms,” he derided, but developed “in op-position to the bulk of mankind, who through want of taste,are not able to relish the finest performances.” Wither-spoon’s criticism of pretentious claims to moral discern-ment that transcended common thoughts and habits

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informed his satirical discussion of biblical text. He as-sumed moderate pretensions to mock the moderate readingof Christian liberty in Romans 14, clarifying the claim that“the worst of all heresies is a bad life”: “Now, if instead ofworst, which is an uncomely expression, you would readgreatest in that passage, then a libertine is the greatest ofall heretics and to be honored in proportion. Even theapostle Paul (who is very seldom of any use to us in ourreasonings) seems to suppose that they are men of mostknowledge who are most free and bold in their practice, andthat they are only weak brethren who are filled withscruples. The weak man is restrained and confirmed by hisnarrow conscience.”104

Witherspoon’s satire also pointed toward the moderates’authoritarian streak. He charged them with using patron-age to impose ministers of the new morality on parishesagainst the traditional call and assent of the congregation,“a settlement decided over the belly perhaps of the wholepeople in the parish.” He viewed this practice as reflectinga broader temperament, which he described in mockinglyvoicing the moderates’ authoritarian reading of “the thirdchapter of the Romans”: “If human authority be once dulyinterposed, it is obeying God to comply with whatever is en-joined thereby.”105

The problem, for Witherspoon, inhered in the new moral-ity itself. Its aesthetic ethic of benevolence possessed theauthoritarian tendency to resolve all ethical and politicaldisputes in “the good of the whole.” This ethic, he wrylynoted, “contains all knowledge of the whole and the good ofthe whole, more than which, I hope, will be allowed to benot only needless, but impossible.”106 He feared that re-fined sensibilities were precluding individual obligations ofconscience from taking precedence over collective claims of

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the common good. “Conscience,” he remarked ironically, “isof all things the most stiff and inflexible and cannot by anyart be molded into another shape,” “whereas the wholeprinciples of moderation are most gentle and ductile.”Witherspoon suggested that in substituting benevolence forconscience, this moral ductility was equating God with soci-ety. “The good of the whole,” he ridiculed, suggesting theimage of idolatry from Exodus 20:3, “is not only true, but itis all truth, and will not suffer any thing to be true but it-self.”107

In A Serious Apology, Witherspoon defends satire in de-bates about religion by explaining “that it is a lawful thingto employ ridicule in such a cause,” which is sometimes“the most proper method, if not, in a manner, necessary.”He describes his satirical censuring in terms of Enlighten-ment toleration: “No civil penalties follow upon it amongus, and no civil penalties ought to follow upon it in any na-tion.” The “highest authority” being biblical text, he en-gages the “many instances of irony in the sacred writings,”ranging from Genesis and Kings to “an expression from ourSaviour himself,” who “uses a language plainly ironical; asin John x. 32.”108 Underlying these biblical references is adistinctly evangelical rationale for satire, a religion of theWord leveling the impregnable forces of pride. “The lawful-ness of employing ridicule,” Witherspoon explained, is“founded upon the plainest reason. There is commonly apride and self-sufficiency in men under the dominion of er-ror, which makes them deaf to advice and impregnable tograve and serious reasoning; neither is there any getting atthem till their pride is leveled a little with this dismayingweapon.”109

A Serious Apology appeared as the great war for empirebetween Britain and France was ending and tensions

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between the victorious Britain and its North Americancolonies began. Shortly thereafter, Witherspoon migratedto British America to become the president of Princeton, in1768. As a member of the Continental Congress, hepreached a fast-day sermon in Philadelphia on “the justview given us in scripture of our lost state” before returningto the city weeks later to sign the Declaration of Independ-ence.110 He taught philosophy at Princeton. His studentsincluded almost one-fifth of the future delegates to theConstitutional Convention of 1787.111 His teaching dwelton “the depravity and corruption of our nature”112 as hecontinued to question aestheticism, identifying one of the“excesses” of moral sense theory as “the making the gener-al good the ultimate practical rule to every particular per-son, so that he may violate particular obligations with aview to a more general benefit.”113 Witherspoon’s notion ofparticular obligations of conscience taking precedence overcollective claims of the greater good influenced his mostfamous student, James Madison, who replicated the argu-ment in helping to end Virginia’s religious establishment inthe 1780s.114 Though Witherspoon’s use of satire and ri-dicule in debating religious texts, practices, and beliefs re-mained predominately highbrow, the age included increas-ingly popular forms of such expression in ongoing debatesabout religion and toleration.

DEMOCRATIZING SATIRE: THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

More popular satirical discussions of religion and tolerationproliferated in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.The voices widening the audience of the satirical republicincluded those of a younger generation, adept at writing inpopular and assertive tones. Two such figures were the

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freethinking deist Thomas Paine and the Christian evangel-ical James Murray. Paine authored widely read tracts suchas Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791–92),and The Age of Reason (1794–96). Murray’s Sermons toAsses (1768) went through several editions in England anda Philadelphia printing in 1774.115 He followed with asecond volume in 1771, defending the American Revolutionin Sermons to Ministers of State, which also had multipleEnglish editions and a Philadelphia run in 1783.

Both wrote in a style intended to reach wide audiences.Paine’s “clear, simple, concise, and . . . manly”116 style inCommon Sense reached hundreds of thousands, while Mur-ray feigned “hope [that bishops] will not be offended at re-ceiving a little assistance” from his printed appeals overtheir heads to their parishioners.117 Though neither inhab-ited the cultural mainstream, both conceived of what Mur-ray called the “republic of letters” as an arena of moraljudgment, persuasion, and competition, projecting them-selves less as identities seeking recognition and protectionthan as agents of moral declaration.118 They both pro-claimed much of contemporary religion corrupt, tainted bymaterial allure and ensnared in worldly power, pomp, andambition. “The church,” Paine declared of Christianity, “hasset up a religion of pomp and of revenue in pretended imit-ation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”119

Murray bemoaned the “interest, sordid self-interest” of“men in sacred offices.”120 When “men began to corrupt re-ligion,” he sneered, “they were obliged to make up the wantof Christian simplicity with honours borrowed from thekingdoms of this world.”121

Through their competing programs of deism and evangel-ism, Paine and Murray sought to free society from estab-lished religion. Both thus attacked religious establishments

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and promoted the natural rights of religious conscience.“All national institutions of churches,” Paine declared, are“no other than human inventions set up to terrify and en-slave mankind and monopolize power and profit.”122 Mur-ray similarly avowed, “If there were no alliance betweenchurch and state, there would be more civil and religiousliberty.” Seeking to limit state power to outward things, hecontinued, “The Laws of civil society have only a respect tothe bodies of men, and cannot extend beyond what pertainsto the body.” Society, in other words, “cannot oblige men topart with their natural rights.” “Asses, and worse thanasses, surely you are,” then, who surrender “the rights ofyour own consciences.”123

Paine and Murray infused their calls for greater religiousliberty with wit, ridicule, satire, and irony. Murray sugges-ted that Sermons to Asses “should have been dedicated tothe A[rch]b[ishop]s, B[ishop]s, and their C[lerg]y,” but withconspicuous irony, having just made the association he in-tended, “the author was afraid of offending their modestywith the flattery of a dedication, and for that reason alteredhis design.” The people were thus the asses, ridden by the“two burdens of civil and religious oppression.”124 Murraydirected Sermons to Doctors in Divinity, however, at theleaders of established religion. “Doctors and Asses are syn-onymous terms,” he scoffed, after noting, “Perhaps the titleshould be Sermons to wild asses.” “Unless the Doctors beregenerated, the address is very proper,” he continued, giv-en that “there have been few disturbances in the church, orthe world, of which they have not either been the parents ornurses.”125 Murray echoed Dickinson in criticizing clericalambition and Witherspoon in questioning the ethics ofprominent belles letters and the authoritarian imposition ofpastors.126 He also resembled Witherspoon in using satire

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to debate biblical meaning. Referencing 2 Corinthians 10:4,which renounces “carnal weapons,” or temporal authority inreligion, he mocked the erudite recourse to temporalpower: “Some narrow minded bigoted people may perhapsalledge, that the weapons of the Church’s warfare are notcarnal,—and our translation of Paul’s epistles seems to hintas much;—But as it is very likely that Doctors in divinitymay find a various reading, and perhaps discover the wordcarnal to be genuine, but the particle not, an interpolationthrough the rashness of some transcriber, by rectifying thetext and restoring it to its primitive state, it will read, Theweapons of our warfare are carnal.”127

Paine’s satire in promoting religious liberty derided or-thodox Christianity. In Common Sense, he advocated inde-pendence from Great Britain by suggesting that hereditaryrule was as ridiculous as original sin: “To say that the rightof all future generations is taken away by the act of the firstelectors in their choice not only of a king, but of a family ofkings forever, hath no parallel in or out of scripture but thedoctrine of original sin, which supposes the free will of allmen lost in Adam.” “From such comparison,” he chided,“hereditary succession can derive no glory. For as in Adamall sinned, and as in the first electros all men obeyed; as inthe one all mankind were subjected to Satan, and in theother to sovereignty.” It “unanswerably follows,” Paine sar-castically concluded, “that original sin and hereditary suc-cession are parallels. Dishonorable rank! Inglorious connec-tion!”128

To “the absurdity and profaneness of the story” of origin-al sin, Paine added “the whole theory or doctrine of what iscalled the redemption” in The Age of Reason. This doctrine,he scoffed, “was originally fabricated on purpose to bringforward and build all those secondary and pecuniary

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redemptions upon.”129 He not only filled the pamphlet withblasphemous statements about Christianity130 but de-scribed Christianity itself as blasphemous, “for what can begreater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man tothe order of the Almighty[?]”131 Paine repeatedly mockedthe very idea of revelation and undermined the notion ofsacred text as a “fraud.”132 In this, his purpose was not un-like Shaftesbury’s, though pursued without literary disguiseand in more militant tones. He unequivocally declaredChristianity to be an inferior cultural system—“the age ofignorance commenced with the Christian system”—whichhe hoped to replace with “the pure and simple profession ofDeism.”133 A contemporary compared him to the Devil inturning “God’s word into ridicule.”134 When the Britishgovernment charged Paine and his publisher with seditionin 1797, the prosecution criticized Paine’s writing for hav-ing “excited a general avidity to read the book, particularlyamong the middling and lower classes.”135 Supporters thenpublished the trial transcript for popular audiences.136

Their response to this prosecution was a democratized ver-sion of Shaftesbury’s earlier recommendation to counter in-tolerance with still more deistic wit and anti-Christiansatire—a popular form of Berlinerblau’s profanity loop.

CONCLUSION

Eighteenth-century opponents of satirical discussions of re-ligion sought to preserve belief systems as buttresses to so-cial hierarchy and authority. That judgment seems self-evid-ent in retrospect. Yet the notion that certain forms of ex-pression are potent agents of disorder threatening the so-cial fabric is not always comfortably assessed from such dis-tance. Ronald Dworkin defended the right to ridicule

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religion while endorsing media self-censorship to avoidcausing psychological pain and social alienation for somereligious readers and viewers.137 He opposes legal censor-ship by the state. Jeremy Waldron does not. He recommendscriminalizing the verbal creation of a hostile environmentfor believers, meaning one that damages their psychologicalwell-being or undermines their sense of equality.138 Of par-ticular importance is his historicism. “There is a very con-siderable literature on hate speech,” he explains, “but mostof it lacks a historical dimension.” Waldron seeks to providethat dimension by disclosing the “relation between religioustoleration as an Enlightenment ideal and religious hatespeech” prohibitions.139

Most regimes, legal systems, and ideologies seek someform of historical legitimatization, a purported heritage ofearlier developments as justifying grounds for programs ofmore recent vintage. John Rawls famously cast his liberalphilosophy as the evolved product of political thinking fol-lowing the early modern wars of religion.140 Americansroutinely portray their competing views on church and stateas faithful reflections of the First Amendment’s religionclauses.141 Radical forms of political theology often appealto a past of purer beginnings. And Waldron quotes fromLocke, Bayle, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot in pursuing an En-lightenment pantheon to support current hate speech crim-inalization.142

Yet the pursuit is misguided. Many Enlightenment figureswere aware of the potency of expression. Following Eng-land’s civil wars, a young and intolerant Locke “accused thepens of Englishmen of as much guilt as their swords.”143

Following the American Revolution, an older and tolerantGeorge Washington “practiced restraint,” in the words ofChris Beneke, “a determination not to take certain kinds of

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actions—not to insult, not to offend, not to persecute, not totyrannize over a minority group—a willful withholding ofjudgment.”144 The restraint of personal decorum is funda-mentally different from the restraint of criminal law. Ad-vocacy of the former is not a natural ally of the latter; theone respects individual autonomy, while the other does not.Most Enlightenment writers took direct and primary aim atlimiting state authority to criminalize, not empowering it.Slighting this fact elicits James Murray’s irony regardingerudite exegesis, turning a renunciation of carnal weaponsinto an endorsement of their use.

NOTES

1. See Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmus in Praise of Folly . . .(London: Reeves and Turner, 1876), available at http://oll.liberty-fund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3F-title=551&layout=html#chapter_104195. For a print edition, seeErasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. and ed.Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

2. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Sys-tems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632).

3. Rembrandt van Rijn, Satire on Art Criticism (1644).4. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681); MacFlecknoe, or

a Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S. (1682).5. For different perspectives on religious toleration, see John Cof-

fey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689(New York: Pearson Education, 2000); John Christian Laursen andCary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: ReligiousToleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1998); Laursen and Nederman, eds., Differenceand Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early ModernEurope (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).

6. István Bejczy, “‘Tolerantia’: A Medieval Concept,” Journal ofthe History of Ideas 58, no. 3 (1997): 376–77, claims that Erasmusworked “on behalf of the unity and the concordia” of Christians.

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More generally, consider Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, Toler-ance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002).

7. E.g., Hugo Grotius, Discourse of Toleration before the Amster-dam City Council (1616). See Even Haefeli, New Netherland and theDutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 39–40. After Calvinistsgained ascendancy in the Dutch Church at the Synod of Dort (1618),some Arminians began rethinking sectarian toleration, such as Si-mon Episcopius, who wrote Free Worship of God (1627). See Jonath-an I. Israel, “The Intellectual Debate about Toleration in the DutchRepublic,” in The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic,ed. Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Israel, and G. H. M. PosthumusMeyers (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3–36.

8. Samuel Pufendorf, The Divine Feudal Law: Or, Covenants withMankind, Represented (1695), trans. Theophilus Dorrington, ed. Si-mone Zurbuchen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002). See DetlefDöring, “Samuel von Pufendorf and Toleration,” in Laursen and Ne-derman, Beyond the Persecuting Society, 178–96.

9. E.g., Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (London,1680). See John Marshall, “The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men,1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and ‘Hobbism,’” Journal of Eccle-siastical History 36, no. 3 (1985): 407–27; Richard Ashcraft, “Latit-udinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political His-tory,” in Philosophy, Science and Religion in England, 1640–1700,ed. Richard Kroll, Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1992), 151–73.

10. Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody: By Mr.Cottons Endevour to Wash It White in the Blood of the Lambe(1652), in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (NewYork: Russell and Russell, 1963), 4:203, 194. See also Williams, TheBloody Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644), inibid., 3:127, 202, 240.

11. The argument possessed scattered roots, as in Sebastian Cas-tellio, Concerning Heretics and Whether They Should Be Per-secuted, and How They Should Be Treated (1554), and Dirck Volck-ertszoon Coornhert, Synod of Freedom of Conscience (1582).

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12. William Penn, One Project for the Good of England (1679), inThe Political Writings of William Penn, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Indi-anapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 120. See also Penn, The Great Case ofLiberty of Conscience (1670), in ibid., 101.

13. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1689),ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 32. For limitingstate power to “Civil Interests” or “outward things,” see 26. See alsoPierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary (1708), ed. John Kilcullenand Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 89 (pt.1, ch. 4): “Each Sect looks on it self as the only true Religion”; 133(pt. 1, ch. 10): “Each Party believes it self the Orthodox”; for limit-ing the state to civil matters, see 203, 207 (pt. 2, ch. 6), 301 (pt. 3,ch. 7), 350 (pt. 3, ch. 25).

14. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds.,introduction to From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Re-volution and Religion in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991), 15.

15. John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlighten-ment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19.

16. E.g., Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for ReligiousLiberty (1773); “Religious Petitions Presented to the GeneralAssembly of Virginia, 1774–1802,” microfilm, Virginia State Library.See also Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion andthe First Amendment, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1994), 22; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dis-sent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church andState, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971),1:482.

17. Roger D. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit inAugustan England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

18. Charles Blount, “The Deist: A Satyr on the Parsons: To theTune of Old Simon the King” (unpublished, c. 1686), quoted in Gil-lian Manning, “The Deist: A Satyr on the Parsons,” Seventeenth Cen-tury 8, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 155. The opening lines of the poem cir-culated in various publications that reproduced them without attri-bution. See, e.g., George Flint, The Lunatick (London, n.d.), 1; TheHonest Electors, or, The Courtiers Sent Back with Their Bribes: ANew Ballad Opera (1733), 13–14.

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19. Ralph Wallis, Rome for Good News, or, Good News from Rome:In a Dialogue between a Seminary Priest, and a Supposed Protest-ant, at Large (London, n.d.), 11–12.

20. For information on this period, see J. A. I. Champion, The Pil-lars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies,1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); MichaelWatts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolu-tion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

21. James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists:The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1997), 23–49.

22. See, e.g., Anthony Collins, Priestcraft in Perfection (1710),and the deist Alciphron in George Berkeley, Alciphron: Or theMinute Philosopher (1732), in Alciphron in Focus, ed. David Berman(London: Routledge, 1993), 27. See also Champion, Pillars of Priest-craft Shaken; Mark Goldie, “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism,”in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phil-lipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993), 211; Robert Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Con-troversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1982).

23. For recent thinking on religion and science, see Ronald L.Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Scienceand Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

24. Kerry Walters, Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s RationalInfidels (New York: Prometheus Books, 2011), 8.

25. See 2 Corinthians 10:4–5 and Hebrews 4:12–13.26. Ralph Wallis, More News from Rome, or Magna Charta, Dis-

coursed of between a Poor Man and His Wife (London, 1666), 10–11.27. Ibid.; Charles Blount, Oracles of Reason (London, 1693).28. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1989), 13–22.29. Daniel Defoe, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Pro-

posals for the Establishment of the Church (London, 1702), 16, 23;also referencing the international plight of toleration at 5, 12.

30. The hoax convinced some Tory Anglicans to view the work asone of theirs. Defoe made fun of this fact in More Short-Ways withthe Dissenters (1704), 8. For Anglican responses, see Charles Leslie,

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Reflections upon Some Scandalous and Malicious Pamphlets, Viz. I.The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703), and Mary Astell, AFair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons (1704). See alsoDaniel Brühlmeier, “Daniel Defoe: Dissent, Economics, and Tolera-tion,” in Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus toDefoe, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999),213; Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions—HisLife and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 173–78;Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, 132–35.

31. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1701), 4–5.32. Sammy Basu, “‘Woe unto You That Laugh Now!’: Humor and

Toleration in Overton and Shaftesbury,” in Laursen, Religious Toler-ation, 163.

33. Defoe, True-Born Englishman, 26. Similarly, “Satire, return toour unthankful isle / Secured by Heaven’s regard and William’s toil /To both ungrateful and to both untrue / Rebels to God, and to good-nature too” (56).

34. For related trends in other parts of the North Atlantic world,consider Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural Historyof the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1994); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in BritishAmerica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

35. Defoe, True-Born Englishman, preface (n.p.), 32.36. Shields, Civil Tongues.37. Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).38. Herrick, Radical Rhetoric, 17.39. Douglas J. Den Uyl, forward to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third

Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,Times, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 1:vii.

40. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, in ibid.,2:3. See also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture ofPoliteness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in EarlyEighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), 54–57.

41. Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections, &c., in Characterist-icks, 3:69. Shaftesbury also discussed the religion “espous’d orcountenanc’d by the Magistrate” (65), meaning the state’s

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established religion. Most freethinkers advocated not the separationof church and state but a religion “firmly under civil control.” SeeKlein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 10.

42. Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: Or, Advice to an Author, in Characteri-sticks, 1:121: ancient dialogues “pointed out real Characters andManners: They exhibited ’em alive.”

43. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody; Being aRecital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects, inibid., 3:107.

44. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom ofWit and Humour, in a Letter to a Friend, in ibid., 1:42.

45. Ibid., 40, with “zealots” identified as those who “try the Edgeof Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.”

46. Ibid., 53: “’Twas agreed that there was only one certain andtrue Dress, one single peculiar Air, to which it was necessary allPeople shou’d conform. . . . Men became persecuted thus on everyside.”

47. Ibid., 51: Christians “had made sound Experiment upon oneanother; each Party in their turn.”

48. See Basu, “‘Woe unto You,’” 162–65.49. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 93: “It becomes, upon the

whole, a Matter of nice Speculation.”50. Ibid., 61–80.51. Ibid., 93.52. Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord

Sommers, in Characteristicks, 1:8.53. Ibid., 7. See also Voitle, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 324–33.54. Shaftesbury, Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 7–8. Likewise,

ibid.: “There can be no impartial and free Censure of Manners whereany peculiar Custom or National Opinion is set apart, and not onlyexempted from Criticism, but even flatter’d with the highest Art.”See also Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 19.

55. Basu, “‘Woe unto You,’” 148: “Humor was a mode of tolera-tion,” 154.

56. Shaftesbury, Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 9, 19 (on theapostle Paul): “What Advantage he made of his Sufferings, and howpathetically his Bonds and Stripes were set to view, and often

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pleaded by him, to raise his Characters, and advance the Interest ofChristianity.”

57. Ibid., 18.58. Ibid., 12–13: “Supernatural Charity, has taught us the way of

plaguing one another most devoutly. It has rais’d an Antipathywhich no temporal Interest cou’d ever do. . . . The saving of Souls . .. has become in a manner the chief Care of the Magistrate, and thevery End of Government it-self.” For criticism of intolerance, see9–10, 13–14.

59. Bridget Hill, ed., The First English Feminist: “Reflectionsupon Marriage” and Other Writings by Mary Astell (New York: St.Martin’s, 1986).

60. Edward Fowler, Reflections upon “A Letter Concerning Enthu-siasm, to My Lord *****,” in Another Letter to a Lord (1709), 28.

61. Mary Astell, Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit, inWhich Due Respect Is Had to “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”(1709), 22–23.

62. Ibid., 19.63. Fowler, Reflections, 46. Similarly, see John Tottie, Ridicule, So

Far as It Affects Religion, Consider’d and Censur’d (1734).64. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit, 29; Justin

Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis ofChristian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2003), 12.

65. See Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against theSacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1995), 221.

66. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit, 189–90. Astatute sometimes called the Blasphemy Act was passed in 1698 butnever successfully used.

67. Astell, Bart’lemy Fair, 60, mocks Defoe as “a good Humor’dMan in the Pillory, for no sort of Crime, but a little harmless Wit,and because his Superiors do not understand Raillery!” SeeBackscheider, Daniel Defoe, 102–5. Attempts were also made to pro-secute the deist Matthew Tindal for his The Rights of the ChristianChurch Asserted (1706) as well as those who sold this book. SeeSamuel Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution of Mr. Sare and His

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Servant, for Selling “The Rights of the Christian Church” (London,1709).

68. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 46. Similarly, John Toland,Christianity Not Mysterious (London, 1696), iv, suggests that one “iseither forc’d to keep perpetual Silence, or to propose his Sentimentsto the World, by way of Paradox.”

69. In his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, for instance, Shaftsburyinvokes biblical texts (“I learn from Holy Scripture,” 28) that com-mand believers to “judge the Spirits whether they are of God” (35)as the rationale for a self-analysis that guards against grave andweighty beliefs.

70. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 48–49.71. Thomas Woolston, Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Sa-

viour and Defences of His Discourses, 1727–1730 (New York: Gar-land, 1979), 68.

72. Ibid., 19, 34–35.73. Richard Smalbroke, A Vindication of the Miracles of Our

Blessed Saviour, 2 vols. (London, 1731), 2:vii.74. Woolston, Six Discourses, 20. For the patristic element, see

William H. Trapnell, “What Thomas Woolston Wrote,” British Journ-al for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 13–30.

75. An Account of the Trial of Thomas Woolston, B.D. (London,1729), 3.

76. Edmund Gibson, The Bishop of London’s Pastoral Letter to thePeople of His Diocese (London, 1728), 35. Roger D. Lund, “Irony asSubversion: Thomas Woolston and the Crime of Wit,” in The Mar-gins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response,1660–1750, ed. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995), 170, describes the Woolston affair as “a case in which not thematter of the argument but the witty manner of its presentationprovided the grounds for legal prosecution.”

77. William Holdsworth, A History of the English Law, vol. 8 (Lon-don: Methuen, 1938), 408, quoted in Lund, “Irony as Subversion,”187.

78. Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons ofthe Christian Religion (1724).

79. Anthony Collins, The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered(1727), 415, 432.

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80. Anthony Collins, A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony inWriting (1729), 25, argues that ridicule “is both a proper and neces-sary Method of Discourse in Many Cases, and especially in the Caseof Gravity, when that is attended with Hypocrisy or Imposture, orwith Ignorance, or with soureness of Temper and Persecution; all ofwhich ought to draw after them the Ridicule and Contempt of Soci-ety, which has not other effectual Remedy against such Methods ofImposition.”

81. Ibid., 26. The other referenced texts are 1 Kings 18 andPsalms 2:4.

82. For Hume’s irony, see John Valdimir Price, The Ironic Hume(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).

83. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. DavidFate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000), 102 (1.3.13).

84. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . .. , ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), §10, “Of Mir-acles,” 89–90.

85. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757), in DavidHume: Writings on Religion, ed. Antony Flew (Chicago: Open Court,1996), 147 (9.5), 139–40 (6.12).

86. Timothy S. Yoder, Hume on God: Irony, Deism and GenuineTheism (New York: Continuum, 2008), 47–48.

87. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §11, “Of aParticular Providence and of a Future State,” 90, 99.

88. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of theLanguage of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, vol. 2,Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), 238–329.

89. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and thePosthumous Essays of the Immortality of the Soul and of Suicide, ed.Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 58–76 (pts. 10–11).Even Philo’s famed “confession” at 88 (pt. 12) severs morality fromnatural religion, which “affords no inference that affects human life,or can be the source of any action or forbearance.” See J. C. A.Gaskin, “Hume on Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion toHume, ed. David Fate Norton and Jacqueline Taylor (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008), 480–514.

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90. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abra-ham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25.

91. Jonathan Dickinson, The Scripture-Bishop, or The DivineRight of Presbyterian Ordination and Government (Boston, 1732),3–4.

92. Ibid., i–ii, 1–2.93. See Douglas G. Jacobsen, An Unprov’d Experiment: Religious

Pluralism in Colonial New Jersey (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991).94. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §1, “Of the

Different Species of Philosophy,” 1, 4.95. Dickinson, Scripture-Bishop, 9–10.96. James Wetmore, Eleutherius Enervatus: Or, An Answer to a

Pamphlet, Intitled, The Divine Right of Presbyterian Ordination(New York, 1733), 13.

97. John Beach, A Vindication of the Worship of God According tothe Church of England, from the Aspersions Cast upon It by Mr.Jonathan Dickinson (New York, 1733), 10.

98. Jonathan Dickinson, The Scripture-Bishop Vindicated: A De-fence of the Dialogue between Praelaticus and Eleutherius (Boston,1733), 29.

99. John Witherspoon, A Practical Treatise on Regeneration(1764), in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon (Philadelphia,1802), 2 vols., 2nd ed., ed. William W. Woodward (Harrisonburg, VA:Sprinkle, 2001), 1:76–77.

100. Richard B. Sher and A. Murdoch, “Patronage and Party in theChurch of Scotland,” in Church, Politics and Society: Scotland1408–1929, ed. Norman MacDougall (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983),197–220; Robert K. Donovan, “The Popular Party of the Church ofScotland and the American Revolution,” in Scotland and America inthe Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edin-burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 81–99.

101. Thomas Miller, ed., The Selected Writings of John Wither-spoon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 49.

102. John Witherspoon, A Serious Apology for “The EcclesiasticalCharacteristics” (Edinburgh, 1763), 5, 41, 30.

103. John Witherspoon, Ecclesiastical Characteristics, or, The Ar-cana of Church Policy (Glasgow, 1753), in Miller, Selected Writingsof John Witherspoon, 61.

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104. Ibid., 67–68. Two further examples of satire on moderatereadings of sacred texts are at 72, 73.

105. Ibid., 88–89.106. Ibid., 79.107. Ibid., 99, 79.108. Witherspoon, Serious Apology, 15–16, 36. Witherspoon

quotes the cited passage as an example of biblical irony: “Many goodworks have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those worksdo ye stone me?” (16). He also defends irony by quoting from thechurch fathers Irenaeus, Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine (16–17).

109. Ibid., 16.110. John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence over the Pas-

sions of Men (Philadelphia, 1776), in Political Sermons of the Amer-ican Founding Era, 1703–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis:Liberty Fund, 1991), 538.

111. Marci A. Hamilton, “The Reverend John Witherspoon and theConstitutional Convention,” in Law and Religion: A Critical Antho-logy, ed. Stephen M. Feldman (New York: New York University Press,2000), 61.

112. John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. JackScott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 66, contra MarkA. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for aChristian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Prin-ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 43: “With Hutcheson,[Francis] Alison, and most other eighteenth-century moral philo-sophers, Witherspoon set aside the Augustinian distrust of humannature.”

113. Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 86.114. James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Reli-

gious Assessments” (1785), §1: “Religion or the duty which we oweto our Creator and the manner of discharging it . . . is precedent,both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims ofCivil Society.”

115. James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radical-ism: Non-conformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society, re-pr. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129.

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116. John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 19, 1776, in The Let-ters of John and Abigail Adams, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York:Penguin Books, 2004), 145.

117. James Murray, Sermons to Asses (London, 1768), ii.118. James Murray, Sermons to Doctors in Divinity; Being the Se-

cond Volume of Sermons to Asses (London, 1771), 41.119. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794), in Paine:

Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997), 284.

120. Murray, Sermons to Asses, 20.121. Murray, Sermons to Doctors in Divinity, 56.122. Paine, Age of Reason, 268.123. Murray, Sermons to Asses, 155, 186, 9, 40.124. Ibid., v–vi, 5.125. Murray, Sermons to Doctors in Divinity, ix–x.126. Ibid., 2, 11, 25, 29, 41, 48.127. Ibid., 26–28.128. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), in Kuklick, Paine:

Political Writings, 13.129. Paine, Age of Reason, 275, 284.130. E.g., ibid., 271: “The Christian theory is little else than the

idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposesof power and revenue.”

131. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part II (1795), in ThomasPaine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library ofAmerica, 1995), 747. I thank Chris Beneke for bringing this quote tomy attention.

132. Paine, Age of Reason, Part I, 272, 276, 278, 280, 281, 299.133. Ibid., 299, 302.134. James Muir, An Examination of the Principles Contained in

“The Age of Reason” (Baltimore: S. and J. Adams, 1795), 9.135. R v. Williams, 26 St. Tr. 653 (1797), quoted in Ivan Hare,

“Blasphemy and Incitement to Religious Hatred: Free SpeechDogma and Doctrine,” in Extreme Speech and Democracy, ed. Hareand James Weinstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 303.

136. Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall ofTransatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 2011), 42.

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137. Ronald Dworkin, “The Right to Ridicule,” New York Reviewof Books 53, no. 5 (March 23, 2006), accessed November 23, 2012,www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/mar/23/the-right-to-ridicule/.

138. Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2012), 105–43.

139. Ibid., 230.140. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,”

Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 225; Politic-al Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993),xxiv–xxix, 10, 154.

141. Contrasting perspectives include, on one side, Steven K.Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State inNineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,2010), and Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall ofSeparation between Church and State (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2002), and on the other, Douglas Laycock, “‘Non-preferential’ Aid to Religion: A False Claim about Original Intent,”William and Mary Law Review 27, no. 5 (1986): 875–923, andLawrence W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the FirstAmendment, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1994).

142. Waldron, Harm in Hate Speech, 210–33.143. John Locke, “First Tract on Government” (1660), in Locke:

Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997), 5.

144. Chris Beneke, “The ‘Catholic Spirit Prevailing in Our Coun-try’: America’s Moderate Religious Revolution,” in The First Preju-dice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed.Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2011), 275.

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CHAPTER 2

The ProductiveObscene: Philip Rothand the ProfanityLoop

JACQUES BERLINERBLAU

Maybe that’s all I really am, a lapper of cunt, theslavish mouth for some woman’s hole. Eat! And sobe it! Maybe the wisest solution for me is to live onall fours! Crawl through life feasting on pussy, andleave the righting of wrongs and the fathering offamilies to the upright creatures! Who needs monu-ments erected in his name, when there is this ban-quet walking in the streets?—Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

By 1969, when Philip Roth published the staggeringly

obscene effusions in our epigraph, he could do so with im-punity.1 The volcanic legal controversies about obscenity inliterature, which had spewed so much sulfur from the turnof the century to the early 1960s, were a smoldering relic ofthe past.2 The societies for the suppression of vice and thetextual inquisitions that the Post Office led in the era ofComstock laws were losing steam.3 The undercover raids ofbookstores in which police officers and district attor-neys—two cohorts not renowned for the breadth of their hu-manistic erudition—raked the shelves in search of salaciousnew fiction were drawing down.

It was the 1957 Roth v. United States (the plaintiff,Samuel Roth, bears no relation to our author) that, para-doxically, set the stage for what fast became a new culturalreality. Roth ruled that “obscenity is not within the area ofconstitutionally protected freedom of speech or press.”4 Yetwithin a decade, obscenity in American literature, art,cinema, and so on gushed forth with unparalleled fre-quency, openness, and constitutional protection. The na-tion’s judicial system soon ceased to debate whether workssuch as James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chat-terley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, VladimirNabokov’s Lolita, or Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, among manyothers, could be published, sold, or even read.5 The juridic-al lava about the communal dangers that obscene passagesin fiction presented could no longer threaten novelistsholed up in their studios, university offices, or writers’colonies.6

In the wake of Roth, a “circular, self-nourishing processof liberalization” was afoot.7 The 1957 decision defined ob-scene material as “material which deals with sex in a man-ner appealing to prurient interest”—that is, having a tend-ency to excite lustful thoughts. The arbiter would be “the

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average person, applying contemporary community stand-ards.”8 Writing for the majority was Justice William Bren-nan—a delicious irony, since his subsequent rulings wouldestablish him as something like the patron saint of Americ-an free speech.

In the 1960s, Brennan was instrumental in the processthat “turn[ed] on its head” Roth’s severe views on the con-stitutionality of obscenity.9 This was a decade when thejustice fully explored the logic of his aside in Roth that onlyworks “utterly without redeeming social importance” wouldbe denied First Amendment protection.10 This moment inAmerican legal thought made much of his 1957 insight that“sex and obscenity are not synonyms.”11 And it was a timewhen experts—as opposed to the state or “the average per-son”—were increasingly empowered to judge the merits ofliterary fiction.12 So thoroughgoing was the impact of the“Brennan Doctrine” that law enforcement officials aroundthe country mostly (and to some, inexplicably) ignored re-taliatory decisions intended to reinvigorate censorship stat-utes, such as the Warren Burger court’s 1973 collection ofcases Miller v. California.13

From the point of view of artistic freedom, this was a newAmerica. One of Philip Roth’s protagonists helpfully chartswhere the winds were blowing. A character living in 1973croons about the virtues of the porn magazine that he wasallegedly publishing, “Sex is changing in America—peopleare swinging, eating pussy, women are fucking more, mar-ried men suck cocks, so Lickety Split reflects that.”14 Theliterature of the period reflects that as well; obscene liter-ary expression was increasingly commonplace and decreas-ingly contested.

Obscenity without legal obstacles, profanity without pen-alty, blasphemy without banishment—these were the new

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standards that creative persons enjoyed (and for the mostpart continue to enjoy) in the United States. Writers whoexuberantly trafficked in profanity-laden, obscene, and oc-casionally blasphemous prose suddenly found fewer legalobstacles standing between them and uninhibited creativeself-expression. What did confront them, however, was notnecessarily inconsequential: the censure and condemna-tion, as well as the hysterical sanctimony, of some of theircompatriots.

What happens, then, when artistic products that may en-joy legal protections encounter ferocious cultural contesta-tion? There exists little theoretical conjecture about how of-fensive literature (and by extension, theater, art, cinema,comedy, and so forth) functions under circumstances inwhich its offensiveness cannot be subjected to legal pen-alty.15 How do we theorize the relation between the profan-er and the profaned in such liberal conditions? Under lessliberal regimes, the profaner is simply fined or imprisoned.But what happens when the profaner has every “right” toply his or her craft?

Our inquiry begins with four theoretical rules of thumb.16

First, disputes about obscenity are always relational. Thisobvious, albeit crucial, insight impacts every aspect of ouranalysis, including how one defines and understands ob-scenity. Simply put—and with all due respect to the defini-tion that Roth adumbrates—“the obscene” is what a givenindividual, community, or society claims to be obscene (thelaw, the final authority in such matters, may or may notconcur). The artist and others, in turn, riposte that thework under assault is no such thing. In some instances,they may double down and gleefully declare that while thework is obscene, it is nevertheless a constitutionally protec-ted form of expression.17

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Second, and in accord with this relational approach, wewill need to be cognizant of what I will call the sociological“profanity loop.” Participating in the loop are at least twoparties. The first—though not necessarily always the initiat-or—is a profaner, in the form of the artist. The second is(are) the profaned. The latter might include religious con-stituencies, ethnic minorities, pressure groups of variousstripes, scholars outraged about stereotypical depictions,incensed aesthetes, and so forth. As we shall see, the mostideologically diverse and even mutually antagonistic groupsmay draw together in a coalition of the profaned.

The profaner and the profaned typically feel that they in-habit completely opposite sides of a moral spectrum and aredivided by an unbridgeable abyss. The truth is that—andhere I come to my third rule—their relationship is unavoid-ably dialectical. They provoke and invoke each other.

Roth himself, in broad terms, expressed a similarly dia-lectical understanding of human social interaction. In TheCounterlife, his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, muses, “Thetreacherous imagination is everybody’s maker—we are allthe invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjur-ing up everyone else. We are all each other’s authors.”18 Aprofanity loop in the arts suggests that the belligerents, es-pecially the profaners, are not only spurred but also influ-enced by the cycle of outrage; the outrage becomes part ofthe art.

Fourth and finally, before I get to the empirical data thatis Roth’s oeuvre, a theoretical distinction needs to be drawnbetween artists who intentionally and consciously seek toenrage particular constituencies and those who inadvert-ently infuriate their auditors. Roth, playing the role of pro-faner to perfection, virtually dared his readers to take

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umbrage at his writing. And for much of his career, that isprecisely what they did.

THE OUTRAGES OF PHILIP ROTH: A SAMPLER

Philip Milton Roth almost certainly ranked among the na-tion’s most controversial and reviled writers in the 1960sand especially the 1970s. (Nowadays, by contrast, he is oneof America’s, and the world’s, most garlanded writers.)19

He earned his infamy mostly in the period following the re-lease of his best-selling 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.The Newark, New Jersey, native, however, had ruffled feath-ers—Jewish feathers in particular—since his debut on theAmerican literary stage with his breakthrough 1959 collec-tion, Goodbye, Columbus. He continued to provoke outragefor the next half century.

Still, not all of Roth’s novels are cut from the same scan-dalous cloth. Contributions such as Letting Go (1961),When She Was Good (1966), The Plot against America(2004), and Everyman (2006) are relatively free of offensivecontent. It is, therefore, not accurate to say that everysingle one of this writer’s works is a testament to obscenity.It would be more accurate to say that in each decade of hisprodigious career, one can point to novels that evince thecharacteristic Rothian provocations.

Posterity’s first encounter with Roth’s fiction includes aview of a woman’s posterior. The very first paragraph ofGoodbye, Columbus set the tone for more than half a cen-tury of transgressive prose. A first-person narrative voiceintroduces us to the auburn-haired Brenda Patimkin. Ourinitial glance at this intriguing young woman occurspoolside, as she adjusts her swim gear: “Her hands sud-denly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her

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suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what fleshhad been showing back where it belonged. My bloodjumped.”20

Roth’s next two novels (Letting Go and When She wasGood) are relatively sedate affairs. Aside from his festeringconflicts with Jewish communal leaders in the early 1960s(triggered by Goodbye, Columbus), the author did not fig-ure centrally in the national debates that were then ragingabout obscene literature. Yet by the time he published Port-noy’s Complaint, the anything-goes atmosphere of the dec-ade and the relaxed censorship laws of the Brennan eraseem to have influenced his work.21

Portnoy’s established Roth as a writer who exulted in thedepiction of sexual taboos and antireligious themes (he of-ten couples the two, interestingly, in his fiction). Much ofthis text focuses on his masturbatory deflowering of socks,apple cores, and a piece of liver. To cite one memorablepassage:

I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that Ibought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on theway to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast ofit, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first piece. My firstpiece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled around my cockin the bathroom at three-thirty—and then had again on the end ofa fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor in-nocent family of mine.

So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked myown family’s dinner.22

It is also a work that scratches at some of the woundsthat Roth had allegedly inflicted on Jews a decade earlierwith the stories of Goodbye, Columbus. Alexander Portnoyrants that his people are “sucking and sucking on that sour

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grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is comingout of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Dome a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage upyour suffering ass—I happen also to be a human being!”23

The experienced Roth reader knows that, for all of his self-hating shtick, he happens to be quite fond of Judaism. (Thesame cannot be said about his relationship with Christian-ity; see below.)

In his disappointing follow-up to Portnoy’s Complaint, thepolitical satire Our Gang, the author again indulges his rib-ald proclivities. He imagines this dialogue among RichardNixon’s handlers:

Spiritual Coach: Jane Fonda. Has she ever appeared nude in afilm?

Highbrow Coach: I can’t honestly say I remember seeing herpudenda on the screen, Reverend, but I think I can vouch for herbreasts.

Spiritual Coach: With aureole or without?

Highbrow Coach: I believe with.

Spiritual Coach: And her buttocks?

Highbrow Coach: Yes, I believe we’ve seen her buttocks. Indeed,they constitute a large part of her appeal.24

In his 1983 The Anatomy Lesson, a character masquerad-ing as a pornographer claims that he rejected a cache ofpictures portraying Playboy’s Hugh Hefner in flagrante de-licto. He rationalizes his refusal to publish these images asfollows: “‘You think it’s news that Hugh Hefner fucks? Getme pictures of the Pope fucking—then we can do busi-ness.’”25

Even in the domain of literary criticism—to which Rothhas contributed some very fine essays—one may identify his

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characteristic irreverence. This is a writer who could de-scribe The Scarlet Letter as follows: “Hawthorne gave usHester Prynne, the brave adulteress of Puritan Boston,whose cunt, to paraphrase an ancient, was her fate.”26

In some of his later fiction, the profanity becomes consid-erably darker in tone—in both its existential and its miso-gynistic dimensions. The unforgettable graveyard masturb-ation scenes in the crackling 1995 Sabbath’s Theater arepoignant examples. Standing by his deceased lover’s tomb-stone, the deranged protagonist Mickey Sabbath observesthat he wanted his ejaculate “to drill a hole in her grave! Todrive through the coffin’s lid to Drenka’s mouth!”27

Another of Roth’s recurring alter egos is the professor ofliterature David Kepesh. In a 1972 work, The Breast,Kepesh metamorphoses into a six-foot mammary and sub-sequently fantasizes about anally penetrating a hospitalworker with his enlarged nipple.28 When last sighted, in2001’s The Dying Animal, Professor Kepesh was whingingabout a former student’s lackluster fellating technique: “Ibegan coming, she abruptly stopped and received it like anopen drain. I could have been coming into a wastepaperbasket.”29

In a recent interview with Tina Brown, Roth chuckled atthe “green dildo scene” in his 2009 The Humbling. WhenBrown asked him whether it was “a hard thing to write a sexscene with a woman in [sic] a green dildo,” he replied, “Noharder than writing a sex scene without a woman with agreen dildo, really.”30 In any case, even nearing the age ofeighty, Roth could imagine encounters such as this one:

Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy’s lips and nippleswith her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down aways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo. Pegeen did nothave to force her open. She did not have to say a word—he

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imagined that if either one of them did begin to speak, it would bein a language unrecognizable to him. The green cock plunged inand out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow atfirst, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy’scurves and hollows moved in unison with it.31

Not all of Roth’s provocations, however, are of a sexuallygraphic nature. He also traffics in anti-Christian and moregenerally antireligious sentiments. While there is someoverlap, profanity and obscenity are not necessarily thesame thing as the more religiously tinged concept of blas-phemy.32

Roth verges on blasphemy in his treatment not only ofJudaism but of Christianity as well. One thinks of a remark-able 1987 exchange (first made public in 1998) with thewriter Mary McCarthy. There she chided the novelist for theway he depicted Christians in The Counterlife (1986) andaccused him of harboring a “pathology—a severe case ofanti-anti-Semitism” for the manner in which he sketchedEnglish conceptions of Jews.33 For example, in one scene ofthe novel, an old woman in a restaurant complains aloudabout the terrible odor of Jews.34

Elsewhere in Counterlife’s metafictional extravaganza,Zuckerman, the central protagonist, attends Christmas EveMass and proceeds to unspool a variety of “unseasonal ob-servations.” One of these occurs while he observes the in-teraction between the head of a youth choir and its star per-former. Scouring their movements from afar, Zuckermancannot restrain himself from detecting “a little whiff of ho-moerotic pedophilia” in the older man’s treatment of theyoung boy.35 The discerning reader may again notice theproximity of sexual and antireligious themes.

Perhaps we should expect nothing less from a writer whohad earlier referred to Jesus as “The Pansy of Palestine.”36

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In the same work, Portnoy’s father exclaims, “I assure you,Alex, you are never going to hear such a mishegoss ofmixed-up crap and disgusting nonsense as the Christian re-ligion in your entire life.”37 In The Anatomy Lesson, Rothspeaks of “the voodoo healer, Dr. Jesus Christ.”38

Lest one think that Roth has confined his antireligious ef-fusions to Christianity, there is Zuckerman’s visit to theWailing Wall in Jerusalem. Observing Jews communing withtheir God at this holiest of sites, he demurs, “I couldn’t helpbut be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplify-ing as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect ofthe human mind.”39

PREMEDITATED PROFANITY

“Why should writers alone,” one of Roth’s most enervatedprotagonists kvetched, “get to say the unsayable?”40 It’s arevealing query, and as evident above, Roth does in fact ap-pear to have luxuriated in the expression of sentiments thatpolite society would rather leave unexpressed. Throughouthis massive oeuvre, now totaling more than thirty books,the author has consistently endeavored to shock hisreaders.

As the literary critic Debra Shostak observed, “Roth hasseemed not just to risk, but even to welcome, censure.”41

Frank Kermode was spot on when he commented that “whatdistinguishes Roth’s [work] is outrageousness.”42 In fact,the theme of transgression is “omnipresent.”43 Roth him-self, without much prodding, has conceded as much: “I oc-casionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind. I think, ‘Howhe is going to hate this!’ That can be just the encourage-ment I need.”44 In terms of the profanity loop, I should note

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that Roth is anticipating the reaction of the profaned evenbefore he profanes on the written page!

What must be stressed, then, is that Roth’s transgres-sions are intentional. They are not, however, gratuitous orsecondary to his work. As we shall see, his offenses are es-sential to the broad thematic import of the fiction he pro-duces.45 The purposefulness of his boundary crossingprovides a contrast with literary provocateurs of yore. Read-ing through Edward de Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Every-where, a magisterial study of twentieth-century obscenitytrials, one is struck by the incredulity that afflicted literarydefendants.46 Most simply could not believe that their workas a whole would be subjected to censorship for this or thatobscenity. It was all a surprise, and a tragedy, to them.

This was not the case for Roth, which probably also holdstrue for most writers in the West today. Communicationsand knowledge being what they are, fictionalists nowadaysare usually cognizant of precisely where the boundaries ofobscenity are situated. In fact, many writers consciouslyfactor their audiences’ reception of their work into theirart. Roth is a case in point: he fully understands that he isbeing offensive.

In fact, Roth has used his fiction to explore the act oftransgression. Even in his earliest stories, the author ru-minates on how one goes about breaking the rules, on howone effects the transition from “nice Jewish boy” to “theJewboy” (his parlance for the libidinous, outrageous, so-cially unacceptable Jew).47

In a youthful short story, “The Conversion of the Jews,”the protagonist Ozzie Freedman asks at the very momentwhen he is about to scandalize his community, “Can this beme?”48 Continuing to ponder the dilemma, he likens him-self to a thief who “crams the money in his pockets and

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scoots out the window.” As he is about to perform his sacri-legious outrage (threatening to commit suicide by plungingfrom a rooftop unless the entire Jewish community downbelow says they believe in Jesus Christ), he answers his ex-istential query in the affirmative: “Suddenly you know it’syou.”49

The decisive passage demonstrating Roth’s studied con-templation of the process of transgression is in Portnoy’sComplaint. There his “cunt-crazy” lead character, AlexanderPortnoy, reflects on his boundary-crossing past, “The lessonmay have been learned that to break the law, all you have todo is—just go ahead and break it! All you have to do is stoptrembling and quaking and finding it unimaginable andbeyond you: All you have to do, is do it!”50 And do it PhilipRoth did! While almost any serious author will inadvertentlyoffend certain groups and sensibilities, Roth’s outrageshave certainly not been adventitious. Upsetting norms anddisturbing pieties would appear to be a moral imperative forhim. His provocation is purposeful, with deep philosophicalmoorings in his thought.

Throughout his career, Roth railed against what he callsthe “pastoral.” By this he means hypocritical, shallow, arti-ficial, and patently false conceptions of life. These, he in-timates, abound in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, towhich he must retort with his antipastoral world view. God(if he exists) is severe, not loving. Humans are creaturely,not saintly. Christianity is a religion of violence, not love.Death results in nothingness, not heaven or hell. Betrayal isthe stuff of life. A pastoral, for Roth, is a decidedly goyischething, an inversion of lived reality, a misprision against theartist’s obligation “to expose the unspeakable truth.”51

The late literary critic Mark Krupnick drew attention toRoth’s proclivity for antipastoral metaphors, such as images

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centering on excrement. These symbols point to the funda-mental truth that we live “a shit-filled life.” “He has in-creasingly found loss, humiliation, and death at the heart ofthings,” Krupnick remarked. “He has found the basic, mostelemental principle of things in excrement. The protagon-ists of his most recent books have in the end been overcomeby storms of shit.”52

Roth’s use of obscenity and profanity is the form thatspeaks to the contents of his fiction. Thus when askedabout the obscenity in Portnoy’s Complaint, he was adam-ant that the it furthered the novel’s thematic. Of AlexanderPortnoy, he wrote, “He is obscene because he wants to besaved. . . . I wanted to raise obscenity to the level of a sub-ject.”53 Regardless of what the reader may think of Roth’scanon, his experiments in obscenity are not conducted formere titillation. Rather, obscenity is constitutive of life; fic-tion bows to this truth.

THE PROFANED RESPOND

Expressions of profanity, I have suggested, dialecticallytrigger expressions of outrage. The context in which thisdialectic played out in the 1960s and 1970s was quite differ-ent from that of previous decades. Unlike writers of bygoneeras, Roth was not threatened with legal sanctions for hisindiscretions. District attorneys and vice societies did notseek his arrest and prosecution. He did not have to mountan impassioned defense of expressive liberties in front of askeptical jury.

None of this means, however, that he lacked for vocal andvehement detractors. Roth was subjected to the perfervidcounterthrusts of the profaned. He was skewered for beinga self-hating Jew, a pervert, a misogynist, a racist, an enemy

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of common decency, and—naturally—a mediocre writer. Hedealt with this outrage in the way that a sculptor deals withclay, shaping it into not only more obscenity but also liter-ary reflections on all of those who played a role in the pro-fanity loop.

Roth’s decades-long skirmish with the Jewish communitybegan after the appearance of Goodbye, Columbus, forwhich he received the National Book Award. In 1984 hecomplained to an interviewer, “They’d never really got offmy ass for publishing Goodbye, Columbus, which was con-sidered in some circles to be my Mein Kampf.”54 AsKrupnick observed, “Roth’s own career has been markedfrom the start by attempts to mortify him. Goodbye, Colum-bus (1959) stirred up the indignation of rabbis and otherspokespersons of the organized Jewish community. The fa-miliar cry of anti-Semitism went up, and it has been heardsince then at various times.”55

Rabbi Saul Teplitz complained that Roth “constantly de-picts the Jewish characters in his short stories and novels asdepraved and lecherous creatures.” He quoted anotherrabbi wondering aloud whether, for this author, the world“would be a much better and happier place without‘Jews.’”56 Some Jewish religious leaders made careers outof anathematizing the young literary phenom from Newark.

Incensed about his treatment of Jewish subjects, the poetand author Jeremy Larner complained in 1960, “Roth,however, seeks only to cheapen the people he writes about.”“He cheats himself,” Larner sighed, “and cheats his readersof the truth.”57 The sports writer Harold Ribalow com-plained in 1963 about “what I felt was a violence againstJudaism on the part of the author.”58 Likewise, the journal-ist Charles Angoff lamented Goodbye, Columbus’s “almosttotal lack of understanding of Jewish life in America.”59

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The invective halted for most of the latter half of the1960s, when, as noted above, Roth was relatively inoffensivein his prose and thematics.60 But with the publication ofthe anything-goes Portnoy’s Complaint, it seemed as if hebecame Public Literary Enemy No. 1 in the American Jewishcommunity and beyond.61

Marie Syrkin unloaded on Roth as a “frequently nasty”writer. She accused his character Alexander Portnoy of be-ing “a total phony . . . and a rebuke to all those Jews whoget high grades and profess to be socially involved.” Syrkinterminated her screed with an accusation that would hauntRoth: “Within the trappings of the old-hat Jewish joke lurksa savage anti-Jewish stereotype, even more old-hat, and notat all funny.”62

Portnoy’s Complaint not only exposed an intergeneration-al rift between Roth and the Jewish community—for itscentral protagonist lampooned the ignorance, hypocrisy,and philistinism of his Jewish elders—but triggered an on-going series of confrontations with female writers andscholars, some of whom exemplified the burgeoning femin-ist consciousness of the era. Marya Mannes proffered a dis-sent from laudatory assessments of Portnoy’s Complaintand charged that Roth “succeeds brilliantly in generatingrevulsion.” Mannes—who had earlier sacked the comedianLenny Bruce during one of his many run-ins with thelaw—accused Roth of practicing “the pornographer’s trade.”She went on to complain that “not only does he sit on life’stoilet seat; he examines, lovingly, the bowl beneath.”63

In her classic Sexual Politics, Kate Millett devotes half aparagraph to Roth, and not a flattering one. As she en-thuses, “Portnoy’s long kvetch is a hilarious demonstrationof how elaborate cultural penis-worship may produce, in aman of intelligence or sensitivity, a monumental infantilism

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whose only satisfactions are a contradictory blend ofonanistic self-deprecation and the cheap glory of settlingold minority scores in the sexual exploitation of women.”64

The literary scholar Mary Allen accused Roth of voicing“enormous rage and disappointment with womankind.”65

The general outrage stimulated by Portnoy’s Complaint,which sold millions of copies and was translated into atleast nineteen languages, often spilled over into assess-ments of Roth’s qualifications as a writer.66 The snow-balling coalition of the profaned now acquired those whoobjected to him on aesthetic grounds. As Robert Alteropined, “Roth suffered, rather, from a general deficiency inthe sympathetic imagination of humanity. . . . This defi-ciency of sympathy expresses itself in a kind of vendettaagainst human nature.”67 Syrkin did not find “Roth’s ob-scenity at all original. It is therefore hard to understandwhat new dimension Roth believes he has given to the pub-lic usage of obscenity. . . . Obscenity is achieved when thewriter shows not human beings animated by emotion butmerely organs in friction. This contemptuous dismember-ment of personality Roth aims for and achieves adnauseam.”68

The literary critic J. Mitchell Morse lamented Roth’sfame: “As I write, he is for the time being Lord of all, thehottest brand name in the market. By now, everybody knowsenough about him, and I don’t find him worth discussing atlength. Philip Roth belongs in the same abject bag as LeoRosten, Harry Golden, Myron Cohen, and Sam Levenson.”Morse rated Roth a mere “servile entertainer.”69

But perhaps the most famous and spectacular of all thecriticisms of Roth’s profanity emanated from one of theperiod’s leading literary grandees, Irving Howe. Roth couldparry insults from rabbis, feminists, sports writers,

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journalists, and even obscure professors—let us never losesight of what strange bedfellows constituted this particularcoalition of the profaned. But Howe was precisely the sortof Grand Man of Belles Lettres whose opinions had staturein the pantheon of American high culture, which the agileRoth was in the process of scaling.70

Back in 1959, Howe had defended Goodbye, Columbusagainst the strictures of the Jewish community.71 But onreading Portnoy’s Complaint, his assessment of Rothworsened considerably. In 1972, in what is now probably thesingle most famous riposte to a Roth novel, Howe deridedthe author’s creative vision as “deeply marred by vulgarity,”by which he meant “the impulse to submit the rich sub-stance of human experience, sentiment, value, and aspira-tion to a radically reductive leveling or simplification.”72

This chapter notes above that in Roth’s aesthetic, ob-scene form speaks to obscene content. Herein lies one ofthe points of contention with Howe. Roth believes that hu-man experience is, in fact, deeply marred by vulgarity(among other things) and hence should be represented assuch. “Stupidity happens unfortunately to be real,” Zucker-man declares, “and no less capable of governing the mindthan fear, lust, or anything else.”73 What was “reductiveleveling” for Howe was truth for Roth.

Any student who examined the loop between profanersand their profaned critics would not be surprised by Howe’sphilippic or any of the other interventions predicated on dif-fering concerns. What is surprising, however, is whathappened next. Instead of passively submitting to the bat-tering that he received from his critics, Roth reloaded andproceeded to fictionalize his pain in ways that make us re-think the creative potential of ordeals concerning obscenityand culture wars.

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ROTH STRIKES BACK: EXTENDING THE LOOP,“APERTURES SPUTTERING”

In her tell-all Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, ClaireBloom recounts a variety of unflattering anecdotes abouther former husband Philip Roth. One of these concerns hisreaction to a middling review of the 1993 OperationShylock. “John Updike’s grudging estimation in The NewYorker,” Bloom reveals, “came as a great blow to Philip’smorale.” She goes on to insinuate that Updike’s evaluation,as well as other negative assessments, led to Roth’s physicaland psychic breakdown.74

This anecdote demonstrates how attuned artists may beto their critical reception; they do not appreciate what theymay see as the profanation of their own work. There is, ad-mittedly, a certain type of creative soul who may remain ob-livious to criticism hurled in his or her direction. Roth,however, is more the rule than the exception. As one of hischaracters, himself a novelist, phrased it, “Sooner or later,there comes to every writer the two-thousand-, three-thousand-, five-thousand-word lashing that doesn’t juststing for the regulation seventy-two hours, but rankles allhis life.”75

Roth was majorly rankled by the critique he received fol-lowing Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Thefirst full-blown fictional symptoms of this anguish are evid-ent in the 1979 novel The Ghost Writer.76 This fine bookcame on the heels of a run of novels that achieved nowherenear the commercial success of Portnoy’s Complaint, in-cluding Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972), The GreatAmerican Novel (1973), My Life as a Man (1974), and TheProfessor of Desire (1977). Creatively speaking, Roth ap-peared to be leveling off in 1979, still reeling from the lash-ing and notoriety that he experienced post-Portnoy’s.

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Roth’s innovation in The Ghost Writer reinvigorated hiscareer for decades thereafter. Employing the techniques ofwhat is variously known as metafiction or autofiction, he re-introduced the character of Nathan Zuckerman—whom wefirst met in a different iteration in Roth’s first postmodernexperiment, My Life as a Man.77 Zuckerman, it would ap-pear, is some sort of fictionalized version of Roth. He is fea-tured in nine novels, becoming increasingly quiet until hislast sighting, in the 2007 Exit Ghost.78

The critic Alan Cooper coined the term ZuckerRoth tomake sense of the bewildering overlap between the fictionaland nonfictional personae.79 The question of whether Zuck-erman is literally Roth—whose answer Roth has doneeverything he can to playfully obfuscate—has preoccupiedcritics for years and need not detain us here.80 For our pur-poses, what is essential is the bufferlike role that Zucker-man plays in Roth’s fiction. The wearing of this mask haspermitted the author to make his own contribution to whatI have called the profanity loop.

Prior to the 1960s, the profanity loop was incomplete innot allowing the profaner the freedom required to respondto outraged critics. It went something like this: A perceivedliterary obscenity outraged some persons somewhere, whoroused themselves to action and initiated legal proceedingsas they surged into a loosely affiliated coalition of the pro-faned. That led, often enough, to the punishment and cen-sure of the artist (if not the publishing house and assortedbooksellers). It also led to heartache: from Joyce toLawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and Radclyffe Hall—all writerswhose work was subjected to lengthy, expensive, and well-publicized inquisitions. The process pulverized theseartists.

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By the 1960s, however, with the federal governmentgradually backing out of these disputes, a new equation de-veloped. Obscenity led not to legal injunction but merely tothe outrage of the profaned. With the playing field leveledand the latter no longer in possession of what AntonioGramsci might have called the coercive apparatus of thestate, authors were free to blaspheme with impunity.81

Roth’s work demonstrates a new possibility in the loop,whereby the profaner strikes back. The artist modulates thecritique received into the key of his or her art. The equationnow becomes: profanity leads to the outrage of the pro-faned, which in turn triggers the profaner to create moreart about the encounter itself. When the London SundayTimes asked if he had an “inflamed Jewish readership” priorto publishing Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth railed against Jew-ish detractors who “wouldn’t let up, no matter what I wrote.So I thought finally, ‘Well, you want it, I’ll give it to you.’And out came Portnoy, apertures sputtering.”82 Metafictionprovides contemporary writers with a stunning vehicle forpayback.

Ironically, the activism of the coalition of the profanedtends to heighten attention to the offending work of art, toradiate the abominations far and wide. The profaned be-come unwitting contributors to the further creation and dis-semination of what they see as the unspeakable. Is it unfairthat artistic work that may demonize, let’s say, a minority isproffered so many advantages—the constitutional right tooffend and then to reoffend? Perhaps, but society’s crucialneed for free expression is an obvious counterbalancingconcern. In liberal democracies it may sometimes beprudent for those in the coalition of the profaned to be lesspublicly outraged, lest they inadvertently contribute to thesuccess of the profaner.

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In any case, it was in The Ghost Writer that Roth began torevisit the psychic pain he experienced after the publicationof Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Lookingback in 1984 at that period of his life, he spoke of “thecensorious small-mindedness and shame-ridden xenophobiathat I ran into from the official Jews who wanted me to shutup.”83 As he embarked on the metafictional stage of his ca-reer, it became clear that he would not be shut up. Zucker-man would be his mouthpiece.

The Ghost Writer, a winking bildungsroman, features ayoung Zuckerman, who spends the night at the home of hisidol, the highly revered albeit nearly forgotten Jewish writerE. I. Lonoff.84 The twenty-three-year-old arrives at hismentor’s home in emotional duress. He has been estrangedfrom his father owing to a short story he wrote about a fam-ily inheritance dispute gone terribly awry. A nervous DocZuckerman, Nathan’s father, had shown the unpublishedmanuscript to one of Newark’s most influential Jews, a cer-tain Judge Leopold Wapter. The latter proceeded to delivera philippic.

In a lengthy letter, the jurist asks young Zuckerman,“What set of aesthetic values makes you think that thecheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is moretruthful than the sublime?” Wapter was just getting intogear. He terminates his inquisition with “Can you honestlysay that there is anything in your short story that would notwarm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a JosephGoebbels?”85 It does not seem a coincidence that MarieSyrkin, mentioned above, invoked Streicher in her jeremiadabout Portnoy’s Complaint.86

Zuckerman’s resolution of the psychological agony thatthe twin scowls of the paternal and legal authorities createis to conjure up a most remarkable fantasy about marrying,

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of all people, Anne Frank. Through a narrative twist too de-tailed to mention here, he convinces himself that unbe-known to the world, Frank survived the Nazi death campsand made her way to the United States. In a remote cornerof western Massachusetts she serves as the archivist andlover of her professor E. I. Lonoff.

In one of the most dramatic passages in all of Roth’s fic-tion, young Zuckerman emotes vindictively as he pondersthe possibilities of marrying this saint of Jewish suffering:“To be wed somehow to you, I thought, my unassailable ad-vocate, my invulnerable ally, my shield against theircharges of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous in-forming! Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me beforemy outraged elders of this idiotic indictment! Heedless ofJewish feeling? Indifferent to Jewish survival? Brutish abouttheir well-being? Who dares to accuse of such unthinkingcrimes the husband of Anne Frank!”87 Who dares indeed!

Having invoked his own ghosts and poked Jewish detract-ors in the eye by imagining Frank as Zuckerman’s wife,Roth took on his “expert” antagonists in the third Zucker-man novel, The Anatomy Lesson. It begins with images ofan ailing, physically broken Zuckerman, unable to write orfunction. He attributes his pain to the recent death of hismother. Yet something else gnaws at him. This would be hisfeelings of guilt for “the family portrait the whole countryhad assumed to be his, for the tastelessness that had af-fronted millions and the shamelessness that had enragedhis tribe.”88

The family portrait in question is Carnovsky—a work thatseems suspiciously similar to Portnoy’s Complaint. Else-where, Zuckerman had written that Carnovsky had not goneover well with its (fictional) audience, “for depicting Jews ina peep-show atmosphere of total perversion, for depicting

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Jews in acts of adultery, exhibitionism, masturbation, sod-omy, fetishism, and whoremongery.”89 As the plot of TheAnatomy Lesson progresses, we learn that Zuckerman ismourning not only the recent death of his mother, not onlythe maelstrom set off by Carnovsky, but also a crushing re-view he has received from the noted literary critic MiltonAppel.

Informing this part of the plot of The Anatomy Lessonwas Howe’s critique of Roth in the pages of Commentary in1972. Through the alchemy of fiction, Roth transformedCommentary and Howe into Inquiry and Appel. In The Ana-tomy Lesson, Zuckerman describes Appel’s literary take-down: “In Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteenyears earlier had published Zuckerman’s first stories,Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’scareer that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look al-most lackadaisical.”90

Roth goes on, “In the Times in 1959, the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stor-ies in Higher Education ‘fresh, authoritative, exact.’”91 Thisfictional description closely resembles what Howe had writ-ten in 1959 about Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in a piecetitled “The Suburbs of Babylon.”92 And following “the suc-cess of Carnovsky, Appel”—much like Howe in the after-math of Portnoy’s—“reconsidered what he called Zucker-man’s ‘case.’” Appel, a frowning Zuckerman recounts, hadconcluded, “Now the Jews represented in Higher Educationhad been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vul-gar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy andthe tenets of realistic fiction.”93

In The Anatomy Lesson, Roth couples his loathing of pas-torals with his penchant for fictionally extending the pro-fanity loop. He derides Appel/Howe as a sanctimonious sort

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who “finds criticism a voice for virtue.”94 Roth/Zuckerman’sscreed on sanctimony culminates in this blast, which takesaim at literary critics, Jews, pastoralists, and others in thecoalition of the profaned:

You sententious bastard, have you ever in your life taken a mentalposition that isn’t a moral judgment? . . . Milton Appel, theCharles Atlas of goodness! Oh, the comforts of that difficult role!And how you play it! Even a mask of modesty to throw us dodos offthe track! I’m “fashionable,” you’re for the ages. I fuck around,you think. My shitty books are cast in concrete, you make judi-cious reappraisals. I’m a “case,” I have a “career,” you of coursehave a calling. Oh, I’ll tell you your calling—President of the Rab-binical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest ofLoftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Oth-er than the Manual for Circumcision. Regulation number one. Donot mention your cock. You dumb prick!95

Elsewhere, Roth/Zuckerman excoriates Howe/Appel for fail-ing to “distinguish between the illusionist and the illu-sion.”96 Yet our analysis indicates that the lines betweenthese two states are stubbornly blurry in Roth’s fictionalplaygrounds.

The liberalization of the post-Roth era made it possiblefor writers such as Roth to process the outrage of the pro-faned into newer and greater profanity and reflection on itssignificance.

THEORIZING THE PROFANE

In the last of the Zuckerman novels, the 2007 Exit Ghost,we witness the unexpected, if not the absurd. There an eld-erly, incontinent Zuckerman is devoting formidable psychicand physical energy to suppressing a manuscript. Huffing

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about Manhattan in an adult diaper, the frail but still libid-inous author sets himself the task of censoring an unpub-lished biography. The text in question exposes infelicitoustruths about his mentor, Lonoff. These include the revela-tion that he had had an incestuous affair with his sister.97

How ironic! In The Ghost Writer, Roth introduces Zucker-man to us as a champion of unbridled, open literary expres-sion. Nearly three decades later, on his last legs, this samecharacter seeks to defend his master’s privacy through anact of self-righteous, clarity-occluding, truth-denyingcensorship.

Once again, there is reason to suppose that an entire non-fictional galaxy had been sucked into Roth’s fictional uni-verse. Was he alluding to recent revelations made by thewriter Henry Roth that he had had inappropriate relationswith his sister and first cousin? Is it a mere coincidencethat the biographer in Exit Ghost is named Kliman andHenry Roth’s biographer is named Kellman?98

Fiction, as we have seen, is parasitic on nonfiction(whether the converse holds is not a possibility I will en-gage here). This chapter has detailed how disputes aboutobscenity in the nonfictional universe trundle their way intothe so-called world of make-believe. To describe this pro-cess, I have made reference to a profanity loop and exploredsome of its mechanics in a time and a space where there arefew legal prohibitions on artistic expression.

The case of the eminent writer Salman Rushdie, however,introduces us to a most instructive variant, or curlicue, inthe loop. Rushdie so incensed assorted state and nonstateactors with the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988)that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa forced into him hiding fornearly a decade.99 This work, of course, is more explicitlyblasphemous than Roth’s—it engages directly and

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extensively with verses from scriptures sacred to Muslims.That is to say, Rushdie’s infelicities coursed along a pathwell graveled by Muslim heretics and apostates, not to men-tion enemies of Islam since the time of the ProphetMuhammad.

Yet as with Roth, we see in Rushdie the metafictional im-pulse to recycle the outrage provoked by one’s fiction inone’s fiction. Consider this startling, even taunting passageon the very first page of his underappreciated The Moor’sLast Sigh (1995): “On the run, I have turned the world intomy pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers havefollowed the trail, they’ll find me waiting, uncomplaining,out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn’t’ve done it dif-ferently.”100

Also in a manner reminiscent of Roth, Rushdie in TheSatanic Verses labors under the assumption that he can plyhis provocative wares with impunity. And again as withRoth, there is reason to suppose that Rushdie was com-pletely cognizant of the effect that The Satanic Versesmight have on Muslim sensitivities. In a candid conversa-tion with the Paris Review, he asked himself rhetorically ifhe “did it on purpose.” His response: “Of course I did it onpurpose! How do you spend five years of your life doingsomething accidentally?”101

Two provisos are in order: Rushdie never imagined thathis fiction would result in a global death sentence againsthim or in the horrific violence committed against translat-ors, editors, and others affiliated with the book. The Westmay have legalized obscenity through the rule of law, defin-ing and protecting its expression as a right. Yet the pro-faned, as I have been calling them, can sometimes marshalthemselves into a force that acts beyond the state and

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beyond the hard-fought accomplishments of the West’s ruleof law. This was never a consideration for Roth, but “world-wide vilification” coupled with Islamist militancy was an un-foreseen tragedy for Rushdie.102

Obscenity controversies can have horrifying outcomes,but sometimes quite creative ones as well. This is becausethe energy that the profanity loop unleashes may galvanizefictionalists to produce new fiction. This is not to celebratethe axiom that misery is the greatest patron of the arts, butit is to stress that, all things considered, culture wars canhave aesthetically significant results. As a character inRoth’s The Professor of Desire quips about the suffering ofFranz Kafka, “All the worse for him . . . and all the betterfor the fiction.”103

NOTES

Epigraph: Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Bantam,1969; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 270–71.

1. It should be recalled that sections of Portnoy’s Complaint hadappeared “out of the wreckage of four abandoned projects” thatRoth had undertaken between 1962 and 1967. Roth, “In Response toThose Who Have Asked Me: ‘How Did You Come to Write That Book,Anyway?,’” in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage, 1985),29.

2. For the best account of this long era in American literary andlegal history, see Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere:The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Vintage,1993). See also de Grazia, “How Justice Brennan Freed Novels andMovies during the Sixties,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8(1996): 259–65.

3. For a gripping discussion of Catholic efforts in the war againstobscene literature, see Thomas F. O’Connor, “The National Organiz-ation for Decent Literature: A Phase in American Catholic Censor-ship,” Library Quarterly 65 (1995): 386–414.

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4. Samuel Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 485 (1957). See thematerials in n. 2, above, for the long-term impact of Justice WilliamBrennan’s opinion.

5. On the trials and travails of these literary figures, see deGrazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 263–64. Interestingly, de Grazianotes that Philip Roth had an opportunity to participate in some ofthe late 1950s ructions about censorship centered at the ChicagoReview, but for some unspecified reason he did not join the cause(355).

6. On how writers such as Roth and John Updike were the “benefi-ciaries” of the passing of the obscenity hysteria, see Loren Glass,“Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,”Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 341–61. Glass’s contentionthat Roth and Updike were “middlebrow novelists,” however, seemsgravely mistaken (360).

7. Anthony Lewis, “Sex . . . and the Supreme Court,” Esquire, June1963, 82.

8. Roth, 354 U.S. at 487, 488.9. De Grazia, “How Justice Brennan Freed Novels and Movies,”

262.10. The germane words read, “All ideas having even the slightest

redeeming social importance—unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas,even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion—have the fullprotection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they en-croach upon the limited area of more important interests. But impli-cit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscen-ity as utterly without redeeming social importance.” Roth, 354 U.S.at 484.

11. Ibid., 487.12. Lewis, “Sex . . . and the Supreme Court,” 82.13. On Brennan’s import and the way that Roth constitutionalized

obscenity, see de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 12, 273, 321,342, 409. In Miller v. California (413 U.S. 15), the Burger court triedto “[excise] the ‘utterly without social value’ prong of the three-pronged Brennan Doctrine” obscenity test (570; see also 572). Onthe lack of adherence to Miller, see 575.

14. Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1983; repr., New York: Vintage, 1996), 182.

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15. Blasphemy, by contrast, with its distinctly religious tincture,has been more widely investigated.

16. The following discussion shadows my research on heresy andorthodoxy, which advances a similar relational, nonessentialistdefinition of those terms: Jacques Berlinerblau, “Toward a Sociologyof Heresy, Orthodoxy, and Doxa,” History of Religions 40, no. 4 (May2001): 327–51.

17. This brings us to the highly complex question of nomen-clature. What is the difference between profanity, obscenity, andblasphemy? For the purposes of this article, we will relegate the lastto a strictly religious context. That is to say, blasphemy has to dowith the expression of sentiments that run afoul of religious author-ities. As we shall see, this is only minorly germane to Roth’s writing,if only because of the loose and acephalous authority structure ofmodern Judaism.

18. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Vintage, 1986), 145.The surmise, incidentally, that we become who we are by engagingwith others has a lengthy genealogy in social thought. Theoristshave explored this nexus through initiatives such as Charles HortonCooley’s “the looking-glass self,” the work associated with GeorgeHerbert Mead, and the school known as symbolic interactionism.Cooley first introduced his term in Human Nature and the SocialOrder (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), writing, “The kindof self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this at-tributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be calledthe reflected or looking-glass self” (151–52). See also Mead, “Frag-ments on Ethics,” in Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint ofa Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Ch-icago Press, 1962), 379; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self inEveryday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).

19. He has won the PEN/Nabokov, PEN/Faulkner, and PEN/BellowAwards, the National Book Award, the Man Booker International Pr-ize, and so forth. Wikipedia has compiled a complete list of his manyliterary accolades: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_roth#List_of_awards_and_nominations. On his awards, onecan also read Timothy Parrish, “Introduction: Roth at Mid-career,”in The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, ed. Parrish(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5.

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20. Philip Roth, “Goodbye, Columbus,” in Goodbye, Columbus(New York: Vintage, 1959; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987),3.

21. Roth discusses the effect that the “theatrics” of the 1960s hadon him in his interview with Scott Raab, “Philip Roth Goes HomeAgain,” Esquire, October 7, 2010, www.esquire.com/features/philip-roth-interview-1010. Note that he published short sections of whatbecame Portnoy’s Complaint in the earlier years of the decade. SeeDaniel Walden, “Goodbye Columbus, Hello Portnoy—and Beyond:The Ordeal of Philip Roth,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3,no. 2 (Winter 1977–78): 9.

22. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 134.23. Ibid, 76.24. Philip Roth, Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (New

York: Random House, 1971), 70.25. Roth, Anatomy Lesson, 185.26. Philip Roth, “Imagining the Erotic: Three Introductions; 1.

Alan Lelchuk; 2. Milan Kundera; 3. Frederica Wagman,” in ReadingMyself and Others, 233.

27. Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (New York: Vintage, 1995),444.

28. Philip Roth, The Breast (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-ston, 1972; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 44.

29. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (New York: Vintage, 2001), 29.30. Tina Brown, “Philip Roth Unbound,” Daily Beast, October 21,

2009, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/21/philip-roth-un-bound.html.

31. Philip Roth, The Humbling (New York: Vintage, 2009), 112–13.32. The latter term, needless to say, is difficult to define. See Ivan

Hare’s chapter “Blasphemy and Incitement to Religious Hatred:Free Speech Dogma and Doctrine,” as well as many others, in Ex-treme Speech and Democracy, ed. Hare and James Weinstein (NewYork: Oxford, 2009), 289–310.

33. Mary McCarthy and Philip Roth, “An Exchange,” New Yorker,December 28, 1998–January 4, 1999, 98.

34. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Vintage, 1986),290–95.

35. Ibid., 261.

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36. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 168.37. Ibid., 40.38. Roth, Anatomy Lesson, 143.39. Roth, Counterlife, 86.40. Ibid., 215.41. Debra Shostak, “Roth and Gender,” in Parrish, Cambridge

Companion to Philip Roth, 112.42. Frank Kermode, “Philip Roth,” in Pleasing Myself: From

Beowulf to Philip Roth (London: Penguin, 2001), 256.43. Robert Greenberg, “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip

Roth,” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 488.44. Philip Roth, “Interview with The Paris Review,” by Hermione

Lee, Paris Review 93 (Fall 1984), reprinted in Reading Myself andOthers, 121.

45. In his interview with Scott Raab, “Philip Roth Goes HomeAgain,” Roth discusses his little-known short story “On the Air.” Ad-mitting that he does not like it, he opines, “I was experimenting withexcess. . . . I just wondered how far I could go, and I discovered whatmy limit was.” The story appears in New American Review 10 (1970):7–49.

46. On the poverty, sadness, and depression that often resultedfor writers who ran afoul of censors, see de Grazia, Girls Lean BackEverywhere, 51. For D. H. Lawrence, see 63, 65; Theodore Dreiser,109; Radclyffe Hall, 192. See also 247.

47. Roth, “‘How Did You Come to Write that Book, Anyway?,’” 31.48. Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews,” in Goodbye, Colum-

bus, 147.49. Ibid., 148.50. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 78, 79. See also Greenberg,

“Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth,” 489.51. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Vintage, 1993), 58.52. Mark Krupnick, “‘A Shit-Filled Life’: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s

Theater,” in Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination,ed. Gene Carney and Mark Shechner (Madison: University of Wis-consin Press, 2005), 15.

53. Roth, “On Portnoy’s Complaint,” in Reading Myself and Oth-ers, 16–17.

54. Ibid., “Interview with The London Sunday Times,” 134.

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55. Mark Krupnick, “‘We Are Here to Be Humiliated’: PhilipRoth’s Recent Fiction,” in Carney and Shechner, Jewish Writing, 47.See also Aharon Applefeld, “The Artist as a Jewish Writer,” in Read-ing Philip Roth, ed. Asher Milbauer and Donald Watson (London:Macmillan, 1988), 13–16.

56. Rabbi Saul Teplitz and Rabbi Theodore Lewis, quoted in DanIsaac, “In Defense of Philip Roth,” in Critical Essays on Philip Roth,ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 182.

57. Jeremy Larner, “The Conversion of the Jews,” Partisan Review27, no. 4 (December 1960): 761, 768.

58. Harold Ribalow, review of Letting Go, Chicago Jewish Forum21 (Summer 1963): 327. See also Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and theJews (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 34–35.

59. Charles Angoff, “Caricatures of Jewish Life,” Congress Bi-weekly 30 (March 4, 1963): 14.

60. Roth discusses the impact of this decade on his work in “In-terview with The Paris Review,” 119–48.

61. See Walden, “Goodbye Columbus, Hello Portnoy,” 3–13, for adiscussion of early reactions to Roth. See also David Evanier, “Look-ing for Anne Frank,” National Review 31, no. 47 (November 23,1979): 1502.

62. Marie Syrkin, “The Fun of Self-Abuse,” Midstream 15 (April1969): 64, 66, 68. See Roth’s answer, “Imagining Jews,” New YorkReview of Books, October 3, 1974. Syrkin responded to that piecewith a letter to the editor, which was published with a reply by Roth:“Philip Roth and the Jews: An Exchange,” New York Review ofBooks, November 14, 1974. Roth also pillories Syrkin in The Ana-tomy Lesson; see Eric Sundquist, “Philip Roth’s Holocaust,” HopkinsReview 5, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 239.

63. “A Dissent from Marya Mannes,” Saturday Review, February22, 1969, 39. For her attack on Bruce, see de Grazia, Girls LeanBack Everywhere, 466.

64. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1970), 325.

65. Mary Allen, The Necessary Blankness: Women in the MajorAmerican Fiction of the Sixties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1976), 96.

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66. For a list of translations, see Bernard Rodgers Jr., Philip Roth:A Bibliography, 2nd ed. (Metuchin, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984), 3–4.

67. Robert Alter, “When He Is Bad,” in Pinsker, Critical Essays onPhilip Roth, 45.

68. Syrkin, “Fun of Self-Abuse,” 67–68.69. J. Mitchell Morse, “Brand Names and Others,” in Pinsker,

Critical Essays on Philip Roth, 51, 52.70. Debra Shostak, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 13. For anoth-er discussion of Howe, see Jay Halio’s Philip Roth Revisited (NewYork: Twayne, 1992), 173–75.

71. Irving Howe, “The Suburbs of Babylon,” New Republic 140,no. 24 (June 15, 1959): 17–18.

72. Irving Howe, “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” in Pinsker, CriticalEssays on Philip Roth, 243. Howe’s reductive equation (that the vul-gar equals the simple) was of dubious warrant to the postmodernaesthetic that eventually set in and dominated the American artscene for decades. For a fascinating account of how judicial concep-tions of obscenity clashed thunderously with the values of postmod-ern aesthetic production, see Amy Adler’s important “Post-modernArt and the Death of Obscenity Law,” Yale Law Journal 99, no. 6(April 1990): 1359–78.

73. Roth, Counterlife, 306.74. Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1996), 192, 193.75. Roth, Anatomy Lesson, 78.76. Readers of Roth’s earlier My Life as a Man (New York: Vint-

age, 1974) started to get hints of his critique-induced malaise. Thiswork must be seen as the experimental mock-up whose new metafic-tional technique the works of the Zuckerman cycle revisited so prof-itably. For a fuller discussion, see Pia Masiero, Philip Roth and theZuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld (Amherst, NY: Cam-bria, 2011).

77. For some important studies of this literary genre, see BrianStonehill, The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce toPynchon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988);Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1979); Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction (London:

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Longman, 1995). On Roth, see Lillian Kremer, “Philip Roth’s Self-Reflexive Fiction,” Modern Language Studies 28, nos. 3–4 (Autumn1998): 57–72; Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Roth’s Autobiographical Writ-ings,” in Parrish, Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 158–72,which explores the introduction of “Philip Roth” as a character (thusadding a new layer of complexity to the proceedings).

78. The number of books is based on the most recent Rothiantable (Roth’s breakdowns of who his books are “by,” which appear inthe front matter of his novels), found in Nemesis (Boston: HoughtonMifflin Harcourt, 2010).

79. Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews, 210.80. Actually, a tremendous amount of confusion has been raised

by the specter of an authorized biography of Philip Roth, the first ofwhich is dead in the water. For a humorous assessment of the situ-ation, see my “Philip Roth’s Next Book and Biography: What’s GoingOn?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012, ht-tp://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/philip-roths-lives/47489. A newbiographical project with Blake Bailey has been announced. SeeCharles McGrath, “Philip Roth to Cooperate with New Biographer,”Arts Beat (blog), New York Times, September 5, 2012, http://arts-beat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/philip-roth-to-cooperate-with-new-biographer/; Associated Press, “Philip Roth Biography, Writtenwith His Cooperation, Acquired by WW Norton & Co.,” WashingtonPost, September 27, 2012.

81. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed.Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: InternationalPublishers, 1987).

82. Roth, “Interview with The London Sunday Times,” ReadingMyself and Others, 116.

83. Roth, “Interview with The Paris Review,” 135.84. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage, 1979).85. Ibid., 103, 104.86. Syrkin, “Fun of Self-Abuse,” 75.87. Roth, Ghost Writer, 170–71.88. Roth, Anatomy Lesson, 34.89. Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound (New York: Vintage, 1981),

7.90. Roth, Anatomy Lesson, 68.

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91. Ibid.92. Howe, “Suburbs of Babylon,” 17–18.93. Ibid., 69.94. Ibid., 161.95. Ibid., 167.96. Roth, Zuckerman Unbound, 168.97. Roth, Exit Ghost, 197.98. Steven Kellman, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2005). For more on Henry Roth and incest, seeJonathan Rosen, “Writer, Interrupted: The Resurrection of HenryRoth,” New Yorker, August 1, 2005, 74–79; Charles McGrath,“Breathing Life into Henry Roth,” New York Times, May 23, 2010,sec. C, 1.

99. See Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and theRage of Islam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990); Andrew Anthony,“How One Book Ignited a Culture War,” Guardian, January 11, 2009,www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses; Steven Weisman, “Japanese Translator of Rushdie BookFound Slain,” New York Times, July 13, 1991, www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie-translator.html.

100. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Vintage,1995), 3.

101. Salman Rushdie, “The Art of Fiction No. 186,” interviewed byJack Livings, Paris Review 174 (Summer 2005),www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5531/the-art-of-fiction-no-186-salman-rushdie.

102. Ibid.103. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (New York: Vintage,

1977), 167.

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CHAPTER 3

DefacedThe Art of Blaspheming Texts and Imagesin the West

DAVID LAWTON

I have tried for more than two decades to find a culturallylegitimate space for serious artistic purposes in the polem-ics of blasphemy. When I wrote my book Blasphemy in1992, I found myself using the language of exchange trans-action; I argued that blasphemy marks a struggle to definecommunity, both by those who would regulate blasphemy,thereby identifying who and what is to be marginalized, andby those who would challenge such regulation, thereby con-testing a community’s cultural boundaries and normativeconceptions of self. Blasphemy is thus most volatile andcreative when opposing groups intuit degrees of affinity aswell as of difference.1 This analysis sheds some light onwhat David Nash has called the epidemic of blasphemysince the Salman Rushdie affair, yet it has been harder thanever in the intervening years to sustain a case for guardedcultural optimism.2 In hindsight, the spirit of the timesseems more attuned to warnings by Richard Webster

against what he saw as free-speech fundamentalism3 or toNash’s own more moderate conclusion that periods of toler-ation and secularization are mere “conditional episodes”4

in the history of blasphemy.In this chapter I examine works that have been labeled

blasphemous, caused community shock, or attracted actualviolence since the 1990s. In contrast to my practice in Blas-phemy, which moved through a series of textual readings, Ifocus mainly on the visual arts. This is where most of thecontroversies have occurred, a fact that marks our culture’sshift to the image, the digital, and the short attention spanthat characterizes Internet browsing; it is an environmentin which artists know they have but a moment or two to cap-ture the viewer’s attention and in which blasphemy and oth-er forms of shock may become a regular part of the artist’stool kit. Most recent controversies about blasphemy in thearts have concerned visual images rather than texts; evenwhen a text is involved, especially a sacred one, it is likelyto be by being burned, graffitied, or otherwise defaced—inother words, by being treated as a visual rather than averbal sign. Historically, this may be less of a culturalchange than it appears: the long history of iconoclasmmeans that images deemed offensive to religious sensibilit-ies have been prone to destruction, not just by the Taliban.My questions here, however, are about our contemporarysituation and the future of blasphemy as a way of conceptu-alizing complex identities across a range of global com-munities. I look at groups of images in the first part of whatfollows in order to, in the second part, characterize and be-gin to explore the broader questions they raise. I have ex-cluded work that does not merit examination as artwork,subjective though I acknowledge such judgments to be; Itherefore do not look at the Danish Mohammed cartoons or

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the shady fragment of film insultingly titled The Innocenceof Muslims. The works I cite here are works I consider seri-ously as art, whether I like them or not.

FACES OF BLASPHEMY

“There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports hor-rible and disgusting projects!” This was the famous reac-tion of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to the exhibitionSensation, shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999after premiering at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997.5 Gi-uliani found much in the show—or rather, in its catalog—tooffend him; his reprisals against the museum, including anattempt to evict the show, were promptly overruled by a fed-eral court judge.6 The particular target of Giuliani’s wrathwas The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili, a black Madonnaincorporating collaged pornographic images of female gen-italia from blaxploitation magazines—at a distance, theselook like cherubim—and decorated with elephant dungcovered in resin (see fig. 3.1). This had not been “thrown”at the religious image, as Giuliani alleged, but carefully ap-plied as part of the work’s design. At the time, Ofili usedelephant dung, which he described as “beautiful,” in a num-ber of his works.7 This led one detractor, when Ofili wasawarded the Turner prize in 1998, to dump a load of ma-nure on the steps of Tate Modern with a sign reading“Modern art is a load of bullshit.”8 The sense of humor herechimes rather well with Ofili’s own. His work explores ste-reotypes of race, gender, and indeed religion and often,sometimes comically, finds beauty through them (the color-ation of The Holy Virgin Mary is aesthetically stunning). Nosuch humor was evident in the New York protests, whichwere led by Giuliani and the president of the Catholic

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League, both of whom failed to recognize a fellow Catholicin Ofili. After the court overruled Giuliani, the painting wasattacked by an elderly white man, who, all too symbolically,smeared it with white paint.9

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FIGURE 3 .1 . Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996.Acrylic, oil, polyester resin, paper collage, glitter, mappins, and elephant dung on linen. 96 × 72 inches

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It seemed to British observers that New York protestershad chosen the wrong painting. It was another work on ex-hibition that caused most controversy in London and wastwice attacked there as Ofili’s painting was to be in NewYork: Marcus Harvey’s Myra, an enormous blowup of thestandard press image of Myra Hindley (see fig. 3.2), afterthe style of Andy Warhol or Chuck Close.10 As Americancommentators noted at the time, very few Americans had asense of who Hindley was. To an English spectator of Sensa-tion, however, her gaze was inescapable and ominous. Hind-ley was one of the Moors murderers: with her lover IanBrady in the early 1960s she had kidnapped, tortured, andeventually murdered five children from the GreaterManchester area (where, incidentally, Harvey and Ofilitrained a generation later). This is my home area, and Iused to wait for my school bus in the early 1960s beside thephotographs of their victims, then listed as missing. I intro-duce such personal witness because the offense of a shock-ing image is deeply personal and goes to one’s sense ofcommunity. I understand very well the trauma that theMoors murders caused, not least because the moorlandgraves of the victims could not all be identified, even withthe supposed help in 1986 of the murderers, who had beensentenced to life imprisonment in the very year capital pun-ishment was abolished. Winnie Johnson, the mother ofKeith Bennett, who was murdered in 1964 aged twelve,went to her grave in August 2012, his photo and his glassesin her coffin, having failed in her long search for his body tobury. It was Johnson who spearheaded the protest againstthe Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy on behalf ofMothers against Murder and Aggression: “They used tohang killers on the gallows. Now they hang them in the gal-lery.”11

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What made Myra singularly provocative was that Harveyhad constructed his image, designed to rise above the sur-face of the canvas, by using a plaster cast of a child’s hand.Knowing this made the image particularly compelling and,to the protesters, repellent. Much as I understood theirfeelings, I cannot say that I shared their reactions to Har-vey’s work. I found it disturbing, as it was intended to be,but also genuinely moving. The image of celebrity in ourtime, and our art market, is drained of meaning. Harvey’schoice of medium restored meaning to the image of MyraHindley in a terrible way: it brought home the human real-ity of her crimes and the pathos of her victims. For me italso raised questions about the sort of communities we livein: how did Hindley herself, still a teenager when she andBrady made a hobby of murder, grow from a child into that?In this context, the use of the child’s hand seemed not ex-ploitative but rather painfully relevant. Among the some-times jejune and self-regarding artifacts of the exhibition,Myra stood out, in company with a few others, for its solem-nity, even for a moral gravity.

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FIGURE 3 .2 . Press photo of Myra Hindley.

Yet the exhibition was not wantonly called Sensation(with its puns on sensational and sensationalism). It

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invited, indeed sought, the reactions of offense it received,though perhaps with insiders simultaneously assuringthemselves and one another that only the unsophisticatedwere likely to register the offense. It is a truism, muchvoiced at the time of the New York protests, that Mayor Gi-uliani and company were doing Charles Saatchi’s work forhim by driving up the price of his investments12—just as ittook Ayatollah Khomeini to sell Salman Rushdie’s novels inthe United States. It would seem futile to try to distinguishbetween types of offense involved in the New York and Lon-don protests, both, after all, against works in the same ex-hibition. Although only one of the controversial works hadan overtly religious subject, both cases rudely jolted a com-munity’s sense of the sacred. If “blasphemy” is a useful cat-egory, it should apply to both. The jolt creates a secondary,microcosmic community around the artwork, one whosefault lines represent, reenact, or redefine those of com-munities beyond the gallery. Community, even more thanreligion, is at blasphemy’s core. If so, it is not quite truethat “blasphemy emerges somewhere between the produc-tion and reception of images.”13 In both these cases, of-fense completes the circuit of the artwork, which is unfin-ished and unproductive without it. This is the economy ofthe art market, which takes attendance figures and publi-city, almost all publicity, as an index of financial value. It isalso, however, an aesthetic effect—by no means always acreative one, but potentially so. Blasphemy is part of the in-tention of these works. Artists, patrons, and protesters arelinked together involuntarily and depend on one another.

Now let us take another celebrity image, the installationsculpture by Maurizio Cattelan simply called HIM. Seenfrom behind, some distance away, is a young boy, smartlybut soberly dressed in the style of the first half of the

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twentieth century. The boy is kneeling in prayer. He ap-pears absorbed, unaware of his vulnerability to the viewerbehind him. The viewer is drawn into the space and walksforward for a closer look. As one reaches the front of thefigure, one sees the mistake one has made. For the face isnot that of a young boy; the praying figure is Adolf Hitler(HIM; see fig. 3.3).14 One also understands, as anyone whohas watched Claudius trying to pray in Hamlet should know,that prayer does not equate with innocence or virtue. Is thisthe point of the work? Is the joke also on the viewer: wehave chosen to involve ourselves with Hitler all over again,when our history should have taught us to leave well alone?Both Myra and HIM challenge us to rethink our relation-ship with an icon of evil. Are we merely its victims, or doour communities help to produce, as well as reproduce, theevil by which we are harmed and offended? Whereas Myralooms over us, Cattelan’s installation is subtler, because itdepends on surprise—though at the expense of entrappingthe viewer. My first encounter with it, in the Centre Pomp-idou, brought an unforgettable moment of recognition; I re-call my near-simultaneous reactions of amusement and hor-ror, followed by panic (because I had laughed) at the tem-porary breakdown of my moral priorities. For that reason,and in the light of Cattelan’s other work (he produced anotably irreverent sculpture of Pope John Paul II beingstruck by a meteorite),15 I am less inclined to attribute to itthe gravity I ascribe to Myra. Cattelan seems to align him-self with the anticlericalism of the Italian Left, as expressedin the trenchant farce of Dario Fo: prayer here seems syn-onymous with hypocrisy.

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Context, however, is everything. One of the great advant-ages of installations is that they are portable and may resttemporarily in unexpected places. One thinks of Cattelan’slate Italian colleague Gino de Dominicis, whose building-size skeleton Calamita Cosmica lay supine for a while out-side the Duomo in Milan.16 So HIM has turned up in partsof Europe that all but convert it into moral allegory. Themost recent, and controversial, is the site of the Warsawghetto (where the statue is visible only from a distance:counterproductively, Cattelan’s image is now so well knownthat one does not even have to see it in order to know thatit represents Hitler).17 Scarcely deterred by the artist’s pri-or form in Poland (his image of John Paul), the SimonWiesenthal Center moved forthrightly to an accusation ofblasphemy: the installation was “a senseless provocationwhich insults the memory of the Nazis’ Jewish victims.” Inwhat for me is one of the few hopeful signs since 1992, thedefense came from an unexpected quarter: Poland’s chiefrabbi, Michael Schudrich. To the credit of the organizers,he had been consulted before the installation took place. Tohis own infinite credit, he continued to defend it even afterhis life became difficult, saying, “I felt there could be edu-cational value to it.” His contribution to the installation’scatalog makes what is by far the best case not only for thiswork but for Harvey’s: art can “force us to face the evil ofthe world.” His comments imply that a community maychoose to move on from an entrenched position once histor-ical circumstances have changed and may engage with avariety of means, including art, to enable its review of pastand present trauma.

Examples like these compel us to examine each case onits merits and carefully weigh both intention and context.They encourage us to question whether the few seconds of

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viewers’ attention that constitute blasphemy in a digital agerepresent a religious breach, a community fault line, or, forinstance, an ungenerous or inadequate reading practice.Out of such questioning should emerge not a hit-or-misstest but rather a spectrum of intention, offense, context, in-terpretive community, and effect. (For example, if we grantthat Harvey’s painting does not condone child murder norCattelan’s installation make light of the Holocaust, what isthe discomfort we feel about having the subjects recalled toour present view?) Against such nuanced local calibration,however, is the whole weight of globalization. This tends toprivilege religion, which is all encompassing, whereas com-munity is sometimes too small, too singular, too under theradar to register. Nevertheless, in cases that most obviouslycall religion into question, the stakes are often communityin a global environment. Among exhibitions that set out tochange the culture—such as Sensation or the Centre Pomp-idou’s Traces du Sacré—must rank the 2003 Moscow exhibi-tion whose title translates as Caution! Religion! This wasthe occasion of an act of violence comparable to those dir-ected against the works by Ofili and Harvey: the destructionby an Orthodox demonstrator of Alexander Kosolapov’s ThisIs My Body. The work consisted of a huge head of Jesus,hoarding style, juxtaposed quite plainly with the McDon-ald’s sign and the inscription, as per the title, “This is mybody” (see fig. 3.4). A companion piece merely exchangedthe McDonald’s sign for the Coca-Cola logo and changedthe inscription to “This is my blood” (see fig. 3.5).18 To be-lievers these must have seemed plainly offensive, but in facttheir intent was far from plain. Kosolapov was vitally inter-ested in registering the effect of different Western influ-ences pouring into Russia after the fall of communism. Thathis intention is not religious, or not primarily so, is

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demonstrated by a comparable pair of images in which theface of Lenin replaces the face of Jesus, with equivalent slo-gans. While the Jesus image was taken to be religious in ad-dress—and Kosolapov, not being naïve, was not slow to in-vite such a reading—it was in fact about the impact of glob-alization and the attendant commercialism that inundatedRussia under Boris Yeltsin. This seems to me an importantdistinction, not least in the exploration of a local identitythrough global interventions, but it is not easy to distin-guish between the religious and other forces external tothat identity—indeed, the work looks like a series of ques-tions without pat answers. In this case, it may be that reli-gion offers the most succinct and symbolically powerfulvocabulary we possess for considering the claims ofcommunity.

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FIGURE 3 .4 . Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Body,2001. © Alexander Kosolapov, courtesy of the artist.

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FIGURE 3 .5 . Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Blood,2001. © Alexander Kosolapov, courtesy of the artist.

Let us therefore follow the Coca-Cola sign to further com-plications, and back to another exhibition in New York. Wesee here what happens in extreme conditions when an artistimposes both Coca-Cola and his own image on a classic, ca-nonical photograph—one accorded nearly universal respectand reverence. The work involved, not a painting but a di-gital manipulation, is Alan Schechner’s ironically titled It’sthe Real Thing (1991–93). Onto Margaret Bourke-White’sfamous monochrome picture of the skeletal wraiths wholooked up at her camera on the day the Buchenwald campwas liberated, Schechner has interpolated his own image,looking sleek and confident.19 Amid the monochromebleakness of White’s photo only a can of Coca-Cola, restingin Schechner’s hand, is rendered in color (see fig. 3.6). Inall the presentations I have given, I have never found an im-age more universally provocative or divisive than this one.

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With a longevity to rival that of the Rushdie affair, the furorraised by it persists: there can be found any number of rawdenunciations on the Internet (“Self-Hating, Israel-Threat-ening” is one of the easiest to look for).20 The criticismamounts to a great human cry of pain, on behalf of Jews,Holocaust victims, and all other victims of human historynever before subject to digital manipulation. As if the criti-cism need be academic or objective to be worthy of discus-sion, it is often aimed at the medium itself: digital manipu-lation, the detractors claim, is too easy or too slick. ButSchechner already knows this, and would place his ownwork in a cutting-edge critique of commercialization, indus-trialization, and therefore digitalization itself. He seems tofeel that reproduction has eroded the moral power of theoriginal photograph; his trivialization of it is a perverse ef-fort to reinstate it. Another of his manipulations, moresubtle and more skillful, takes a standard bar code, blursand morphs it slowly through several stages, and arrives atprecisely the image of Jewish prisoners in their Holocaustcamp uniforms (see fig. 3.7).21 It is eerily skillful: as onereads downward, the bar code numbers are transfigured in-to the faces of the condemned. The point is threefold: tech-nology facilitated the original Holocaust; our sensibilitieshave become forgetful, lulled by our own exposure to tech-nology; and so, having lost the moral, we are in danger ofrepeating history with our Abu Ghraibs and occupied territ-ories. Hence, perhaps, Schechner’s apparently cocksure in-tervention into our cultural memory of the Holocaust.

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FIGURE 3 .6 . Alan Schechner, Self Portrait at Buchen-wald: It’s the Real Thing, 1991–93. Digitally

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Born in England, Schechner lived in Israel as a youngadult and served in the Israeli army. He belongs with agroup of Israeli and international artists working in digitalmedia whose work reflects uncomfortably on its complicitywith its technological base. One of them, Horit Herman-Peled, acknowledges as much: “Digital technology plays animportant role in . . . state terror, as an instrument of sur-veillance and identification, construction, deconstructionand stripping of human identity.” She asks, “What is the re-lationship between the production of art by means of digitaltechnologies and the production of terror by the samemeans?”22 This was posted online during the U.S. interven-tion in Iraq; it was a global, and thoughtful, act of dissid-ence. Along similar lines, the greatest of all Schechner’sprovocations proved to be his simplest (and critics wouldsay his cheapest) manipulation. He takes two photographs,one of a young boy from the Warsaw ghetto, another of ayoung Palestinian stone thrower (such as the dying EdwardSaid passionately defended) after his arrest by Israelitroops. With the utmost economy, Schechner places in thehand of the one the photograph of the other, so that each ofthe historically distant boys carries, and is, a representationof the other. A still greater provocation is the title Schech-ner then gives his work: The Legacy of Abused Children:From Poland to Palestine (see fig. 3.8).23 The trope is thathistory will repeat itself unless we acknowledge how it hasabused us. Schechner’s work belongs with dissident attackson Israeli foreign policy, both from inside Israeli societyand from committed outsiders. His art is so probingly polit-ical and plays so strongly into political divisions of our ownsociety and world that there is no neutral ground fromwhich to estimate its quality. I judge worthwhile the offensegiven by the last two images I have examined; I remain

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unsure about It’s the Real Thing except to feel that youngerpeople today may know Bourke-White’s original photographbecause of it—and that is a mixed blessing. My very attemptto make this judgment confronts the incompatibility of aes-thetic and political criteria. Is there any question, however,that we are talking about blasphemy? If we are, I would de-fend Schechner’s work on the grounds that I defendedRushdie’s, that he has earned the right to make his criti-cism from the inside of a culture that is his own. ThoughSchechner, in common with important Israeli digital artistssuch as Ori Gersht,24 makes his professional home in Eng-land (and latterly the United States), he served in the Is-raeli army in the occupied territories. He became pro-foundly disaffected as a result, and his art draws on his per-sonal observation and experience, which necessarily varyfrom one human being to the next. To repeat the key pointhere: if the core of blasphemy is community, then dissent-ing voices within a community have a moral—and, onewould hope, legal—right to be heard and defended.

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Issues of provocation and community conflict couldhardly be sharper than in the case of Submission, the shortfilm made in English by the Dutch polemicist Theo vanGogh with a script by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The film was shownonce on Dutch television in 2004; as a direct consequence,Van Gogh was shot dead on an Amsterdam street, and afive-page note was left pinned by knife to his body.25 Thenote parodies, intentionally or not, the theme of writing onthe body that gave the film its one striking visual image:the back of a naked woman, supposedly after punishment,on which are inscribed verses from the Qurʼan. The image ismost commonly reproduced as a still and has come to standin lieu of the film itself (see fig. 3.9).26 It brings to mind along history of orientalism and topics such as the Ottomanharem or the treatment by Western artists of odalisques.(An image of an odalisque by the Tunisian artist Héla Am-mar was at the center of riots in Tunis in June 2012 againstlocal artists’ Printemps des Arts exhibition.)27 The motif ofwriting on the body is powerful and was also fashionable incultural theory and in the work of artists and photographerswhen Van Gogh employed it. It appears, for example, inI.N.R.I., the 1999 retelling of the life of Jesus photographedby Bettina Rheims with a text by Serge Bramly. This bookcaused a sensation in France with its strangely bohemianand cerebral blend of the Gospel stories with Vogue cov-er–style fashion shoots, rock video and MTV, and soft-corefetishism, all with a surprisingly hard visual edge. One ofthe more trenchant images in I.N.R.I. represents Jesus andthe doctors in the Temple: the doctors, attired as Hasidicrabbis, are writing Hebrew scripture on the boy Jesus’s baretorso.28

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The most likely influence on Van Gogh, however—whichled to an allegation of plagiarism in the Dutch Parliamentafter the film’s TV showing—was the much more complexand interesting work of the Iranian artist, photographer,and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.29 Her images of Iranian wo-men are conceptually strong and do not attempt realismany more than Van Gogh did; she violates taboos by, for ex-ample, showing the bare soles of the feet, she paints sacredtext in beautiful calligraphy on the faces of her subjects andelsewhere on their bodies, and in some images she thenshows the women holding guns—ambivalently, perhaps as asign of the violence to which they are subject, but notwithout autonomous menace. Yet nothing about Neshat’swork invites prurience, and the juxtaposition of motifs isused to disturb stereotypes rather than to reinforce them.The viewer—all the more when looking at a woman’s intelli-gent face rather than, as in Van Gogh’s case, her abusedback—is prompted to reflect upon a life experience otherthan one’s own. A kind of tenuous contact is made, defamil-iarized but not dehumanized.

For its part, Submission purports to show the experienceof Muslim women. It stems, directly or indirectly, from HirsiAli’s cultural background and her desire to repudiate it.30

The film’s tone is unremittingly polemical, its visual modecontrastingly abstract and detached; the combination doesnot lend itself to imaginative engagement, though it suc-ceeded all too well in evoking outrage. Hirsi Ali is open tothe accusation of ignoring the diversity within Islam butcould reply that she did not experience it, any more thanJeanette Winterson’s character in Oranges Are Not the Only

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Fruit experienced liberal Christianity. The fact that Hirsi Aliwas working within her own cultural formation, however,makes the case very different from that of the Danish Mo-hammed cartoons. Her protest demands to be seen in a dif-ferent kind of context and needs to be set alongside power-ful novels and memoirs by socially prominent women inMuslim countries, such as Nawal el-Saadawi in Egypt andTehmina Durrani in Pakistan, whose target is the wide-spread cruelty to women, as they represent it, at the handsof Muslim men, especially clerics.31 In the case of Submis-sion, a breach in an Islamic community is complicated bythe fact that it takes place in Western Europe and plays towider debates about cultural and religious identity both in-side and outside European Islamic communities. The list ofqualifications could continue: for example, the difference inthe cultural attitudes of different ethnic Muslim communit-ies, in Holland between Moroccan and Turkish, or the wholecontext of Dutch politics after World War II. Van Gogh’s de-cision to make his film with Hirsi Ali becomes even morecomplex when one factors in his own sexual and culturalpolitics, especially his friendship with the right-wing politi-cian Pim Fortuyn (himself assassinated in 2002): both weregay men who had resisted Calvinism, only to see a revival ofhomophobic attitudes from migrant communities, to whichthey responded with what they saw as a proportionateIslamophobia. In this instance, the offense preceded theartwork. Yet the story of Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh’s work isnot quite a grand narrative of a “clash of civilizations,” forit is shaped at every turn by the intense interplay of culturalspecificities.

What offense takers and offense givers share in this tra-gic episode is their acute anxiety about identity on the per-sonal and communal level (gender, sexuality, ethnicity,

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religion). I am struck that almost all the recent “blasphem-ous” images discussed thus far have as their main visualsubject the human face. The face may be a means of en-gagement and empathy, as in some of Neshat’s images, butit can also be a means of alienation, as in others by her or(for some viewers) in Ofili’s Madonna, and at times drastic-ally so, as with the faces of Hindley and Hitler. These are allvariations on a global theme of identity politics. The mainpublic function of the human face in the modern world, beit on passports, driver’s licenses, or identity cards, is as ameans of instant personal identity, as recognized or some-times stigmatized by a community. To make a propositionout of Schechner’s most subtle representation: our facesmorph into our individual bar codes. The face has thereforebecome our privileged cultural marker for the boundariesof community (with identity as its middle term), whether weseek to include or exclude, extend or delimit. Those whowould ban the burqa, for example, see it as an affront totheir normative idea of community precisely because it re-moves the face from social circulation. It is probably no ac-cident that the leading social media site of recent timesshould be called Facebook, where users (“members”) aregreeted by name and can play with queasy agency at com-munity and identity.

Thus blasphemy, community, and the face are interlinkedin identity politics, and what worries us is the question ofhow much agency we really have in who we are, even online.The pressure on identity may come from outside or within,and often from both. In addressing fellow Muslims in 2005“as citizens of states that recognize human rights,” TariqRamadan urged them to “reject the status of subcitizensthat is the product of a perverse internal neocolonialism.”32

This is a warning, granted a regime of mutual rights, not to

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retreat into an alienated communal identity formed partlyin response to historic violence. Yet the point is hardly spe-cific to Muslims. It applies to any of us with a cultural trig-ger to give or take offense, even in the absence of realthreat or danger. Most of us still subscribe, if vaguely, tothe Freudian belief that our current anxieties are groundedin past trauma. At the community level, such past traumamay blaze forth as offense. But even historic victims remainmembers of a violent species. In all the cases examinedhere, the taking of offense is aggressive or at best passive-aggressive; the posture is a biosocial consequence of differ-ential concepts of identity at the communal level. The of-fense taken at an imaginary danger can create a real one. Insuch circumstances, the giving of such offense, whatever anartist’s intention, may serve as a cultural lightning conduct-or, allowing us to vent, more or less safely, the violence thatinheres in our community formation. Large portions of theworld need the advice of Poland’s chief rabbi. If art can“force us to face the evil of the world” (notice the ubiquit-ous “face” here),33 can it also help our communities facethe night terrors of identity from which blasphemies gainstrength?

A good start might be a rethinking of art history itself. Animportant development in this respect was the exhibitionTraces du Sacré at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008,an ambitious, inevitably uneven attempt to rewrite thewhole history of modern European art in terms of its en-gagement with religion and the spiritual. The exhibitionhad a clear thesis, the autonomy of the artist in relation tothe systems of thought and power associated with thechurches of all faiths and confessions. In a secular society,the curators argued, art is not emptied of the sacred, yet itexists in an individual relation not controlled by quasi-

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obligatory belief systems. This is an important version ofthe centuries-old battle between the poets and the priests:as the curators depicted it, art unsettles the foundations ofour being (individual destiny, existential anguish, the cycleof life and death) just as religion does. The exhibition’s tra-jectory ran to the present day through such key phases asthe “solar and lay cult” of impressionism, notions of thespiritual in art from Wassily Kandinsky onward, a retro-spect on Auschwitz as the cathedral of the twentieth cen-tury (in Jerzy Grotowski’s staging of Stanisław Wyspiański’sAkropolis, showing the sublimity of humankind plunged inthe abyss),34 abstraction’s search for the absolute, and mul-ticultural contestations in our postcolonial times—as, forexample, in Adel Abdessemed’s Also sprach Allah.35 Namessuch as George Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, and JidduKrishnamurti were a little more central than usual in arthistory, alongside growing stock in Antonin Artaud, early,figural Mark Rothko, and Georges Bataille. The exhibitiondealt with topics such as sacred violence (see catalog p. 52),myth versus religion (54), ruins and a poetics of the dead(60), theosophy, syncretism, automatism, hermeticism, andeven crystals, and it produced such interesting and provoc-ative pairings as spiritualism and art brut, Bauhaus andesotericism, Dada and gnosis, architectural utopianismsand dystopianisms, mystical socialisms and danses sacrées(185). It is a counterhistory that might enable us to revisit,say, The Satanic Verses and find it a work not of postmod-ernism but of high modernism. The exhibition was persuas-ive by virtue of its intellectual organization and the sheernumber and quality of the artworks that substantiated itsthemes.

Not least, Traces du Sacré put blasphemy in a muchbroader historical and conceptual space than we are used

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to. Works employing a blasphemous motif, such as MaxErnst’s painting of the Virgin Mary paddling the very redbottom of a very corporeal Christ child, appeared in a longhistorical perspective and alongside contemporary worksthat engage with religion with more evident deference. InErnst’s painting, three attentive surrealists (including Ernsthimself) watch the Virgin’s strenuous Messiah abusethrough a window.36 In this exhibition it was more thanusually evident that they were contemplating not only theantecedent traditions of Christian, especially Renaissance,art but also the paradigms of conduct and discipline passedon by the churches. Since so much art is oppositional, fromwithin a partly common culture, the viewer of this exhibi-tion might at least glimpse the notion that a history of blas-phemy, as a history of appropriation and misappropriation,could also be—indeed, in the Centre Pompidou manifestedas—a revisionist history of art. That history would then de-mand a new formalism to describe it (an aesthetic of blas-phemy), together with a highly developed sense of rhetoric-al situation. It always matters who is doing the represent-ing, just as in Cattelan’s HIM (exhibited here) it matterswho is doing the praying. The sorts of questions we woulddevelop would then be questions about context, reading,and, in all senses (cultural, linguistic, and material),translation.

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FIGURE 3 .10 . Gérard Garouste, Passage (Autoportrait),2005. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /ADAGP, Paris.

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For me, the salient image from Traces du Sacré was Pas-sage, a self-portrait of the contemporary Parisian artistGérard Garouste (see fig. 3.10).37 Again, it features aface—in the extended sense established here, a definingface of blasphemy. Garouste takes upon himself the personaof the fool—it is a key motif in his autobiography,L’Intranquille. His use of it is Pauline: folly in the eyes ofthe world is wisdom. In the self-portrait, arms outstretched,he is carrying an open Bible, the Greek Septuagint. He ex-tends this toward the rear of a donkey that wears a fool’shat and motley; as Garouste explains in an interview on theexhibition website, the visual image is sustained by a pun inFrench on ânesse, she-ass, which reinforces the play on wis-dom and folly.38 The she-ass also appears in L’Intranquille,where it is part of a larger pattern of puns on bêtise.39 Thepresence of the Septuagint in the artist’s hands is rein-forced by another volume, open on his head. This isAugustine’s commentary on Psalm 56, which became an au-thoritative locus of medieval anti-Semitism but, accordingto Garouste, was based on a mistranslation of the originalHebrew in the Septuagint. This is an intervention into thescholarly history of theology; the exhibition catalog (235)speaks of Garouste’s “peinture érudite.” But there is noth-ing pedantic in the thrust of the painting. The two volumesthat the artist carries, like his outstretched arms, point up-hill toward the donkey, which carries a third volume on itsback: Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the historical outcome of theChurch-authorized anti-Semitism that began withAugustine’s commentary on Psalm 56. While the visualplane moves upward to the donkey, its direction is complic-ated by the extraordinary and unnatural contortion of theartist’s body, which appears to have three legs: two pointingforward and one back, supported by a third arm, which

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carries a cane. The artist’s torso and head also point backdownhill, in the direction of the viewer and in the oppositedirection from the outstretched arms. The artist’s face isclearly visible, mouth open, eyes uplifted as if in prayer oranguish. The painting therefore expresses an unresolvedambiguity: is the artist moving uphill, toward the donkeyand Mein Kampf, or attempting to retreat to safety down-hill? Even if the latter, does the painting offer the possibil-ity of a positive direction (and why should that be down-hill)? All around, the world is on fire.

Formally and conceptually, the painting invites allegory.The hill is history, the fire is apocalypse; the artist is tryingto escape both even while being carried toward destruction,to which we are led in Garouste’s design by the misappro-priation and misuse of religious texts. Garouste says thathis posture indicates doubt, but if so, it is a religious doubtthat repudiates institutional religion. Here we find the visu-al artist recalling us to the need to address issues of read-ing and misreading, especially the appropriation and misap-propriation of religious texts. This is the most rational faceof modern blasphemy.

BLASPHEMY DISENCHANTED?

In the concluding part of this chapter, I want to develop, al-beit in brief, a consideration of the issues raised by the ex-amples I have provided. These examples largely arise withinone community or subcommunity and cause offense whenthey reach the arena of another. In the case of Myra, thedistance is small, between Manchester and London. Excep-tionally, in this case, a broader movement, from London toNew York, may lead to the erasure of offense. Even in theEuropean context, this sort of movement looks like an

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extension of colonial history and might reasonably be calledpostcolonial. For all their cultural variety, the examples in-volve a limited number of tropes that migrate across cul-tures. Offense is itself one such code; the “clash of civiliza-tions” is another; the inhospitable fallacy that one cannotbe both Muslim and European, whether used against mi-grant communities or against Turkish membership in theEuropean Union, is a third. One could analyze most blas-phemy cases in the style of Michael Riffaterre’s semioticanalysis of poetry, by identifying the underlying trope orcliché.40 Most of these would be about temporality, the un-timely embeddedness of the past in the present. In otherwords, they are instances of a “perverse internal neocoloni-alism” or, one might say, a “perverse internal medievalism,”or both. Scripture can be a medievalism, inasmuch as it en-tails a violent recapture of a mythologically lost past. Fun-damentalism can be a medievalism, because it denies thepast, even that of the text itself. It is subject to, andthreatened by, translation. Although the desire to equateMuslim and Christian fundamentalism is lazy, some form offundamentalism, even in the absence of an overt religiousideology, as in secular France, is often invoked in blas-phemy cases. Fundamentalism, and not just American fun-damentalism, is generally a form of exceptionalism, and ex-ceptionalism is wired to nationalism, as the national appro-priation of an ostensibly international discourse.

To begin with, we should surely problematize the unit ofstudy, not least where blasphemy is alleged. I received myscholarly training in the 1970s, when one was still largelytrained in the academic discipline pertaining to a nationalculture. If one studied two national cultures, one was calledcomparative. If one studied more than two, any of whichhad the appearance of transgressing continental

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boundaries, one was called multicultural. To be interdiscip-linary was a brave new world. In today’s global perspective,doing less than all this at once would be to announce one’sintellectual limitations. The sole drawback, since the train-ing itself has not been proportionately transformed, is thatrelatively few scholars have the reach to meet our interna-tional ambitions. The danger becomes that we fall into arather lazy globalism that effaces difference rather than en-hancing it, which benefits mainly—to draw from the aboveexamples—McDonald’s and the Coca-Cola company and be-comes a standard currency for making generalizationsabout, say, Christianity and Islam. By contrast, limitationsfreely admitted become a form of knowledge. The benefit ofa collaborative volume such as this one is that it bringsvarious types of informed intellectual limitation into dia-logue. I am aware, then, that the images I have consideredabove are restricted to Western Europe. One might arguethat this is often held to be a key location for the “clash ofcivilizations” (since at least 1453), but such a claim mightmerely prolong a legacy of Eurocentrism. Or I might pleadan ethical extenuation: this is my culture of origin, in whoseaffairs I therefore meddle as of right. Much of what is im-portant in the Western European context is nevertheless co-lonial and postcolonial (in the cases of, for example, Moroc-can, Algerian, and Somali communities in Holland andFrance, and Indian, Pakistani, Bengali, and Indonesiancommunities in Britain) or extends significantly beyond ex-isting European boundaries, as in the case of Turkey. TheU.S. context for its part entails making a historical andpolitical case for racial and cultural diversity, which haveoften served as the involuntary opponents, and tragic vic-tims, of exceptionalism and nationalism. All of which is tosay: we need to be careful about what we mean by world.

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We need to be more careful still if we rely on claims that“the world” is growing “disenchanted.” Much writing aboutand around themes relating to blasphemy in the past gener-ation has acknowledged the influence of Marcel Gauchet’s1985 book, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoirepolitique de la religion, translated into English in 1997.41

The Traces du Sacré exhibition, for example, depended to agreat extent on his thesis. Since that thesis concerns cul-tural change in the wake of the Enlightenment, Gauchet’s“world” must be largely coextensive with Western Europe.His central tenet is what he calls the paradox of freedom:although religion was historically necessary (indeed, liber-ating) as a sine qua non of social organization, it createdconditions for its own undoing in its increasing reliance onstate power. Established religion as a form of social regula-tion comes into conflict with a principle of individualautonomy that it helped create. Hence the inevitability of“disenchantment”: the more theocratic a society, Gauchetargues, the more vulnerable its religion is to change. As ahistorical prospectus, this offers some comfort to those ofus who would like to see, for example, a more secular Iran.Viewed from a long historical perspective, in which almostall forms of social organization eventually fail, it has anantecedent plausibility, but one should surely hesitate toapply it as a Marxist law. Logically, the theory is self-certify-ing and does little more than work out the terms ofGauchet’s definition of religion as choice rather than oblig-ation and as conferring the power to change. We might wellwonder whether the theory as configured in the 1980swould have assumed quite the same form if devised intoday’s world, which outside Europe seems to have veeredfurther from disenchantment. Gauchet’s account would seta positive value on blasphemy, as a portent of individual

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autonomy, and so it was represented in Traces du Sacré. Yetone might wonder how in these terms blasphemy could out-live the obsolescence of the religion in opposition to whichit derives its power to offend. Is blasphemy itself subject todisenchantment?

If Gauchet’s theory seems inflexible, that may be becauseits key terms—religion, the nation-state—are too broad. Theanalysis of visual examples of blasphemy in the first part ofthis chapter demonstrates the need to deal in smaller, morediverse and variable units of study: communities and sub-communities, both within and across nations. Harvey’sMyra caused offense in its transition from Manchester toLondon, and Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary became an object ofoffense once it crossed the Atlantic. Kosolapov’s satires onincursions by global commercialism into postcommunistRussia gave offense to the newly reempowered Orthodoxcommunity. Shechner’s disconcerting manipulation of Holo-caust images needs to be linked to a subcommunity of dis-senting Israeli writers and artists and their critique of Is-rael’s policy. The account of Submission and of Van Gogh’smurder reveals a particularly complex interplay of com-munities and subcommunities in contemporary Amsterdam.We saw too how Cattelan changes the reception and there-fore the meaning of HIM by periodically relocating it in dif-ferent communities. These examples all suggest in differentand specific permutations that the basic unit of blasphemy,even more basic than religion, is community.

Gauchet’s work is useful, however, in insisting on majordifferences in the character of the three major European re-ligions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This helps explainwhy blasphemy tends to play differently from one religion tothe next—why, for example, blasphemy in a Christian com-munity is both more routine and harder to sustain than in

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Islam. In both Islam and Judaism, scripture must be studiedand read in the original language, whereas Christian com-munities habitually read their Bible in translation. Al-though burning a Christian Bible has historically been asource of blasphemy allegations,42 the defacing of scriptureby an attack on its actual form—cutting up an ancientTorah43 or using Islamic calligraphy on women’s bodies—isboth more heinous and more immediate in the other tworeligions.

Just as scripture in Judaism and Islam resists translation,so the divine resists representation: though neither religionhas ever been uniformly aniconic, the main traditions vari-ously inhibit or prohibit representing the divine or traffick-ing in the divine in terms of human embodiment. (It istherefore calamitously easy to provoke Muslims with anyvisual representation of Mohammed, however inept or mali-cious.) Christianity, by contrast, insists on the dual natureof Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. However de-sirable it may be for orthodoxy to insist on a certain physic-al decorum, apart from what Saint Paul calls the scandal ofthe cross (1 Corinthians 1:18–21), there is no theologicalbarrier to prevent the godhead’s exposure to the gamut ofroutine corporeal indignities. A Christ child with a bottomto be slapped is relatively mundane among them. Anothermodern image that was physically attacked by onlookers,Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, pushes Christian notions ofthe beauty of embodiment as far as they will go, and fur-ther.44 There is a long history of Christian discomfort atartists’ religious images, most of which yields to grudgingacceptance over time—not because Christian communitiesare exceptionally tolerant, but because they mostly learn tolive with the visual consequences of their theology. Most re-cent examples of offense have been caused by the

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introduction of corporeal elements that are nonhuman:Ofili’s elephant dung or an image of the crucified Christmade of Marlboro cigarettes,45 even an otherwise inoffens-ive Hello Kitty Nativity scene in a department store win-dow.46 Pushing against orthodox limits often seems littlemore than teasing and attracts at best synthetic outrage, asin the I.N.R.I. images or Gilbert and George’s SonofagodPictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual?47 Elisabeth Ohlson Wal-lin’s much-traveled Ecce Homo photographs of an LGBT Je-sus have been controversial,48 but I am aware of no cogenttheological grounds for decrying them (and the archbishopof Uppsala sanctioned their exhibition in their nativeSweden). In this day and age in Western Europe, those whowish to give genuine offense must go to innovative ex-tremes, as in Jerry Springer: The Opera, which representedJesus as an infantile, mother-fixated, diaper-wearing, fatAmerican adult male,49 but such extremes tend to owe moreto the desire to excel as off-color comic entertainment thanas theological pretensions or social commentary. They areoffense as box office, which at least calls for a measure ofartistic accomplishment.

If one were to make a typology of blasphemy, then, itwould require the categories of both religion and culture,categories sometimes contested and opposed to each otherbut which almost always interplay, albeit in different ways,and which point to different types of communities and sub-communities. Those who speak for a religion are often alsospeaking for a culture, for example those who would con-vert homophobia into a religious principle (or thosenineteenth-century preachers in the deep South who defen-ded slavery as God’s manifest will). Whatever else it is, fun-damentalism, especially in the modern United States, is aculture. Moreover, many types of difference are at stake

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when offense is given or taken, from the broadly religiousto the narrowly communitarian. In addition to depicting aspectrum of offense, a typology of blasphemy would allowfor a spectrum of intention on the part of the blasphemer.Sometimes the offense taken arises from a misunderstand-ing of the artist’s intention: this is probably true of Kosol-apov’s painting and certainly true of the Hello Kitty Nativ-ity. Sometimes the offense fails to register what the artistsees as the distance between a strategic element of blas-phemy and the overall intention of the work. This appliesparticularly to literary texts and rarely makes for a success-ful defense in alleviating perceived provocation. The fatwaagainst Rushdie was not annulled by his insistence that theoffending Jahila material was a fantasy on the part of theinsane Gibreel Farishta, and Christopher Marlowe was notdistinguished from Doctor Faustus when Puritans rejoicedin his death as a blasphemer.50 In the visual arts, offensemay arise when an artist turns something regarded as sac-red into the vehicle for another kind of social comment. SoHarvey in Myra reflects on monstrosity and media; Schech-ner critiques Israeli militarism; Kosolapov and Sarah Lucastake aim at consumerism and commercialism. In the lastthree cases, the artists reveal what they are doing throughprovocatively punning titles (all transplanted quotations):respectively, It’s the Real Thing (Coca-Cola, Schechner’simage and digital manipulation of a Holocaust image), ThisIs My Body (McDonald’s), and Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy(the Marlboro Crucifixion).

At one end of the intention spectrum are cases where anartist means no offense but apparently gives it in the designor treatment of the subject. A clear historical instancewould be Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) byJohn Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite plainness of which

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offended the more sentimental canons of Victorian cul-ture.51 At the opposite end are cases where the blasphemyis fully intended, most commonly as the expression of polit-ical, social, or religious dissent. A straightforward exampleis Piss Christ. A much more thoughtful and programmaticexample is Garouste’s Passage, analyzed above. Images ofthis kind arise not from latter-day disenchantment, asGauchet describes, but from an older, atavistic battlebetween priests and poets fundamental to artistic blas-phemy; they are the visual counterparts of literary workssuch as Doctor Faustus or The Satanic Verses. In the liter-ature, the common strategy, beyond offense, is to dispute orqueer scripture by rewriting it in a contrary form, as in TheLast Temptation of Christ, and sometimes by splitting it in-to doubles. Thus Rushdie turns Mohammed into Mahound;Sigmund Freud, arguing for the origin of Judaism in ancientEgypt, turns Moses into two, the second of whom assassin-ates and supplants the first;52 and Philip Pullman producesa fiction about “the good man Jesus and the scoundrelChrist, “the latter of whom betrays the former and then im-personates the dead Jesus in order to propagate the myth ofhis resurrection and establish the church.53 In all threecases, there is a discernible artistic pleasure in pervertingthe received scriptural text. The writers seek to expose thetrick, to undo the history, of both religious institutions andthe scripture itself. At least in the cases of Freud and Pull-man, the accusations of misappropriation that they make intheir fictions serve to license their own calculated misap-propriations of scripture. However subtly modulated (and itrarely is subtle), such misappropriation is assimilable toDada or surrealism and the desire to paint a mustache onthe Mona Lisa. We should not underestimate the serious,often heartfelt, pleasure of defacing scripture.

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In the absence of extended narrative, the pictorial artsmake such suggestions by substitutions, of putti by vulvasin Ofili’s Virgin Mary, of blood by urine in Piss Christ, of apious boy by Hitler in HIM. Since these are acts of transla-tion, they belong in the same conceptual territory as appro-priation and misappropriation and insist on the artist’stransitive freedom of movement. But while literature andthe visual arts generally seek the maximum play for appro-priation, scripture does not. The notion of scriptural inerr-ancy is important in all three major Western religions, evenChristianity, whose Bible is already translated. The culturalconflict is therefore about the freedom to appropriate, andit yields a version of history: on the one hand, poets andartists who rejoice in that freedom; on the other, clerics ofvarious faiths and denominations who would regulate itwhile being as it were professionally exempted from suchregulation. From a cultural viewpoint, appropriation andmisappropriation are the same act, common to both the artsand religion and, crucially, using the same language. Mar-lowe gets it right at the beginning of Doctor Faustus. Faus-tus, who after Marlowe comes to embody the artist as delib-erate blasphemer, is both Icarus—“His waxen wings didmount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir’dhis overthrow”—and the precursor of John Milton’s Satan,“falling to a devilish exercise.”54 He is at once artist andblasphemer, depending entirely on the angle of view.

Yet blasphemous dissent may stem from authentic ideal-ism. The best modern example might be the French-Cana-dian film Jesus of Montreal (1989), in which a group of act-ors whom the church has called on to refresh an uninspiredand embarrassingly maudlin Passion play discover in theirresearches what seems to them the truth of the New Testa-ment, which the church has suppressed. The film itself

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becomes a serious modern parody of the New Testament, inwhich the resurrection of Jesus is represented by cornealgrafts and organ transplants from the dead body of the act-or who had played him in the revised Passion play. The filmworks out the logic of its antiscripture at a level of detail sosustained as to be allegorical (the link between allegory andblasphemy would repay further study). Though leadingCatholic dignitaries in Canada and the United States loudlyexpressed their offense, the film struck most viewers, in-cluding Catholics, as a serious-minded and artistically hon-est inquiry. Were it to be rereleased in the modern climateof Catholicism after so many recent scandals, it might beregarded as both prophetic and exemplary. It returns us tothe central question of the interpretation of scripture. Thisis also integral to the most intellectually demanding of themodern visual works discussed above, Garouste’s Passage.Paradoxically, both the film and Passage reveal the com-monality between dissident and official interpreters. For alltheir rupture, they are agreed on the importance of scrip-ture. Theirs is a shared tradition that makes the artists’ dis-sent intelligible and important. Without it, neither the reli-gion nor the art is truly functional. Whereas in Traces duSacré a range of esoteric artistic forays into comparativeanthropology or archetypal symbolism was considered bythe curators to be largely self-explanatory, Garouste’s bril-liant painting was judged to require an extensive text panelin order to be understood. Garouste would scarcely havebeen surprised: our culture is not in touch with its historicroots. There has to be at least this much merit, when ap-plied to Western Europe, in Gauchet’s thesis. There, ifnowhere else, what happens to blasphemy as Christianityretreats? To judge from examples reviewed in this chapterreviews, it adapts to more secular, more overtly cultural

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subjects—such as child abuse or Hitler or governmentpolicy. There is nevertheless an intellectual and affectiveloss, not least of familiar modes for discussing pressing is-sues of translation, appropriation, and, above all, com-munity. For all their cultural antagonism, blasphemy andreligion occupy adjacent fields. They need each other. As re-ligion loses its hold, so may blasphemy.

If Gauchet is right after all, if only in the case of post-Christian Western Europe or North America, and it growsharder for blasphemy to do its cultural work in the West asreligion becomes less secure socially and less supported in-stitutionally, then we may need a new term for a newly ali-enated form of blasphemy. Hesitantly, I would endorse post-blasphemy. This will combine elements in new ways and beless susceptible to ideological reading. In visual terms, thetwo works from Sensation in this chapter may come closest.In literary terms, we have a frighteningly commonplacevisualization of the breakdown involved in Douglas Pre-ston’s airport novel appropriately called Blasphemy: in theviolent meeting of backwoods fundamentalism andgovernment-sponsored science, each turns out to be as fun-damentalist, blasphemous, and destructive as the other.55

More compellingly, and from the end of the twentieth cen-tury, when the sort of cultural breakdown involved becameclear on an international scale, we might consult OrhanPamuk’s Turkish novel Yeni Hayat (1995), translated intoEnglish as The New Life (1998).56 It is a surrealist retro-spect of Turkey’s civil strife in the 1970s and 1980s.Islamic-leaning Eastern Anatolia is at odds with secularistIstanbul; political divisions have become so inscribed thatnobody knows any longer what caused them; and various ir-regular factions, not only in universities but also in civil so-ciety across the country, are happily engaged in the process

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of killing fellow citizens with whom they think they mightdisagree. The casus belli is a book that the combatants haveglimpsed but not read, an improbable amalgam of railwaytimetables, memoirs of a retired railway engineer, and half-reminiscences of Dante Alighieri and Rainer Maria Rilke.The ideas and passions involved prove ephemeral. All thatthe participants agree on is the importance of killing oneanother to advance programs never defined. Violent offenseholds sway without real cause. The whole is a parable of theidentity confusion spread by globalizing modernity.

Again, the visual arts mostly eschew a narrative dimen-sion but invite such conflicts. We may find an equivalent inthe increasing intermixing of international cultural signs inmodern art. The Coca-Cola logo appears in remote Anatoliain Pamuk’s novel. I think of its meeting with Russian Ortho-doxy in Kosolapov and with the Holocaust in Schechner. Ithink of the way that Islamic artists, say in Europe or inTunisia, reflect on the representations of colonial, oriental-ist art and of the fateful way that Theo van Gogh tried toturn such representations back on Islam. I think of portableartwork such as Cattelan’s that signifies differently in Lon-don or New York, Paris or Warsaw. I think of the challen-ging mixture of elements in Ofili’s Virgin Mary, derivedfrom medieval Europe and postcolonial Africa, from reli-gious idealism and racist pornography. I conclude that wewill not give up blasphemy. Even if it proves more deeplyrooted than religion, it will remain one of the most valuableand ominous indices of who we think we are.

NOTES

1. David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1993): “Blasphemy is an exchange. . . . Though

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the weight is always heavily on the side of power, the offense existsbetween the sides involved, in the gap between them, in the ex-change itself, an exchange without reciprocity” (5); “Blasphemy istherefore a discourse that includes those who purport to be offendedby it” (202).

2. David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

3. Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism,Censorship and “The Satanic Verses” (Southwold, Suffolk: Orwell,1990). Webster has written of what he calls “liberalism’s holy war.”See www.richardwebster.net/liberalismsholywar.html.

4. Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World, 242.5. Robert Ayers, “Red Grooms’s Chris Ofili Drawing,” Blouin

ArtInfo, November 20, 2007, www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/26119/red-groomss-chris-ofili-drawing/; Sensation: Young BritishArtists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy catalogue, ed.Norman Rosenthal and Brooks Adams (London: Thames and Hud-son, 1998). For the controversy, see Hugh Davies and Ben Fenton,“Whiff of Sensation Hits New York,” Daily Telegraph, October 2,1999, and, in the aftermath, Lawrence Rothfield, ed., Unsettling“Sensation”: Arts Policy from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Contro-versy (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

6. For the threat of eviction, see New York Times, September 24,1999; the court’s first order, New York Times, November 2, 1999;and the outcome of the case, New York Times, March 28, 2000.

7. British Council website for Chris Ofili, “Painting with Shit onIt,” http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/18786/ob-ject/39634. See also Christopher Rapp, “Dung Deal—Brooklyn Mu-seum of Art’s ‘Sensation’ Exhibition,” National Review, October 25,1999; Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, “Contemporary Art and theReturn of Religion,” August 6, 2010, www.cardus.ca/comment/art-icle/2093/.

8. Bibi van der Zee, “Chris Ofili (Winner 1998),” Guardian, Octo-ber 31, 2003.

9. New York Times, December 18, 1999. For the outcome of thecase against the painting’s attacker (a $250 fine), see New YorkDaily News, November 15, 2000.

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10. Dalya Alberge, “Attacks Force Hindley Portrait to Be Moved,”Times (London), September, 19 1997; http://artcrimes.net/myra; Si-mon Hattenstone, “Myra, Margaret and Me,” Guardian, February 20,2009.

11. Winnie Johnson, quoted by Tamsin Blanchard in theIndependent, September 19, 1997. Hindley herself appealed in a let-ter from prison for the portrait to be removed. Johnson died onAugust 18, 2012, and obituaries appeared in all the main Britishnewspapers in the days following.

12. See, for example, Hilton Kramer, “How Saatchi OrchestratedBrooklyn Museum Frenzy . . . Money, Not Art, Rules Show,” NewYork Observer, April 10, 1999. For a more considered critique, seeJulian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (London:Verso, 2006).

13. S. Brent Plate, Blasphemy: Art That Offends (London: BlackDog, 2006), 28. This is an indispensable collection of images, includ-ing most of those examined here dated before 2005.

14. It is photographed in situ at the Centre Pompidou in the cata-logue Traces du Sacré (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2008),248–49.

15. Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, reproduced in Plate, Blas-phemy, 8; see also Traces du Sacré, 242. The statue was vandalizedwhen exhibited in Warsaw in 2000–2001.

16. Italo Tomassoni, De Dominicis (Milan: Skira, 2011); ht-tp://moblog.net/view/251782/calamita-cosmica-by-gino-de-dominicis.

17. For the material in this paragraph, see Vanessa Gera, “Maur-izio Cattelan’s Statue of Praying Hitler in Ex–Warsaw Ghetto SparksEmotion,” Huffington Post, December 28, 2012,www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/maurizio-cattelan-praying-hitler_n_2376699.html.

18. See Plate, Blasphemy, 46–47, 160–61. There is, inevitably,again a Saatchi connection—see www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/kosolapov_alexander.htm?section_name=breaking_the_ice.

19. Plate, Blasphemy, 46; Alessandro Imperato, “Boundaries ofRepresentation: Holocaust Manipulation, Digital Imaging and theReal,” http://drainmag.com/contentFEBRUARY/RELATED_ESSAYS/boundaries.htm; Lutz Koepnick, “Photographs and Memories,”South Central Review 21 (2004): 94–129.

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20. See, e.g., www.masada2000.org/Schechner.html.21. See Plate, Blasphemy, 105.22. www.horit.com/terror.htm.23. For Schechner’s own presentation, see

www.dottycommies.com/holocaust10.html. For Said, see Aaron Matz,“Stone Thrower and Scholar: Edward Said’s Ferocious Unity,” NewYork Observer, September 11, 2000, http://observer.com/2000/09/stone-thrower-and-scholar-edward-saids-ferocious-unity/.

24. Gersht’s magnificent exhibition History Repeating was at theMuseum of Fine Arts in Boston from August 25, 2012, to January 6,2013. MFA Press printed the catalogue and study, written by Al Min-er and Yoav Rinon, in 2012.

25. The film can still be seen on YouTube. For the murder, see IanBuruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Lim-its of Tolerance (London: Penguin, 2007).

26. Some of the stills are reproduced in Plate, Blasphemy, 16–17;others can be found online.

27. Yasmine Ryan, “Tunisia’s Embattled Artists Speak Out,” AlJazeera, June 15, 2012, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/2012615111819112421.html.

28. Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly, I.N.R.I. (New York: Mona-celli, 1999), 64–65.

29. A major retrospective of Nishat’s work was held at the DetroitInstitute of Arts in April–July 2013. The catalogue, Shirin Neshat(Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2013), has essays by Rebecca R.Hart, Sussan Babale, and Nancy Princenthal. See also MarinaAbramović and Arthur C. Danto, Shirin Neshat (New York: Rizzoli,2010). For an online sample of photographs and an interview withNeshat, see http://whoawaitwhat-witlee28.blogspot.com/2011/12/wiki-abstracts-no-39-shirin-neshat.html.

30. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007); Ali, TheCaged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam(New York: Atria, 2008).

31. Nawal el-Saadawi, The Fall of the Imam, trans. Sherif Hetata(London: Methuen, 1990), discussed in Lawton, Blasphemy, 140–41;Tehmina Durrani, Blasphemy: A Novel (London: Penguin, 1995).

32. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 225.

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33. Gera, “Maurizio Cattelan’s Statue of Praying Hitler.”34. Traces du Sacré, 25.35. Ibid., 160–61.36. Max Ernst, La Vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus devant trois té-

moins: André Breton, Paul Eluard et le peintre (1926); see Traces duSacré, 238–39.

37. Gérard Garouste, Passage (Autoportrait), 2005; see Traces duSacré, 237.

38. “Entretien avec Gérard Gerouste,” dir. Bernard Clerc-Renaud,Centre Pompidou, http://traces-dūsacre.centrepompidou.fr/exposi-tion/paroles_artistes.php?id=28.

39. Gérard Garouste, with Judith Perrignon, L’Intranquille: Auto-portrait d’un fils, d’un peintre, d’un fou (Paris: L’iconoclaste, 2009).

40. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (London: Methuen,1980).

41. Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoirepolitique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), trans. Oscar Burgeas The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

42. For the 1855 Dublin case against Rev. Vladimir Petcherine,see Lawton, Blasphemy, 111–19.

43. For a 2012 case in Tel Aviv, see Shmarya Rosenberg, “ChiefRabbis Protest ‘Blasphemous’ Art, Threaten to Find Ways to CloseGallery,” December 27, 2012, http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2012/12/chief-rabbis-protest-blasphemous-art-threaten-to-find-ways-to-close-gallery-567.html.

44. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ (Immersion) (1987); see Plate,Blasphemy, 131–32; Traces du Sacré, 232–33, 243.

45. Sarah Lucas, Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy (2003); see Plate,Blasphemy, 14–15.

46. Tom Sachs, Hello Kitty Nativity Scene (1994); see Plate, Blas-phemy, 26–27. After Catholic League protests, Barney’s removed theinstallation, which it had intended to auction for charity, from itsstore window.

47. Gilbert and George, Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Hetero-sexual?, with essay by Michael Bracewell (London: White Cube,2006).

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48. The series may most accessibly be viewed on YouTube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyM7P4j2WYc.

49. The Wikipedia article provides a useful description of theshow and its reception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Springer:_The_Opera.

50. See David Lawton, “Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus,” inThe Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge andGreg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 161–74.

51. Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents(1849–50); see the account on the Tate Gallery’s website,www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-christ-in-the-house-of-his-parents-the-carpenters-shop-n03584/text-summary.

52. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), in The Ori-gins of Religion, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin,1985); see also Lawton, Blasphemy, 167–72.

53. Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ(London: Canongate, 2010).

54. Christopher Marlowe, Faustus, A-Text, prologue, lines 20–23,in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and EricRasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

55. Douglas Preston, Blasphemy (New York: Forge Books, 2008).56. Orhan Pamuk, The New Life, trans. Güneli Gün (New York:

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998). See David Lawton, “History andLegend: the Exile and the Turk,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medievalthrough Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 175–78.

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PART TWO

Sacrilege andDemocraticDevelopment

CHAPTER 4

Blasphemy and FreeThought inJacksonian AmericaThe Case of Abner Kneeland

PAUL FINKELMAN

In 1834 a grand jury in Boston indicted Abner Kneeland forblasphemy. In 1838, after four trials and a final appeal tothe Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Chief JusticeLemuel Shaw upheld Kneeland’s conviction.1 The prosecu-tion and conviction resulted from three articles Kneelandpublished in his newspaper, the Boston Investigator. TheInvestigator was the first “rationalist” publication in theUnited States2 and was aggressively hostile to organized re-ligion, Christianity, traditional notions of God, and the ex-istence of a hereafter. Although it was in his discretion tosuspend Kneeland’s sentence, Shaw sent the iconoclasticpublisher off to the Suffolk County jail for two months. Theconviction and the sentence had no effect on Kneeland’shostility toward established churches or his willingness toattack them from the lectern or in print. If anything, the

short jail sentence further radicalized him. As the Bostonminister Theodore Parker noted after Shaw’s decision, “Ab-ner was jugged for sixty days; but he will come out as beerfrom a bottle, all foaming, and will make others foam.”3

While the venerable and famous Chief Justice Shaw hadthe temporal power to jail Kneeland, the case did moredamage to him than to Kneeland. The chief justice’s opinionwas one of the worst in his long and otherwise distin-guished career and “did not so much reveal his greatness asit confirmed Richard Henry Dana’s observation that Shaw, aconservative Unitarian and Whig, was ‘a man of intense anddoting biases.’”4 From a modern perspective, Kneelandspoke truth to power, and Shaw’s use—or misuse—of hispower remains a black mark on his reputation.

For Kneeland, the conviction and sentence had the oppos-ite effect. The case enhanced his reputation at the time andamong scholars today. At the beginning of Kneeland’s legalordeal, a number of intellectuals were unsympathetic to hisviews, especially his unorthodox religious beliefs, as well ashis views on gender, marriage, and sexuality, and his Jack-sonian political sympathies. The charge of blasphemy re-flected this larger constellation of social and cultural per-spectives that challenged so many accepted or traditionalsocial conventions of Boston’s elite establishment. Similarto blasphemy charges today, it was not just about religionbut involved the attempt to protect the way social institu-tions, cultural norms, and political power were structured.However, by the time Kneeland went to jail, many seriousand significant members of Boston’s intellectual com-munity, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Rev. Willi-am Ellery Channing, had rallied to his cause and were thor-oughly disgusted with the prosecution and jail sentence,which seemed like a persecution for religious beliefs. A

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number of New England intellectuals recalled that the lasttime Massachusetts had pursued this kind of persecution, ithad left a score of people dead in Salem. While no onethreatened Kneeland’s life for his theological beliefs (or hissocial views), his persecution smacked of the same sort ofintolerance that had led to Salem, and this surely disturbedmany who disagreed with him on most of these issues.

There are many ironies tied to Kneeland’s fame. Althoughhe had a long career of radical free thought and social agit-ation, Kneeland is remembered mostly because of Shaw’sopinion and the jail sentence he confirmed. Although Knee-land mocked Christianity with its tradition of martyrdom,Chief Justice Shaw made him a martyr. Similarly, Kneelandrejected the idea of a “resurrection of the dead, immortal-ity, and eternal life,” and believed that death is an externalextinction of life.”5 But ironically, what Kneeland wrote andpublished in the Investigator, which helped send him to jail,gave Kneeland immorality among historians and supportersof religious liberty, as it highlighted the dimensions of so-cial and political authority that are invariably embedded inblasphemy charges.

KNEELAND’S EARLY LIFE

Born in Massachusetts a year before the American Revolu-tion began, Kneeland had a common-school education butlittle more. While working as a carpenter, he joined aBaptist church, becoming a preacher in that denominationin 1801. He also taught school and published some well-re-garded spelling books.6 He became the official town minis-ter in Langdon, New Hampshire, in 1805 and served in thatstate’s legislature in 1810–11. He left New Hampshire andthe Baptist church at the end of his legislative term and

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moved back to Massachusetts, where he became a Univer-salist minister in Charlestown. In 1814 he abandoned thechurch, in part because he no longer accepted the Bible asa divine text. But by 1818 he was once again preaching,holding pulpits in New York and Philadelphia. In 1829 hepermanently abandoned the Universalist Church and form-ally and publicly rejected Christianity with the publicationof A Review of the Evidences of Christianity. While clearlyblasphemous to many Americans (such as Chief JusticeShaw), this tract went through six editions in the next dec-ade and brought Kneeland a substantial following. In 1831,the same year that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrisonbegan publishing the Liberator, Kneeland moved to Bostonand founded the Boston Investigator, which continued tooperate until 1904.

Though the era was marked by a resurgence of evangelic-al Protestantism, Kneeland quickly attracted a significantnumber of supporters, with twenty-five hundred people sub-scribing to his paper and nearly as many attending each ofhis lectures. Shocking to “proper” Boston society was thefact that about a third of those who came to his lectureswere women. His lectures—and those he sponsored given byothers—introduced Bostonians to new ideas about mar-riage, birth control, and the irrationality of Christianity. Bythis time, he had emerged as a radical freethinker. He sup-ported antislavery, workers’ rights, public schools, and theabolition of imprisonment for debt. His most radical anddangerous positions (from the perspective of the Boston es-tablishment) were on gender equality, racial equality, mar-riage, birth control, and religion. He went beyond merelyadvocating women’s rights—which was radical enough tomake many of Boston’s elite shudder—but supportedgender equality in marriage, the dissemination of

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information about birth control, and what would come to beknown as family planning. In a “Marriage Catechism” thathe published in his paper, Kneeland argued that the basisof marriage was the mutual happiness of the partners andwithout that happiness the marriage should be automatic-ally dissolved. He asserted that a marriage contract was“morally and virtually binding so long as it is productive ofthe happiness of the parties immediately concerned, and nolonger,” and that it was “civilly binding as long as it is ne-cessary to, and promotive of, the well-being of the offspringand no longer.”7 He was essentially arguing for what wewould today recognize as a civil contractual understandingof marriage and its accompanying dissolution in no-fault di-vorce. Such forward thinking was utterly shocking to theBoston establishment, as were his ideas that women shouldbe allowed to choose their own mates and that there shouldbe “perfect equality as to rights and privileges regardless ofsex.”8

Kneeland also argued that marriage choices should bemade, as individuals wished, “totally regardless of color.” Ina state where interracial marriage was still illegal—and in asociety obsessed with race and color—he proclaimed,“What! To marry each other? Yes, to marry, if they love orfancy each other.”9 He was probably the first social critic inthe nation not merely to advocate an end to racial restric-tions on marriage but to support the idea that peopleshould be free to make such choices.

In addition to his newspaper, Kneeland printed and soldsocially radial works by others. He offered the public RobertDale Owen’s Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treat-ise on the Population Question, which was first published inGreat Britain in 1830, and a marriage manual (which advoc-ated birth control) written by Dr. Charles Knowlton, who

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had been briefly jailed for this allegedly “obscene” publica-tion. Well before he was charged with blasphemy for his re-ligious opinions, Kneeland was writing (and selling) papersand books that could only be described as socially blas-phemous to the Unitarian and predominantly Whig elite ofBoston, challenging their views on gender, marriage, andrace and thus undercutting the cultural basis of their polit-ics. His radical ideas and intellectual connections to radicalpolitical and social thinkers were ultimately as important inleading to his prosecution as anything he wrote that mighthave been construed as blasphemous.

Every lecture he gave and every issue of the Investigatorhe published brought Kneeland a greater following—andgreater notoriety—in Boston. His freethinking threatenedalmost every social convention of the age. But except for hisadvocacy of birth control, which might have led to an ob-scenity prosecution,10 there were no obvious legal remediesfor those who felt threatened by him. Antebellum Bostongenerally provided a relatively free and open forum forspeech and the exchange of ideas. Advocates of antislavery,radical abolition, racial equality, and even slave revoltswere able to publish there without any serious legal con-sequences. Garrison’s Liberator was secure in Boston, andin 1829 the black radical David Walker advocated black re-bellion in his famous Appeal, which he successfully pub-lished in the birthplace of the American Revolution.11

But there was one arena (beyond obscenity) where thestate could restrain free speech. A Massachusetts act of1782, passed at the very end of the Revolution, provided im-prisonment of up to a year for “any person [who] shall will-fully blaspheme the holy name of God by denying, cursingor contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, govern-ment, or final judging of the world or by cursing or

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reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost or by cursing orcontumeliously reproaching the holy word of God, that isthe canonical scriptures as contained in the books of theOld and New Testaments, or by exposing them or any partof them, to contempt and ridicule.”12

In December 1833, the Investigator published three art-icles that in the eyes of the local prosecutor, Samuel Park-er, violated the 1782 statute. Parker, a Whig politician andthe son of the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts,13 ap-proached the prosecution with the zeal of a Grand Inquisit-or. At the trial, he argued that Kneeland had to be sup-pressed because his popular newspaper and lecturesbrought dangerous ideas to the general public. Parker tiedKneeland to Voltaire, Robert Owen, Thomas Paine, FannyWright, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Edward Gib-bon, “the Republic of Revolutionary France,” and “Mr. Jef-ferson . . . the Virginian Voltaire.” He admitted that therewere “other infidels—Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Volney, &c.”whose works were available, but they “were read only bymen of literary habits—necessarily a few—and to men ofsound understanding they carried their antidote withthem.” But Kneeland was different. His “Journal, a Newspa-per [was] cheap—and sent into a thousand families. Whereone man would be injured by Hume, Gibbon, or Volney, athousand may be injured by this Newspaper so widely circu-lated, so easily read—so coarsely expressed—so industriallyspread abroad.”14 In other words, the real danger of Knee-land was not his religious views per se but the fact that hewas able to disseminate them to large numbers of people,many of whom were not sophisticated members of Boston’selite, well-educated class. Parker feared that Kneelandwould undermine the hegemony of Boston’s elite by bring-ing radical social, political, and religious ideas to the

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masses. The dangers of such a radicalization of large num-bers of average Bostonians were clear for conservative Whigpoliticians such as Parker and the judges who sentencedKneeland and upheld his conviction.

Parker did not directly accuse Kneeland of being a Demo-crat in overwhelmingly Whig Boston, but the implicationwas there, underscored by numerous attacks on Thomas Jef-ferson. Kneeland was not on trial for his political views, buthis support for Andrew Jackson and his Democratic sym-pathies increased the hostility toward him from the city’sconservative Whig establishment. Parker was probably de-lighted that Kneeland’s attorney was Andrew Dunlap, aleader of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts and aformer attorney general of the commonwealth. With Dunlapstanding up for Kneeland, the connections to the Jacksoni-ans were obvious.

In January 1834, a jury found Kneeland guilty of blas-phemy, and Judge Samuel Putnam, a Whig on the BostonMunicipal Court, sentenced him to two months in jail.Kneeland appealed to the intermediate court, which con-sisted of one state Supreme Court justice sitting with a jury.This case ended in a hung jury, as did a second appeal. Atthat point the prosecution might have dropped the case.Endless trials for such a small matter seemed pointless.Indeed, it was highly unusual to continue prosecutions afterhung juries at this time. The relentless prosecution ofKneeland smacked of bigotry and intolerance, as well aspolitics, rather than ordinary law enforcement.

KNEELAND’S BLASPHEMY

The three articles that led to Kneeland’s prosecution seemnumbingly tame to modern readers. His attorney offered a

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two-pronged defense. First he claimed that they were pub-lished without Kneeland’s permission or knowledge, on aday when he had not been in Boston. Thus he was not leg-ally responsible for them. Dunlap also noted that Kneelandhad not written two of them and thus could not be prosec-uted for their publication, since he had also never seen orauthorized them. This defense was consistent with a classicdefense in seditious libel cases dating from the seventeenthcentury. This sort of defense had protected numerous sev-enteenth- and eighteenth-century printers from angry pro-secutors in Great Britain and in the colonies before theAmerican Revolution.15 Until the end of the eighteenth cen-tury, juries in seditious libel cases in America and Britainwere asked to decide only who had published the materialthat allegedly libeled the government.16 The judge wouldthen decide whether the publication was libelous, whichwas almost always a foregone conclusion. Thus, in seditiouslibel cases, lawyers defended printers by arguing that theywere not responsible for the offensive publication becausesomeone else had typeset it or inserted it in the publicationwithout the permission of the defendant, or that the defend-ant had not read the document but only found it on thefloor of the printshop and simply inserted it to fill space.Kneeland’s very capable lawyer, Dunlap, followed this tradi-tion, correctly arguing that his client could not be respons-ible for what he did not write and that someone else had in-serted it into the newspaper without his permission orauthority.

Dunlap also argued that the publications were not blas-phemous under the language of the statute. This claim wasprobably technically true but was ultimately unpersuasiveto the juries and judges in Massachusetts. As Kneelandlater noted in one of his pieces, he disputed the Unitarian

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view of God but never took the atheist position that therewas no God.

The first two articles mentioned in the indictment werenot even written by Kneeland, but were reprinted from theNew York Free Inquirer and, as noted, placed in the In-vestigator when Kneeland was out of town. However, itseems unlikely that he would have refrained from publish-ing them had he been in Boston that day. He had publishedother essays from the Inquirer and was hardly restrained inwhat he printed. The third item was a letter that Kneelandhimself wrote, which had previously been published in theTrumpet and Universalist Magazine, which was affiliatedwith the Universalist Church.17 No one at the time seems tohave raised the obvious question of why the commonwealthwould prosecute Kneeland for printing the letter in his pa-per but not seek to prosecute the editors of the Trumpet forpublishing it in the first place. If the letter was blasphem-ous, then its publication violated the law when published bya religious periodical as well as by an antireligiousnewspaper.

The least important article was a harsh review of the re-cently published religious tract The Miller’s Son. The art-icle, signed “A Skeptic,” was probably written by a mysteri-ous author named Ben Krapac.18 His review included a fewshort sentences that ridiculed prayer: “I cannot pass overthe subject of prayer, without adverting to the curious andstrange predicament that God is placed in, by listening tothe unceasing and endless varying, and what is worse, con-tradictory petitions that are every moment ascending up, ordown to him. I think the old gentleman is more a subject ofpity than General Jackson was during his late visit, his bow-ing and shaking was very arduous, but it was all one way,congratulatory and pleasing, and he had some occasional

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respite; but only think of God having no respite whatever,day or night.”19

Certainly this passage, which seems moderately humor-ous today, was deeply offensive to the Whig establishmentof Boston, because it both mocked prayer and comparedGod with Andrew Jackson. Calling God an “old gentleman”was moderately impious, but it is hard to imagine how eventhe superpious prosecutor Parker could seriously believethat something in the passage violated the blasphemy stat-ute. It is also particularly ironic that a Massachusetts pro-secutor would be offended by an argument that challengedthe efficacy of prayer, since the commonwealth’s Puritanfounders had had numerous public debates about thenature of prayer. The Puritan and Separatist founders ofMassachusetts believed in predestination and thus wouldhave agreed with “A Skeptic” that prayers asking God forfavors or help were ineffective—and even blasphemous byPuritan standards.

The second article, which the mysterious Ben Krapacsigned, argued that religion causes prejudice. It began witha quotation from Voltaire on the virgin birth of Jesus. Thispassage (which I set out below) was presumed to be so inde-cent and offensive that it was not put into Kneeland’s in-dictment or introduced into evidence at the trial. Thus thejurors were asked to convict Kneeland without seeing theevidence that proved he had committed blasphemy. Oddly,even by the standards of the early nineteenth century, thedocument was at worst vulgar, and certainly not obscene.Even odder, scholars since then have been reluctant (or tooprudish) to quote it. Leonard W. Levy, who was certainlynever shy about controversy, referred to the passage as a“gutter obscenity relating to the miraculous conception ofChrist.”20 As I will discuss later, this characterization is

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clearly wrong. Whatever Kneeland published, it was not ob-scene. Later Levy again dodged the document, simply writ-ing, “There was merely a quotation from Voltaire’s Philo-sophical Dictionary, which circulated in the respectableAthenaeum and in the Harvard Library.”21 Perhaps in 1957the young Professor Levy was too reluctant to reprint thispassage, but oddly, two decades later, when he was one ofthe most important historians in the United States and anexpert on freedom of expression, he used the same descrip-tion in his introduction to a collection of documents aboutKneeland.22

What had Kneeland published that the prosecutor Parkerthought was “too obscene . . . too revolting” to show thejury?23 It was this:

“A Parisian would be surprised to hear that the Hottentots cut outone of the testicles of every little boy; and a Hottentot would besurprised to hear that Parisians leave every little boy with two.”24

Neither the Parisian nor the Hottentot is astonished at the prac-tice of the other because he finds it unreasonable, but because hefinds it differs from his own. The Frenchman will ask why the Hot-tentots allow their boys but one testicle,—but that same French-man, though he be too stupid to understand the laws of evidence,or too illiterate to apply them to history, firmly believes that JesusChrist was begotten without any testicles at all.25

While Parker, in his bombastic style, asserted this was “ob-scene,” a characterization that Levy surprisingly en-dorsed—calling it a “gutter obscenity”—there was clearlynothing about the statement that was even remotely ob-scene. It might be crude, but it is not lascivious, salacious,or lewd. Even Boston Brahmins could not have argued thatthe language—including the word testicle—rises to the levelof obscene.

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Levy argues that there was no blasphemy in this passagedbecause “the Virgin was not even mentioned in the stat-ute.”26 But this is too narrow an argument. The statute of1782 punished “any person . . . reproaching the holy wordof God, that is the canonical scriptures as contained in thebooks of the Old and New Testaments, or . . . exposing themor any part of them, to contempt and ridicule.”27 Surelymerely doubting or questioning the idea of the virgin birthcould have been construed to be blasphemous under thestatute, because a challenge to the truth of the virgin birthwas a challenge to the literal truth of the Bible. However, atthis time pamphlets, books, printed sermons, newspapers,and magazines contained numerous debates among clergy,theologians, scientists, and historians over the veracity ofnumerous portions of the Bible. Some of the leading scient-ists of the time, for example, regularly disputed the cre-ation stories in Genesis.28 Thus, despite the language of thestatute, challenging the literal truth of the Bible couldhardly be blasphemy. And even for respectable Bostoniansof the early Victorian era, this passage seems to be a prettytame, although perhaps crude, attack on religion or faith.Although the prosecutor Parker refused to read this pas-sage in court on the grounds that it was too obscene for thetender ears of the all-male jury, it is at least plausible thathe did not present it to them because even a partisan jury ofconservative, churchgoing Whigs might have found it mildlyamusing and neither blasphemous nor obscene.

Throughout the many incarnations of this case, the pro-secutors and judges (including Chief Justice Shaw) insistedthat the blasphemy statute did not prohibit discussions oftheology or “the freest inquiry, when the real purpose is thediscovery of truth, to whatever result such inquiries maylead.”29 This standard should have protected all of the

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allegedly blasphemous articles in Kneeland’s newspaper.But as Parker noted throughout his speeches in court, thedanger came from the fact that Kneeland appealed so ef-fectively to average citizens. The manner of speech, in otherwords, was as important as the content. Thus Parker madeovert distinctions between high- and lowbrow expression.“Men of literary habits” could safely be allowed to readHume, Gibbon, Voltaire, or even the newspapers that Knee-land published, but average Bostonians were not sophistic-ated enough to understand and reject these radical ideas.Popular discussions of religion and theology were moreclosely scrutinized than more learned exchanges. The out-come of Kneeland’s reprinting of Voltaire’s comments onthe virgin birth illustrates this. Though the style of expres-sion was certainly satirical, it could at least plausibly bemaintained that a discussion of the biological issues of thebirth of Jesus, however crude, qualified as a search fortruth. But the prosecutors and judges in Boston believedthat such discussions could not be presented to anyone ex-cept, perhaps, “men of literary habits.”30

Although the jury and the midlevel appellate courts foundKneeland guilty of publishing all three articles, by the timehis case reached Chief Justice Shaw, the prosecution nolonger focused on the two articles reprinted from the NewYork Free Inquirer, which Kneeland had not written. The at-torneys for the commonwealth may have ignored theseparts of the indictment because they accepted (but neveracknowledged) the argument that Kneeland could not beprosecuted for something he had not written and was tech-nically not responsible for printing. It is also possible thateven the zealous Parker and the equally fanatic state attor-ney general, James T. Austin, who argued the case before

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Shaw, ultimately realized that these passages were surelynot blasphemous by any standard of interpretation.

In the end, Chief Justice Shaw upheld Kneeland’s convic-tion based on the third article in the indictment, whichKneeland had written. This passage (set out below) was partof a letter that Kneeland had sent to the editor of the Trum-pet, a Universalist publication. In this letter Kneeland ex-plained his philosophical views and his personal views onthe theology of the Universalist faith. He wrote, “That insome respects I am still a Universalist; but that in others Iam not.” He then set out how he differed from the Univer-salists. As he noted in every trial, he never denied the exist-ence of God but only explained how his theological viewsdiffered from those of the Universalists:

1. Universalists believe in a god which I do not; but believe thattheir god, with all his moral attributes (aside from nature itself) isnothing more than a mere chimera of their own imagination.

2. Universalists believe in Christ, which I do not; but believethat the whole story concerning him is as much a fable and a fic-tion as that of the god Prometheus, the tragedy of whose death issaid to have been acted on the stage in the theatre at Athens, fivehundred years before the Christian era.

3. Universalists believe in miracles, which I do not; but believethat every pretension to them can be accounted for on naturalprinciples, or else is to be attributed to mere trick and imposture.

4. Universalists believe in the resurrection of the dead, in im-mortality and eternal life, which I do not; but believe that all life ismortal, that death is an eternal extinction of life to the individualwho possesses it, and that no individual life is, ever was, or everwill be eternal.31

In all of the proceedings against Kneeland, the prosecu-tion and judges, including Chief Justice Shaw, argued that

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these passages proved that Kneeland had violated the 1782statute, because he denied the existence of God. But ofcourse Kneeland consistently and vociferously objected tosuch a characterization of his letter. He insisted again andagain that the statement was not a denial of the existenceof God but a rejection of the Universalists’ view of God.32

After his conviction, he reasserted his position: “I do notsay, I do not believe in God, or in the Gods.” He followedthis argument with a statement of his “PhilosophicalCreed,” in which he declared, “I am not an Atheist, but aPantheist; that is, instead of believing there is no God, I be-lieve that in the abstract all is God; and that all power thatis, is in God, and that there is no power except that whichproceeds from God. . . . Hence, I believe, that God is all inall; and that it is in God we live, move and have our be-ing.”33

More important, throughout Kneeland’s trials, all theprosecutors and judges asserted that the law was not de-signed to interfere with legitimate theological discussion.In the first trial, Judge Samuel Putnam “had admitted thateven an atheist might propagate his opinions,” and in alater trial, Judge Samuel Wilde had agreed that “the truthof the scriptures might be denied.”34 As Chief Justice Shawnoted, the Massachusetts Constitution

admits the freest inquiry, when the real purpose is the discoveryof truth, to whatever result such inquiries may lead. It does notprevent the simple and sincere avowal of a disbelief in the exist-ence and attributes of a supreme, intelligent being, upon suitableand proper occasions. And many such occasions may exist; aswhere a man is called as a witness, in a court of justice, and ques-tioned upon his belief, he is not only permitted, but bound, byevery consideration of moral honesty, to avow his unbelief, if it ex-ists. He may do it inadvertently in the heat of debate, or he mayavow it confidentially to a friend, in the hope of gaining new light

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on the subject, even perhaps whilst he regrets his unbelief; or hemay announce his doubts publicly, with the honest purpose of eli-citing a more general and thorough inquiry, by public discussion,the true and honest purpose being the discovery and diffusion oftruth. None of these constitute the wilful blasphemy prohibited bythis statute.35

It is hard to imagine how someone as smart and sophist-icated as Chief Justice Shaw could write this passage andthen uphold a conviction for blasphemy on the basis of avery serious letter about theology in a publicationsponsored by a religious group. Under Shaw’s stand-ard—that someone “may announce his doubts publicly, withthe honest purpose of eliciting a more general and thor-ough inquiry, by public discussion, the true and honest pur-pose being the discovery and diffusion oftruth”—Kneeland’s conviction should easily have beenoverturned.

In the end, the Kneeland prosecution makes no logicalsense, and the evidence hardly supports the conviction orChief Justice Shaw’s overblown opinion upholding it. Suchan analysis, though, assumes that the case was actuallyabout blasphemy and motivated by the threat it posed to or-thodox religion. But it was not. Kneeland’s real crime waschallenging an interconnected network of social conven-tions and attracting thousands of subscribers and listenersin the process.

BLASPHEMY AND TOLERATION IN ANTEBELLUMAMERICA

Kneeland’s was the last blasphemy case in Massachusettsand the last blasphemy conviction upheld by a significantAmerican state judge. Shaw was the most influential

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antebellum American state judge. His decisions were citedthroughout the nation, and his jurisprudence shaped muchof modern American tort, contract, property, and laborlaw.36 Almost every Northern state adopted the precedentin his decision in Commonwealth v. Aves, that slaves volun-tarily brought to free states by their masters were free.37

Similarly, most American jurisdictions accepted his articu-lation of the “fellow servant rule,” which shifted much ofthe burden of industrial accidents to workers and awayfrom corporations and business owners.38 Thus Shaw’s de-cision in Kneeland—and his imposition of a two-month jailterm—seems at odds with his generally forward-thinking,practical, and modern approach to law.39 Shaw’s most im-portant biographer, Leonard Levy, argued that this decisionwas not only among the chief justice’s “worst” but that itwas also “wholly at variance with freedom of opinion on re-ligion.”40

Such an analysis is certainly consistent with modern no-tions of freedom of conscience and the separation of churchand state, which is precisely the point that Levy was mak-ing. In the modern United States, it is pretty clear that thespeech, press, and religion clauses of the First Amendmentprotect all discussions of religion and belief.41 In our time,freedom of religion includes the right to denounce or mockthe practices of other faiths. It also includes the right todeny the very existence of God and the hereafter. The Un-ited States Supreme Court has held that the establishmentand free exercise clauses of the First Amendment preventgovernments from discriminating against atheists or ag-nostics or establishing any faiths or favoring one faith overanother.42 Today the federal government even acknow-ledges that the practice of witchcraft, which historically hasbeen considered the antithesis of religious faith, should be

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recognized as a legitimate form of religious practice.43 Inour time the state may not protect religion or religious in-stitutions from the rough-and-tumble discourse of a freesociety.

But Shaw’s opinion was not of our time. Rather, it reflec-ted antebellum conditions, in a time when religion could beused as a tool to suppress dissent, though even then suchsuppression was at odds with the vibrant reform culture ofMassachusetts and the substance of the persecution was atodds with the view of many intellectuals and dissentingministers in the commonwealth. Certainly in retrospect, andfor some contemporaries, Chief Justice Shaw’s opinion re-flected a dying past and was inconsistent with the emergingfuture. Many antebellum intellectuals and reformersthought blasphemy statutes and prosecutions such as Knee-land’s were archaic and in opposition to what they believedwere contemporary concepts of intellectual freedom in a re-public dedicated to liberty. Thus many New Englandersagreed with the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing that itwas “shocking” for a man to “be punished for his opinion,”and that the prosecution was “an offense at once to theprinciples and feelings of the community.”44 In addition toChanning, those opposed to the prosecution of Kneeland in-cluded other progressive clergy and abolitionists, tran-scendentalists, academic scholars, and reformers such asWilliam Lloyd Garrison, Ellis Gray Loring, Ralph WaldoEmerson, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, George Ellis, Ge-orge Noyes, Rev. Theodore Parker, and George Bancroft.Indeed, by the end of the case, Kneeland’s supporters readlike a Who’s Who of New England intelligentsia.45

In many ways, Kneeland’s conviction was the last gasp ofthe established church in the Bay State. A blasphemy pro-secution, in the end, is an assault on belief, faith, or

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religions (or a particular faith or religion). It can only becriminal if the state chooses to use its civil power to protecta particular faith, creed, or church. By the Civil War, fewAmericans believed that the state had any interest in pro-tecting or supporting one faith against another. ManyAmericans still believed the state could be used to perse-cute minority faiths—the Mormons in the late nineteenthcentury and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the mid-twentiethcentury—but these persecutions were not framed in termsof theology or belief but rather as responses (however ille-gitimate and oppressive) to behavior, the actual practices ofmembers of these faiths.

Scholars disagree about the role of blasphemy prosecu-tions in the culture of antebellum America. Levy claimedthat Shaw’s decision was “wholly at variance with freedomof opinion on religion,”46 although this seems to be mostlya retrospective analysis rather than a description ofnineteenth-century legal theory. Other scholars argue thatShaw’s opinion in the Kneeland case was “the distillationand application of four decades of blasphemy jurispru-dence.”47 In a sense both positions may be correct.

There is no doubt that Shaw’s decision was “wholly atvariance with freedom of opinion on religion.”48 But Levy’spoint seems to be a philosophical one, about the nature offreedom of speech and religion under the Constitution andin a free society. He does not argue that there were no oth-er cases on the subject at the time, because there were. Healso notes that while a libertarian jurisprudence did not de-velop to accompany the democratized politics of the firsthalf of the nineteenth century, many antebellum intellectu-als and reformers thought blasphemy laws were archaic andin opposition to the notion of liberty in the young republic.

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But many Americans, especially conservatives such asChief Justice Shaw, had different notions of religious libertyand its limits, especially when religion-related expressiontouched on venerated customs and norms. Their views illu-minate how blasphemy charges, then and now, cannot beseen in isolation as controversies merely over belief. Knee-land’s prosecutors regarded his blasphemous expression aspart of a wider constellation of ideas that challenged notjust religious orthodoxy but social institutions and culturalnorms affecting gender, marriage, sexuality, birth control,labor relations, and race. Moreover, their charges werelinked to their perception that Kneeland was on the wrongside of important political divides in contemporary society.This implicit political dimension of Kneeland’s case is alsoan enduring feature of blasphemy charges in other cases.Boston’s leaders—almost all of whom were conservativeWhigs—agreed that Kneeland was dangerous not merely be-cause of his social and theological views but also becausehe had opposed the Bank of the United States and suppor-ted Andrew Jackson. Compounding these factors was hispopularity. The fact that thousands came to Kneeland’s lec-tures and read his newspaper truly frightened the Bostonestablishment.

Blasphemy was a convenient tool for silencing people likeKneeland in a nation where the overwhelming majority wereevangelical Protestants. Thus virtually all legal theoristsand jurists at the time supported blasphemy laws, but suchsupport for these prosecutions was not fundamentally basedon protecting religious orthodoxy. In that sense, the Knee-land case differs from older applications of blasphemy lawbecause the prosecution was not designed to protect eitheran established church from a theological schism or a con-fessional state from a challenge to its religious ideology.

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Kneeland’s conviction was shocking to many in Bostonbecause by the 1830s, convictions for blasphemy in the Un-ited States were, though not unheard of, at least uncom-mon. They were rare not because there was a strong, prin-cipled argument against them in the antebellum legal com-munity. Legal commentators and treatise writers all agreedon the importance of such laws. However, most Americansallowed a fair amount of dissent and theological disagree-ment within and between traditional churches. Rather, blas-phemy prosecutions were rare because relatively few peopleopenly denounced or attacked religion in a manner suffi-ciently egregious to trigger a prosecution. The most famousAmerican blasphemy case before Kneeland’s was People v.Ruggles, in which Chief Justice James Kent supported theconviction of Ruggles for declaring that “Jesus Christ was abastard, and his mother must be a whore.”49 But few peoplewere as bold or as outrageous as Ruggles. In addition, asAmerican urban society became more complex and more re-ligiously heterodox, there were fewer calls to suppress blas-phemy or heresy.

Surely most American legal theorists generally endorsedreligious liberty (at least for traditional Western faiths),and in the context of world history, there was an extraordin-ary amount of religious freedom in the new nation. TheConstitution banned religious tests for holding office at thefederal level, and by the 1830s, the remaining state reli-gious tests had been repealed or were being ignored. Sincethe end of the revolution, Protestants of all denominationshad held public office, as had some Jews and Catholics. Theoverwhelmingly mainstream Protestant leaders of the legalcommunity were doubtless skeptical of radical Protestants,and many were unabashed in their hostility toward Cathol-ics. They generally tolerated Jews, who did not proselytize

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or engage in popular debates over theology or religiouspractice. At most, American Jews asked for exemptions fromperforming civic duties on their Sabbath, which they did notalways get.50 As a small community that was supplementedby only a trickle of immigrants to the country,51 they posedno threat to America’s Protestant hegemony.

The nineteenth century is replete with examples of polit-ical attacks (and sometimes mob attacks) on Catholics.52

Attempts by public school systems to impose Protestantprayers and Bible readings on Catholic children led toenormous political controversies and revealed the deeplyanti-Catholic biases of the nation’s Protestant majority. Butcourts, judges, and legislatures were more circumspect, asillustrated by the New York decision upholding the clergyprivilege for Catholic priests who refused to testify aboutwhat they heard in confession.53 Indeed, despite the politic-al attacks and prejudice, Catholics had more political free-dom and religious liberty in the United States than in anyother country in the world where they were not the majorityfaith or where theirs was not the official church. Jews alsohad more political freedom and religious liberty in the Un-ited States than anywhere else in the world. Not surpris-ingly, few members of these faiths challenged America’sProtestant hegemony or religion in general.

On the other hand, some extreme Protestants, atheists,and agnostics (who were usually from a Protestant back-ground) challenged religious orthodoxy in ways that led toblasphemy prosecutions. The victims of these prosecu-tions—we might easily call them legal persecutions—wentbeyond acceptable bounds in their criticisms of faith andtheology. It is important to understand that in antebellumAmerica, robust theological debates were common and nev-er seen as threatening to the status quo. Episcopalians,

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Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians all de-bated fine points of theology and practice. They also arguedand divided over slavery, race, and the place of women insociety. But none of these debates challenged the funda-mental idea of a living God or the divinity of Christ.54 ThoseProtestants or former Protestants who openly challengedthese fundamental notions of Christianity were occasionallyprosecuted for blasphemy. Similarly, some Protestantswhose theology led them to lifestyles, family arrangements,and marital relationships that challenged the statusquo—such as the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and mostof all the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mor-mons)—faced persecutions that went beyond merely blas-phemy trials. There was significant oppression, prosecution,harassment, and social ostracism of these groups for theirdifferences of religious belief, communitarian values, reli-ance on strong, almost dictatorial leadership (for the Mor-mons and the Oneida Community), and martial relation-ships and family organization. The Mormons were certainlyheretics according to traditional Christian theology becauseof their belief that Christ had returned to earth, and thustheir entire faith might be seen as blasphemous, but the vi-cious treatment of the Mormons went well beyond any sortof blasphemy punishments.55 Kneeland was jugged for twomonths in the local jail and emerged with significant sup-port from many in Boston; Joseph Smith and his followerswere forced out of one community after another untilIllinois authorities threw Smith into jail and did nothing toprotect his life, allowing a local mob to murder him.

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KNEELAND’S CASE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In the end, the only true winner in Kneeland’s saga was Ab-ner Kneeland. During his sixty days in jail, he had constantvisitors. Every day, supporters came “unto him,”56 bringinghome-cooked meals to sustain him in his cell. And asTheodore Parker predicted, when he left the county jail,Kneeland was “all foaming” like “beer from a bottle.”57

Almost immediately after he had served his sentence,Kneeland published a pamphlet, A Review of the Trial, Con-viction, and Final Imprisonment of in the County Jail of theCounty of Suffolk, of Abner Kneeland for the Alleged Crimeof Blasphemy, defending himself and attacking those whohad prosecuted and persecuted him.58 In it, he reprinted allthree essays that had led to his indictment in the firstplace, a blasphemous response to his prosecution for blas-phemy. Such a response is hardly unique in the history ofexpression controversy. In chapter 1 of this volume, Chris-topher S. Grenda considers similar responses in the eight-eenth century. He notes how figures such as the Third Earlof Shaftesbury and Thomas Paine responded to critics oftheir satires on Christianity by producing yet more satire.Jacques Berlinerblau explores similar dynamics in the twen-tieth century in chapter 2. In what he calls a profanity loop,the novelist Philip Roth used charges of obscenity as a cre-ative source for the production of more obscenity. Knee-land’s pamphlet was a similar example of creativity in re-sponse to attempts at censorship. Significantly, it provedfar more durable, and easier to disseminate, than a singleissue of his newspaper. The offensive issue of the Boston In-vestigator had ceased to be sold or to circulate immediatelyafter publication. But this pamphlet could be sold and couldcirculate for years to come.

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This new publication could have led to new indictmentsand trials. If the three essays were blasphemous when firstprinted, they were equally blasphemous when reprinted. Anindictment would not have been double jeopardy, becausethe pamphlet constituted a new offense against the 1782law, the churches of Massachusetts, and the protectors ofmorality in the Bay State. In publishing this pamphlet,Kneeland seemed to be begging the conservative establish-ment to give him more fame and publicity by bringing himto trial again. But by this time even a fanatic like SamuelParker had no desire to take Kneeland on a second time.Never again would Massachusetts use its blasphemy stat-ute—a relic of its Puritan past—to silence skeptics or criticsof religion.

In the future, Massachusetts would prohibit “obscene”material that was too sexual in its content. In the mid-twen-tieth century, the place where the American Revolutionbegan was slapped down more than once for its absurdlynarrow views on literature. In “Memoirs of a Woman ofPleasure” v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court re-versed a Massachusetts decision that this classic nov-el—known more popularly as Fanny Hill—was obscene.59

This was perhaps the last vestige of a blasphemy case in theBay State, but hardly in the United States. Attempts to cen-sor art, literature, and music, while often in the guise ofregulating pornography or obscenity, are in the end oftensimply a reprise of blasphemy laws. These actions at thelocal, state, and national levels by prosecutors, legislators,and executives are all too often modern versions of blas-phemy prosecutions, designed to impose the traditionalistmoral values of those in power on those who challenge au-thority, tradition, and cultural hegemony.

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NOTES

I thank the brilliant librarians at Albany Law School, Colleen Os-tiguy and Bob Emery, for their help in tracking down sources forthis piece. This article was written while I held a summer researchgrant from Albany Law School.

1. Commonwealth v. Kneeland, 37 Mass. (20 Pick.) 206 (1838).2. Henry Steele Commager, “The Blasphemy of Abner Kneeland,”

New England Quarterly 9 (1935): 31.3. Theodore Parker to George Ellis, quoted in Leonard W. Levy,

The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 57.

4. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 43, quote on 51–52.5. “The Trial of Abner Kneeland for Blasphemy, Boston, Mas-

sachusetts, 1835,” 13 American State Trials 450, at 453.6. Abner Kneeland, The American Definition Spelling Book

(Keene, NH, 1802). Different publishers reprinted this book in nu-merous editions with revisions by Kneeland. I have located editionsfrom 1804, 1807, 1808, 1809, and 1814. See also Kneeland, A BriefSketch of a New System of Orthography (Walpole, NH: Nichols andHale, 1807); Kneeland, The Child’s Spelling Book, Containing EasyWords from One to Four Syllables (Walpole, NH: Bill Blake and G.W. Nichols, 1808). These also went through multiple printings andeditions.

7. The “Marriage Catechism” appeared in the second issue of theInvestigator, on April 9, 1831. The relevant portions are in RoderickS. French, “Liberation from Man and God in Boston: Abner Knee-land’s Free-Thought Campaign, 1830–1839,” American Quarterly 32(1980): 205–6.

8. Ibid., 206.9. Ibid.10. Advocates of birth control were often prosecuted under ob-

scenity statutes in the United States. See Paul Finkelman, “CulturalSpeech and Political Speech in Historical Perspective,” BostonUniversity Law Review 79 (1999): 717–43.

11. David Walker, Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Pre-amble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and

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Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (Boston,1829).

12. “An Act against Blasphemy,” Massachusetts Acts, 1782, ch. 9,150. Part of the text of the act is found in “Trial of Abner Kneeland,”13 American State Trials 452. Almost all articles about this case, in-cluding the record in American State Trials, incorrectly identify thisstatute as chapter 8 of the 1782 laws. Even Chief Justice Shaw incor-rectly cited it that way. The statute listed all the books of the Bible,by name, which could not be exposed “to contempt and ridicule.”Not surprisingly, it included only those in the Protestant, KingJames Version and did not include books of the Apocrypha from theLatin Vulgate, in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, such as Tobit(also called Tobias), Judith, and Maccabees. Apparently, and not sur-prisingly, the authorities in Protestant Massachusetts—where Cath-olics were not allowed to even hold office under the 1780 state con-stitution—would not have been bothered if someone had attackedthe validity of the books in the Catholic Bible that were not in theProtestant Bible.

13. Walter Nelles, “Commonwealth v. Hunt,” Columbia LawReview 32 (1932): 1133n19.

14. Report of the Arguments of the Attorney for the Common-wealth, at the Trials of Abner Kneeland, for Blasphemy, in the Muni-cipal and Supreme Courts in Boston (Boston: Beals, Homer, 1843),13–14, 15, 75; reprinted in Leonard W. Levy, ed., Blasphemy in Mas-sachusetts: Freedom of Conscience and the Abner Kneeland Case—ADocumentary Record (New York: Da Capo, 1973) 189–90, 191, 251.

15. I have discussed this strategy at length in the introduction toPaul Finkelman, ed., A Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of JohnPeter Zenger (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010).

16. The one great exception to this happened in the prosecutionof John Peter Zenger, where the jury refused to comply with thejudge’s demand for a verdict on only the facts of publication (whichZenger admitted) and instead came back with a general verdict ofnot guilty. See ibid.

17. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 45.18. We know little about Krapac. In a footnote, Kneeland asserted

that he lived in Mobile, Alabama. Kneeland, A Review of the Trial,Conviction, and Final Imprisonment of in the County Jail of the

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County of Suffolk, of Abner Kneeland for the Alleged Crime of Blas-phemy (Boston: George A. Chapman, 1838), 13n; reprinted in Levy,Blasphemy in Massachusetts, 473.

19. Kneeland, Review of the Trial, 18; reprinted in Levy, Blas-phemy in Massachusetts, 478.

20. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 45.21. Ibid., 49.22. Levy, Blasphemy in Massachusetts, ix. Levy’s reticence, espe-

cially in 1957, may have reflected the cultural conditions of postwarAmerica, as evidenced by Jacques Berlinerblau’s ch. 2 in thisvolume.

23. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 46.24. Here the article cites Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (first

published in Geneva in 1764), s.v. “circumcision.”25. Kneeland, Review of the Trial, 13–14; reprinted in Levy, Blas-

phemy in Massachusetts, 473–74.26. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 49.27. “An Act against Blasphemy,” Massachusetts Acts, 1782, ch. 9,

150.28. See, for example, William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots:

Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1960); Paul Finkelman, DefendingSlavery (Boston: Bedford / St. Martins, 2006) 157–211.

29. Kneeland, 37 Mass. (20 Pick.) at 220.30. Report of the Arguments, 13; reprinted in Levy, Blasphemy in

Massachusetts, 189.31. Kneeland, 37 Mass. (20 Pick.) at 216.32. Earlier writers, such as the skeptical David Hume, carefully

suggested God’s amoral nature only in learned treatises, not news-papers, and even then only through the voice of a fictitious dialoguecharacter. See Christopher S. Grenda’s discussion of Hume in ch. 1of this volume.

33. Kneeland, Review of the Trial, 480, 481.34. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 49.35. Kneeland, 37 Mass. (20 Pick.) at 220.36. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, ch. 2.37. Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pick. (Mass.) 193 (1836). For a full

history of the application of this case in the North, see Paul

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Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

38. Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad, 4 Metc. (Mass.) 49(1842). For a discussion of this issue, see Paul Finkelman, “Slaves asFellow Servants: Law, Ideology, and Industrialization,” AmericanJournal of Legal History 31 (1987): 269–305.

39. However, it does dovetail with his support for the establish-ment of the Unitarian Church in Massachusetts in Stebbins v. Jen-nings, 10 Pick (Mass). 172 (1830). See Levy, Law of the Common-wealth, 32–42.

40. Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against theSacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1993), 422.

41. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment ofreligion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging thefreedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peace-ably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress ofgrievances.” U.S. Constitution, Amendment I.

42. In Torasco v. Watkins, 467 U.S. 488 (1961), the SupremeCourt struck down a Maryland constitutional provision that requiredall officeholders to give a “declaration of belief in the existence ofGod.” See Richard B. Saphire, “Torasco v. Watkins and McDaniel v.Paty,” in Religion and American Law: An Encyclopedia, ed. PaulFinkelman (New York: Garland, 2000), 535.

43. Thus military cemeteries now allow the use of the Wiccanpentacle on headstones of graves.

44. William Henry Channing, The Life of William Ellery Channing(Boston, 1899), 506.

45. Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, 51, 57; Robert E. Burkhold-er, “Emerson, Kneeland, and the Divinity School Address,” AmericanLiterature 58 (March 1986): 11.

46. Levy, Blasphemy in Massachusetts, 422.47. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Blasphemy and the Law of Religious

Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 52(2000): 715n34. However, Gordon does not provide any evidence forthis claim. She cites a series of “profanity” prosecutions, only two ofwhich took place before the Kneeland case, and a series of“Sabbath-breaking” cases, only one of which took place before the

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Kneeland case. Sabbath breaking, while having implications forblasphemy, is clearly a different kind of offense. The only reportedblasphemy prosecutions before Kneeland’s that Gordon cites werePeople v. Ruggles, 8 Johns (N.Y.) 290 (1811), and Updegraph v.Commonwealth, 11 Serg. & R. (Pa.) 394 (1824). As best I can de-termine, in addition to those two there were only five reported blas-phemy cases before Kneeland in the United States: Muzzy v. Wilkins,Smith (NH) 1 (1803); In re Bell, 6 City Hall Rec. 38 (1821); People v.Porter, 2 Parker Cr. R. (NY) 14 (1823); Barclay v. Hargrave, 16 NJLaw 1 (1837); and State v. Chandler, 2 Harr. (Del.) 553 (1837). BothBell and Porter ended in acquittals. There were also a few reportedcases for “profane swearing,” which might be seen as a form of blas-phemy but is in fact something quite different; see Holcomb v.Cornish, 8 Conn. 375 (1831); Odell v. Garnett, 4 Blackf. (Ind.) 549(1838). In the end, blasphemy is the crime of “the wilfull denial ofthe existence of God” (“Trial of Abner Kneeland,” 13 American StateTrials at 576, paraphrasing the charge of Judge Wilde), denouncingholy figures (such as publicly declaring “that the Virgin Mary was awhore and Jesus Christ was a bastard,” Chandler, 2 Har. [Del.] at553), or “malicious reviling of Christianity” (Updegraph, 11 Serg. &R. at 401).

48. Levy, Blasphemy in Massachusetts, 422.49. Ruggles, 8 Johns (NY) at 290, 293.50. In Stansberry v. Marks, 2 Dall. (Pa.) 213 (1793), the

Pennsylvania Supreme Court fined “Jonas Phillips, a Jew, as a wit-ness,” when “he refused to be sworn, because it was his Sabbath.”Four decades later it supported this jurisprudence, noting in anoth-er case involving a Jew, “It never has been held except in a single in-stance, that the course of justice may be obstructed by any scrupleor obligation whatever. . . . Rightly considered, there are no dutieshalf so sacred as those which the citizen owes to the laws. . . . Thatevery other obligation shall yield to that of the laws, as to a superiormoral force, is a tacit condition of membership in every society,whether lay or secular, temporal or spiritual, because no citizen canlawfully hold communion with those who have associated on any oth-er terms, and this ought, in all cases of collision, to be accounted asufficient dispensation to the conscience.” Philips v. Gratz, 2 Pen. &W. (Pa.) 412, 416–17 (1831).

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51. Obviously this would change at the end of the century.52. For example, Millard Fillmore’s presidential campaign on the

Know-Nothing ticket in 1856. See Paul Finkelman, Millard Fillmore(New York: Times Books, 2011).

53. People v. Phillips (NY, 1813), reprinted in Western Law Journ-al 1 (1843): 109. For a discussion of this issue, see Spencer WeberWaller and Natasha Leigh Chefetz, “Clergy Privilege in Civil andCriminal Litigation,” in Finkelman, Religion and American Law,89–92.

54. In theory, Jews challenged the divinity of Christ by rejectingthe entire New Testament. In the seventeenth century, authorities inMaryland charged Jacob Lumbrozo with the capital crime of blas-phemy for denying the divinity of Christ, but his capital sentencewas commuted to expulsion from the colony. That seems to be theonly instance in America, before or after independence, when a Jewwas accused of blasphemy simply for being a Jew. See Levy, Blas-phemy, 255.

55. Gordon, “Blasphemy and the Law of Religious Liberty,” dis-cusses the connection between the LDS Church and blasphemy.Clearly, however, the vicious persecution of the Mormons went wellbeyond traditional blasphemy cases. See Edwin Brown Firmage andRichard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of theChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1989).

56. Kneeland’s experience in jail, in an ironic sense, perhaps hadBiblical implications: “Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and yevisited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” Matthew 25:36(KJV).

57. Theodore Parker to George Ellis, quoted in Levy, Law of theCommonwealth,

58. See n. 18.59. “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S.

413 (1966). See generally Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Every-where: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York:Random House, 1991) for the best history of the law of obscenity.

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CHAPTER 5

Secular BlasphemiesSymbolic Offense in Modern Democracy

ROBERT A. YELLE

On July 27, 1656, Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77) was excom-municated by the elders of the Portuguese Jewish com-munity in Amsterdam for heresy. The text of the proclama-tion of banishment stated in part,

We excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, . .. cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshuabanned Jericho and with the curse with which Elisha cursed theboys and with all the castigations which are written in the Book ofthe Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed behe when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. The Lordwill not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousyshall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are writtenin this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out hisname from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him untoevil out of all the tribes of Israel.1

It is not entirely clear which heresies Spinoza was excom-municated for, though some accounts indicate that he was

accused of professing disbelief in God and in the law of theTorah. The prescribed punishment was banishment. Despiteadditional persecutions from Dutch authorities, Spinozalived out the remainder of his short life plying his trade as alens grinder and writing works of philosophy that contrib-uted to what Jonathan Israel has called “the Radical En-lightenment.”2 Spinoza died at the age of forty-four a secu-lar Jew, having never converted to Christianity.

The Jewish elders invoked Joshua and Elisha in cursinghim. These were dreadful historical precedents. During thesiege of Jericho, Joshua commanded, “And the city and allthat is within it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruc-tion,” and his people “utterly destroyed all in the city, bothmen and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses,with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:17, 21).3 Elisha’scurse was only slightly less deadly: when some boys mockedhim, he cursed them, and two she-bears devoured forty-twoboys (2 Kings 2:23–24). The punishment of Jericho was anexample of the war curse known as ḥerem ( ), whichcommanded the complete extermination of an opposingtribe and combined elements of an irrevocable sacrifice(see Leviticus 27:28–29) with punishment for severe reli-gious violations.4 The curse against Spinoza was also a ḥer-em, a term often translated as “ban” or “proscription,” al-though “devotion to destruction” is more descriptive.

Such a terrible curse pronounced against Spinoza as partof a punishment for heresy might be thought to illustratethe continuity of the ancient Hebraic law’s authority and itsenduring ability to police the boundary between sacred andprofane. Yet a crucial difference between the biblical ḥeremand this seventeenth-century deployment is immediately ap-parent. Spinoza was not executed by a state, merely excom-municated by a religious community. He had earlier taken

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refuge in an increasingly secular Dutch society, in whichthe power of the ban imposed by the Jewish community waslimited. Spinoza went by the Latin version of his givenname—Benedict—and lived among the Christians.

His case illustrates the transformation of heresy and blas-phemy in secular modernity. With the political decline ofJudaism from an independent nation to a minority religiouscommunity, the force of the ḥerem diminished significantly.Because of the church-state divide that has become normat-ive under secularism, the punishment for religious offensesgenerally, not only in Judaism, has been gradually limited toexcommunication. Although the United Kingdom’s blas-phemy laws were repealed only in 2008, the last person ex-ecuted (by hanging) there for blasphemy was ThomasAikenhead in 1697.5 The seventeenth century representedsomething of a watershed for religious freedom in this andother respects. However, as I shall argue, secularism doesnot represent anything as simple as the disappearance ofthe notions of blasphemy or heresy. Instead, these notionshave been continued and modified, sometimes in subtleways.

This chapter first traces some of the changes in these re-ligious offenses under secularism and describes what theysuggest about the status of the sacred-secular divide in con-temporary society. It then focuses on the contemporary Un-ited States, where some popular movements, leading intel-lectuals, and jurists seek to perpetuate something similar tothe offense of blasphemy in their efforts to ban flag burningand hate speech. Rather than rehearsing the arguments oflegal scholars based on U.S. constitutional law, I aim tosituate the contemporary phenomenology of blasphemy in alonger history of religion and of secularization, a term I willuse in the common way to denote the decline of

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institutional religious authority and the rise of a monopolyon law and punishment by the civil authority. Despite theofficial demise of the old blasphemy laws, we moderns haveour own inviolable sensibilities, which are attached to cer-tain identities and objects. Often these constitute culturalmarkers of difference.

Recently, Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have criticizedthe dichotomy of “religious” societies, which are supposedlyintolerant, as signaled by their punishment of blasphemyand heresy, versus “secular” societies, which have aban-doned such archaic notions in favor of free speech and so-cial critique.6 This dichotomy, which has encouraged thenotion of a “clash of civilizations” between Islamic andWestern societies, is both self-serving and reductive. It ig-nores the injuries that derogatory words or images depict-ing objects of veneration, such as the Prophet Mohammed,may cause, as occurred with the infamous cartoons that theDanish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published in 2005. Suchinjuries are marginalized or rendered invisible, from a legalperspective, by normative concepts of privacy and freedomof speech in much of the contemporary West and by a tri-umphalist narrative of secularization that would relegatethem to a category of “religious blasphemy” supposedlytranscended through an inevitable process of the decline ofreligious authority and of an increasing freedom of religionfor the individual citizen. A careful analysis of the differ-ences between Muslims and secularists or secularizedChristians regarding the relative values of private belief,public expression, and the power of images helps todestabilize such dichotomies and enable a more fruitful dia-logue on issues of mutual concern.

I sympathize with these critiques. In particular, the no-tion of a rigid dichotomy between religious and secular

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societies, according to whether they do or do not punishblasphemy, ignores the fact that many modern, supposedlysecular Westerners are sensitive to symbols and identitiesthey wish not to be defiled. The discussions below of flagburning and hate speech illustrate this. Nevertheless, thereare certain differences between modern, or “secular,” andtraditional, or “religious,” concepts of blasphemy. Spinoza’scase illustrates a level of intellectual freedom and socialcritique that would have been rare, if not unthinkable, be-fore (or even since) the European Enlightenment. There is,surely, a difference between the fatwa that calls for thedeath of a blasphemer and the milder punishment of ex-communication that Spinoza suffered. Although excommu-nication is undoubtedly a serious penalty for a believer andcan entail a form of what we metaphorically call socialdeath, it cannot be compared with either capital punish-ment or the extinction of all civil rights that comes from ageneral banishment.

Another major difference, at least in the United States,concerns the legal protection accorded to most speech, in-cluding certain actions (such as flag burning) that are re-garded as primarily expressive and therefore speechlike.These legal protections depend on the viability of the dis-tinction between speech and action, or between ordinary ac-tion and action that is primarily symbolic. Some importantthinkers, including Mahmood, have called this distinctioninto question. According to them, it emerged from a seculardisestablishment of blasphemy that ignores the real harmthat hateful speech, just as much as injurious action, maycause. In the analysis that follows, I attempt to situate suchdiscussions in a longer history of blasphemy and its moderntransformation. While acknowledging the instability of thedistinction between speech and action, I call into question

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some of the arguments that have been deployed in favor ofundoing or weakening this distinction.

PROFANATION AND THE “DECLINE” OF THE SACRED

The idea of blasphemy includes what can be described as“symbolic offenses against the sacred,” or what is deemedinviolable.7 According to classical theories of seculariza-tion, the sacred has declined or even vanished in modernity.This immediately raises a question: what role does or canblasphemy play in a society that is supposedly secular? Con-versely, does the ongoing fact of symbolic offenses againstthe sacred, which has been raised to public prominenceagain as a result of increasing religious diversity and publicdebates over religious difference, prove that secularizationis a myth? How do contemporary notions of symbolic oridentity offense—“secular” blasphemy—differ, if at all, frommore traditional forms of “religious” blasphemy?

The ban of ḥerem laid on Spinoza already illustrated theattenuation of the power of the sacred. That which was “de-voted to destruction,” no less than that which was labeled“holy” ( ), was separated absolutely from common usage.The root word , like , means alternatively “sacred”or “prohibited” in various Semitic languages. Both denoteitems that are tabooed or interdicted, cordoned off bysevere prohibitions. The dangerous power of the holy is il-lustrated by Uzzah’s death at touching the Ark of theCovenant (2 Samuel 6:6–7) and by Nadab and Abihu’s beingconsumed by fire for offering improper sacrifices to God(Leviticus 10:1–2). That same power is also illustrated bySaul’s loss of his kingship as a result of failing to executethe ḥerem that had been laid on the Amalekites (1 Samuel

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15). Samuel cursed him for having let Agag, the king of theAmalekites, live, along with his people’s choicest cattle.

Part of the leveling function of secularization has been todeny the distinctions encoded in older systems of ritual pro-hibition. Together with the Mosaic distinction between pureand impure, already relativized by Paul’s rejection of theMosaic law’s separation of Jew from gentile, the distinctionbetween sacred and profane has gradually eroded. Chiefamong the targets of this leveling has been the Bible itself,which has come to be treated much like other secularbooks. Spinoza contributed significantly to the rise of a his-torical criticism of the Bible that began by interrogating itsdivine origins and status as a mode of revelation. He wasone of the earliest to argue that Moses could not have au-thored the Pentateuch. More than a century later, ThomasPaine, in his Age of Reason (1794)—which led to his beingcharged with sedition and his publishers convicted of sedi-tious and blasphemous libel—pointed out that, in additionto stylistic inconsistencies and historical discrepancies, theso-called Five Books of Moses contained events that theirsupposed author could not have observed, including his owndeath and burial, “for certainly Moses could not himself tellwhere he was buried.”8

Such deist criticisms reflected a broader rationalization,which Christopher S. Grenda also describes in chapter 1, aprocess that resulted in what we might call a republic of re-torts or an economy of insult, in which religion increasinglycame under criticism. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), theEnglish utilitarian philosopher and legal reformer, played anotable role in these developments. He was a proponent ofthe separation of church and state who rejected the argu-ments of William Blackstone (1723–80) supporting the lawsagainst heresy9 and the incorporation of divine law into

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common law. Blackstone had quoted the proposition ofChief Justice Matthew Hale (1609–76) from a famous blas-phemy case that “Christianity is parcel of the laws of Eng-land.”10 Against this sacralizing move, Bentham worked tosever civil and ecclesiastical law by establishing a positivelaw that would be independent of religion. While criticizingChristianity in ways that challenged the blasphemy laws, healso rejected religiously based judicial oaths and deniedthat law required a religious sanction.11

Since Bentham, the principle of utility, as expressedthrough marketplace forces of valuation and the commodi-fication of an increasing number of goods, has leveled manythings formerly held sacred. In a market society in whichfinancial transactions quantify value, the notion that holi-ness inheres in certain objects or beliefs deserving specialprotection seems dubious at best. One might say that secu-lar modernity is based on a principle of profanation, break-ing taboos and upending sacred perceptions and values. Infact, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described this upend-ing process as a chief effect of capital.12

However, Marx suggested that even in this destabilizingand leveling process, venerating proclivities continued, inwhat he called “commodity fetishism,” the transference ofsacred values to secular objects that thus acquire a valuequite apart from any use or function they might have.13

Some early twentieth-century movements, including Dada-ism and surrealism, criticized this aspect of capitalism, es-pecially as it had encroached on other domains, such as theaesthetic, that were supposedly free from commercialism.Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) was a manufactured ur-inal displayed as a work of art. For some, this desecratedthe sanctity of art, by associating it with bodily waste andindustrial production. However, Duchamp’s provocation

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arguably only rendered explicit a debasement of aestheticvalue that had already occurred. In similar fashion, decadeslater, Andy Warhol’s iconic representations of Campbell’ssoup cans and Marilyn Monroe used the power of commodi-fication and the cult of celebrity to suggest the sacral di-mensions of capitalism. Such cases may be read ambival-ently, as continuing the process of profanation that has ac-celerated under capitalism or as revealing repressed con-tinuities between earlier religious techniques of sacraliza-tion and the present-day logic of commodity fetishism. Theprocess of profanation, though asymptotically approachinga total evacuation of the sacred, appears to depend on aresidue of sacrality that may be ineradicable.

Giorgio Agamben has asserted a contrarian view of the re-lationship between secularization and profanation. He dis-tinguishes secularization, meaning the decline of the sac-red, from profanation, which depends on and inverts thesacred.14 Rather than identifying modernity with profana-tion, Agamben laments its inability to truly profane: asprofanation means desecrating the sacred, whether by defa-cing it or appropriating it for common use, then the disap-pearance of the sacred, which Agamben believes hashappened, means the impossibility of profanation. It is thisimpossibility, not desecration itself, that he mourns.15 Inhis inversion of values, the truly liberating human experi-ence is profanation, which he views as increasingly harderto achieve.

As examples of the kinds of profanation that modernityhas disabled, Agamben points to ritual play and religiousfestivals.16 Many scholars have noted that numerous cul-tures include periodic rituals that symbolically invert thesocial hierarchy and license a temporary release from socialnorms. The lords of misrule, feast of fools, medieval

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charivari, and similar customs may survive in some modern-day carnivals.17 Insults are also common in certain tradi-tional rituals described by anthropologists, such as thejokes and taunts that A. R. Radcliffe-Brown catalogued orMax Gluckman’s “rituals of rebellion.”18 This further com-plicates the picture of a straightforward decline from “sac-red” to “secular.” The idea that profanity is especially com-mon in modern society is widespread. However, if culturessupposedly possessing strong notions of the sacred havecultivated outbursts of profanity, is the stereotype of a rev-erent past simply mistaken?

Many would argue an opposite view: namely, that thedramatic, in-your-face culture of obscenity for its own sakeor for the sake of provocation is uniquely modern, at leastto the degree to which we are now experiencing it. TheAmerican Jewish writer Philip Roth, whose profanitiesJacques Berlinerblau’s chapter 2 quotes in unexpurgatedform, would appear to be a case in point. However, as Ber-linerblau shows, Roth’s most graphic declarations on sexualand excretory proclivities coincided with the end of effortsin the United States to ban obscenity in literature. In astrictly legal sense, then, it does appear that, as Agambensuggests, it has become impossible to profane. This may,however, represent not the decline of the sacred that hediagnoses but rather, as Berlinerblau describes, the migra-tion of obscenity from the domain of law and punishment tothat of civil society and social sanction.

For various reasons already noted, although the crime ofblasphemy may have declined, together with the decline ofthe legal authority of the Christian churches, the idea thatmodernity represents a simple trajectory from sacred tosecular appears distinctly untenable.

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THE SEMIOTICS OF PROFANITY: SPEECH ACTS, NAMETABOOS, AND ICONOCLASM

One way that secularization has supposedly affected the un-derstanding of blasphemy is by introducing a semiotic lessattuned to the power of images. Saba Mahmood has tracedpart of the Euro-American cultural incomprehension ofMuslim injury over derogatory images of Mohammed to asecularist commitment to the arbitrariness of signs andtheir severability from more embodied and affective ways ofknowing. She argues against viewing Islam through a secu-larist semiotic, drawing on Webb Keane’s argument thatEuropean modernity is partly constituted by a Protestantideology that posits the autonomy of the subject from thesign. This development earlier attacked the performativeand pragmatic dimensions of language and ritual in Cathol-ic tradition.19 The new ideology, which anticipated the mod-ern idea of the arbitrariness of the sign, rejected any sub-stantive identity between language and physical reality.Henceforth, speech was supposed to be a transparent ex-pression of sincere intention or (ideally) an accurate reflec-tion of the world but not a source of magical power. Thishelped to create a dichotomy between speech and action.

There does appear to be a difference, if not an unbridge-able divide, between traditional and modern views of signs:words, images, and other symbols. This divide has had con-sequences for symbolic offenses against the sacred. AsMahmood and Keane have noted, the Reformation pro-foundly influenced the development of the semiotic ideo-logy of modernity.20 Protestant literalism and iconoclasmcreated a new economy of the sign, one that subordinatedits poetic and performative dimensions. Polemics againstritual, against “vain repetitions” in prayer, and against ty-pological interpretations of the Bible signaled a dramatic

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shift. The insistence on a literal reading of the Bible andother texts coincided with a privileging of semantic-referen-tial over pragmatic-performative functions and promotedthe idea of a univocal language—one word having onemeaning, and vice versa—as a corollary of monotheism. Thetranslation of scripture into the vernacular coincided withreforms reducing or eliminating much of the poetry of earli-er liturgy. Pagan idolatry and polytheism were character-ized as mistaken attributions of concreteness to language,beginning with the names of the pagan gods. We could de-scribe this shift overall as a semanticizing of language. Itcontributed to the disenchantment of the sign, the reduc-tion of linguistic and other signs to a supposedly transpar-ent medium of communication rather than a power or forcein their own right. As articulated by John Locke and otherEnlightenment figures, this movement anticipated, in somerespects, the contemporary structuralist doctrine of the ar-bitrariness of the sign, with the caveat that scientific know-ledge was thought to be capable of bringing words into con-formity with true knowledge. Brian Vickers has labeled thisthe shift from “identity” to “analogy,” from a magical viewof the inextricable interconnection of a sign with its refer-ent to the idea that such a relation is more remote or evenentirely arbitrary.21

Mahmood and Keane emphasize the performative andpragmatic—that is, worklike and effective—dimensions oflinguistic and other signs as an effort of recovery against acenturies-long process of repression. This scholarly effort isongoing and incomplete. It will require that far more atten-tion be paid to the semiotic ideologies of other cultures andhistorical periods. For example, in the English liturgy onthe eve of the Reformation, as in many cultures, poeticdevices played a crucial role in reinforcing the rhetorical

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and performative dimensions of language;22 these werelargely stripped out as a result of the reformers’ bias to-ward the semantic.23 Similarly, the declaration of ḥeremagainst Spinoza used parallelisms—a device common in theHebrew Bible—to reinforce its message: “Cursed be he byday and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he liesdown and cursed be he when he rises up.” It also used thedevice called historiola, invoking mythic paradigms—thecurses enacted by Joshua and Elisha—as precedent for thecurse against Spinoza.24 Punishments imposed for blas-phemy in early England as in some other cultures were alsooften symbolic, involving burning or boring through thetongue or branding with a B.25 Such uses of analogy andpoetry served to reinforce the appearance of naturalness ofarbitrary social institutions.

Investment in the power of images, whether verbal,plastic, or pictorial, stands at the core of many traditionalreligions. This investment is the precondition for the of-fense of blasphemy, for if the image were of no account, itsdefacement would not elicit strong reaction. The notionthat certain images are inviolate is expressed, for example,in the taboo placed in the Hebrew Bible on not only seeingGod but also pronouncing his four-letter Hebrew name.26

Instead, one is supposed to say Adonai (Lord), and the vow-els of are pointed in such a way as to remind one ofthis. The secrecy of the name in many traditions is designedto prevent magical control over its bearer. Hinduism aswell, in which images are ubiquitous, includes encryptionsof the true name of the god. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanisad 4.2.2declares, “The true name of the person in the right eye isIndha. Even though he is really Indha, people crypticallycall him ‘Indra,’ because gods in some ways love the crypticand despise the plain.”27 The name taboo is so widespread

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that it appears in popular culture: the villain in J. K. Rowl-ing’s Harry Potter series is called “He Who Must Not BeNamed,” but those who defy this taboo call him by his as-sumed name, Voldemort, and the wisest wizard, AlbusDumbledore, even refers to him by his given name, Tom(Riddle), to challenge the aura of power that the name ta-boo creates.

The last example points to a theme that cuts across tradi-tional and contemporary societies: the blasphemous, pro-fane, or obscene often derives its force from the violation ofa name taboo or other form of secrecy. The comedian Ge-orge Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Televi-sion” depends on violating such taboos, as does Eve Ensler’sThe Vagina Monologues. As noted above, ritual insults andeven insult contests (such as flyting in Old English andNorse) are found in many traditional societies. But modern-ity specializes in violating such taboos, and not merely onritually circumscribed occasions.28

A powerful argument for freedom of speech is that suchname taboos have historically buttressed the hegemony ofreligious orthodoxy, with their violation representing a free-dom to criticize authority. The ability to name something is,if not the power to control it, at least a means of releasefrom its power. A flaw in this argument is that it does not,and perhaps cannot, distinguish between name taboos thatreinforce authority and those that enhance individual orcollective dignity by outlawing slurs against minoritygroups.

“Secular” and “religious” cultures appear to share certainprinciples of profanation. Among the most common is thejuxtaposition of discordant elements, particularly, in thecontext of blasphemy, prototypically sacred and profaneitems.29 Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) is one

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example; another is Antiochus IV Epiphanes’s desecrationof the Jewish Temple by sacrificing swine’s flesh to Zeus onan altar there, precipitating the second-century B.C.E. Mac-cabean revolt. Another technique involves the caricatureddistortion of the features on an individual, either facial fea-tures or mannerisms. This is not completely new either, norlimited to ridicule. Some have interpreted the exaggeratedhips and breasts of female figurines from ancient societiesas representing a “Great Mother,” or goddess of fertility; inthis case, the principle of metonymy or synecdoche—of onepart standing for the whole—combines with or constitutesexaggeration. Something similar may inform the represent-ation of the Hindu god Shiva by means of his liṅga, or phal-lus. Such modes of reduction-and-exaggeration may be rev-erential or demeaning. Thus, calling a man a prick or a wo-man a cunt or referring to either as an asshole exemplifiesa basic mode of insult.

The cartoon has always depended on a recognition andexploitation of the emotional investment in the power of theimage, the drive to violate taboos on representation, and aquasi-magical belief that the manipulation of the imagemay reveal or even influence reality. Ernst Gombrich arguedthat the caricature—meaning a pictorial representation thatexaggerates or otherwise distorts the features of a recogniz-able individual person—began only in the sixteenth cen-tury.30 The caricature or cartoon itself may be uniquelymodern. However, the direct antecedents of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are burnings in effigy and other symbolicpunishments in absentia that were thought to affect the tar-get at a distance.31 Such modes of punishment have alsobeen applied to blasphemers, and to their publications, in-dicating that these symbolic actions have proved appealingto both blasphemers and censors.32 The principles of

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cartoon and caricature have long existed, even if the mod-ern form of targeting recognized public figures has not.

Therefore, I cannot agree entirely with the argument, ex-pressed by Mahmood and others, that a major differencebetween Muslims and secularist Westerners is the inabilityof the latter to appreciate the power of the image. Thoserevering an image and those destroying or defacing it con-verge in their belief in its importance, even while using thisfor different ends. Ancient Israelites revered the name andfigure of God while zealously rejecting image worship anddestroying the idols of false gods. Who was more convincedof the power of the image: the Catholics who created im-ages of the saints or the Protestant iconoclasts who des-troyed such images? Iconoclasts are sometimes unbelievers,intent on dishonoring the sacred, such as the Republicanswho desecrated churches and exhumed and displayed thereligious dead during the Spanish Civil War.33 Yet icono-clasm draws part of its rationale from the gravity of the im-age it defaces or destroys.

How do we then distinguish blasphemy from iconoclasm?Whereas Leonard W. Levy uses Diagoras of Melos, whothrew a wooden idol into the fire and challenged the godthus abused to rescue his image from the flames, as an ex-ample of blasphemy, this appears to be at least equally acase of iconoclasm.34 Genesis Rabbah 38.13 tells a similarstory about Abraham, who destroyed the idols made in hisfather-in-law Terah’s workshop, then, tongue in cheek,claimed that they had destroyed one another. Clearly Abra-ham, as the patriarch of iconoclastic monotheism, wasscarcely unaware of the power that images wield.

Islam itself serves as an illustration of the convergence ofreverence for the image with blasphemy and iconoclasm.Though Mahmood argues that Muslims are deeply attached

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to the image of Mohammed, this attachment does not de-pend on any general belief in the sanctity of images or theirnonarbitrary status. It is perfectly compatible with the de-struction of the images of other religions, as in the case ofthe Taliban bombardment of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Thepoint to consider is that the publishers of the cartoons ofMohammed in Jyllands-Posten practiced a related version of(ir)reverence and iconoclasm. Despite their evincing a mod-ern semiotic, a secular disenchantment with the religioussign that may partly reflect the legacy of the Reformation,their iconoclasm did not prevent them from recognizing thepower of signs—quite the contrary.

SYMBOLIC OFFENSES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA

In the contemporary United States, the practice of con-demning symbolic offenses against sanctities deemed invi-olable arguably continues in at least two “secular” forms:laws against flag desecration and the misappropriation ofgovernment symbols, and laws against hate speech directedagainst minorities. Both disclose important features of blas-phemy’s “secularization,” or rather migration outside thetraditional religious context. While inert vestiges of reli-gious blasphemy laws can still be discovered in state stat-utes, Americans now reserve their most solicitous protec-tions for objects of civil adoration.

The 2012 case United States v. Alvarez involved XavierAlvarez, a candidate for a local water district board in Cali-fornia who falsely claimed to have received the Congres-sional Medal of Honor for service in the U.S. military.35 Thecase required the U.S. Supreme Court to determine the con-stitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. This act,signed into law by President George W. Bush, made false

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statements concerning one’s military honors punishable byfine or imprisonment. It reads, “Whoever falsely representshimself or herself, verbally or in writing, to have been awar-ded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for theArmed Forces of the United States, any of the servicemedals or badges awarded to the members of such forces,the ribbon, button, or rosette of any such badge, decora-tion, or medal, or any colorable imitation of such item shallbe fined under this title, imprisoned not more than sixmonths, or both.”36 The court found the law to be unconsti-tutional and held that even false speech that is not other-wise illegal is constitutionally protected. Following the de-cision, some congressional representatives have sought topass an amended law that would survive constitutional chal-lenge by narrowing the prohibition to fraudulent speech,meaning false speech made for monetary gain.

The name of the Stolen Valor Act was borrowed from thetitle of a 1998 book that recounts false claims of service inthe Vietnam War, the ill treatment of veterans of that con-flict, and the post-traumatic stress disorder they suffered.37

On July 12, 2005, Congressman John Salazar (D-CO) gavethe following reasons for introducing the act:

I wish to pay tribute to these brave individuals and to those menand women currently serving our Nation overseas. The Nation’shighest award [the Medal of Honor] is facing a serious challengeto its meaning and symbol. I am outraged by the impostors whoclaim they have received this and other honors the military awardsfor deeds and actions of soldiers. These criminals not only dishon-or themselves, but they dishonor the sacrifice that true recipientshave made. That is why, Mr. Speaker, I plan to introduce theStolen Valor Act of 2005 next week. This piece of legislation willmake it easier for Federal law enforcement officials to prosecutephonies and impostors and restore the true meaning of these il-lustrious awards. I hope my colleagues can join me in this effort to

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reclaim the meaning of honor and bravery and sacrifice in theseUnited States.38

Salazar’s rationale was unrelated to monetary fraud. In-stead, he sought to protect a different value: the “meaningand symbol” of honor, bravery, and sacrifice. Another provi-sion of the U.S. Code already made it illegal to sell suchmedals.39 The post-Alvarez effort to criminalize fraudulentclaims of military honors thus represents a compromisebetween the desire of some to outlaw such profanations andthe Supreme Court’s efforts to protect free speech.

Federal law already prohibited the wearing of militaryservice decorations not rightfully earned.40 The samechapter of the U.S. Code also makes it illegal for unauthor-ized persons to wear the uniform of any member of the U.S.armed forces;41 to use the symbol of the 4-H Clubs or thewords “4-H Clubs,” with or without intent to defraud;42 oreven to use “knowingly and for profit” the character orname of Smokey the Bear or Woodsy Owl.43 None of theseprohibitions was in question in Alvarez. But the Stolen Val-or Act attempted to go further, by criminalizing false verbalclaims about having earned a military medal.

The rationale for such laws appears to be that the U.S.government requires control over the symbols of its author-ity and the ability clearly to identify its agents in order tofunction effectively. Thus it reasonably makes illegal theimpersonation of federal officials.44 The logic of prohibitingthe impersonation of active-duty troops in time of war iseven stronger. The potential harm of false claims of pastmilitary service in a civilian context is naturally muchlower.

The Stolen Valor Act attempted to protect a value that isalmost entirely symbolic rather than functional. The act had

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less in common with the law preventing the impersonationof a federal official than with the law that introduces thesame chapter of the U.S. Code, which prohibits the “desec-ration of the flag of the United States”: “Whoever knowinglymutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains onthe floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the UnitedStates shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for notmore than one year, or both.”45 The Supreme Court de-clared a similar Texas statute unconstitutional in Texas v.Johnson (1989). In that decision, it defined flag burning assymbolic speech communicating a political message, the of-fensiveness of which did not render it unprotected.46 Con-gress responded by amending the federal flag desecrationlaw, framing its intent as the preservation of the physicalintegrity of flags rather than the prevention of offensivespeech.47 The court struck down this effort too, arguingthat the desire to protect the flag’s material substance restson its importance as a symbol, the burning of which re-mains protected “speech” because it communicates a mes-sage.48 Subsequent efforts to amend the U.S. Constitutionto prohibit flag desecration have been unsuccessful.

Several states had or have laws prohibiting the desecra-tion of venerated objects. In Texas v. Johnson, the courtoverturned the Texas Venerated Objects Law.49 Such lawsoften designate churches, public buildings, and flags as sac-rosanct objects. Although many of these laws are of dubiousconstitutionality or have been overturned, they point towardthe phenomenology of blasphemy in America, a nationwhere affective attachments to the symbol similar to thosethat have traditionally been associated with religious con-ceptions of blasphemy continue in the modern age. The de-sire to preserve real property does not in itself explain thegrouping of only certain types of structures, including

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symbols of church and state authority, as requiring speciallegal protection from vandalism or desecration. Laws suchas the Stolen Valor Act are intended to prevent injury to themajesty of public symbols, which can either be related totraditional religion or inform a kind of modern, civil reli-gion.50 These laws maintain an important function of tradi-tional antiblasphemy prohibitions: the commingling of invi-olable sensibilities with the power of the state, such that achallenge to symbolic authority is tantamount to lèsemajesté.51

The changing legal and semiotic status of the image un-der secularization thus has not precluded continued effortsto designate privileged objects and symbols for special legalprotection. Many Americans regard the flag as inviolable,the secular form of a sacred object, considerably more thanan arbitrary expression of national identity. This view con-tests some standard analyses of our civil religion. SheldonNahmod, for example, has applied a structuralist semioticto the American flag:

The American flag is a rectangular piece of cloth with the colorsred, white and blue arranged in stars and stripes. Standing alone,like markings on a piece of paper, the flag lacks meaning. . . .What is signified by the American flag has no natural or necessaryrelationship to that signifier; rather, what is signified by theAmerican flag is solely a function of socially created conventions.Just as words have no meaning apart from the conventions of thelanguage in which they appear, and apart from their relation toother words in that language, the American flag similarly has nomeanings apart from those conventionally given to it by those whosee it.52

Though the meaning attributed to the U.S. flag may be ar-bitrary, this notion only raises the question of how such

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arbitrary symbols come to be invested with great import-ance and authority, akin to traditional conceptions of thesacred.

For Americans, the U.S. flag is equivalent to what used tobe called a totem, a symbol of the group. Émile Durkheimdeveloped an anthropological account of the totem inidentifying society itself or the group’s sense of identity asthe source of the sacred. He sketched the primal scene of agroup ritual in which effervescence or exuberance is projec-ted on to the totem, investing it with sacral power and au-thority. The terms of his theory led him to dismiss the con-tribution that the sign itself made to this power, however.The nature of the “original” totem, he claimed, was re-vealed in the Australian churinga, a (supposedly) purely ar-bitrary sign, devoid of any meaning other than that whichthe group invests in it.53 As I have argued elsewhere,Durkheim’s reductionism leaves little room for a semioticsof religion and culture.54 In the case of the U.S. flag,however, his argument has some legitimacy. The flag’s red,white, and blue may have symbolic associations, but theseare not widely known or agreed upon and cannot be re-garded as the sources of the symbol’s meaning. Though thefifty stars, one for each state, are iconic rather than arbit-rary, the U.S. flag comes close to being Durkheim’s “arbit-rary” churinga. It is a symbol meaningless in itself but in-vested with massive significance as the expression of agroup’s identity and history.

William Connolly offered another analysis of the flag’spower: “When nationalists in the United States, for in-stance, demand laws to punish flag burners, they inadvert-ently expose the black hole at the center of the nation. Whynot just pull out five new flags each time one is burned?The rage engendered by the flag burning expresses anxiety

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that the flag covers up the hole at the center of the nation.And it functions to fill that hole with a symbolic sub-stance.”55 Connolly argued that the identity of the nationand the substance of its politics are entirely empty. Beingarbitrary, the flag may mean whatever the group in powersays: it is a useful cipher, the bare sign of sovereignty. Yetfor these very reasons, the flag is indispensable. Connollypoints us to the irrationality of our investment in an imagethat is fungible and reproducible. Any individual flag is justa scrap of cloth; other copies may easily replace it.

Walter Benjamin reached a similar conclusion in arguingthat mass industrial production, which “by making many re-productions . . . substitutes a plurality of copies for aunique existence,” diminishes or destroys the “aura” ofart.56 He highlighted how commodification alienates theimage from its local context of production. His analysis wasmainly directed at film. There is no doubt that Benjamincaptured something essential regarding the transformationof the image under capitalism. Yet the commodification ofthe flag has not undermined its capacity to represent, met-onymically, an entire complex of associations. The flag’saura differs little from that of the cross in an earlier age, anaura that reproduction did not diminish (even in the absurdmultiplication of fragments of the “true cross”). It is in thenature of such symbols to function as tokens of somethingabsent. The transition from handwork to machine produc-tion has arguably affected the crucifix little in this regard.If Benjamin is correct that art depends on the uniquenessof the object, then perhaps we need to distinguish betweensacred objects and objets d’art more carefully. Or perhapsthe yearning for the unique object represents a form of nos-talgia, a counterreaction to commodification, and is itselfpeculiarly modern.

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A further illustration of the continued aura of the U.S.flag is the protocols for its handling and disposal as pre-scribed by Florida State University under color of federaland state law, as well as custom. The protocol is titled“Handling/Respect of the National Flag” and states,

The flag of the United States should never be handled in a mannerthat would indicate an attitude of disrespect. The following shouldbe observed. The United States flag should:

Never be displayed with the union down except as a signal ofdire distress;

Never be dipped to any person or thing;Never touch anything beneath it such as the ground, floor or

water;Never be used as drapery, festooned, drawn back or up in folds;Never be fastened, used or stored in a manner that allows it to

be easily torn, soiled or damaged;Never be used as a drape or covering for a ceiling;Never have placed upon it or attached to it any mark, insignia,

letter, word, figure design, picture or drawing of any nature;Never be used for receiving, holding, carrying or delivering

anything;Never be embroidered on such items as cushions, handker-

chiefs, costumes or athletic uniforms and should not be printed onnapkins, boxes or other items for temporary use and subsequentdisposal.57

Compare this to the rules that Muslims prescribe for thetreatment of the Qurʼan. In addition to disposing of worn-out copies by wrapping and storing them, burying them, orin rare cases ritually burning them, Muslims also followetiquette when using the text: “Quran-handling regulationsextend far beyond disposal. Depending on their chosen sect,Muslims are forbidden to touch the Quran during

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menstruation, allow the book to touch the ground, leave itopen after reading, use it as a pillow, or take it into impureplaces such as the bathroom.”58 It appears that the differ-ence between a “secular” symbol such as the U.S. flag and a“sacred” symbol such as the Qurʼan is not always easy todiscern; in any case, it clearly does not depend on a modernembrace of the arbitrariness of the sign.

HATE SPEECH

The other class of contemporary prohibitions on expressionthat recalls traditional forms of blasphemy in seeking todesignate and protect something as inviolable is hatespeech legislation. Such laws have generally been held un-constitutional in the United States. An important exceptionis when speech involves an imminent physical threat to oth-ers, so as to meet the “fighting words” standard of Chaplin-sky v. New Hampshire (1942), which developed into inciting“imminent lawless action” in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969).59

Private organizations have more latitude to regulatespeech.

Many other democracies, however, maintain legal prohib-itions on speech that do not require imminent threats ofphysical or lawless action. Such prohibitions include thoseagainst group defamation or incitement to racial or reli-gious hatred. In addition to having a public-order rationale,which is generally less demanding than the U.S. “fightingwords” standard, such laws are designed to protect minorit-ies from defaming insult or ridicule deemed to create a hos-tile environment. One objection to such laws is that, unliketraditional defamation, the speech act in hate speech con-texts may not target an individual and may therefore notmeet traditional evidentiary standards of harm. Another

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objection is that insult and similar events that cause emo-tional distress are often in the eye of the beholder, as Eliza-beth Coleman also notes in chapter 9. Even what consti-tutes fighting words depends on context and the standardsof the community. As Robert Post points out, such prohibi-tions enforce subjective norms in the guise of such con-cepts as the “rational person” test: what a reasonable indi-vidual would find insulting or hateful.60 Of course, similarstandards have often been used in the past to suppressminority opinion labeled blasphemous or seditious.

Hate crimes legislation, as opposed to hate speech legis-lation, imposes a higher penalty on physical crimes, such asassault, that target members of minority groups. Many suchlaws have been upheld as constitutional in the UnitedStates. The fact that hatred against such groups has mani-fested in lawless action that is not merely imminent but ac-complished avoids running afoul of the constitutional pro-tection for most speech. In the dichotomy between speechand action, speech, which is seen as intimately connectedwith a zone of private conscience, including religious belief,is regarded as more worthy of legal protection than manyother forms of behavior.

But the distinction between speech and action has comeunder criticism in recent years. Building on J. L. Austin’snotion of the performative utterance or, as John Searle hascalled it, the speech act,61 Judith Butler has interrogatedthe malleability of the characterization of speech as actionembedded in American constitutional law. She has demon-strated that the labeling of certain behaviors as either“speech” or “action” by the U.S. Supreme Court and othercourts reflects conclusions concerning the legality of suchbehaviors, conclusions that have already been arrived at onother grounds. She contrasts the Supreme Court’s

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protection of cross burning, regarded as a form of freespeech, in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), with the formergovernment policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military,which rendered an individual’s declaration of homosexualitypotential grounds for dismissal from service.62 There doesappear to be an inconsistency, in that the former case foundphysical actions to be symbolic, classifiable as speech, andprotected, whereas in the latter context, verbal declarationsnot accompanied by other behavior were omitted from thedomain of protected speech.

Peter Danchin has contributed to efforts to call into ques-tion the dichotomy between speech and action that hasbeen enforced in U.S. free-speech law. Summarizing and ex-tending Mahmood’s argument, he contends, “Once th[e]embodied and affective nature of the relationship betweenMuslims and the Prophet is made visible, the notion of mor-al injury caused by denigrating or purposively offensivespeech no longer falls as neatly into an imagined forum in-ternum of private belief or conscience. Rather it suggests asense of violation—and violence—that strikes at a Muslim’svery being, a sense of wounding against an entire habitus orstructure of affect.”63 In his effort to minimize the distinc-tion between conscience and speech on the one hand andthe body on the other, Danchin deploys such terms as viol-ence, strikes, and wounding to describe offensive forms ofspeech. Such metaphors render emotional injuries morevivid by obscuring the boundary between speech and ac-tion—as in the phrase speech act. Similarly, the sociologistAnthony Cortese seeks to assimilate hate speech to hatecrimes in order to criminalize the former. He defines hatespeech as a form of violence—“words that are used to ter-rorize, humiliate, degrade, ambush, lacerate, pummel, as-sault, and injure.”64 This accumulation of visceral action

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verbs rhetorically redefines hate speech as aggressiveaction.

However, erasing the distinction between verbal andphysical forms of assault carries dangers, even beyond therisk that, given the subjective nature of emotional injury, itwould be difficult to know which verbal or symbolic acts willprovoke offense. Indeed, an argument against efforts tominimize this distinction is that they resemble the types ofcensorship represented by the older antiblasphemy laws,laws which prohibited forms of speech that many now re-gard as protected. As David Edgar has argued, the prosecu-tion of artistic depictions of homosexuality under obscenityand blasphemy laws has often depended precisely on the in-ability or refusal to distinguish between action and expres-sion: “[The] most dangerous legacy [of such cases] was notthe well-worn notion that the representation of somethingencourages people to do it, but the new if related idea thatto portray is to do. In the [infamous Gay News case, in-volving a poem about a Roman centurion’s homosexualactivity with the dead body of Jesus Christ, the complain-ant] Mary Whitehouse’s solicitor claimed that there was nomaterial difference between people being portrayed makinglove on stage or in film and a couple having sex in thestreet.”65 Butler has articulated a similar criticism of thecall made by certain proponents of hate speech prohibitionsto erase the legal distinctions between speech and action.The fact that in the case of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” “an actof speech in which a sexual intention is stated or impliedbecomes oddly indissociable from a sexual action” showsthat such a call can have unintended consequences poten-tially dangerous to certain liberal values that many of ustreasure.66

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Comparing hate speech prohibitions to those against flagburning is instructive. In flag or cross burning, the U.S. Su-preme Court has defined the action of desecrating the flagor the cross as a form of symbolic speech, with the effect ofexpanding freedom of expression. Cortese suggests essen-tially the reverse, defining hateful speech as a form of ac-tion—an assault—for the purpose of narrowing permittedexpression. In both cases, an important image is involved,one of civic, religious, or racial identity, which some sug-gest warrants the protection of criminal law. Cortese couldhave employed words such as desecrate and defile (ratherthan pummel and assault) in seeking prohibitions on hatespeech, as these appear appropriate to his cause. However,that would have created an association between the punish-ment of hate speech and that of blasphemy, which wouldlikely have been repugnant to many secularists.

I find attractive Elizabeth Coleman’s conclusion inchapter 9 that there should be a limited right to freedomfrom offense, a right that requires us all to observe stand-ards of politeness in civil discourse but is also limited towhat is substantively and contextually reasonable. Thiswould mean that neither those who maintain views that aredirectly at odds with the values of contemporary liberal so-cieties nor those who express themselves in the context of afull-throated academic debate may reasonably expect to en-joy freedom from offense. Of course, this conclusion re-solves none of the thorny issues regarding what constituteseither reasonable behavior or reasonable expectation. Thecourts will still have to decide what constitutes an absoluteminimum legal standard of civility.

My comparison of contemporary efforts to criminalizehate speech with earlier efforts to prohibit blasphemous ex-pression will likely raise objections. The contemporary

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legislation is commonly presented as a reasonable and ne-cessary response to raw bigotry, which undermines the so-cial fabric when expressed publicly. As two proponents ofhate speech prohibition explain, “Hate is generally under-stood as extreme negative feelings and beliefs held about agroup of individuals or a specific representative of thatgroup because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, orsexual orientation.”67 Criminal law treats hate speech as asimple question of mens rea (guilty mind or intent). By fo-cusing on the motives behind the hate, proponents of crim-inalization deflect attention from the actions themselves. Ifwe are concerned with maintaining social order rather thanwith someone’s internal state of mind, this focus is arguablymisplaced.

From another perspective, efforts to prohibit hate speechrepresent something new in the history of blasphemy.Whereas, in the past, the criminalization of blasphemy fo-cused almost exclusively on protecting the religious sym-bols of a hegemonic order for the sake of preserving its au-thority, current protections in multicultural democraciesprohibit symbolic offenses against racial, religious, andsexual minorities that majoritarian society has victimized.However, once such protections are codified through the le-gislative processes, they are incorporated into a governingsystem of laws and are treated as a reflection of public con-sensus. In this respect, they appear indistinguishable fromolder antiblasphemy laws. Like the governing philosophy ofliberalism that it seeks to replace, multiculturalism facesdifficulties of equal protection. When confronted by suchcases as Piss Christ, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Mo-hammed, and Ku Klux Klan depictions of African Americ-ans, for example, where are we to draw the line that separ-ates protected free speech from hate speech that may be

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prohibited and punished? This question underscores thedifficulty of framing a consistent standard ofantidefamation.

CONCLUSION

Despite the novelty of the shift to protect nonhegemonicgroups against hate speech, the contemporary semiotics ofprofanity exhibits some continuities with the past. Theslurs—racial, ethnic, sexist, or homophobic—that are em-ployed against victims of hate speech identify them by onetrait, which is taken as the only one that matters. Thus, theN-word refers exclusively to skin color, reducing the vastrange of dermal tones to only two: black and white. A fur-ther reduction eviscerates every other aspect of humanity ofthe victim, who is identified exclusively with this one trait,which metonymically stands in for the whole. These types ofexpressions play off the markers of identity that minoritiesthemselves may proffer. What the one asserts as inviolable,requiring recognition and respect—racial or religious iden-tity—is profaned by the other. Furthermore, the victim ismade to stand for the class of all individuals who share thistrait, so that violence may be exerted against the class orgroup as a whole by being directed against the person ofthe individual victim. One of the curiosities in the Jyllands-Posten cartoons is that, while many Muslims objected towhat they saw as a specific denigration of the Prophet Mo-hammed and a violation of the prohibition against display-ing his image, from the cartoonists’ perspective he was ar-guably unimportant in his own person and individuality. In-stead he functioned as a representative of a larger entity,identified as terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, or evenIslam as a whole. The principle of substitution that governs

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the logic of such outbursts of sacrificial violence is inher-ently symbolic. And so are efforts to regulate it.

The key difference that modernization or secularizationhas made in the treatment of symbolic offenses would ap-pear to reside neither in the semiotics of profanation nor inthe simple decline of the sacred, which has endured in someforms (such as the U.S. flag) that seem scarcely to departfrom older modes of sacrality. The main difference appearsto be that the logic of sacrifice has been extended to valuethe victim or scapegoat against the dominant combinationof church and state. Returning to the example with which Ibegan this chapter, the biblical ḥerem represented the apexof a sacrificial logic that demanded purification through theextirpation of the other group: the Amalekites or theCanaanites, for instance. Not only the severity of the pun-ishment imposed on the other but the very denigration ofotherness has been challenged in modern democratic soci-eties. The ḥerem now has to compete with an alternativediscourse that attenuates or even reverses its sacrificiallogic.

If we are to believe René Girard, this process has deeproots in Christianity, which, by revealing and rejecting thelogic of scapegoating, elevated the moral status of the vic-tim above that of the oppressor.68 Girard does not explainwhy Christianity throughout its long history has often beenassociated with the enforcement of laws against blasphemyand heresy and has sided with the hegemonic at least as of-ten as the marginalized. Nor does his analysis explain whyoppressed ethnicities and sexualities have begun only re-cently to receive some measure of liberation. Yet his gener-al idea of social evolution as consisting in part of a rejectionof scapegoating has some value as a description of certainaspects of the secularization of blasphemy. If we accept this

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evolutionary account, then the analogy between modernityand Christianity gives further reason both for hope and forconcern. For just as Christ crucified gave way to Con-stantine’s imperial Christianity, current efforts to undo thesacrificial logic of the scapegoat could end by producing theopposite of what they intend: a new hegemonic order.

NOTES

I thank the editors and the anonymous reviewer for the press fortheir helpful comments and suggestions for the improvement of thisessay.

1. I have taken the text and details of Spinoza’s excommunicationfrom Asa Kasher and Shlomo Biderman, “Why Was Baruch deSpinoza Excommunicated?,” accessed March 4, 2014, www.tau.ac.il/∼kasher/pspin.htm.

2. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and theMaking of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001).

3. All translations are from the Revised Standard Version of theBible, unless otherwise indicated.

4. See Phillip D. Stern, The Biblical Ḥerem: A Window on Israel’sReligious Experience (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1991).

5. The last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the UnitedKingdom was the infamous 1977 Gay News case, discussed below.

6. Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,”in Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Cri-tique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley:Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009), 20–63; Mahmood, “Re-ligious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” inibid., 64–100.

7. As Leonard W. Levy shows in Blasphemy: Verbal Offenseagainst the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York: Al-fred A. Knopf, 1993), in Latin Christian civilization, the category ofblasphemy came to incorporate not only direct curses against God orinvoking God’s name but all manner of religious deviations: heresy,

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profanity, and sacrilege. In what follows, I will make no distinctionamong these categories but will use the terms blasphemy and sym-bolic offense interchangeably to describe forms of expression, bothverbal and pictorial, directed against sacred names, doctrines, andimages, including acts of iconoclasm that, while constituting physic-al destruction or vandalism, appear to be directed against the powerof the image itself.

8. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part II (London, 1795), 8.For a discussion of the impact of this work, see David Nash, Blas-phemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present (Aldershot, U.K.:Ashgate, 1999), 76–77.

9. Jeremy Bentham, “A Comment on the Commentaries” and “AFragment on Government,” ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart(London: Athlone, 1977), 407–8.

10. Rex v. Taylor (1676), involving the blasphemy trial of JohnTaylor. For a discussion, see Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain,160–61. Blackstone quoted this proposition in his famous Comment-aries on the Laws of England. See Samuel Warren, ed., Blackstone’sCommentaries, 2nd ed. (London, 1856), 1.

11. See the discussion in Robert A. Yelle, “Bentham’s Fictions:Canon and Idolatry in the Genealogy of Law,” Yale Journal of Lawand the Humanities 17 (2005): 151–79.

12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto(1848), accessed March 4, 2014, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm, ch. 1: “All that is solidmelts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last com-pelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and hisrelations with his kind.”

13. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (1867), accessed March 4, 2014,www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4, ch. 1.

14. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations,trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 75–77.

15. Ibid., 73–92.16. This anticipates his use of carnival as an example of the “state

of exception.” See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. KevinAttell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 71.

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17. On such practices, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons ofMisrule,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–151.

18. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships,” Africa 13(1940): 195–210; Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in South-EastAfrica (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954).

19. Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” 71–73. Seealso Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in theMission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

20. See Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Prot-estant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York:Oxford University Press, 2013); Yelle, Semiotics of Religion: Signs ofthe Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), chs. 4–6.

21. Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Oc-cult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities inthe Renaissance, ed. Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984), 95. Peter Gay had earlier articulated a similar idea, in“The Rehabilitation of Myth,” in The Enlightenment: An Interpreta-tion, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966),237–55. See, e.g., 250: “The Christian logos, for all its debt and re-semblance to the logos of the Greeks, was tinged with mystery wherethe boundaries between the sign and the thing signified, reality andideal, were wiped away and the human and divine met.”

22. Robert A. Yelle, Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and theDream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra (London: Routledge,2003), chs. 4–5; Yelle, Semiotics of Religion, ch. 2.

23. See the discussion of Thomas Cranmer’s reform of the Englishliturgy in Yelle, Semiotics of Religion, 127–31.

24. On historiola in charms, see ibid., 28.25. Levy, Blasphemy, 50, 529; Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Bri-

tain, 13, 156, 162–63. For a discussion of symbolic or analogicalpunishments, see Robert A. Yelle, “Rhetorics of Law and Ritual: ASemiotic Comparison of the Law of Talion and Sympathetic Magic,”Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 627–47.

26. See Levy, Blasphemy, 12–13.27. Patrick Olivelle, trans., Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1996), 57.

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28. Consider Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Ag-gression (1977–2005), an entire journal devoted to the history, us-age, and meaning of curses, profanity, and expletives.

29. See S. Brent Plate, Blasphemy: Art That Offends (London:Black Dog, 2006), 60: “Blasphemy is about impure crossings fromone side of the sacred-profane divide to the other; about juxtaposingthe sacred and the profane in times and places where they are ex-pected to be kept separate; of twisting the profane so that it appearssacred, or making the sacred appear profane.”

30. Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, “The Principles of Carica-ture,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 17 (1938): 319–42.

31. Yelle, “Rhetorics of Law and Ritual.”32. Michael Servetus, for example, was burned in effigy (Levy,

Blasphemy, 65) before he was captured and burned in person, whileLodowick Muggleton’s book was burned (ibid., 223).

33. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society:Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (New York:Oxford University Press, 1992), 103–27.

34. Levy, Blasphemy, 6.35. United States v. Alvarez, 132 S. Ct. 2537 (2012), decided June

28, 2012.36. Stolen Valor Act of 2005, 18 USC 704(b).37. B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Viet-

nam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (Dallas:Verity, 1998). See, e.g., “The Purple Heart Flea Market,” 349–53.

38. 151 Cong. Rec. H. 5643.39. 18 USC 704(a).40. Ibid. See also Ramya Kasturi, “Note: Stolen Valor: A Historical

Perspective on the Regulation of Military Uniforms and Decora-tions,” Yale Law Journal 29 (2012): 419.

41. 18 USC 702.42. 18 USC 707.43. 18 USC 711 and 711(a), respectively.44. 18 USC 1912.45. 18 USC 700(a)(1).46. Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989).47. Flag Protection Act of 1989, Pub. L. No. 101–131, 103 Stat.

777 (amending 18 USC 700).

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48. United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990).49. Venerated Objects Law, Tex. Penal Code Ann. Sec. 42.09(a)(3).50. For a discussion of civil religion as it relates to the Pledge of

Allegiance to the U.S. flag, see Grace Y. Kao and Jerome E. Copulsky,“The Pledge of Allegiance and the Meanings and Limits of Civil Reli-gion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (2007):121–49.

51. See Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain, 1.52. Sheldon Nahmod, “The Sacred Flag and the First Amend-

ment,” Indiana Law Journal 66 (1991): 512.53. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,

trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 144,148–49.

54. Yelle, Explaining Mantras, 114–16.55. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 86.56. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction” (1936), translation at www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.

57. “4-OP-B-7 United States Flag Etiquette,” Florida StateUniversity, January 1, 2014, http://policies.vpfa.fsu.edu/bmanual/flag.html.

58. Brian Palmer, “Don’t Burn after Reading: What’s the RightWay to Dispose of a Quran—or Any Other Sacred Text?,” Slate,February 22, 2012, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ex-plainer/2012/02/afghan_qur-an_burn-ing_protests_what_s_the_right_way_to_dispose_of_a_quran_.html.

59. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942) at 573;Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) at 447, 449.

60. Robert Post, “Hate Speech,” in Extreme Speech and Demo-cracy, ed. Ivan Hare and James Weinstein (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009), 123–38.

61. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1975); John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay inthe Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1969).

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62. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative(New York: Routledge, 1997). For the Supreme Court decision, seeR.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992).

63. Peter G. Danchin, “Defaming Muhammad: Dignity, Harm, andIncitement to Religious Hatred,” Duke Forum for Law and SocialChange 2 (2010): 31–32.

64. Anthony Cortese, Opposing Hate Speech (Westport, CT: Prae-ger, 2006), 9.

65. David Edgar, “From the Nanny State to the Heckler’s Veto:The New Censorship and How to Counter It,” in Hare and Weinstein,Extreme Speech and Democracy, 585. For more on the Gay Newscase, see introduction, n. 3.

66. Butler, Excitable Speech, 76.67. Michael Waltman and John Haas, The Communication of Hate

(New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 2. See also 33.68. René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1986), 198–212.

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PART THREE

Civility, the Sacred,and Human Rights

CHAPTER 6

Muslim PoliticalTheologyDefamation, Apostasy, and Anathema

EBRAHIM MOOSA

Pakistan and Afghanistan are not only neighbors. In thefirst decade of the twenty-first century they are both epi-centers of blasphemy-related violence, ranging from prosec-utions and political mayhem to assassinations. And inEgypt, blasphemy-related prosecutions rose dramaticallyduring the brief reign of the Muslim Brotherhood, mainlyagainst Christians and a few secular figures.1 Anger overmatters broadly identified as blasphemy frequently eruptsin Muslim-majority countries in response to Western car-toons and media portrayals that are demeaning to Muslimreligious figures. Malevolent acts of Qurʼan torching or sa-lacious films and novels that cast Islam’s founding figuresand personalities in a negative light all elicit a range of re-actions around the Muslim world. These range from atti-tudes that ignore such provocations, peaceful protests, andscholarly responses to violent expressions of indignation.

Yet Muslim reactions to provocations of a religious kindare not limited to South Asia or any specific region. In thepast three decades, the conflict over Muslim religious val-ues and beliefs has played out on multiple fault lines—reli-gious, political, cultural, and economic, among others—inthe full glare of a global media revolution.

Local actors connect to global pathways of protest anddebate about religion and politics; they highlight the differ-ences between national sensibilities about religion inMuslim-majority countries and the sensibilities that inter-national law and secular legal, political, and moral ordersadvance. Within national contexts, these debates aboutblasphemy highlight variation among different segments ofMuslims. While the picture often pits those who propose asecular Muslim political order against those who demand agreater public role for religion, the matter is often morecomplex. A host of unidentified positions exist betweenthese polar positions of secular versus religious. Followingthis chapter, Ron E. Hassner identifies important linksbetween blasphemy and violence (see chapter 7), whileAsma T. Uddin offers an in-depth analysis of Indonesia’sblasphemy law (see chapter 8). As both show, those inpower often have to navigate the shoals of multiple con-stituencies. Often the authority of those in power is testedby large, highly diverse, and equally influential nonstate re-ligious sectors whose motives vary considerably and cannotbe easily plotted. If the picture becomes confusing in timesof conflict, it is certainly clearer in Hassner’s careful scru-tiny of what multiple actors achieve by mounting highly me-diatized spectacles and global public campaigns againstblasphemy. This chapter prepares the way for such sub-sequent analyses in this volume by considering the theolo-gical architecture of blasphemy.

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EVENTS OF BLASPHEMY

What frequently gets ignored in debates about blasphemy ishow all the players across the board instrumentalize Islamand its teachings, ranging from Muslim political and reli-gious figures to representatives of the international order,foreign governments, and their political leaders. In Muslimcommunities, both political and religious players competewith one another to defend what they view as normativeteachings of Islam in order to sustain their legitimacyamong their respective audiences. In combustible politicalenvironments, these become risky and deadly wagers.

In 2011, Afghan president Hamid Karzai publicly con-demned the torching of the Qurʼan in Florida by the Americ-an Christian zealot Terry Jones. Hours after Karzai’s denun-ciation, thousands of his compatriots took to street protestsin various cities and went on a rampage at a United Nationscompound, killing several employees. Many Afghans alsodied in ensuing clashes with police. A year later, in 2012,the burning of used Qurʼans as part of a disposal process byU.S. soldiers sparked protests and violence across Afgh-anistan, resulting in the deaths of at least forty Afghans andseveral U.S. soldiers.

In neighboring Pakistan, a controversial blasphemy actdating back to colonial times and amended in the era of thedictator General Ziaul Haque is frequently used to vex andharass members of minority faiths. Attempts by politicalfigures to amend this controversial statute have sparkedangry public protestations and opposition from religiousgroups. Religious intimidation has paralyzed the country’scivilian government. The governor of Punjab Province Sal-man Taseer was gunned down by his security aide, who be-lieved his boss had committed a religious offense in callingfor the blasphemy laws to be reformed or abolished.

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Shabbaz Bhatti, a cabinet minister belonging to the Christi-an minority, was also gunned down, since he too believedthat the blasphemy laws discriminated against members ofhis faith community.

Opponents of the law claim that it has been abused andused for vexatious purposes, to target minorities such asChristians and the excommunicated Muslim sects of Qadi-anis and Ahmadis. But Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, somesay, have also been used to settle private and political ven-dettas.2 All an accuser has to do is allege to the police thatsomeone has blasphemed Islam. The accused can get en-tangled in an inextricable and menacing prosecutorial pro-cess lasting years. Advocates of the law insist that the cur-rent penalties for blasphemy be enhanced rather than liber-alized in order to be brought in line with a strict interpreta-tion of the Shari‘a.

Beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan, even in IranianAzerbaijan and other provinces of Iran, blasphemy trials arecommon. In Iran, the cleric Mohammad Javad Lankarani ap-plauded the November 2011 murder of the Azeri activistRafiq Tagi. He praised the killers for “sending the reprob-ate who insulted the Prophet to hell.”3 Occasionally onehears of charges of blasphemy in Indonesia or Malaysia. InTurkey, the religious sector has been more judicious andhas successfully ignored those who have criticized Islamand its religious figures, sensibly deciding not to indulgethe publicity-seeking strategies of provocateurs.

Beyond recent history, there has been a consistent trendof using blasphemy as a means to silence critics of Islam. Inthe last quarter of the twentieth century, Sudan executed ahigh-profile religious figure, Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭāhā, atthe same time that its formerly socialist president, Jaʼfar al-Numayrī, discovered his religious faith. In Egypt, an

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academic, Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, was famously prosecutedfor publishing views that were deemed contrary to Islam’s apriori doctrines.4 He was judged to have left his faith, andEgypt’s highest court nullified his marriage, since a Muslimwoman there was not allowed to remain married to a non-Muslim man. Abū Zayd’s alleged apostasy elicited threatsfrom militants claiming he deserved the death penalty, andhe was thus driven into exile.

The most celebrated case of blasphemy is, of course, the1988 publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, authoredby Salman Rushdie. A legal opinion (fatwa) issued byAyatollah Rūḥullāh Khomeini, the supreme leader of theRepublic of Iran, stating that a person who insulted theProphet Mohammed deserved the death penalty underIslamic law only inflamed the debate. While blasphemycharges were at the center of the Rushdie controversy, theevent spiraled out of control and spilled into the domain ofinterstate relations, leading Iran and the United Kingdomto sever diplomatic ties. Debates about freedom of expres-sion and the rights of religious minorities in Britain andlater Europe also surfaced as a result. Throughout thesecontroversies, the persistent charge was leveled that“Islam” was incompatible with liberal freedoms. In 2006,the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a provocat-ive series of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed,sparking global outrage among Muslims that resulted inmayhem and deaths in several countries.

Rushdie claimed that he was challenging certain staticnotions of religion, especially a fundamentalist interpreta-tion of Islam, and experimenting with a literary mode ofpostmodernist satire to raise questions as a novelist and acultural critic. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons appeared afterthe author of a children’s book on Mohammed said he could

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not find an illustrator brave enough to depict Islamicthemes for his book, especially if they involved illustrationsof holy figures, such as the Prophet. This then gave thisright-wing newspaper the idea to solicit cartoons in order tobreak the alleged stranglehold that the growing Muslimcommunity in Europe had on the cultural norms of the con-tinent and, more broadly, the West. If Rushdie was contest-ing particular notions of Muslim religious imaginaries bydesecrating or giving offense through his fictional charac-ters, then Jyllands-Posten felt the need to protect Europeanculture by challenging, even if it meant offending, the reli-gious values and culture of a new Muslim citizenry inEurope. Some observers were generous to Jyllands-Postenwhen they claimed that it engaged in testing the limits offreedom of speech. Yet the newspaper was not an equal-op-portunity agitator for religious freedom. In 2003 it refusedto publish cartoons that depicted Jesus in a demeaningmanner, because it was cautious not to offend its readers’Christian sensibilities.

Eighteen years after the Rushdie event, the depiction ofthe Prophet Mohammed in cartoons again focused on thereligious culture of Muslim minorities in Europe and theiralleged unwillingness to conform to, integrate with, or as-similate into the dominant culture. It was not only a matterof the cartoons; tensions lurked in the background aboutMuslim immigration to Europe and the display of Muslimreligious symbols, as in the head scarf controversy inFrance. The ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, amidgrowing European fears of religiously inspired acts of ter-rorism pursued by Muslims in Europe, only further inflamedthe global context. As the unrest of the offensive cartoonsspread to Muslim-majority countries, Denmark’s political

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and economic interests were subject to boycotts andcondemnation.

Even though the defenders of the Danish newspaper con-tinued to pose the cartoon controversy as a symbol of a warof civilizations, this was an unsustainable argument.Doudou Diène, a United Nations special rapporteur, bestsummarized the issue: “These newspapers’ intransigent de-fence of unlimited freedom of expression is out of step withinternational norms that seek an appropriate balancebetween freedom of expression and religious freedom, spe-cifically the prohibition of incitement to religious and racialhatred.” “The debate sparked by the publication of the car-toons,” he added, “has revealed the emergence in some in-tellectual, media and political circles of a rhetoric of clashof cultures and civilizations that divides the world into sec-ular, democratic and civilized countries that protect free-dom of expression, and obscurantist, retrograde and back-ward States that enshrine religious freedom and the posi-tion of religion in society. . . . This line of argument . . .draws on the same spirit of caricature as the drawings inthe Danish newspaper.”5

At the heart of the cartoon debate are different, and per-haps incommensurable, sensibilities about religion. Indeed,these differences are located in different understandings ofculture. They are also evident in Muslim self-understand-ings of religion, especially on the topic of blasphemy.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY

Culture and its artifacts give meaning to life. Enmeshed inthe highly publicized European debates on Islam is theMuslim theological doctrine of blasphemy. Corporal punish-ments linked to blasphemy derive from cultural norms and

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practices dating back to early practices of Muslim societies.Over time, Muslim sensibilities have acclimated to thesepenalties as a norm, although some Muslim scholars con-test their application as part of national codes of law inmodern times on theological and ethical grounds. Debateshinge on notions of Islamic reform and the embrace by sec-ular elites and rejection by a substantial section of Muslimorthodoxy of modern sensibilities that support un-trammeled freedom of expression, including blasphemy.The most fervent arguments center on the salience of polit-ical theologies—theories of how political practice is relatedto salvation—crafted during periods of Muslim empire andtheir relevance to societies modeled on democracy, equalityof citizenship, free speech, and religious diversity.

The requirement of reverence and respect for religiousfigures, especially the person of the Prophet, is part of asubstantive theological value commitment and spiritualpractice for Muslims. Each individual believer upholds loveand honor for Mohammed as a religious value. Over timethis value became linked to the theological and political di-mensions of Muslim public life in successive empires.Alongside the political, as Islam’s discursive tradition de-veloped and morphed, those authorized to interpret theMuslim tradition, the ‘ulamā, became the gatekeepers ofthe Prophet’s legacy. Hence, the ‘ulamā’s discursive tradi-tion, its methods, and their authority became coterminouswith Mohammedan charisma. Infractions of certain teach-ings involving the authority of the tradition are oftencouched as violating the authority of the Prophet and fre-quently trigger charges of anathema (takfīr), blasphemy,and apostasy.

What Europeans and even modern educated Muslimswere surprised to learn of was a Trojan horse of doctrines

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relating to Muslim political theology that proscribe satiredirected at the Prophet Mohammed, his family, and hiscompanions. The guardians of this political theology aremainly the religious scholars, the ‘ulamā, and in someplaces the Islamic state, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran,Pakistan, and Sudan. What further surprises Muslims of aliberal stripe is that the ‘ulamā extend the sanctity attachedto the Prophet to the methodology they and their forebearshave crafted to interpret the Prophet’s teachings. There-fore, many who are engaged in critical scholarship findthemselves on the receiving end of anathematizing ‘ulamācritiques that declare them to be persona non grata interms of Muslim theology. Individual scholars are often ac-cused of breaching and challenging an interpretative frame-work deemed sacrosanct by the ‘ulamā precisely because aconsensus-driven political theology has legitimated it overthe centuries. It is to this political theology that I now turn.

Take, for example, the consequences of leaving Islam as afaith community or of criticizing the Prophet Mohammed.The penalties prescribed are a product of political theologyand require some explanation. Despite the fact that Muslimpolitical theology developed over centuries under varyingconditions of empire, elements of it resonate to this veryday. So what is political theology? It is, in the words of JanAssmann, the “ever-changing relationships between politic-al community and religious order, in short, between power[or authority, Herrschaft] and salvation [Heil].”6 Muslimthinkers such as the jurist of Muslim political theory Abūal-Ḥasan al-Māwardī have articulated a similar idea, albeitthrough the prism of leadership and governance: “Leader-ship [imāma] was designed in order to succeed the role ofprophecy by protecting the order of salvation [dīn] andmanaging the affairs of the world.”7 In Māwardī’s view,

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there was a conjunction between the religious order and thepolitical order. But what made Muslim political theologydifferent from its counterpart in Christianity was that inIslam, the political theological was intimately related to theidea of prophecy, which is the pathway to salvation. Thepolitical in Islam, therefore, paved the way for a publicsphere committed to advancing the common welfare thatwas also in part related to the order of salvation. (While thismodel was applicable in the early constructions of Islam, itis open to question whether it is still sustainable in newerpolitical and cultural regimes.)

With the end of the Prophet Mohammed’s prophecy, therole of guiding the community passed to his pious politicalsuccessors or to members of his household, depending onwhether you follow a Sunnī or a Shī‘a interpretation of suc-cession, respectively. Muslim culture reveres those desig-nated as the guardians of the knowledge that stemmed fromthe Prophet. Since salvation was a core idea of Islam as adīn (collective practices of salvation), the knowledge ofpractices was integral to that order of salvation. In order toreproduce, explain, and interpret practices over time, a dis-cursive tradition emerged. It elevated the status and thepower of those who mediated the learned tradition, namelythe scholars. This discursive tradition, validated by a varietyof subtraditions in Islam, acquired a quasi-sacrosanct char-acter. Soon the learned were seen as the true of heirs of theprophetic charisma. Statements attributed to Mohammeddeclare that the learned of his community are the heirs tothe prophets.8 Given the equivalence between the learnedand the prophets of yore, the ‘ulamā and their tradition ac-quired power and authority as the mediators of salvation.Their interpretative methodology gradually gained

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authority and sanctity over the centuries, becoming insep-arable from the prevailing models of Muslim politicaltheology.

Another way of putting this is that the Prophet had, so tospeak, two bodies.9 These continuously inhabited the moralimaginary of the faith community (umma). The two ima-gined bodies of the Prophet paralleled the two primary rolesand functions that he performed in his earthly role.10 Thefirst was the Prophet’s political body, in his capacity as thepolitical axis of the Muslim community—God’s messengerwho established a political order that favored the tran-scendent good. Through the routinization of the propheticcharisma, the political body of Islamdom was continuouslyinhabited and nourished through functions of steward-ship—khilāfa in Sunnism and the imamate in Shī‘ism.

The need for a political order in large part stems from thefact that the God of the Qurʼan is the personification of sov-ereignty, especially through his attribute of omnipotence.11

In Islam, at least according to the historical tradition, thefulfillment of the will of God is the “installation of the ter-restrial reign of that will, thanks to the obedience that isdue to the Prophet.”12 Hence prophets are allowed to useforce to subdue those who try to frustrate and resist the im-plementation of the will of God, described as “the way ofGod” on earth.13

The second body of the Prophet reflects his role as theteacher of the transcendent good and wisdom(yuʼallimuhum al-kitāb waʼl hikma); his embodied life(sunna) became the exemplar of transcendent good. Thebody of knowledge that the Prophet provided was preserved,if not sacralized, by the Muslim knowledge tradition and itscurators, the ‘ulamā.

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Muslims revere the Prophet at both the collective and in-dividual levels, in both public and private spheres of salva-tion. The Prophet’s two bodies—political and religious—be-came intertwined and interlinked. In the view of some, theywere not easily separable. When contemplating certain as-pects of what is today deemed blasphemy, one should bearin mind this inseparability of the roles of the Prophet inboth the popular and the learned religious imaginary ofMuslims.

The political theology espoused by most Muslim thinkers,Sunnī and Shī‘a alike, views the Prophet as a central ontolo-gical fact, not only an epistemological referent. In otherwords, he is the equivalent of a sovereign: the symbolic sov-ereign, higher than any earthly sovereign. Indeed, everyearthly Muslim sovereign, or anyone pursuing politics onbehalf of the Prophet, invariably acts as his successor andin his name, as khalīfatu rasūl allāh (successor of the Mes-senger of God). Some might press further to argue that thesovereign identity of the Prophet is coterminous with theidentity of the Muslim community. If such a religious ima-ginary is at work, then few Muslims would be persuadedthat the classical law of blasphemy devised in the imperialperiod of Islam requires alteration and updating today.Some cling to the old law on the grounds that the Prophetis the symbolic figure of the earthly Muslim community. Indefense of his honor, a certain amount of founding violencewas necessary and is required today, to protect a key sym-bol of their faith. Therefore, in political terms, the one whoinsults Mohammed becomes a damned person. To use thelanguage of the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben,such an offender or damned person must be killed but notsacrificed.14 In his view, such a person would be a homosacer.

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Any change or rethinking in the question especially ofblasphemy, and to a lesser degree apostasy, would requirereconfiguring an established Muslim political theology towhich both Sunnīs and Shī‘as tenaciously subscribe. Grasp-ing that nettle would require some serious rethinking ofhow the Sharī‘a is imagined and formulated. One importantconsideration is whether Muslim thinkers will take onboard the varieties of knowledge and the experience of thepresent when adjudicating normative values of Islam of thismagnitude.

A SHIFT IN METHODOLOGY

A key shift in methodology has been the cause of somemutation and transformation in the intra-Muslim debatechallenging the doctrinal validity of some of the penaltiesrelating to the offenses of blasphemy and apostasy. Briefly,the default methodological position among Muslim scholarshas been to appeal to a hermeneutics-centered canonicaltradition. Both the Qurʼan and the prophetic tradition,Sunna, were viewed as equally authoritative sources. Theinterpretative process (hermeneutics) trusted the authorityof tradition and valorized the pious exemplars at the found-ing of Islam with some consideration for change that al-lowed for a reasonable dialogical relationship among text,time, and context. Canonical variation and multiple inter-pretations were tolerated on the basis of different com-munities of learning in multiple contexts who exercised dis-crete forms of reasoning—formal reasoning or affectivemethods of communal reasoning with shared beliefs, con-duct, and aspirations.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, and perhapsslightly earlier, methodological shifts have produced

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alternate ways of imagining the canonical tradition. Whilethere is some continuity with the traditional canonicalmethod, there is also some discontinuity. Modern Muslimthought—including elements of Muslim traditionalism—hasbegun to view the canon in a more instrumental manner.The goal is to see revelation as a reservoir of outcomes-based knowledge supported by a belief that the primarypurposes of the Muslim revelation are totally transparentand knowable. In fact, some modern Muslims often claimthat the classical and postclassical canonical tradition,mired in the cultural practices of the past, often failed tograsp Islam’s transcendent values.

Hence an emerging juridico-moral lexicon is graduallygaining popularity and displacing the established canonicaltradition and its methodology. Advanced in the guise ofIslamic reform, this new method stresses the overarchingpurposes (maqāṣid) of the Muslim revelation and statesthat morals and values are based on certain interests(maṣlaḥa, pl. maṣāliḥ). Revelation is designed to preservereligion, life, reason, property, and family. In this re-designed method, the Qurʼan becomes the primary sourceof religious and moral instruction. While the prophetic tra-dition, hadith, is not ignored, it is subject to greater scru-tiny. This method appeals to some Muslim traditionalist fig-ures among the ‘ulamā, but it is the favorite approach ofthe non-‘ulamā intelligentsia. As a result, a number ofteachings that were previously based on the authority ofhadith have been questioned, such as apostasy and blas-phemy, especially when the values of the hadith clash withthe broader purposes of the Qurʼanic teachings or when theQurʼan is silent, as on matters such as the penalties forblasphemy and apostasy. This reformist and Qurʼan-basedapproach, even though it is challenged by some sectors of

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orthodoxy, has generated a great deal of debate and pro-poses new ways of thinking about fairly weighty mattersthat were once unquestioned but are now subject toreinterpretation.

BLASPHEMY AND ANATHEMA IN ISLAM

Blasphemy as a media term is widely used to describe re-strictions and limits evident in passionate intra-Muslim ar-guments or as Muslim disapproval of the ways in whichIslam is portrayed. Bear in mind that in Western moralphilosophy and theology, this term covers a variety ofthings. Any “profane speaking of God or sacred things” orany kind of “impious irreverence” or “reproach of a sacredfigure” constitutes blasphemy.15

The Muslim discursive tradition uses several terms to sig-nal the violation of doctrinal boundaries and teachings.Muslim theology tolerates disagreement within acceptablediscursive boundaries. But when a disagreement is con-strued as tantamount to a rejection of an a priori doctrineof Islam, then it triggers charges of anathema (takfīr) forthe author or holder of such offensive views.16 In both thepremodern and modern periods, theological and doctrinaladversaries hurled this highly injurious epithet at one an-other as contentious groups and individuals contestedmeaning and authority. Tradition counsels caution in orderto restrict the use of mutual anathematizing to instances ofnecessity only. Yet a reader of the writings of modern tradi-tional Muslim authorities will note the widespread use ofthe anathema label to silence dissent among rival groups of‘ulamā and among their non-‘ulamā rivals. Surely the use ofthe rhetoric of anathema fragments the moral consensusamong Muslims. Yet it nevertheless creates discursive

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tension among Muslims and foments a vibrant religiouspublic sphere, provided such debates do not spill over intoviolence. When some of these disagreements are contestedin modern secular courts, then the discursive disagree-ments mutate into political offenses and the perpetrator, iffound guilty, is viewed as a criminal. This was true in thecase of Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭāhā of Sudan, Naṣr ḤāmidAbū Zayd of Egypt, and other individuals who were prosec-uted for theological offenses in secular courts in the twenti-eth century.17

INSULTING THE PROPHET

Two other offenses, insult to the Prophet Mohammed andapostasy, incur severe penalties and are part of an estab-lished Muslim theological vocabulary. Muslim politicaltheology views the use of satire, lampooning, and personalinsult known as sabb al-rasūl (insult to the Messenger) as agrievous offense. Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328), arenowned fourteenth-century jurist, and Taqī al-Dīn al-Sub-kī (d. 1355) both made the case that insulting remarks andsatire directed at Mohammed constituted not only a majorsin in Islam but is also an offense deserving capital punish-ment. The religious imaginary views it as unthinkable for aMuslim to intentionally insult the Prophet. According tolater Muslim scholars, a person adhering to anotherfaith—say, a Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Hindu—wholived in a premodern Islamic imperial domain and insultedMohammed would be in breach of the contract of indemnityhe or she enjoyed. Early scholars held a different view, ar-guing that such persons would not be in breach of theircontract.

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For Muslims, though, guilt for defaming the Prophet isexpiated by the severe consequences of capital punishmentin Shari‘a law. To insult Mohammed not only signifies an in-tention to leave Islam, since reverence for him is a centralrequirement of the faith, but amounts to something worse:defamation. In short, many scholars view insult and defam-ation of the Prophet as a sui generis offense independent ofapostasy. Others treat it as an extreme version of apostasy,since capital punishment is the prescribed penalty for both,but there are differences in the formalities of each.

Blasphemy-related penalties most likely stem from thepre-Islamic Arabian cultural milieu in which Islam wasfounded. The word for satire is hijā in Arabic. However, itsignifies a range of meanings from the lofty to the coarse,from the amoral to the immoral.18 In addition to “satire,”the word also means “lampoon,” “invective,” and “abuse.”With the advent of Islam, the anthropocentric Arabian ethosfused with Islam’s theocentric ethos to create new moralsensibilities. Already in the pre-Islamic Arabian milieu, hijāelicited physical punishment. One of the reasons to deterhijā was its destabilizing effect on communities, includingthe endangering of solidarity.19 The use of hijā in theIslamic “shame culture”—with its ethical strictures to pro-tect peoples’ reputations and honor—came to signify a seri-ous offense, of “dishonoring” someone. So the penalties forsatire enforced via tradition in Islamic law could plausiblyhave early Islamic precedents.20

Drawing on these precedents, Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-HalīmIbn Taymīya confidently writes that defamatory satire of theProphet is a “unique crime” (jināya mufrada).21 He goes onto show that when the Prophet conquered Mecca, he ruledin favor of the death penalty for a number of people who is-sued defamatory statements in their poetry and speech,

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while adversaries who did not engage in defamation enjoyedamnesty. Those among the Prophet’s companions whoavenged his defamation received special honors as the“aides of God and his messenger” (nāsiran lillāhi wa rasū-lihi), according to Ibn Taymīya.22

Traditionalist or orthodox Sunnī and Shī‘a scholars up-hold the binding authority of this precedent. However, inthe twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some traditionalistscholars and a spectrum of scholars belonging to other per-suasions disagreed over its meaning, interpretation, andbinding authority. Supporters of the death penalty for de-famation of Mohammed cited this precedent as conclusiveevidence. Those who demurred argued that the persons ex-ecuted were killed for capital crimes they had previouslycommitted, not for defaming the Prophet. Furthermore,some argued that the Qurʼan does not prescribe a penaltyfor the defamation of the Prophet, even though it condemnsany physical or emotional injury caused to him. By contrast,supporters of the blasphemy penalty argue that the veryverses of the Qurʼan that condemn those who cause emo-tional and physical injury to the Prophet imply the gravityof defaming and dishonoring him. Yet advocates are atpains to substantiate the claim that the death penalty forthis offense is derived from the Qurʼan. At best, such au-thority derives from the hadith where Mohammed elicitsthe help of his companions to put Ka‘b bin al-Ashraf to thesword because “he had offended God and His Prophet.”23

Opponents of the death penalty for defamation of theProphet say that if he did enact such a penalty, then it wason the grounds of political expediency and not for religiousreasons. However, the naysayers also, of course, have theburden of explaining why the blasphemy rule has been

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retained throughout Muslim history in a virtually unbrokenjuridical consensus as part of the law of apostasy.

APOSTASY

The doctrine of apostasy (riddah) is also among those pen-alties that have prompted discussions among experts ofIslamic law. As for defaming the Prophet, the Qurʼan in-cludes no penalty for apostasy. The tradition found inprophetic reports, hadith, establishes the authority for thispenalty. A statement attributed to Mohammed states, “Who-ever changes their religion should be killed” (Man baddaladinahu fa ‘l-yuqtal). The meaning and interpretation of thisreport give rise to multiple perspectives. According to someauthorities, the precedent for the death penalty forapostasy derives from the Prophet Mohammed’s decree toexecute a handful of persons at the conquest of Mecca,mentioned above, for their alleged apostasy in having aban-doned their faith in Islam. Unlike with the penalty for de-famation of the Prophet, which very few scholars have chal-lenged, a good number have entered the fray to contest thepenalty for apostasy.

Ṭāhā Jābir al-‘Alwānī, a foremost traditional scholar onceactive in the United States but now residing in Cairo, hasargued that the traditional death penalty for apostasy milit-ates against Islam’s principle of “no coercion in matters ofreligion.”24 After an extensive survey of doctrines, he con-cluded that the meaning of apostasy was a contested teach-ing in early Islam. If it was enforced, then it was as part ofIslam’s doctrines of political adjudication, not any sort ofreligious adjudication. Since ‘Alwānī believes that disagree-ment on apostasy goes back to the early centuries of Islam’shistory, he also challenges the claim of an unbroken

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consensus in favor of the death penalty for it. He does notgive much credence to the hadith that commands that theone who changes his faith should be killed.

The more well-known and in some circles controversialQatar-based cleric Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī has argued that thereare two types of apostasy.25 The first is a form of subversivepropaganda to mislead and confuse Muslim communities inorder to undermine a society’s identity, public order, andstability. Anyone who urges others to leave Islam, Qaradāwīargues, should be punished. The second is less public, aprivate form. In this kind, an individual leaves Islamwithout inviting others to do the same. This form ofapostasy, in Qaradāwī’s view, is not punishable. In Muslimtheology it amounts to a sin, but one is accountable forsuch an offense only in the hereafter, in his view, with nothis-worldly consequence.

Mawlānā Vah.īduddīn Khān, a moderate-minded orthodoxIndian scholar, wrote extensively in order to refute the or-thodox position on apostasy and blasphemy. The evidencesupporting blasphemy penalties is questionable, in his view.And such punishments, he argued, militate against Islam’smandate to constantly invite people onto its path of salva-tion (daʼwa).26

In Pakistan, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, a prominent Muslimpublic intellectual, has argued that the penalty for“apostasy has arisen due to a misunderstanding of a proph-etic report [ḥadīth].”27 He offers an explanation for themuch-debated prophetic report mentioned above, “Whoeverchanges their religion should be killed.” Instead of reject-ing this as inauthentic, Ghamidi believed its context wasmisunderstood. In their prophetic role, Mohammed andother prophets before him envisioned a cutoff point atwhich they would alert their communities that the “period

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of announcing their respective gospels” (itmām al-hujja)had come to an end. After this time had elapsed, prophetswould be allowed to present ultimatums to their communit-ies and to demand compliance with their teachings in orderto create a unified group of believers. They would not coun-tenance any subversive activities that would underminetheir nascent communities. For this reason, Ghamidi ex-plained, the Arabs of seventh-century Arabia—only thepeople ethnically related to the Prophet—were required toconvert to Islam or else face the sword. The greater stra-tegic rationale was to make Mohammed’s Arab group an all-Muslim hegemony that would form the nucleus of a com-munity that would invite other people to the new faith. Thisrule’s application was not universal, Ghamidi clarified, butonly one-time, to the Arabs of seventh-century Arabia, whowere known as the ummiyyūn: the spiritually unletteredones. The prophetic report in question, he averred, was ad-dressed to them. In other words, if any of these spirituallyunlettered ones reverted back to paganism after they hadaccepted Islam, then the consequence of such apostasywould be the death penalty.28 However, this was a historic-ally contingent and time-sensitive rule, according to Gh-amidi, that no longer had any application. Needless to say,the majority of orthodox Muslim scholars do not accept thisinnovative interpretation.

Similarly, a rising traditional cleric affiliated with theDeoband School in Pakistan, ‘Ammār Khān Nāṣir, has ar-gued that Muslim law schools were not unanimous aboutthe death penalty for insulting the Prophet.29 While he doesnot deny the viewpoint of the majority of law schools, hepoints out that credible figures in the Ḥanafī school did al-low for an offender to recant. The other Sunnī law schoolsdo not allow someone who had defamed the Prophet to

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recant, but they do allow apostates to recant. An influentialminority of Ḥanafī scholars offered an apostate the oppor-tunity to recant and save himself from the death penalty.Nāṣir has attempted to open a conversation among tradi-tional scholars in order to present a more tolerant and real-istic face of Islamic teachings in Pakistan. Criticized for cir-culating ideas that challenge hegemonic views, he contin-ues to soldier forth in the cause of ideas and debate.

Among thinkers who follow Shī‘a theology there has alsobeen a vibrant debate on the viability of the penalties forapostasy and insult to the Prophet. A number of scholars,such as the Iranian Mohsen Kadivar, argue that the deathpenalty for apostasy violates Islamic notions of the right tofreedom of belief.30 Similarly, Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan al-Amīn, a prominent Lebanese Shī‘ī thinker, invites scholarsto consider overhauling Islamic religious thought if theywish to be relevant to the contemporary world, in whichMuslims live and share the globe with people of otherfaiths.31

Disagreement on some of the toughest issues pertainingto religion, culture, tolerance, and freedom of speech isevident from the preceding debates. At the same time, pro-ductive disagreement also provides room for discussionamong the orthodox ‘ulamā, who are the most influential inaltering the direction of religious thought. While these aresmall revisionist steps, some of them hardly radical, they dosuggest that there is sufficient concern and interest inMuslim scholarly circles around the world to address someof the rules that are increasingly being challenged.

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THINKING ABOUT ISLAM IN A DIVERSEGEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

While ideas, values, and principles might tend to be univer-sal and appeal to reason, they are also the products of theirtimes and locations. To ignore historical realities is to fallinto a trap. Such ignorance misleadingly presents a viewthat people are without history. Social continuities and tra-ditions might give us the sense that things have been thesame over time in a changeless and seamless universe.Closer scrutiny shows that traditions adapt and words earnnew glosses and meanings. The same word, say ‘aql, canmean “reason” or “formal reason” during one stage of his-tory and “rationality,” “scientific or empirical reason,” and“common sense” in another. Canons of law and doctrines oftheology might use the same terminology in the interest ofcontinuity, but they also mean very different things in dif-ferent times and places.

The Muslim religious tradition, in a variety of ways, ac-knowledges the historicity of God’s communication with hu-manity. There is a general acknowledgement that the pur-pose of a human being’s earthly sojourn is to pursue a re-demptive relationship with God, the importance of the ideaof dīn—to follow a path of salvation by performing certainprescribed acts. To accept indebtedness to God is to observedīn. Muslim theology claims that the idea of dīn is a con-stant in all religious traditions. However, it equally acknow-ledges that the form and modus operandi of this salvationpractice change in history. The how is the modality, themodus and means, of performing salvation, and hence theShari‘a or other path is contingent. That is why Muslims ex-plain that the heavenly installments of faith took differentforms and therefore even the Abrahamic traditions lookedso different among themselves.

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Yet this very question of history is complex. Do we live intime or through time? The first imagines time only as a ves-sel or an atmospheric range through which we pass, relat-ively separate from it; time becomes a means, vis-à-viswhich we can retain a certain kind of objectivity. But morerecent reflections suggest that we live through time; in oth-er words, we are constituted, shaped, and formed by time.Without time we have no existence and no being, becausewe human beings are the embodiment of time. How doesthis notion relate to history? If time is objective and separ-ate from us, we are unaltered and unchanged by history. If,however, human beings are the very embodiment of time,then we change as time changes and time changes as wechange. And our portraits of the past continue to change asour self-understanding deepens and alters our view of thehuman condition.

The idea of history is central to the modern Muslim pre-dicament, especially in the realm of religious thought andthe debates about the reformation of Muslim thought.Clearly, there is a spectrum of viewpoints. There are thosewho believe that we live in time and have agency independ-ent it. Therefore, they think that one can retain the inher-ited values and imprimaturs of the past, because these areunrelated to time. Some proponents of this view do take his-tory seriously and hence advocate radical change, while oth-ers would allow only moderate change and alteration.

Another construction of Muslim history implicitly under-stands that we live through time and that humanity’s inher-itance and ideas are all part and parcel of the mutation oftime. Our experiences make us who and what we are. This isa more dynamic understanding of history but equally chal-lenging and even threatening to certain versions of Muslimorthodoxy.

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The South Asian poet-philosopher Muammad Iqbal under-stood these two registers of time, one of which he calledpure duration and the other serial time.32 As a modernist,he believed that the entirety of Islamic thought would haveto be recrafted for our times. Yet he was equally aware ofthe lack of equilibrium in power between those wielding thetools to impose change through the knowledge of modern-ity, the West, and those dispossessed or unable to wield thispower, the rest, including Muslims. This lack of power wassomething that constantly troubled him, and he could notentirely shake off his resentment of coloniality or the colo-niality of power. This dilemma that Iqbal experienced hasnot yet passed, nor has it been resolved. The coloniality ofpower, a concept that the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijanocoined, distributes epistemic, moral, and aesthetic re-sources in such a way as to both reflect and reproduce em-pire through the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge sys-tems.33 While Iqbal was suspicious of power encoded inknowledge systems and forms of life, he also understoodthat Muslims too were now part of that emerging know-ledge system. His rhetoric may have been defiant, even po-larizing at times, but he was a realist when it came to reli-gious thought.

CONCLUSION

It might be helpful to ask what role the rules on apostasy,defamatory blasphemy, and the anathematizing of adversar-ies play in Muslim societies today. These types of laws werecoherent in an imperial theocratic political context. Butpolitical systems no longer make freedom of speech andpolitical choices contingent on one’s religious status. One’sreligious commitments no longer threaten societal well-

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being, at least in healthy democracies. It might well be pos-sible to conceive of diversity and pluralism as modes ofShari‘a and thereby sustained as cherished societal goals.In a multireligious and multicultural society, Shari‘a valuescould plausibly place the accent on notions of reciprocity.Of course, society must encourage its citizens to display thebest conduct and not denigrate other people’s beliefs, forsuch actions will only elicit angry reactions. But whensomething offensive is said about one’s belief, the first re-course should be dialogue and an exchange of perspectivesin terms of the highest standards established in Islamicerudition, civility, and etiquette (adab).

NOTES

1. Ben Hubbard and Mayy El Sheikh, “Islamists Press BlasphemyCases in a New Egypt,” New York Times, June 18, 2013,www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/world/middleeast/islamists-press-blasphemy-cases-in-a-new-egypt.html?_r=0.

2. The bishop of Faisalabad some time ago said that among Chris-tians, a “sense of helplessness, insecurity, and anguish had creptin.” Blasphemy cases “have impelled a senior Christian school teach-er to decline a promotion to headmaster because ‘I knew any dis-gruntled [Muslim] teacher or student could send me to prison by ac-cusing me of blasphemy.’ Another non-Muslim history teacher wasasked in class which of the two periods of Muhammad’s life was thebetter—the years in Mecca or Medina. Upon his answer, the teacherwas charged with blasphemy.” Persecution of Christians Worldwide:Hearing before the Subcommittee on International Operations andHuman Rights of the Committee on International Relations, Houseof Representatives, 104th Cong., vol. 4, 32–33 (February 15, 1996).

3. Shalom Goldman, “A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree,” Religion Dispatches, February 15, 2012, www.religiondis-patches.org/archive/atheologies/5619/a_writer%E2%80%99s_murder_raises_fears_of_death-by-decree.

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4. Kilian Bälz, “Submitting Faith to Judicial Scrutiny through theFamily Trial: The ‘Abu Zayd Case,’” Die Welt des Islams 37, no. 2(1997): 135–55; Charles Hirschkind, “Heresy or Hermeneutics: TheCase of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” American Journal of Islamic SocialSciences 12, no. 4 (1995): 463–77; Baber Johansen, “Apostasy as Ob-jective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judg-ments,” Social Research 70, no. 3 (2003): 687–710.

5. Doudou Diène, U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary formsof racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,“Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and All Forms of Dis-crimination: Situation of Muslims and Arab Peoples in Various Partsof the World,” E/CN.4/2006/17 (February 13, 2006), 188, 195.

6. Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie inAltägypten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Hanser, 2000), 24, quoted inHent de Vries, introduction to Political Theologies: Public Religionsin a Post-secular World, ed. De Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2006), 25.

7. Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māwardī, Al-Aḥkām al-ṣulṭāniyya (Cairo: Al-Maktabah al-Tawfīqīyah, 1973), 5. See also Aziz Al-Azmeh, MuslimKingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and PaganPolities, paperback ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 174; ‘Azīzal-‘Azma, Al-Māwardī (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2000), 216.

8. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 103.9. This imagery was inspired by promptings from Christian polit-

ical theology that in my view find resonance in readings of Muslimpolitical theology. See Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s TwoBodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Prin-ceton University Press, [1957] 1997).

10. Ebrahim Moosa and SherAli Tareen, “Revival and Reform,” inThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, ed. Ger-hard Böwering, Patricia Crone, and Mahan Mirza (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2012), 462–70.

11. Rémi Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of anIdea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 78.

12. Ibid., 79.13. Qurʼan 11:19–20.

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14. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and BareLife, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellberry, trans. DanielHeller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.

15. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “blasphemy.”16. Sherman A. Jackson, On the Boundaries of Theological Toler-

ance in Islam: Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghāzalī’s Fayṣal “Al-Tafriqa Bayna Al-Islam Wa Al-Zandaqa,” Studies in Islamic Philosophy 1 (Karachi: Ox-ford University Press, 2002).

17. Bälz, “Submitting Faith to Judicial Scrutiny”; Hirschkind,“Heresy or Hermeneutics”; Johansen, “Apostasy as Objective andDepersonalized Fact.”

18. G. J. H. van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes towardsInvective Poetry (Hijāʼ) in Classical Arabic Literature, publication ofthe De Goeje Fund (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988), 1.

19. Ibid., 13–15.20. By contrast, the use of satire was accepted in the religious de-

bates of the eighteenth-century English-speaking North Atlantic.See Christopher S. Grenda’s chapter 1.

21. Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halīm Ibn Taymīyah, Al-Sārim al-maslūl‘alá shātim al-rasūl, ed. Ibrāhīm Shams al-Dīn (Beruit: Dār al-Kutubal-Ilmīya, 1975), 209.

22. Ibid., 208. See also Gelder, Bad and the Ugly, 21.23. Ibn Taymīyah, Al-Sārim, 211.24. Tāhā Jābir Alwānī, Lā ikrāh fī al-dīn: Ishkāliyat al-ridda wa-al-

murtaddīn min sadr al-islām hattá al-yawm (Cairo: Maktabat al-Shurūq al-Dawlīya, 2003).

25. Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī, Jarīmah Al-Riddah . . . Wa ‘uqūbah Al-Mur-tadd Fī Daw Al-Qurʼān Wa Al-Sunnah (Cairo: Maktabah Wahbah, A.H.1416/1996), 44–63.

26. Vah.īduddīn Khān, Shatm-I Rasūl kā masʼalah: Qurʼān vaḤadīs aur fiqah va tārirkh kī roshnī men (New Delhi: GoodwordBooks, 2007).

27. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, The Penal Shari‘ah of Islam, trans.Shehzad Saleem (Lahore: Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences,2004), 36.

28. Ibid., 39.29. Muḥammad ‘Ammār Khān Nāṣir, Barāhīn (Lahore: Dārulkitāb,

2011), 445–604.

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30. Haydar Hubb Allāh, Al-‘Unf wa al-hurriyāt al-dīnīya: Qirāʼātwa-ijtihādāt fī al-fiqh al-islāmi, 2 vols. (Bayrut: Muʼassasat al-Intishār al-‘Arabī, 2011), 1:77–123.

31. Ibid., 33–73.32. Allama Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious

Thought in Islam (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1960), 55–60.33. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cul-

tural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 171.

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CHAPTER 7

Protesting SacrilegeBlasphemy and Violence inMuslim-Majority States

RON E. HASSNER

In September 2005, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten,published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mo-hammed. One showed the Prophet donning a turbanlikebomb, inscribed with the Islamic creed, with an ignitedfuse. Another showed an anxious cartoonist sketching aportrait titled Mohammad while nervously straining to hidehis work from view. The cartoons unleashed a flurry of reac-tions in Denmark, including formal protests by ambassad-ors from Muslim countries; the severing of diplomatic tiesby Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia; and judicial charges ofblasphemy against the newspaper.1

The cartoon controversy might have ended there had itnot been for a delegation of Muslim clerics from Denmarkwho embarked on a campaign to circulate the cartoonsthroughout the Muslim world. In addition to the cartoons,their dossier contained information and images concerningthe mistreatment of Muslims in Denmark, including

offensive photos unrelated to the cartoons. The response tothese materials and to the republication of the cartoons inseveral European papers proved violent. Angry mobstorched Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran andattacked the Norwegian and Austrian embassies in Damas-cus, European Union offices in Gaza, and the Italian consu-late in Benghazi, Libya. In Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, andAfghanistan, more than one hundred anti-Danish riotersdied in riots and clashes with police.2 When police in Den-mark and Germany exposed death threats, assassination at-tempts, and terror plots related to the affair, it becameclear that the Mohammed cartoons had ceased to be alaughing matter.

TABLE 7 .1 OCCURRENCE OF CARTOON RIOTS INMUSLIM-MAJORITY STATES

Denmark’s “biggest international crisis since World WarII,” according to Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Ras-mussen, resulted in nearly two hundred fatalities and one

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thousand casualties across eight Muslim states.3 How didthe publication of twelve cartoons in a local European paperlead to the most violent Muslim protests against the Westsince the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses?4

As far as Western leaders were concerned, the responsibil-ity for the riots lay squarely on the shoulders of authoritari-an regimes, accused of manipulating their populations forpolitical purposes. At the same time, a spate of blasphemy-related violent incidents in the Muslim world seemed tosuggest that the cartoon riots expressed genuine Muslimoutrage.5

Complicating these contrasting accounts—of political ma-nipulation on the one hand and of religious outrage on theother—was the unique geographic pattern that the cartoonriots assumed.6 Violence was not confined to states ruled byauthoritarian regimes, nor did riots occur primarily incountries dominated by radical Islamist movements. Peace-ful protests took place in both types of states and did notcorrelate with obvious economic or social indicators. Thusone way of shedding light on the causes is to ask: why didriots in response to the Danish cartoons occur in ninestates where Muslims form a majority of the population(Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria,Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, and Syria) but not inthe forty-three others (see table 7.1)?

I will show that the locations of the cartoon riots are bestexplained by combining insights from the study of politicswith arguments from the sociology of religion. RadicalIslamist movements, alarmed by the moral threat that theblasphemous cartoons posed, mobilized protests. Authorit-arian regimes were able to suppress or capitalize on theseprotests, resulting in subdued or orchestrated demonstra-tions. But in states characterized by significant political

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rights and civil liberties, regimes responded haphazardly,leading to confrontations between security forces and angryrioters.

In the first part of this chapter, I introduce several bodiesof literature, from political science, anthropology, and com-parative religion, that underpin conventional explanationsfor the cartoon riots. These research programs focus on vi-olence as a by-product of either authoritarian rule or reli-gious extremism. In the second part, I introduce a moralthreat argument, drawn from sociology, that offers an al-ternative account of the causes of the cartoon violence. Thisstructuralist approach subsumes both on the one hand thepolitical structures that enable and constrain violence andon the other the religious symbols that drive violence into asingle framework. My moral threat argument links theoriesabout pollution and social revulsion with findings regardingthreat perception and the behavior of social movement un-der authoritarian rule.

I rely on these readings to form three hypotheses in thethird part of this chapter: the political manipulation hypo-thesis, the religious outrage hypothesis, and the moralthreat hypothesis. I then turn, in the fourth part, to testthese hypotheses by exploring patterns across cases. I ex-amine salient cases in detail to explicate the evolution ofprotests into riots and identify the instigating actors andthe role of regimes in constraining or encouraging violence.The analysis confirms a weak correlation between politicalindicators and the presence or absence of riots, undermin-ing the political manipulation hypothesis. I also show thatthe presence of Muslim communities characterized by strictinterpretations of blasphemy is insufficient in accountingfor instances of violence, thus challenging the religious out-rage hypothesis. In most cases, the moral threat argument

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fares better than the others: confrontations tended to ensuewhere powerful Islamist groups tried to attack Westernsymbols but were constrained from doing so by relativelyliberal Muslim regimes.

I conclude this chapter by evaluating the strengths andweaknesses of the three hypotheses and by examining theimplications of my argument for the study of religion andviolence in general. Rather than adopt essentialist explana-tions that reduce religiously motivated violence to politicsor religion, we should combine insights from political sci-ence and religious studies to shed light on the political con-ditions under which religion is most likely to result in con-flict. Such a methodology should proceed from the religiousmicrofoundations of a political phenomenon, constructingsuccessive layers of explanation, each more removed fromthe religious and closer to the political, until it arrives atthe outcome to be explained.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Were the cartoon riots orchestrated by authoritarianMuslim regimes, were they an expression of grassroots out-rage over blasphemy, or were they organized by radical so-cial movements driven by a political-religious agenda? Fourdistinct research programs from political science, anthropo-logy, and the comparative study of religion can shed lighton these questions and help resolve the riddle regardingthe geographic distribution of the cartoon riots.

Authoritarianism and Violence

As the death toll from violence mounted, Western observersof the Danish cartoon crisis converged on a parsimonious

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political explanation for the violence: authoritarian regimeswere orchestrating the protests to penalize the West anddistract their citizens from domestic discontent. Iran andSyria, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued, “havegone out of their way to inflame sentiments and use this totheir own purposes. The world ought to call them on it.”7

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesperson,opined that “things like burning down embassies don’t hap-pen by accident in Damascus.”8 Like Rice, Danish premierRasmussen suspected that “Syria and Iran have taken ad-vantage of the situation because both countries are underinternational pressure.”9 British prime minister Tony Blairseemed to believe that the Iranian government was usingthe cartoon crisis to divert attention from scrutiny of itsnuclear program, stating that “it is not a coincidence thatthe moment this row emerges over the cartoons, that Irani-ans leap straight into the middle of it.”10

These claims mesh well with the literature regarding therole of authoritarian regimes in fomenting violence. Thelack of transparency that characterizes such regimes, theabsence of constraints on repressing their populations, andthe control that they exert over the security apparatus ofthe state would facilitate the staging of riots such as thosethat occurred in response to the Danish cartoons.Moreover, the normative variant of the democratic peaceargument suggests that unlike democracies, which are driv-en by shared norms of persuasion and compromise to settleboth domestic and international disputes peacefully, au-thoritarian regimes are less hesitant in employing violenceto resolve conflicts.11

Authoritarian Muslim regimes may also have exploitedthe cartoons in order to create a “rally around the flag” ef-fect. Authoritarian leaders can exploit high-profile events,

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such as international conflicts, to provoke a surge of patri-otic instincts, increase national cohesion, mute criticism ofthe regime, and raise public approval of leadership, nation-al political institutions, and policies.12 These effects createincentives for regimes to engage in diversionary violence orscapegoating, most commonly by initiating internationalconflict.13

Taboos and Transgressions

Whereas the literature on authoritarianism and violenceemphasizes a political logic, a second set of explanations,drawn from anthropology, emphasizes a religious logic. Thisliterature requires some elaboration, since it strays farafield of the comfort zone of most political scientists andinto the study of religious taboos and their transgression.The concept of blasphemy—the dishonoring of a deity, itsmessengers, or its precepts—plays a central role in this ex-planation. As Ebrahim Moosa emphasizes in the previouschapter, demeaning or malevolent treatment of sacred ob-jects and persons can provoke anger, even violence.

Taboos are restrictions enforced by fear of supernaturalpenalties.14 The anthropologist James Frazer, who dedic-ated an entire volume of his encyclopedic The GoldenBough to the topic, catalogued all manner of taboos, fromprohibitions on eating, touching, or even looking at certainobjects to more esoteric taboos, such as the prohibition onstepping over persons, superstitions against knots, and pro-hibitions against calling particularly sacred or dangerousitems by their name.15 Because certain cultures do not dis-tinguish holiness from danger, sacred persons and sacredthings can be both threatening and threatened at the sametime. Taboos act as “electrical insulators” that surround the

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sacred with prohibitions, symbols, and rituals designed toemphasize the danger of crossing or blurring the boundarybetween sacred and profane.16

Bans on figurative imagery offer one example of such ataboo. Where portraits are believed to capture the soul oressence of a person, taboos prohibit paintings or photos ofhumans in order to protect the subjects from harm. Takingan image is believed to remove a person’s soul or to allowthe image taker to inflict injury by harming the image. Thetaboo on figurative images is often employed to protect themost revered (or dangerous) subject in a community, be itthe deity, a priest, a prophet, or a king.17

Muslim Aniconism and Blasphemy

The taboo relevant for explaining the Danish cartoon riotsis not, strictly speaking, rooted in a Muslim prohibition ondepicting the Prophet Mohammed, since no such prohibi-tion exists in Muslim jurisprudence.18 The Qurʼan prohibitsidolatry but has little to say about figural representation,and formal jurisprudence is indifferent but not hostile tohuman images in art.19 Rather than prohibit images, Islam,like most religious movements, limits the types of imagesthat can be used and the manner in which they can be used.It is the underlying meaning of a representation, not thefact of representation as such, that is potentially offensiveto Muslims.20

Traditionally, copies of the Qurʼan were not illustrated,and Islamic official and religious (albeit not private) artavoided the use of figures and images.21 Depictions of theProphet were rare and, in practice, eschewed.22 Accordingto some historians, Muslim disinterest in icons stems froma lack of need for religious images, since God cannot be

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represented, there are no intercessors to depict, and thereis no continuous Qurʼanic narrative amenable to illustra-tion.23 According to others, the paucity of figural represent-ation in Islam can be traced to the movement’s puritanicalroots, which associated figural imagery with luxury, frivol-ous and prideful display, and distraction from devotion. Thebelief that figurative art excessively glorifies both the artistand the individual portrayed found backing in hadith, oraltraditions about the Prophet, in which he was said to chas-tise those who made or owned pictures.24

This convergence between the lack of interest in imagesand suspicion of their negative effects has become increas-ingly entrenched in Muslim practice. In popular custom,the aversion to iconography now amounts to an all-out pro-hibition against any depiction of the Prophet, despite signi-ficant variation across traditional Muslim schools ofthought regarding this complex issue. Formally speaking,however, the transgression that the Danish cartoons com-mitted is not desecration (mishandling a sacred object orperson) but blasphemy (speaking ill of a sacred object orperson).

The Qurʼan depicts blasphemy as a grave sin, deserving ofhell.25 Islam’s sensitivity to this particular offense can betraced to the early experience of hostility to the Qurʼanicmessage by the Arab clans of Mecca. Mohammed’s oppon-ents heaped ridicule and abuse on him, accused him of lun-acy, and rejected his revelation as a lie.26 In retaliation,Qurʼanic passages condemn “hypocrites” who deny its truemessage, even direct relatives of the Prophet, to a fierydeath.27 Mohammed is said to have ordered the assassina-tion of poets who composed insulting verses about theProphet and his followers. Sura 9:61 of the Qurʼan warnsthat “those who annoy the Messenger of Allah shall have a

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grievous punishment,” a threat that, combined with the pre-cedent provided by the poets’ assassination, guided Ayatol-lah Khomeini’s decision to issue a death sentence againstSalman Rushdie.28 The taboo transgressed by the Danishcartoons, like the taboo transgressed by Rushdie’s SatanicVerses, was thus a prohibition against insulting the Proph-et, not a prohibition against depicting him.29 The cartoonselicited outrage not because they were drawings but be-cause they were cartoons, that is irreverent drawings.

A transgression of this magnitude requires an act of expi-ation. In some societies, according to Frazer, physicalmeans are used to purge the ills brought about by trans-gressions of taboos.30 If the offender is unwilling or unableto redeem himself for his blasphemous actions, then thecommunity must do so in his stead. Islamic law providesvarious procedures for removing contamination, such asconfession, repentance, freeing a slave, fasting, and char-ity.31 Such acts are said to cover, blot out, or drive away thefault caused by the transgression.32

Blasphemy, however, constitutes a unique transgressionbecause it is often interpreted not as mere unbelief (kufr)but as apostasy (riddah), a capital crime. LeveragingMuslim notions of blasphemy to explain the cartoon riotsrequires identifying the social movements most likely to actviolently in response to acts of blasphemy.

Islamism

A final research program that underlies conventional ex-planations of the cartoon riots associates them with radicalMuslim movements. These movements reacted sharply tothe publication of the Danish cartoons and played a key rolein justifying, organizing, and leading the ensuing riots.

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The term Islamism captures a broad array of fundament-alist and revivalist movements, ranging from the revolution-ary to the reactionary.33 Islamists have adopted a strict in-terpretation of Muslim law regarding apostasy and heresy.They share the belief that the nascent Muslim communityduring the Prophet’s lifetime offers the model for the idealsociety. To re-create this authentic Muslim way of life, rul-ing regimes should be reformed or overthrown so thatIslamic law becomes both state law and political ideology,shaping politics, economics, and social justice.34 Islamistsbelieve that the primary obstacle facing this revivalist goalis Western influence, which has infiltrated the Islamicworld with its corrupting laws and customs. The resultingbetrayal of authentic Islamic values is tantamount to idol-atry.35

THE MORAL THREAT ARGUMENT

To bridge the gap between the purely materialist explana-tion offered by the literature on authoritarianism and theideational explanation offered by the literature on taboosand transgressions in Islam, I now propose an alternativeexplanation, which emphasizes a moral threat logic. My ar-gument rests on a series of claims from sociology and an-thropology that investigate how groups respond to per-ceived attacks on their moral order. My approach here isstructuralist, subsuming both on the one hand the politicalstructures that enable and constrain violence and on theother the religious symbols that drive it into a single frame-work. Structuralism, as developed by Émile Durkheim,Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and others,seeks to explain social elements in terms of their contribu-tion to a coherent system of beliefs and practices. Mary

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Douglas’s Purity and Danger, a structuralist contribution tothe study of pollution, is particularly relevant to the topic ofblasphemy because it highlights the relationship between asocial group’s beliefs regarding desecration and thatgroup’s perceptions of imminent threat. I combineDouglas’s argument with insights from the literature onthreat perception and the analysis of social movements toarrive at an understanding of the conditions under whichperceptions of threat may result in violence.

Desecration and Disgust

At the core of Douglas’s Purity and Danger lies the claimthat humans make sense of their existence by imposing or-der on the universe, making distinctions and performingseparations. The result is a systematic ordering and classi-fication scheme, or “symbolic system.”36 Like Durkheim,Douglas suggests that sanctity is exemplified by appropri-ately distinguishing things into mutually exclusive categor-ies. The blurring of categories, the crossing of lines thatdistinguish things from one another, constitutes desecra-tion.37 Douglas takes the argument further than Durkheim,asserting that desecration endangers not only the symbolicsystem of which that prohibition is part but also the societythat gave rise to that system, indeed, the very concepts ofsociety and order.

A society might respond to acts of desecration by per-forming rites of purification or restitution.38 Alternatively,it might employ violence against desecrators to rid itself ofcontamination and reestablish its boundaries.39 Actions de-signed to prevent or punish desecration, while not identicalto rules that uphold the moral principles of a society, serveto clarify and buttress these rules. Where moral disapproval

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lags or where society is incapable of wielding effective sanc-tions against improper behavior, pollution rules step in tothreaten the perpetrator with divine sanction and social op-probrium.40 As Durkheim had already concluded in hisstudy of moral education, punishments by the group are de-signed to restore the moral status quo ante by reestablish-ing the hegemony of a taboo.41 We are thus likely to ob-serve powerful social responses to breaches of these ruleswhen a society both perceives that its boundaries arethreatened and feels helpless in its attempts to securethose boundaries.

The philosopher John Kekes built on Durkheim’s andDouglas’s arguments by focusing on the role that funda-mental prohibitions play in buttressing the moral order of asociety. According to Kekes, moral rules are designed notmerely to protect the boundaries of a particular society, asDouglas proposes, but to form the very bulwark of what thatsociety considers to be civilization. “Gross, flamboyant,flagrant transgressions,” such as cannibalism or incest,that flout fundamental rules, provoke “deep disgust” andthreaten to subvert the moral foundations of a society.42

Unlike regular disgust, deep disgust is an instinctive, knee-jerk response driven by an observer’s identification with thevictim of a transgression and fear that the transgressionwill invade the observer’s own life.

Threat Perception and Social Movements

These theories about moral transgressions as challenges tothe social order leave two primary questions unanswered:Which threats are most likely to provoke extreme re-sponses? And under what conditions are social movementslikely to respond violently to such provocations? The

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literature on threat perception offers a partial answer by in-vestigating how the identity of perpetrators primes theviewers’ interpretation of an act, in this case the perceptionof a religious offense.43 Transgressive acts that might beinterpreted as accidental or insignificant when perpetratedby members of the in-group will be seen as intentional, sali-ent, and hostile when perpetrated by outsiders, particularlyif those outsiders are perceived as threatening. The morepowerful, proximate, hostile, and unfamiliar the outsidersseem, the more threatening their actions are likely toappear.

The literature on social movements and repression addsthe final component to this argument by relating the levelof violence that a social movement practices to the level ofrepression in its society.44 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow,Charles Tilly, and others have proposed that social move-ments are not inherently violent or peaceful. Instead, polit-ical and social conditions determine their behavior.45 Whenregimes promote democratic rights, such as the rights ofassembly, association, and collective voice, they create athriving environment for social movements.46 When thesemovements are disenfranchised, however, their agendashifts from reform to revolution and their activism becomespolarized. They may then opt for violence as a survivalstrategy. Public violence and acts of sacrifice thus becomepart of the social movement’s repertoire, attracting adher-ents, signaling the support of a significant constituency,and spreading the movement’s message.47

Several authors have drawn on these ideas to explain thecauses of religiously induced violence. Natalie Zemon Davis,for example, has shown that Catholic-Protestant mob viol-ence in sixteenth-century France was not solely driven byeconomic or political motives but fulfilled religious

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purposes as well. Mobs that wanted social cohesion andpurity restored initiated violence to either urge the politicalauthorities to perform their duties or wrest political controlfrom their hands and perform social purification of theirown.48

HYPOTHESIS FORMATION

Hypothesis 1: Political Manipulation

The literature on authoritarian violence offers the mostparsimonious hypothesis for explaining the cartoon riots,the political manipulation hypothesis. Since contemporaryproponents of this hypothesis have blamed authoritarianstates for initiating the riots, testing its validity requires as-certaining whether states where riots did and did not occurfall along democratic or authoritarian lines, as coded inconventional indexes such as that of the Polity Project orthe Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy.

Hypothesis 2: Religious Outrage

The literatures on blasphemy and Islamism, on the otherhand, propose that religious outrage drove the cartoon ri-ots. To test this hypothesis, we need to examine statementsby the protesters, to establish whether they perceived thepublication of the cartoons as an insult to the Prophetamounting to blasphemy and apostasy and whether theyconceived of their actions as an expiation of this act.

Such statements, however, can provide little more thananecdotal evidence, since they cannot explain how individu-al protesters organize into violent movements. The religiousoutrage hypothesis identifies Islamist movements, defined

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above, as the most likely candidates for organizing protestin response to acts of religious outrage. If this hypothesis iscorrect, then the presence of powerful Islamist movementsin a given state should correlate with riots there. To preventbias in my selection, I adopt Olivier Roy’s list of significantIslamist movements.49

Hypothesis 3: Moral Threat

The third and final hypothesis combines insights from bothprior hypotheses with my moral threat argument. It postu-lates that violent protest by social movements is the resultof the perception of an imminent threat to their moral or-der. Drawing on Douglas and Kekes, we should expectgroups to respond vehemently to blasphemy if they identifywith the object of the desecration and feel that the blas-phemy poses a real danger to their way of life. A group’s re-sponse to blasphemy should be most extreme if it lacks con-fidence in the ability of authorities to stem the threat yetalso feels powerless to confront the danger by itself.

Thus, like the religious outrage hypothesis, the moralthreat argument expects Islamist movements to emerge asthe most likely candidates for fomenting riots. Thesegroups considered the cartoons more than just offensive.The illustrations, which inflamed both their imaginationsand their fears, provoked deep disgust: protesters were ableto place themselves in the position of the target of the blas-phemy, experiencing revulsion both on their own behalf andon behalf of the Prophet and dreading that the disgustingoffense would invade their lives, that they would not be ableto “keep the horror at bay.”50 The cartoons, which mighthave been disregarded or played down had they originated

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in the Muslim world, appeared as yet another menacinggesture from an anti-Muslim West.

Yet unlike the religious outrage argument, the moralthreat argument does not expect Islamist movements to en-gage in violent protest across the board. Authoritarian re-gimes can be expected to suppress or co-opt Islamistprotest, resulting in subdued or orchestrated demonstra-tions. Islamist movements that enjoy representation in lib-eral regimes can be expected to stage peaceful demonstra-tions. Counterintuitively, violence is most likely under re-gimes characterized by significant political rights and civilliberties in which Islamist movements are disenfranchised.These states permit Islamist protest against moral threatsbut fail to protect Islamists from these threats by enactingcensorship or penalizing religious offenders. Disenfran-chised Islamists in these liberal states can be expected toprotest violently, leading to confrontations between the se-curity forces of the state and angry rioters.

Testing whether the moral threat argument provides agood explanation for the locations of the Danish cartoon ri-ots thus requires distinguishing among Islamist groupsbased on whether they perceived the cartoons as a men-acing threat, the degree to which they enjoy formal politicalrepresentation, and the extent to which the state wherethey act extends political rights and civil liberties to itscitizens.

To determine the presence of an influential Islamistgroup in a given state, I employ the same list of movementsas for the religious outrage hypothesis. To code for politicalrights and civil liberties, I rely on the Freedom House rank-ings for 2006–7, sorting states into “free” on the one handand “partially free” and “not free” on the other. The Free-dom House index offers an advantage over alternatives

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because it focuses on political rights and civil liberties,such as the right to assemble and the freedom to protest,and thus gives a better estimate of the extent to whichIslamist protest in response to the cartoons was permitted,resisted, or suppressed.51

HYPOTHESIS TESTING

Testing the Political Manipulation Hypothesis

Empirical evidence from the cartoon riots offers some sup-port for the political manipulation hypothesis. Many author-itarian Muslim regimes that had previously prohibiteddemonstrations permitted protests against the cartoons. Inseveral of these states, the government paid to bus indemonstrators. In Iran and Syria, police forces seemed tostand idly by as protesters set fire to European embassies,leading Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States toaccuse these regimes of failing to act in good faith to re-strain the violence.52 Efficient crackdowns by Iran’s andSyria’s internal security apparatuses during prior instancesof protest even led several European diplomats to suspectthat the regimes had orchestrated the cartoon riots.53

Syrian machinations were also identified in neighboringLebanon, where religious and political leaders suspected aforeign hand in the instigation of violence. Lebanon’s socialaffairs minister, Nayla Mouawad, characterized the Le-banese riots as “an organized attempt to take advantage ofMuslim anger for purposes that do not serve the interestsof Muslims in Lebanon but of others beyond the border.”54

The noted Islamism scholar Olivier Roy summarized thesesuspicions: “What is happening in the Middle East isprimarily political manipulation—Syria taking revenge for

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its expulsion from Lebanon, Hamas striking back at theEuropean Union for its rebuff on financial aid, Afghans an-ticipating the replacement of U.S. troops by European ones,and Iranians lashing back at the E.U. for its stance on thenuclear issue.”55

On closer observation, however, the political manipula-tion argument does not provide a satisfying explanation forthe locations and nature of the cartoon riots, on severalcounts. For one, five of the nine states where proteststurned violent were not authoritarian at all and were classi-fied as relatively free in 2006. Freedom House ranked Le-banon, Nigeria, and Afghanistan as “partially free” based onits assessment of their political rights and civil liberties, yetin all three, protests escalated into riots. The PalestinianTerritories held democratic elections only a week prior toattacks on European institutions in the West Bank andGaza. Riots also took place in Indonesia, a full-fledgeddemocracy.

Moreover, any explanation that links the cartoon riots tothe authoritarian regimes under which they occurred mustaccount for peaceful demonstration in numerous authorit-arian Muslim states, from Morocco to Qatar. The politicalmanipulation argument thus fails to explain not only themajority of cases in which violence did happen but alsosome two dozen cases in which it did not. The Muslim statesof Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, for example, allranked lowest among regimes worldwide in terms of civilliberties and political rights, yet no riots occurred there.And if, as an editorial in the Washington Post suspected, re-gimes had instigated violence because it provided “a con-venient refuge for authoritarian regimes,” why did protestsin Egypt and Saudi Arabia stop short of the threshold of vi-olence?56

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Grassroots Riots in Libya and Pakistan

Even where riots did occur under authoritarian regimes, theactions of these regimes did not always comport with theexpectations of a political manipulation argument. UnlikeSyria and Iran, the Libyan and Pakistani regimes did notstand idly by as protests took place but attempted to defendWestern institutions from attacks. In Libya, for example,fatalities resulted from fighting between protesters andLibyan police forces attempting to protect the Italian con-sulate in Benghazi. The Libyan demonstration occurredafter Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli, a leading mem-ber of Italy’s Northern League, announced that he wouldwear a T-shirt displaying one of the Danish cartoons. Givenhis prominent role in blocking immigration from Libya so asto promote the “Christian identity” of Italy, it was not un-reasonable for protesters to conclude that his gesture was aslight aimed directly at a Libyan audience.

More than a thousand demonstrators reacted to Calder-oli’s televised appearance by hurling rocks and bottles atthe Italian consulate, then entering the grounds and settingfire to the building.57 Police responded with gunfire andtear gas in a futile attempt to disperse the crowd as fire-fighters tried to put out the fire. Eleven people, includingboth police and protesters, were killed in the exchangesthat followed, while the staff of the Italian consulate es-caped unharmed. The Libyan government “strongly de-nounced” the violence and issued a formal apology to theItalian ambassador.58 The absence of parallel demonstra-tions at the Italian embassy in the capital, Tripoli, suggeststhat the riots, far from being instigated by the government,were the product of weakening state authority in the out-skirts of Libya.59

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The Pakistani regime’s response to protests over the car-toons paints a more complicated picture. Initially it sanc-tioned peaceful protest, and elected officials often suppor-ted demonstrations.60 Gradually, mainstream oppositionparties, hard-line Islamic groups, and fundamentalist move-ments came to assume control of the protests. They repres-ented varied political platforms: some pressed for demo-cratic reforms, others opposed President Pervez Musharrafand his alliance with the West, and yet others representedconstituents angered by corruption in the Pakistani judi-ciary and executive.61 While many were driven by politicalagendas, outrage over the cartoons provided a cohesive ele-ment that drew angry crowds to the streets. Leading themore violent protests were members of Sipah-e-Sahaba, aDeobandi Islamist movement, and Laskhar-e-Tayyaba, abanned jihadist group, as well as members of the UnitedCouncil of Action (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or MMA),Pakistan’s largest Islamic party. Only on grasping the ex-tent of the violence and identifying its organizers did theregime launch an aggressive campaign to ban all protestand arrest agitators.62

President Musharraf had initially denounced the car-toons, commenting in mid-February 2006 that “the mostmoderate Muslim will go to the street and talk against [thecartoons] because this hurts the sentiments of everyMuslim.”63 In the days that followed, three thousand stu-dents rioted in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad, fifteenthousand protesters in Lahore attacked Western busi-nesses, and seventy thousand protesters in Peshawar wenton a rampage, assaulting Christian and Western institu-tions. Security forces, initially indifferent to these protests,attempted to control the crowds by means of tear gas andbatons but ultimately resorted to gunfire, killing three

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rioters in Lahore and two in Peshawar and injuring scoresof others.64

The riots in Islamabad, Lahore, and Peshawar led to adramatic escalation in government repression. The regimedeployed thousands of paramilitary and police forces in ma-jor cities to close schools and colleges, guard governmentand foreign installations, block streets leading to potentialprotest venues, and control major intersections. All ralliesin East Pakistan and Islamabad were banned indefinitely.Police arrested hundreds of ban-defying protesters androunded up religious activists, clerics, opposition law-makers, and religious-school administrators, including thefounder of Laskhar-e-Tayyaba and the head of the MMA.65

After the ban on protests was lifted, they continued to at-tract massive crowds yet proceeded peacefully.66

The reasons why protests turned violent in Libya andPakistan and the responses of their governments to the car-toon riots fly in the face of the political manipulation argu-ment. Casualties in both cases resulted from confrontationsbetween rioters and security forces attempting to controlthe protests. The contrast between these two cases and theriots in Iran and Syria, where government manipulation wasevident, is stark.

Religion as a Missing Variable

Even where the political manipulation hypothesis can ac-count for state orchestration of riots, as in Syria, it stillfails to explain why the Danish cartoons provided a usefultool for the manipulation of local populations. By conceiv-ing of the cartoons as a mere pretext for violence, the polit-ical manipulation hypothesis marginalizes the role of reli-gious interests, which causes difficulties as one tries to

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generalize its claims to non-Muslim authoritarian states. Ifauthoritarian rule rather than Islam best explains these vi-olent responses to blasphemy, then we would expect author-itarian regimes associated with other religious movementsto respond similarly to opportunities for politicalmanipulation.

Yet the Nepalese monarchy has not used repeatedMuslim-Hindu conflict over the desecration of sacred sitesin India and Pakistan as an excuse for mobilizing anti-Muslim riots, despite its identification with Hinduism.Authoritarian regimes in majority-Christian states, such asSwaziland and Zimbabwe, have not incited violence in re-sponse to major blasphemy controversies surrounding art,literature, or films deemed offensive to Christians,67 nordid the Vietnamese regime seize on insults to Buddhism,such as the destruction by the Tamil Tigers of the Templeof Buddha’s Tooth in Sri Lanka in 1998, in order toorchestrate anti-Hindu riots.

An explanation anchored exclusively in politics cannot il-luminate aspects of the cartoon riots that led to a violentoutcome in this case but did not lead to violence in casesinvolving other religious movements. This explanation alsofails to consider the justification for violence that the parti-cipants provided: blasphemy and insult to Islam.

Testing the Religious Outrage Hypothesis

At the grassroots level, outrage was evident in indignant re-actions by protest participants throughout the Muslimworld. One Pakistani protester described his response tothe cartoons as “a great shock . . . a lightening bolt thatstruck the heart of those who love the Prophet.” Another ex-plained, “Muslims keep on being killed all over the world

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and we stay quiet. But love for the Prophet [pause] is suchthat we cannot bear anyone ridiculing it. There is nothingto be explained, it’s not a scientific thing or a contract. It’snot that kind of relation: it’s a relation of love.” A third ri-oter emphasized a different set of emotions: “They had beenrude to our Holy Prophet . . . and I got angry. I swear Iwould kill the guy who’s done these cartoons if ever hecomes in front of me!”68

To ascertain systematically whether this outrage providesthe best explanation for the cartoon riots, we need to testfor the presence of Islamist movements in states where ri-ots did and did not occur. Islamist movements have attrac-ted supporters around the Muslim world by drawing on fa-miliar Islamic themes and images. Because they are able touse mosques as mobilization sites and network hubs, theyhave prospered even in autocratic states, where they oftenform the only effective opposition movement.69 InfluentialIslamist movements include Jamaat e-Islami in Pakistan,Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian Territories,the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Movement in Niger-ia, and the Islamic Defender Front in Indonesia. Only theIslamic Revolution in Iran has succeeded in establishing anIslamist state. There were thus active Islamist movementsin all states where the Danish cartoons prompted unrest,with the exception of Libya and Syria, which had success-fully suppressed their Islamist movements.

Nonetheless, the presence of an Islamist movement is in-sufficient for predicting religiously motivated rioting in agiven state. After all, Islamist movements have arisen inmost Muslim states. Some of the most powerful of these or-ganizations are active in states where violent protest didnot take place. These include states where Islamist move-ments are integrated into the politics of the ruling regime,

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such as the Felicity Party in Turkey, the Congregation forReform in Yemen, and multiple Sunni and Shi‘a parties inBahrain. In other states where rioting was absent, Islamistparties were excluded from the political process in 2006–7and opposed the regime, like the Islamic Salvation Front inAlgeria, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jamaat e-Islamiin the Indian subcontinent, the Islamic Resistance Party inTajikistan, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolutionin Iraq, the National Islamic Front in Sudan, and the Islam-ic Courts Union in Somalia. In the absence of an argumentthat can delineate the political conditions under whichIslamist protest is likely to result in violence, the concept ofIslamism is of limited utility for linking notions of blas-phemy to the cartoon riots.

The weakness of the religious outrage argument thusmirrors the weakness of the political manipulation argu-ment. Where the one focuses on the religious interests ofradical movements without delineating the political condi-tions for their effectiveness, the other emphasizes the polit-ical interests of elites to the exclusion of the religious in-terests being manipulated. Harnessing the strengths ofboth arguments requires a combination of religious andpolitical logics that can link the motivations of the Islamistmovements that fomented the rioting with the motivationsof the regimes that confronted the riots, resulting incasualties.

Testing the Moral Threat Hypothesis

The moral threat hypothesis expects intense grassrootsprotest where Islamist movements lacked confidence in theability of the ruling regime to fend off a threat to the moralorder. It suggests that mass protest offered the only means

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for Islamist groups to draw attention to the threat that blas-phemy posed where these groups were excluded from thepolitical process. Islamist movements acted to expunge thethreat by scapegoating, attacking Western institutions, irre-spective of nationality, that symbolized the source of thethreat. “The government didn’t take any action on this,”one Pakistani rioter explained. “Only the people didsomething.”70

However, where the political framework of the state in-corporated Islamist movements, they used their formal in-fluence and political clout to take official action against thecartoons. In these states, Islamist political groups stagedorganized and peaceful protests or issued formal condem-nations of the cartoons. This argument thus divides all ex-isting Islamist movements into two sets: those disenfran-chised by the ruling regime of their host state and thosesubsumed into the political structure of their host state.

Where did riots ensue? Authoritarian regimes were ableto crack down on Islamist dissent prior to the eruption of ri-ots. Under these regimes, in such states as Egypt, Jordan,Somalia, and Sudan, protest was quashed before it evenbegan. On the other hand, regimes that afforded their cit-izens the freedom to assemble and protest faced severe con-straints in confronting Islamist protesters. Limited in themeans they were willing to employ to suppress dissent,these regimes often responded haphazardly to the protests.In Pakistan, for example, “the police sent mixed signals: insome parts of the procession it displayed empathy, chantingslogans with the crowd, in others it used repression.”71 Theresulting confrontations between the security apparatusesof these regimes and angry rioters produced the cartoon ri-ot casualties. Weak state capacity was neither sufficient notnecessary for the outbreak of riots, though it seems to have

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played some part in the Pakistani case, as I discuss below.Riots occurred not because relatively liberal Muslim stateswere unable to suppress protest but because they were un-willing to do so.

As table 7.2 illustrates, the moral threat argument dividesstates with Islamist movements into four categories. Statesin the top-left quadrant are authoritarian and have disen-franchised influential Islamist movements. No riots oc-curred in these states, with the exception of Pakistan, be-cause their regimes were able to stem dissent, often arrest-ing Islamist leaders, controlling demonstrations with over-whelming police force, or prohibiting protest altogether. Ri-ots were also absent from states in the bottom-right quad-rant, for obverse reasons. Here Islamist groups found ampleopportunities for expressing dissent by peaceful means.Since the regimes in these states afforded Islamist parties avoice in the political process, violent protest provedunnecessary.

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TABLE 7 .2 CARTOON PROTESTS AND RIOTS INSTATES WITH SIGNIFICANT ISLAMIST MOVEMENTS

Riots occurred under one of two conditions. First, re-gimes that were characterized by significant political andcivil rights but that marginalized Islamist movements, rep-resented in the top-right quadrant, left these groups withno alternative but to express their grievances by protesting.In Iran, on the other hand, the state itself representedIslamist interests. In line with the suspicions of Westernleaders but for reasons other than those that the politicalmanipulation hypothesis proposes, the Iranian governmentorchestrated the cartoon riots in Tehran.

Deadly Protests in Indonesia, Nigeria, Lebanon, andAfghanistan

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Evidence from the riots in Indonesia, Nigeria, Lebanon, andAfghanistan lends credence to the moral threat hypothesis:as in Pakistan, protests that Islamist movements initiatedin these states degenerated into violence when securityforces lost control over demonstrations and resorted todeadly force.

In Indonesia, the Islamic Defender Front (Front PembelaIslam, or FPI), a hard-line Islamist group that has confron-ted Western and secular incursions with violence in thepast, organized the riots. On February 3, 2006, hundreds ofFPI members went on a rampage in the lobby of the Jakartabuilding that houses the Danish embassy but failed to getpast security.72 Three days later, a mob in Surabaya at-tacked and smashed windows at the Danish consulate, thenmoved to the U.S. consulate, where they threw rocks andbottles and tried to breach a security wall. Police firedwarning shots to disperse the crowd and scuffled with pro-testers, wounding one protester and two police officers.“We did not ban the demonstration,” Surabaya’s policechief explained, “but when it turned violent, with attemptsat destruction, we had to stop it.”73 Foreign ministryspokesperson Yuri Thamrin added that “the governmentdoes not condone violent protests. . . . Indonesians have theright to protest, but must do it within the law.”74 Twoweeks after the attacks in Surabaya, hundreds of Muslimsattempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, smashingthe windows of a guard post but failing to push through thegates.75

It remains unclear who led the riots in Nigeria, which res-ulted in more than 120 deaths in a single week.76 Protestsdid, however, originate from mosques of the Movement forIslamic Revival (Ja’amutu Tajidmul Islami), an IslamistShi‘a movement led by Abubakar Mujahid.77 The violence

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began in northeastern Nigeria, where Muslims protestedthe cartoons and the alleged desecration of a Qurʼan by aChristian teacher.78 Attempts by police to disperse thedemonstrators with tear gas turned the mob against thelocal Christian population. Protesters burned thirtychurches and looted shops owned by Christians during athree-hour rampage, killing eighteen people. Hundreds ofsoldiers and paratroopers joined police armed with rifles topatrol city streets throughout Nigeria, killing at least oneprotester.79 Christian Nigerians avenged these attacks byassaulting Muslims in majority-Christian cities in the eastwith machetes and shotguns, looting Muslim homes andshops, killing fifty Muslims, and burning two mosques.80

Lebanese leaders were quick to place the blame for the vi-olence in Beirut on outside “infiltrators,” presumably Syri-ans.81 Indeed, of the 174 protesters arrested, 76 were Syri-an.82 Nonetheless, the Lebanese branch of the MuslimBrotherhood (al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya), an Islamist movementled by Faisal Mawlawi, organized the more violentprotests.83 Twenty thousand protesters clashed with twothousand security forces after demonstrators set fire to thebuilding housing the Danish and Austrian consulates. Themob vandalized cars, police vehicles, office buildings, and aMaronite church in the predominantly Christian Achrafiehsection of East Beirut.84 One protester, trapped by flames,died after jumping from the third floor of the consulatebuilding. Lebanese security forces required two hours to re-gain control, using water cannons and tear gas. Twenty-onemembers of Lebanon’s security forces were injured in theexchanges.85

In Afghanistan, thirteen protesters died over three daysin four clashes with police. Afghani officials blamed al-Qaeda and Taliban militants for instigating the riots but

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could offer no evidence to substantiate these accusations.Afghani observers described the riots as “a massive upris-ing” in response to “an incredibly emotive issue [that]really upset Afghans.”86 One of the protest organizers inKabul, for example, was a twenty-three-year-old baker whowanted “to teach a lesson to the infidels that they shouldnot repeat this.”87 The location of Afghan riots lends cre-dence to the idea that the clashes were rooted in popularanger rather than in insurgent efforts to weaken U.S.troops. Whereas coalition operations against the Talibanand other antigovernment forces were concentrated insouthern Afghanistan, the riots occurred in the north.88

EVALUATING THE EVIDENCE

The moral threat argument combines elements from thepolitical manipulation and religious outrage hypotheseswhile overcoming many of their inherent weaknesses in or-der to accurately predict where riots did and did not hap-pen. The political manipulation argument hints at regimetype as the crucial condition for religiously motivated riot-ing but cannot explain why most riots occurred in statescharacterized by civil and political liberties. The religiousoutrage argument correctly points to Islamist movementsas the most likely instigators of anti-Western riots yet can-not differentiate states with active Islamist movementswhere riots did not happen from states where violentprotest did occur. The moral threat argument offers an ex-planation for deadly clashes between liberal Muslim re-gimes and Islamist movements responding to the socialmenace that the cartoons posed. It sheds light on the iden-tity of rioters, their targets, and the reasons for fatalities. Itaccurately predicts spontaneous and orchestrated riots, as

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well as peaceful and subdued protest, and can thus explainnot only where violence did and did not occur but also whyit occurred and what shape it assumed.

Though the moral threat argument offers an explanationfor the majority of the cartoon riots, it cannot explain viol-ence in states without significant Islamist movements. Thisleaves some room for the other hypotheses to explain riotsthat occurred under extreme political or religious circum-stances. The Syrian riots, which showed all the signs of or-chestration by the regime, fit well with the political manipu-lation argument.89 Similarly, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades,a violent offshoot of Fatah, organized riots in the Palestini-an Territories a week after the Hamas victory in the firstPalestinian parliamentary elections. Fatah, still exerting au-thoritarian rule, orchestrated the riots before Hamas hadthe opportunity to form a government or assume responsib-ility for the internal security of the Palestinian areas.90 Theriot in Libya, on the other hand, exemplifies the religiousoutrage argument: popular anger in response to a specificreligious provocation was sufficient in and of itself to ex-plain rioting, even in the absence of an Islamist movement.

Two cases seem to present a challenge for the moralthreat argument. The first is Pakistan, an authoritarian re-gime that should have suppressed the riots, as did its coun-terparts in Egypt, Sudan, and Algeria, for example. The twovariables driving the moral threat argument can explainPakistan’s decision. Pakistan is one of the few authoritarianIslamic regimes that grant their citizens significant free-dom of assembly and protest.91 At the same time, it harborsthe largest Salafi-influenced population in the Muslimworld and one of the largest Shi‘a communities in theworld.92 Pakistan’s liminal political status combined withthe formidable challenge that its Islamists pose helps

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explain why the riots there resembled those in Afghanistanand Nigeria more than the subdued protests under otherauthoritarian regimes.

The riots in Lebanon present an additional challenge,since Hezbollah, an influential Islamist party, held 14 of128 seats in the Lebanese parliament at the time. Yet acloser look at the events of February 2006 confirms themoral threat intuition. The Muslim Brotherhood and, bysome accounts, the Salafi Hezb al-Tahrir party and Wahhabielements from the Palestinian Ein el-Helweh refugee campinstigated the Lebanese riots. Hezbollah, on the other hand,called for calm and staged peaceful protests.93

IMPLICATIONS

My findings have implications for our understanding of viol-ent responses to religious provocation in and outside theMuslim world. At the same time, the moral threat argumenthas implications for the study of religion and internationalrelations in general because it exemplifies a novel approachfor exploring the microfoundations of religiously motivatedpolitical behavior.

Are Muslims inclined to respond disproportionately toacts of blasphemy? The condemnation of apostates in Egypt,Turkey, and Bangladesh; the lynching of a Christian teacherin Nigeria for allegedly desecrating the Qurʼan; the convic-tion of a British schoolteacher in Sudan for naming a teddybear Mohammed; and the deadly riots in response to ru-mors about the desecration of Qurʼans in Guantanamo Bayhave led some to conclude that Muslims are exceptionallysensitive to perceived slights against their religion.94

Several scholars who share this view have offered essen-tialist arguments about the relationship between blasphemy

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and Islam. Richard Webster has traced Muslim intoleranceof blasphemy to Islam’s failure to undergo a “conscience-centered revolution” parallel to the Protestant Reformation.Because the Qurʼan and the Prophet have retained theirstatus as external sources of authority in Islam, Webster ar-gued, Muslims continue to construe acts of blasphemy asattacks against their religion, whereas Puritans and theirmodern-day followers, for example, have internalized blas-phemy laws, judging blasphemy a mere moral offense.95

Scott Atran has drawn attention to the importance of honoras a sacred value in Islamic societies.96 If blasphemy is per-ceived as an insult, Muslims might be expected to defendtheir honor irrespective of the economic or political costs.Daniel Pipes has explained the violent aftermath of theRushdie affair in terms of Muslim “literal-mindedness,” theperception that art expresses the personal opinion of itscreator and entails truth claims. This, combined with a“conspiratorial mentality,” is said to lead Muslim readers tointerpret blasphemous art as part of a larger Western cam-paign against Islam.97

In this chapter, I have offered an alternative to such es-sentialist arguments by demonstrating that the riots in re-sponse to the Danish cartoons cannot be reduced to either apolitical or a religious logic. Like members of other reli-gious communities, Muslims respond to religious provoca-tions under particular circumstances. Most Muslim com-munities did not respond with riots to the publication of thecartoons, even where Islamist movements predominated. Vi-olence occurred primarily where radical groups enjoyed thefreedom to organize and protest but lacked state protectionof their sacred values.

The moral threat hypothesis is the least parsimonious ofthe three hypotheses presented here, and its strength lies

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in its generalizability. A moral threat approach can explainreligiously provoked violence by fundamentalist movementsworldwide. By identifying the actions most likely tothreaten a given fundamentalist movement, we can forecastwhere and when it is most likely to respond violently to reli-gious provocations. Doing so requires both understandingthe principles and practices that specific movements holdsacred and identifying the perpetrators whose transgressionmembers of the movement are most likely to interpret asthreatening.

Fundamentalist Jews in Israel, for example, have not re-sponded violently to blasphemous imagery. For reasonsreadily traceable to Jewish belief and practice, the desecra-tion of the Sabbath amounts to a far greater offense thandoes blasphemous action or speech. Fundamentalist Jewsperceive the desecration of the Sabbath as a particularlyheinous offense when committed by secular Jews in the holycity of Jerusalem. While they are free to protest such trans-gressions in Israel, they must also suffer the costs of resid-ing in a liberal democratic society that seems uninterestedin protecting their most sacred values. Consequently, ul-traorthodox protesters in Jerusalem have attacked secularIsraelis driving through their neighborhoods or going tomovies on the Sabbath.98 There are no parallels to these as-saults in Jewish communities outside Israel, where the in-teraction between ultraorthodox communities and non-Jewsis minimal. It is the unique combination of a sacred valueand its transgression by an opponent perceived as threaten-ing that sparks fundamentalist Jewish violence in Israel butnot elsewhere.

The Jewish sensitivity to Sabbath desecration in Jerus-alem is mirrored by a Hindu sensitivity to slights committedby Muslims against Hindu relics and shrines in India.

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Protestant fundamentalists in the United States, on the oth-er hand, see abortion as the primary secular threat to theirsacred value system. Extremist Hindu violence in responseto desecration of sacred space and Protestant attacks onabortion clinics are unique to India and the United States,respectively. In these environments, fundamentalists areconfronted by transgressive acts committed by opponentsand are permitted the public expression of religiously mo-tivated anger. Yet they receive no legal state protectionagainst the transgressions that they consider so harmful totheir fundamental values.

Beyond its implications for explaining violence motivatedby offenses to religious values, my argument dovetails witha burgeoning literature on religion and violence that strivesto combine observations about religious belief and practicewith an understanding of political incentives and con-straints.99 These analyses exemplify an emerging methodo-logy in the study of religion and international conflict thatemphasizes a sensitivity to religious detail, be it the theo-logy, organizational structure, iconography, rituals, or be-liefs of the religious groups involved, but also a willingnessto generalize from particular religious movements, regions,or instances to arrive at broader conclusions for interna-tional relations.

With a nod toward Clifford Geertz, one might call such anapproach to the study of religion and international affairsthick religion.100 Instead of striving, fruitlessly, to reducereligiously motivated violence to either religion or politics,this methodology starts at the religious microfoundations ofa political phenomenon and then tries to construct success-ive layers of explanation, each more removed from the reli-gious and closer to the political, until it arrives at the out-come to be explained. This approach rests on the

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assumption that the study of religion and internationalpolitics is necessarily an interdisciplinary exercise. In addi-tion to politics, we ought to study religion directly, be itthrough the sociology of religion, comparative religiousanalysis, or theology. Merely viewing religion through apolitical lens will not do.

NOTES

I thank the editors of International Studies Quarterly for permissionto reprint this article, which appeared in vol. 55, no. 1 (March2011): 23–45. For their constructive comments on previous drafts ofthis paper, I thank Emily Bech, Jonathan Blake, Daniel Byman, Jen-nifer Dixon, Raymond Duvall, Tanisha Fazal, Steven Fish, AndriusGalisanka, Philip Gorski, Khurram Hussain, Robert Jervis, SigrunKahl, Nina Kelsay, Ronald Krebs, Andrew Kydd, Amy Nelson, BenOppenheim, Ivo Plsek, Jay Purcell, Tonja Putnam, Vivek Sharma,Jack Snyder, Rachel Stern, Laura Thaut, Monica Toft, and GeorgeWilcoxon. I am grateful to participants in the Macmillan Center Ini-tiative on Religion, Politics and Society at Yale University, theColumbia University International Politics Seminar (CUIPS), theBerkeley IR Colloquium (MIRTH), the Minnesota International Rela-tions Colloquium, and the Wisconsin International Relations Col-loquium for their comments and suggestions. I thank the anonym-ous reviewers for their helpful comments. I am particularly thankfulto Len Weiss for inspiring this research.

1. Dan Bilefsky, “Denmark Is Unlikely Front in Islam-West Cul-ture War,” New York Times, January 8, 2006, 3; Alan Cowell, “MoreEuropean Papers Print Cartoons of Muhammad, Fueling Disputewith Muslims,” New York Times, February 2, 2006, A12; Craig S.Smith and Ian Fisher, “Temperatures Rise over Cartoons MockingMuhammad,” New York Times, February 3, 2006, A3.

2. Carlotta Gall and Craig S. Smith, “Muslim Protests against Car-toons Spread,” New York Times, February 7, 2006, A8; Hassan M.Fattah, “At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized,” New YorkTimes, February 9, 2006, A2; Ian Fisher, “Italian Quits over

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Cartoons; 15 Die in Nigeria,” New York Times, February 19, 2006,16.

3. Karl Ritter, “Danish PM Says Nation Unfairly Portrayed,” Asso-ciated Press Online, February 13, 2006, available at at www.apnews-archive.com; Jan M. Olsen, “Danish FM: Al-Qaeda Will ExploitUproar,” Associated Press Online, February 20, 2006.

4. Political scientists have made few attempts to examine the Dan-ish cartoon incident and no attempts to provide an overarching ex-planation for the ensuing violence. See Marion G. Mueller and EsraOezcan, “The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Under-standing Cultural Conflict and Political Action,” PS: PoliticalScience and Politics 40 (April 2007), 287–91; Matthew J. Nelson,“Who Speaks for Islam? ‘Authenticity’ and the Interpretation ofIslamic Law in America’s War on Terror,” Australian Journal of In-ternational Affairs 61, no. 2 (June 2007), 247–66.

5. Similar differences of opinion have characterized analyses ofthe response to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, with interpretersdivided over whether the motives for the backlash against Rushdieare best viewed as power driven or faith based. For explanations ofthe Rushdie affair anchored in politics, see Z. Sardar and M. Davies,Distorted Imaginations: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair (London:Grey Seal Books, 1990); W. Weatherby, Salman Rushdie: Sentencedto Death (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990). For rejections of thepolitical account based on a religious logic, see Daniel Pipes, TheRushdie Affair (New York: Carol Publishing, 1990); Kalim Siddiqui,“The Implications of the Rushdie Affair for Muslims in Britain,”speech at the Muslim Institute for Research and Planning, London,April 1, 1989.

6. My investigation in this chapter is limited to Muslim-majoritystates. I define riots as mob violence against persons or propertyresulting in damage or fatalities. This excludes individual acts ofmurder, terror, or assassination.

7. Lara Sukhtian, “Are Extremists Fanning Cartoon Outrage?,” As-sociated Press Online, February 9, 2006; David R. Sands and BillSammon, “Rice Accuses Syria, Iran in Riots; Says Nations Incite Car-toon Outrage,” Washington Times, February 9, 2006, A01.

8. “US Keeping Response to Arab Cartoon Controversy ‘Low Key,’”Bulletin’s Frontrunner, February 10, 2006.

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9. “Global Muslim Protests over Prophet Cartoons Grow Violent;European Embassies Burned in Middle East,” Facts on File WorldNews Digest, February 9, 2006.

10. United Press International (UPI), “Blair: Iran Military Action‘Possible,’” February 7, 2006, available at www.UPI.com. See alsoGall and Smith, “Muslim Protests against Cartoons Spread.”

11. William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement ofInternational Conflict,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 1(1994): 14–32; Dixon, “Democracy and the Management of Interna-tional Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 37 (1993), 42–68; Mi-chael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American PoliticalScience Review 88 (1986): 1151–69; Zeev Maoz and Russett, “Norm-ative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace,” American Politic-al Science Review 87 (1993): 624–38; Michael Mousseau, “Demo-cracy and Compromise in Militarized Interstate Conflicts,1816–1992,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 2 (April 1998):210–30; Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Michael Stohl and GeorgeLopez, eds., Government Violence and Repression (Westport, CT:Greenwood, 1986).

12. John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (NewYork: Wiley, 1973); Richard A. Brody, Assessing the President (Stan-ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Kenneth A. Schultz,Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001); Suzanne L. Parker, “Toward an Understand-ing of ‘Rally Effects’: Public Opinion in the Persian Gulf War,”Public Opinion Quarterly 59 (1995): 526–46.

13. Jack S. Levy, “The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique,” inHandbook of War Studies, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (Boston: UnwinHyman, 1989), 259–88; Richard N. Rosecrance, Action and Reactionin World Politics (Boson: Little, Brown, 1963); Michael Stohl, “TheNexus of Civil and International Conflict,” in Handbook of PoliticalConflict, ed. Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Free Press, 1980),297–330.

14. William Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (London:Black, 1894), 149–50. See also Arthur Charles James, “Taboo amongthe Ancient Hebrews” (thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Phil-adelphia, 1925), 11.

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15. J. G. Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, vol. 2 of TheGolden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan,1911). For a literature review that summarizes and critiques the ex-ploration of taboos in Frazer, William Robertson Smith, AlfredRadcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, Sigmund Freud, and others, seeFranz Steiner, Taboo (London: Cohen and West, 1956).

16. Frazer, Golden Bough, 224. See also Émile Durkheim, The Ele-mentary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (NewYork: Free Press, 1915); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Ana-lysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge,1996), 22.

17. Frazer, Golden Bough, 96–100.18. The false claim that Islam prohibits depictions of the Prophet

appears in coverage of the riots by the New York Times and otherpapers, as well as Mueller and Oezcan, “Political Iconography ofMuhammad Cartoons.”

19. Oleg Grabar, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” in Iconoclasm: PapersGiven at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed.Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (Birmingham: Center for ByzantineStudies, University of Birmingham, 1977), 45–47.

20. Thus early Muslims permitted their Christian subjects to wor-ship with icons but took offense at the Christian adoration of thecrucifix. In Muslim eyes, the symbol of the cross, not depictions ofbiblical characters or saints, was provocative, because it symbolizedthe resurrection of Jesus, a blasphemous notion to Muslims. G. R. D.King, “Islam, Iconoclasm, and the Declaration of Doctrine,” Bulletinof the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 2 (1985),267–77.

21. Figural representation was common in private Muslim art anddecorates the palaces of most Muslim dynasties, particularly thoseof the twelfth and the mid-fourteenth century, after which its pop-ularity declined. Grabar, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” 47–48.

22. Muslim manuscripts produced in the Ottoman and Safavidcourts are often illustrated with figures and images. Where imagesof Mohammed exist, most often in Shi‘a and Sufi depictions of thenarrative in chapter 17 of the Qurʼan, they are meant not as iconsbut as illustrations of historical or literary texts. Some of these leave

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the Prophet’s face visible, but most cover his face and even his bodywith a veil.

23. “Art,” in Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, ed.Richard C. Martin, vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan, 2004), 78–79.

24. Marshall Hodgson, “Islam and Image,” History of Religions 3,no. 2 (Winter 1964): 240–41; Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 247, 368–69; DianeApostolos-Cappadona, “Iconoclasm,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed.Lindsay Jones, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2005), vol. 6, 4279–89.

25. Blasphemy can take the form of insult to God, the Prophet, oran important aspect of Islam (sabb); vilification of God (shatm); infi-delity to God or rejection of his revelation (kufr); heresy (zandaqah);or, at worst, apostasy (riddah). See, for example, suras 4:140, 5:73,6:108, 9:74, 28:55, 39:08, and 39:33.

26. Carl W. Ernst, “Blasphemy: Islamic Concept,” in Jones, Encyc-lopedia of Religion, vol. 2, 974–77.

27. See, for example, sura 111, in which Abu Lahab, a half-brotherof Mohammed’s father, is consigned to hell with his wife for theirtreatment of Mohammed.

28. Khomeini justified the death sentence by admonishing Rush-die for “[daring] to insult the Islamic sanctities.” “No Iranian For-giveness for Salman Rushdie,” Associated Press Online, December27, 1990.

29. The leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sheikh Hassan Nassra-lah, made the similarity between the two transgressions explicit, de-claring that “if there had been a Muslim to carry out ImamKhomeini’s fatwā against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabblewho insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and Francewould not have dared to do so.” Agence France-Presse (AFP),“Hezbollah: Rushdie Death Would Stop Prophet Insults,” February 2,2006, available at www.afp.com.

30. Frazer, Golden Bough, 214. Such physical practices are de-tailed in Hutton Webster, Taboo: A Sociological Study (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1942), 35–39; Alfred Radcliffe-Brown,Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,1952), 135; Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points ofAgreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1989).

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31. Kevin Reinhart, “Impurity / No Danger,” History of Religions30, no. 1 (August 1990): 1–24.

32. J. Chelhod, “Kaffara,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. P. Bear-man, T. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), vol. 4, 406.

33. On Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism, see John L. Es-posito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983); Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. CarolVolk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Giles Kepel,Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Bernard Lewis, TheCrisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: RandomHouse, 2004); Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Roy, Secularism Con-fronts Islam, trans. George Holoch (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2007); Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, trans.Ros Schwartz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

34. Roy, Globalized Islam, 58–59; Roy, Secularism ConfrontsIslam, 63.

35. Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 24, 134.36. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 36, 170. For evaluations and cri-

tiques, see Melford E. Spiro, “Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Con-cepts of Pollution and Taboo by Mary Douglas,” American Anthropo-logist 70, no. 2 (April 1968): 391–93; William McCormack, “Purityand Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo by MaryDouglas,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6, no. 2 (Au-tumn 1967): 313–14.

37. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 54–55; Durkheim, ElementaryForms of the Religious Life.

38. Ibid., 124–26, 137. See also Levy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Su-pernatural (New York: Haskell House, 1936).

39. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 40–41. See also Caroline Ford,“Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France,” FrenchHistorical Studies 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 101–12.

40. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 133.41. Émile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and

Application of the Sociology of Education, trans. Herman Schnurerand Everett K. Wilson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 165–67.

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42. John Kekes, “Disgust and Moral Taboos,” Philosophy 67, no.262 (October 1992), 442–43.

43. On threat perception in social and political psychology, seeHenry Tajfel, ed., Differentiation between Social Groups: Studies inthe Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (London: AcademicPress, 1978); Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory ofIntergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Rela-tions, ed. W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole,1979), 1–39; Markus Kemmelmeier and David G. Winter, “PuttingThreat into Perspective: Experimental Studies on Perceptual Distor-tion in International Conflict,” Personality and Social PsychologyBulletin 26, no. 7 (July 2000): 795–809. On threat perception inpolitical science, see Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); David L. Rousseau and RocioGarcia-Retamero, “Identity, Power and Threat Perception: A Cross-National Experimental Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no.5 (October 2007): 744–71.

44. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for directing me tothese texts.

45. Sidney Tarrow, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics ofContention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Tarrow,Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Polit-ics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

46. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain (Boulder,CO: Paradigm, 2005); Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder,CO: Paradigm, 2004).

47. Charles Tilly, “From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Move-ments,” in How Social Movements Matter, ed. Marco Guigni, DougMcAdam, and Tilly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1999), 253–70; Tarrow, Power in Movement.

48. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in Society andCulture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1975), 51–91.

49. Roy, Globalized Islam, 60–75.50. Kekes, “Disgust and Moral Taboos,” 435.51. Like all efforts to quantify social science indicators, Freedom

House’s coding of freedom is not value free, though there is no reas-on to assume that it biases my results toward or away from

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particular Muslim-majority states. Given the logical impossibility ofa value-neutral index, Freedom House offers several advantages overavailable alternatives. Other estimates of state freedom, such asdata included in the Polity Project (www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm) or the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Demo-cracy (http://www.eiu.com/), emphasize constitutional attributes rel-evant for distinguishing democratic from authoritarian regimes,such as the nature of elections and executive authority, which areless useful for estimating regime reactions to protests. Moreover,whereas the Freedom House index (www.freedomhouse.org/) hasdata on all Muslim-majority states for 2006 (with the exception ofthe Palestinian Territories, which held parliamentary elections aweek before the riots), the Polity Project lacks crucial data for Afgh-anistan, Iraq, and Somalia for that year.

52. Gall and Smith, “Muslim Protests against Cartoons Spread.”53. Jeffrey Fleishman, “Muslims Torch Embassies over

Muhammad Cartoons; Iran Threatens to Cut Off Trade with NationsWhere the Drawings Appeared,” Houston Chronicle, February 5,2006, 22; Sonja Pace, “Latest Cartoon Protests May Have PoliticalDimension,” Voice of America News, February 6, 2006, available atwww.voanews.com.

54. Bassem Mroue, “Some See Gov’t Roles in Cartoon Protests,”Associated Press Online, February 5, 2006.

55. Marc Perelman, “Iran, Syria Said to Be Stoking Riots; Dictat-ors Seek to Blunt Push of U.S., Europe,” Jewish Daily Forward,February 10, 2006, http://forward.com/articles/1628/iran-syria-said-to-be-stoking-riots/.

56. “The Use of Cartoons,” Washington Post, February 8, 2006.57. Riaz Khan, “Nine Die in Cartoon Protests in Libya,” Associated

Press Online, February 17, 2006, ; Khaled el-Deeb, “Libya SuspendsOfficial after Deadly Riots,” Associated Press Online, February 18,2006.

58. UPI, “Cartoons Cause Death, Rioting in Libya,” February 17,2006. This apology did not prevent Mu‘ammar Qaddafi from capital-izing on the protest. He later threatened that he could not ensurethe safety of the Italian embassy and consulate in Libya unless Italycompensated Libya for years of colonial rule. “World Briefing Africa:

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Libya: Italy Says Threat Does Not Help Ties,” New York Times,March 4, 2006, 6.

59. El-Deeb, “Libya Suspends Official.”60. John Lancaster, “Cartoon Protests Rage for Third Day in

Pakistan,” Washington Post, February 16, 2006, A18.61. Salman Massod, “Pakistan’s Violent Protests over Cartoons

Taking Political Turn,” New York Times, February 16, 2006, 13;“5,000 in Pakistan Protest Prophet Cartoons,” Associated Press On-line, February 7, 2006.

62. Brian Murphy, “Conflicts Cited at Christian Conference,” As-sociated Press Online, February 20, 2006; “Anti-cartoon ProtestsFuel Domestic Political Unrest in Pakistan,” Voice of America News,February 24, 2006.

63. Riaz Khan, “Police Battle Cartoon Protests in Pakistan,” Asso-ciated Press Online, February 13, 2006.

64. John Lancaster, “Protests over Cartoons Shake Pakistan; De-monstrators Storm Diplomatic Enclave, Attack Western Businesses,”Washington Post, February 15, 2006, A14; Salman Massod, “2 Die asPakistan Cartoon Rage Turns Violent,” New York Times, February15, 2006, 6; Sadaqat Jan, “Cartoon Protesters Tear Gassed inPakistan,” Associated Press Online, February 14, 2006; UPI, “Car-toon Riots in Pakistan Leave 2 Dead,” February 14, 2006; Asif Shahz-ad, “Prophet Cartoon Protesters Torch Western Businesses inPakistan, Two Killed in Shooting,” Associated Press Financial Wire,February 14, 2006; Riaz Khan, “Cartoon Riots in Pakistan KillThree,” Associated Press Online, February 15, 2006.

65. Tanveer, “Cartoon Protesters Arrested in Pakistan”; “PakistanBans Cartoon Protests after Violent Demonstrations,” Voice ofAmerica News, February 18, 2006; UPI, “Pakistan Tries to BlockCartoon Protests,” February 19, 2006; “Thousands Rally againstProphet Cartoons in Karachi, Pakistan,” Voice of America News,February 26, 2006; Zarar Khan, “Pakistan Police: 25,000 ProtestCartoons,” Associated Press Online, February 27, 2006.

66. “Tens of Thousands Rally against Prophet Cartoons inPakistan,” Voice of America News, March 5, 2006; Asif Shahzad,“Thousands Protest Cartoons in Pakistan,” Associated Press Online,March 17, 2006.

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67. These have included, most famously, the film The Miracle(1951), The Last Temptation of Christ (novel in 1951, film in 1988),the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Andres Serrano’s pho-tograph Piss Christ (1989), and Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Vir-gin Mary (1999). A comprehensive review of blasphemy incidentscan be found in Richard Webster’s A Brief History of Blasphemy(Suffolk, U.K.: Orwell, 1990).

68. Amelie Blom, “The 2006 Anti–‘Danish Cartoons’ Riot inLahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics,”South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2 (2008): ht-tp://samaj.revues.org/1652, pars. 22, 24, 63.

69. Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 133.70. Blom, “2006 Anti–‘Danish Cartoons’ Riot in Lahore,” par. 63.71. Ibid., par. 65.72. UPI, “Jakarta Muslims Protest Mohammed Cartoon,” February

3, 2006; Colin Nickerson, “Islamic Anger Widens at Mohammed Car-toons,” Boston Globe, February 3, 2006, A12; “Denmark WithdrawsAmbassador, Embassy Staff from Indonesia,” Voice of America News,February 11, 2006; “Indonesian Minister Says Danish Embassy StaffPullout Hasty,” Voice of America News, February 12, 2006.

73. UPI, “Indonesian Cartoon Protest Grows,” February 6, 2006;Griff Witte and Ellen Nakashima, “Cartoon Protests Stoke Anti-American Mood; Three Killed outside U.S. Base in Bagram,” Wash-ington Post, February 7, 2006, A15.

74. Nancy-Amelia Collins, “Denmark Advises Citizens to Leave In-donesia, as Protests over Political Cartoons Sweep Asia,” Voice ofAmerica News, February 7, 2006.

75. Ali Kotarumalos, “Muslims Assault U.S. Embassy in Indone-sia,” Associated Press Online, February 19, 2006.

76. “World Briefing Africa: Nigeria: Sectarian Riots Continue,”New York Times, February 25, 2006, 5.

77. On the Nigerian Movement for Islamic Revival, see DavidFinkel, “Crime and Holy Punishment; In Divided Nigeria, Search forJustice Leads Many to Embrace Islamic Code,” Washington Post,November 24, 2002, A01; Dan Isaacs, “Nigeria’s Firebrand MuslimLeaders,” BBC World News, October 1, 2001.

78. Lydia Polgreen, “Nigeria Counts 100 Deaths over Danish Car-icatures,” New York Times, February 24, 2006, 8.

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79. Olly Owen, “15 Killed in Cartoon Riots in Northern Nigeria,”World Market Analysis, February 20, 2006; Fisher, “Italian Quitsover Cartoons”; Daniel Balint-Kurti and Jonathan Clayton, “Curfewafter 16 Die in Protests,” Times (London), February 20, 2006, 32.

80. “World Briefing Africa: Nigeria: Death Toll Rises in SectarianViolence,” New York Times, February 23, 2006, 6.

81. Gall and Smith, “Muslim Protests against Cartoons Spread.”82. “Lebanese Minister Resigns after Riots in Beirut,” Irish

Times, February 6, 2006, 1.83. Rory McCarthy, “Cartoon Furore: Media Points Finger at Syria

for Violent Rallies as Lebanon Fears for Its Fragile Sectarian Peace,”Guardian, February 7, 2006, 18.

84. Katherine Zoepf and Hassan M. Fattah, “Beirut Mob BurnsDanish Mission Building over Cartoons,” New York Times, February6, 2006, 3.

85. Robert Fisk, “The Fury; Violent Protests Sweep Europe andMiddle East as Cartoon Crisis Escalates,” Independent (London),February 6, 2006, 4.

86. Daniel Cooney, “Cartoon Protests Rage in Muslim World,” As-sociated Press Online, February 7, 2006.

87. Griff Witte, “Protests Spread in Afghanistan; At Least 3 Killedduring Clash in North over Depictions of Muhammad,” WashingtonPost, February 8, 2006, A15.

88. Scott Baldauf, “A Nuanced Response in Parliament,” ChristianScience Monitor, February 8, 2006, www.csmonitor.com/2006/0208/p11s01-wosc.html.

89. “Syrian Protesters Torch Danish and Norwegian Embassiesover Prophet Cartoons,” Voice of America News, February 4, 2006;Karl Vick, “Cartoons Spark Burning of Embassies; Syrians, Angry atDrawings of Prophet Muhammad, Target Danes and Norwegians,”Washington Post, February 5, 2006, A15; Fleishman, “MuslimsTorch Embassies over Muhammad Cartoons”; Pace, “Latest CartoonProtests May Have Political Dimension.”

90. Eli Lake, “Scandinavia Becomes Islamist Target,” New YorkSun, January 31, 2006; Ibrahim Barzak, “Masked Gunmen BrieflyTake Over EU Office,” Associated Press Online, January 30, 2006;Smith and Fisher, “Temperatures Rise over Cartoons MockingMuhammad”; UPI, “Cartoon Incident Draws Protest,” February 2,

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2006; Barzak, “Protests over Muhammad Cartoons Escalate,” Associ-ated Press Online, February 2, 2006; Joshua Mitnik, “Gunmen inGaza Close EU Office,” Washington Times, February 3, 2006;“Palestinians Protest against Cartoons Mocking Prophet Mo-hammed,” Voice of America, February 3, 2006; Joel Brinkley and IanFisher, “U.S. Says It Also Finds Cartoons of Muhammad Offensive,”New York Times, February 4, 2006.

91. Although the Freedom House index ranks Pakistan as “notfree” (compared to “partially free” Afghanistan and Nigeria, for ex-ample), other indexes assign it a more ambiguous classification.Both the Polity Project and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Indexof Democracy, for example, ranked Pakistan as more democraticthan Afghanistan in 2006. The Economist Intelligence Unit alsoranks Pakistan as more democratic than Nigeria.

92. According to Robert Pape, Pakistan, with forty-three millionSalafi-influenced people, and Nigeria, with thirty-seven million, arethe two states with the largest Salafi-influenced populations, fol-lowed by Indonesia, Egypt, and Sudan. Pakistan and Nigeria thus ac-count for more than half of the world’s Salafi-influenced population.Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (NewYork: Random House, 2005), 117. The world’s largest Shi‘a popula-tions, in descending magnitude, are in Iran, Pakistan, India, Iraq,Turkey, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Syria. “Mapping theGlobal Muslim Population,” Pew Research Center’s Forum on Reli-gion and Public Life (October 2009), www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population/

93. Fisk, “Fury.”94. Apostasy cases are listed in Frank Griffel, “Toleration and

Exclusion: Al-Shafiʼi and al-Ghazali on the Treatment of Apostates,”Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64, no. 3(2001): 340. Christianah Oluwatoyin Oluwasesin, a Christian teacherin Nigeria, was lynched by her pupils on March 21, 2007, for al-legedly desecrating the Qurʼan; Gillian Gibbons was convicted of in-sulting Islam and briefly imprisoned in November 2007; allegationsof Qurʼan desecrations at Guantanamo led to riots across theMuslim world in May 2005.

95. Richard Webster, Brief History of Blasphemy, 26–31.

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96. Scott Atran, “The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terror-ism,” Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Spring 2006), 127–47, citingJ. Peristiani, ed., Honor and Shame: The Values of MediterraneanSociety (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

97. Pipes, Rushdie Affair, 112, 131–32. For claims by the Iranianregime that the Danish cartoons were “a Zionist plot,” see Sukhtian,“Are Extremists Fanning Cartoon Outrage?”; “Iran Leader De-nounces Prophet Cartoons,” Associated Press Online, February 7,2006.

98. See, for example, Reuters, “Jerusalem Police Clash withOrthodox Protesters,” New York Times, September 6, 1987, 17; JoelGreenberg, “Jerusalem Road Is Secular-Religious Battleground,”New York Times, July 15, 1996, 3.

99. See, for example, Daniel Philpott, “Explaining the PoliticalAmbivalence of Religion,” American Political Science Review 101,no. 3 (August 2007), 505–25; Isak Svensson, “Fighting with Faith:Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars,” Journal of ConflictResolution 51, no. 6 (December 2007), 930–49; Michael C. Horowitz,“Long Time Going: Religion and the Duration of Crusading,” Inter-national Security 34, no. 2 (Fall 2009), 162–93.

100. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an InterpretiveTheory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:Basic Books, 1973), 213–31.

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CHAPTER 8

The IndonesianBlasphemy ActA Legal and Social Analysis

ASMA T. UDDIN

On April 19, 2010, I was present when the Indonesian Con-stitutional Court issued its eight-to-one decision upholdingthe country’s Law on the Prevention of Blasphemy andAbuse of Religion, also known as the Blasphemy Act. Thislegal decision confirming the legitimacy of blasphemy regu-lations and prosecutions was deeply disappointing for amodern democratic society such as Indonesia, the largestMuslim-majority nation in the world.

The decision marked a major setback for freedom of reli-gion and expression in Indonesia. The meanings of thoseconcepts—religious freedom and free speech—are hotly con-tested today. Some suggest they are compatible with thecriminalizing of expression that insults religion or offendsreligious sensibilities even when that expression does notincite imminent violence. Such views often seek to limitfree speech in the name of public order or to protect

religious sensibilities in the name of human rights. Thedeeply problematic nature of such views, based on subject-ive and ill-defined legal formulae, is evidenced in the in-creasingly absurd effects the Blasphemy Act has had on In-donesian citizens. For example, in 2006, Muhammad Yus-man Roy was sentenced to two years in prison merely for re-citing Muslim prayers in the Indonesian language insteadof Arabic. In 2007, Sumardi Tappaya was sentenced to sixmonths in prison for deviancy after a relative accused himof whistling during prayers.1

Under the Blasphemy Act and related regulations, thegovernment has also targeted minority religious groups,even those that consider themselves Muslim. Targetingsuch Muslims has the chilling effect of significantly narrow-ing, in both cultural and legal terms, the range of legitim-ate religious expression. In 2008, for example, the ministerof religious affairs, the attorney general, and the ministerof the interior issued a joint ministerial decree prohibitingthe Ahmadiyya Muslim sect from promulgating its beliefs.2

Three years later, the government issued at least eight newlocal regulations similarly prohibiting the Ahmadiyya com-munity from exercising even limited religious rights such ascommunally gathering for public worship.3

More recently, Alexander Aan, an atheist, was sentencedto two and a half years’ imprisonment and a fine of onehundred million rupiah (US$10,600) for insulting Islam andthe Prophet Mohammed. His crime was posting a cartoontitled The Prophet Muhammad Had Been Sleeping with HisWife’s Maid and denying the existence of God on the Face-book page he moderated for atheists. One of Aan’s statusupdates also included a version of a standard atheist re-frain, “If you believe in god, then please show him to me.”4

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Such incidents are not isolated. More than 150 peoplehave been detained merely for speaking critically about reli-gion without any incitement to violence.5 What compels thegovernment to imprison the Ahmadiyya merely for statingtheir beliefs or to prosecute a man for whistling during hisprayer? Are these restrictions results of the state cowing toextremist forces, or do they reflect the popular will? Exactlywho or what is being protected? In recent decades, Indone-sia has been on the path to democratization—yet duringthat same period it has also seen an increasing number ofblasphemy convictions.6 Why?

This chapter addresses such questions by exploring issuesof blasphemy, rights, and democracy in Indonesia. It beginswith an overview of the Blasphemy Act and an analysis ofthe Indonesian Constitutional Court’s reasoning in uphold-ing it. The chapter then attends to the cultural and legal dy-namics of blasphemy in Indonesia, including how theymight be changed through legal reform. Such reform re-quires engaging the reigning understandings of religiousfreedom, free speech, and human rights presently extant inIndonesia, the largest Muslim-majority democracy in theworld today.

CONTEXT

Indonesia’s importance in global discussions about theplace of religion in modern society would be difficult tooveremphasize. It is the world’s third-most-populous mod-ern democracy and is home to the largest Muslim popula-tion in the world.7 Approximately 90 percent of Indonesiansare Muslim, and the remaining 10 percent belong to a widerange of faiths.8

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The spread of Islam in Indonesia in the decades followingWorld War II helped integrate a variety of religious and eth-nic groups into a larger umbrella culture.9 Many of thesegroups then facilitated Islam’s expansion by melding it withindigenous cultures and faith traditions.10 Indications ofthis multicultural layering are still evident. For example,rhythmic drumming characteristic of native ceremonies of-ten precedes the Muslim call to prayer, and some Muslimgroups imbibe wine in celebration, in spite of clear Qurʼanicprohibitions on alcohol consumption.11

Indonesia prides itself on being a moderate Muslim coun-try and has been held up as an example of harmonious reli-gious plurality due to its inclusive culture.12 The Americanweekly Newsweek described it as the home of “the smilingIslam.”13 British prime minister David Cameron commen-ded Indonesia for its democratic transition, hailing its tri-umph over despotic rule without compromises of security orreligious freedom as a model for other Muslim-majoritycountries in the throes of political change.14 Indonesianpresident Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has made at leastnineteen public statements encouraging religious har-mony.15

Given its commitment to religious pluralism and its prideas a leader among Muslim-majority countries, Indonesia’senforcement of the Blasphemy Act and the recent decisionby its highest court to uphold the act seem incongruous atbest and hypocritical at worst. What are the conditions thatmake possible the existence and enforcement of the Blas-phemy Act? And what do they tell us about the future ofdemocracy in Muslim-majority countries?

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OVERVIEW OF THE BLASPHEMY ACT

The Blasphemy Act was issued by President Soekarno as apresidential stipulation on January 27, 1965, and becamelaw four years later.16 It was part of the president’s Na-sakom (nationalist) initiative, designed to advance his polit-ical power by mobilizing the cultural forces of nationalism,religion, and communism.17 The act’s purpose, in otherwords, was overtly political, serving the interest of the gov-ernment and its notion of national solidarity in a postcolo-nial communist society. It represented, among other things,a direct response to the rise of minority religions, which thegovernment depicted as “‘exceedingly detrimental to exist-ing Religions,’ ‘fracturing National unity,’ and‘blasphem[ing] religion.’”18

Appreciating the political purposes of the Blasphemy Actis critical for understanding its impact. The act was notsimply about protecting particular conceptions of theologic-al truth but about mobilizing favored political forces andnorms against disfavored, often minority perspectives. Thefact that such political motivations inform Indonesia’s Blas-phemy Act is illustrative of blasphemy rules and regulationsmore generally. Paul Finkelman’s chapter 4 draws our at-tention to similar dynamics at play in blasphemy prosecu-tions in the early nineteenth-century United States. He cor-rectly emphasizes that charges of blasphemy are not justabout religion but involve attempts to protect the way thatsocial institutions, cultural norms, and political power arestructured. Postcolonial Indonesia highlights this fact aswell as early nineteenth-century America.

In 1967, Soeharto succeeded to the presidency followingthe collapse of Soekarno’s regime and Indonesia’s violentanticommunist purge. In order to suppress atheism, whichwas associated with communism, the new regime advanced

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a law requiring all Indonesians to choose a religion, whichwould be printed on their identification card.19 The choicewas limited to orthodox versions of five legally recognizedand protected religions—Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism,Buddhism, and Hinduism—with Confucianism added later.Then, in 1969, President Soeharto elevated the BlasphemyAct to law status.20

The Blasphemy Act, however, directly contradicts Indone-sia’s constitutional protections. The human rights chapteradded to the Constitution in 2001, Chapter X-A, protects In-donesian citizens’ rights to their beliefs, to worship freelyand practice their religion of choice, and to freely associate,assemble, and express their opinions.21 Additionally,Articles 28 I(1) and 28 D(1) of the Constitution, originalprovisions from 1945, protect the rights to freedom of reli-gion, thought, and conscience and the rights to due processand equal protection of the law.22

The Blasphemy Act is also somewhat in tension with Pan-casila, the philosophical basis for the Indonesian state. Thephilosophy of Pancasila strives for “unity in diversity”through the following five basic principles: belief in the oneand only God; just and civilized humanity; unity of Indone-sia; democracy; and the realization of social justice forall.23 Framing monotheistic belief as a central tenet of In-donesia’s statehood calls the citizenship and rights of athe-ists and polytheists into question. However, Pancasila alsoencourages unity and broad social justice. The BlasphemyAct violates these principles.

Contrary to Indonesia’s broad constitutional protectionsfor religious freedom, the Blasphemy Act makes illegal theintentional public communication or solicitation of supportfor an “unofficial” religion, meaning one other than the sixthat the state recognizes. The act also criminalizes any

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unapproved interpretation of one of the official six reli-gions, obviously narrowing options even for adherents ofthese faiths.24 The act’s purpose is thus to “channel . . . re-ligiosity”25 into the particular religious channels approvedby the state.26 In this way, the government establishes itsprotection of its official religions by punishing those whoeither insult them or attempt to persuade others to followunapproved religions.27 Such strictures require no incite-ment to violence or even to hostility. They thus representthe type of capacious legal prohibition that Jeroen Temper-man cautions against in chapter 10, hindering expressioneven more than the hate speech prohibitions increasinglycommon in democratic societies across the globe.

The Blasphemy Act, however, does more than simply pun-ish those who insult approved religions or proselytize unap-proved beliefs; it also places restrictions on those withineach approved religion, making it illegal to advocate reli-gious teachings that deviate from those “considered funda-mental by scholars of the relevant religions.”28 The case ofSumardi Tappaya, the Muslim man prosecuted for whistlingwhile he prayed, aptly demonstrates this aspect of thelaw.29 Government officials will warn a first-time offenderof the act,30 but a second-time offender will be officiallybanned (if it is an organization), thus losing all legal priv-ileges that undergird an organization’s social presence,such as the ability to own property or express its beliefspublicly.31 Offenders may also face criminal prosecution.Article 156(a) of the Indonesian Criminal Code punishes of-fenses under the Blasphemy Act with up to five years inprison.32 Article 157 prohibits the media from publishinganything that might be deemed offensive to an official reli-gion.33

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The government monitors blasphemy violations, givingthe attorney general the authority to maintain public orderin the face of blasphemous statements that, from the gov-ernment’s perspective, “potentially endanger people andcountry.”34 Given the prominence of the concept of dangerin public order statutes across the world, it is worth em-phasizing that the “potentially endangering” behavior inquestion need not be perceived as a cause of imminent orphysical danger. It need not include any incitement or evenadvocacy of violence. The attorney general, moreover, is as-sisted throughout Indonesia by local monitoring teams thatfunction as surveillance committees. They are called TimKoordinasi Pengawan Aliran Kepercayaan Masyarakat, orPAKEM.35

The Blasphemy Act contributes to an environment of reli-gious intolerance and persecution that has yielded furtherlaws criminalizing many peaceful religious practices thatthe government considers injurious to the state-approvedreligions.36 One prominent example is the 2008 joint decreeagainst the Ahmadiyya, whom the majority of Muslims donot recognize as Muslim, due to doctrinal differencesbetween groups.37 The decree came five months after agovernment-appointed team began monitoring the Ah-madiyya at the request of the MUI, the Indonesian UlamaCouncil.38 While the religious denunciation of groups isfully within the parameters of religious freedom and broadrights to religious expression, the decree goes much fur-ther. It orders, with the backing of state force, that the Ah-madiyya stop the public dissemination of their beliefs. Thismakes the state the arbiter of religious orthodoxy and thusof what the Ahmadiyya may believe and how they may exer-cise those beliefs.

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The MUI’s influence in this regard is not unique. Accord-ing to the United States Commission on International Reli-gious Freedom’s 2012 report, dozens of extremist groups inIndonesia hold a level of influence that is highly dispropor-tionate to their size. These minority groups often succeed inpressuring local officials to detain and restrict other minor-ity groups allegedly deviant in their religious beliefs or per-spectives. It is hardly surprising that this type of local har-assment results in increased religious tension and societalviolence, which is not constructive for the creation of whatmight be called democratic capital, that is, the spreading ofequal-respect sentiments and pluralist values.39

For example, in 2007, when al-Qiyadah al-Islamiyah mem-bers were arrested on blasphemy charges, they were re-leased only after repenting and agreeing to adhere to thegovernment’s approved understanding of Islam.40 The al-Qiyadah sect is considered deviant because it disputes thatthe five pillars of Islam—declaration of faith, five daily pray-ers, Ramadan fast, payment of charity, and performance ofthe hajj—are compulsory.41 The group also considers itsleader, Ahmad Moshaddeq, to be a new prophet, in contra-vention of the Islamic creed, which holds that Mohammedwas the last prophet.42 These beliefs prompted the MUI toissue a fatwa declaring the group heretical (a religious des-ignation) and to relay its conclusions to the police in thehope that Moshaddeq would be prosecuted for blasphemy (acivil designation).43 Police raids commenced henceforth.

The Blasphemy Act thus functions to maintain the hege-mony of government-backed religious groups over dissent-ing minority members of the same religion, reminding us ofthe larger political and social dimensions of blasphemycharges. The act empowers the state over the individual, al-lowing it to use religion to validate its power and to convert

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religious charges of heresy into civil blasphemy charges.These goals, born amid postcolonial nationalism, continuein problematic ways into the present.

THE BECKET FUND’S EFFORTS TO REPEAL THEBLASPHEMY ACT

Through my work as legal counsel at the Becket Fund forReligious Liberty, a nonprofit law firm, I have encounteredthe many pernicious effects of blasphemy laws from Africato Southeast Asia. The firm has advocated against such lawsin several countries, particularly Egypt and Pakistan, andmy work on these initiatives has disclosed severe infringe-ments on freedoms of religion and expression as well as sig-nificant prosecutorial abuse. Moreover, state regulations onreligion—such as blasphemy laws—routinely lead to thepoliticization of religion, as they mix it with matters of na-tional security and public order.44

For example, the Egyptian blasphemy law, Article 98(f) ofthe Egyptian Penal Code, punishes the “use of religion inpropagating . . . extreme ideas for the purpose of incitingstrife, ridiculing or insulting a heavenly religion or a sectfollowing it, or damaging national unity” with a fine or im-prisonment of six months to five years.45 Under the HosniMubarak regime, government officials regularly abused thisvaguely worded article,46 interpreting it to place broad re-strictions on speech so that it criminalized proselytism andhuman rights activism.47 For example, two human rightsactivists, Adel Fawzy and Peter Ezzat, were detained and ac-cused of propagating anti-Islamic material on a websitethat details the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt.48

While Christians have also been prosecuted, Muslims con-stitute the majority of the victims of Egypt’s blasphemy

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laws. A well-known case in Egypt is that of Abdel KarimSuleiman. In 2007, Suleiman, a former student of al-AzharUniversity, was sentenced to four years in prison for blas-pheming Islam, provoking sectarian strife, and criticizingthen-president Mubarak. Suleiman had written blog postscriticizing the Muslim role in the 2005 Alexandria attackson Coptic Christians, calling Mubarak a “dictator,” andcalling al-Azhar “the university of terrorism” and accusingit of limiting free thought.49

In Pakistan, the abuse endemic to its blasphemy lawsstems from both government and mob action. The laws’ lan-guage invites such abuse, being vague and expansive incriminalizing mere sounds, gestures, placement of objects,and indirect defamation in addition to written and spokenwords. Such blasphemy offenses are punishable by fines,imprisonment, or death.50

Recently, Rifta Masih, an eleven-year-old ChristianPakistani girl with Down syndrome, faced the death penaltyfor allegedly burning the Qurʼan.51 She was accused by herneighbors in August 2011 and severely beaten by local vigil-antes before being arrested by the police on blasphemycharges.52 The accusation resulted in angry protests de-manding that the approximately nine hundred Christiansliving on the outskirts of the city of Islamabad leave theneighborhood where they have lived for almost two dec-ades.53

Blasphemy laws in Pakistan have led to the routine perse-cution of the Ahmadiyya community in particular, a plight ithas faced since 1953.54 It is the only minority religiousgroup referred to by name in the more recently enactedblasphemy laws. As an example of the expansive and abus-ive effects of those laws, in February 2012, Abdul Qudoos,the president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in

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Rabwah, Punjab, was illegally detained for thirty-five days55

and brutally tortured into confessing to a murder that hedid not commit, even though there was no evidence con-necting him to the crime.56 He was also pressured to falselyimplicate the Ahmadiyya leadership. The callous treatmentof Qudoos during his thirty-five-day confinement led to in-ternal injuries that soon proved fatal.57 No charges wereever brought against his assailants.

Like Pakistan, Indonesia imposes severe restrictions onthe Ahmadiyya community, as evidenced by the 2008government-issued joint decree that violates the sect’s reli-gious freedoms.58 This decree is a product of the culture offear created, perpetuated, and legitimized by the Blas-phemy Act. The act enables and encourages such perse-cutory measures by inviting the violation of religious free-dom and free speech in the name of preventing so-called re-ligious defamation—that is, the expression of denigratinglanguage about religions. Though proponents of such de-famation prohibitions offer the pretense of balancing reli-gious and expressive freedoms with respect for religionsand religious persons, the actual effects of such policies areunambiguously discriminatory, belying the claims of even-handedness. The Blasphemy Act promotes not respect butreligious intolerance, which has devastating repercussionsfor dissenters and adherents of minority faiths. It is alsodetrimental to the building of a democratic culture guidedby pluralist values and respect for different faiths. In theabsence of such a civic culture, democratic legal proced-ures face a difficult future.

As such, when the opportunity arose to work on the re-peal of the act—the first time it would be challenged59—Ihoped the Indonesian Constitutional Court would see it forwhat it truly is: not only an unconstitutional infringement

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of its citizens’ rights to freedom of expression, religion, andconscience, bad enough in itself, but also, more broadly, anoft-accepted invitation to the harassment and abuse ofminority religious groups. The day the court announced itsdecision was one of anticipation at the prospect that In-donesia would finally embrace more robust understandingsof these freedoms for its diverse people and their develop-ing democratic society. Such hopes, however, were dashed.

The Constitutional Court’s Opinion: Upholding theBlasphemy Act

The Indonesian Constitutional Court grounded its eight-to-one decision upholding the Blasphemy Act on the followingthree claims:

1. The philosophical foundations of the Indonesian stateand its concerns about maintaining public order cir-cumscribe its obligations under international law.

2. National values embedded in the constitutionalscheme circumscribe the individual freedoms that In-donesia’s Constitution affords.

3. While the legislature has reason to reconsider variouselements of the Blasphemy Act, any judicial repeal be-fore legislative action would create a dangerous legalvacuum, in which vigilante action and injury to publicorder are likely to occur.

In addressing Indonesia’s obligations under internationallaw, the Constitutional Court asserted that “the respect ofthe State towards various conventions and other interna-tional law instruments . . . shall be in compliance with Statephilosophy and the constitution of . . . Indonesia.”60 This

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statement reflects the court’s overall approach throughoutits opinion of contrasting Indonesian and Western rule-of-law principles.

The court used the United States as a point of contrast toillustrate that, unlike the United States, Indonesia is not asecular country. For example, it asserted (incorrectly) thatthe U.S. Constitution bars the teaching of religion in publicschools, whereas in Indonesian schools, adherence to Pan-casila makes religious studies mandatory.61 Moreover, inthe court’s view, Indonesia differs from the United Statesbecause Indonesian society values a belief in God and doesnot have space for atheism—as the court made clear, In-donesia would never “allow campaigns on freedom from re-ligion” and “freedom to anti-religion.”62 The court further-more contrasted Indonesia from the West by stating that“the rule of law principle upheld by Indonesia” is one of “alaw-based state that enshrines the principles of belief inone God as the main principle . . . not a state that separatesreligion and the state, and not merely based on individual-is[tic] . . . principles.”63

Even while painting this stark contrast, however, thecourt sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Blas-phemy Act within the framework of international law. It in-voked the International Covenant on Civil and PoliticalRights (ICCPR), Article 19, Paragraph (3), which includesthe provision that “the right to freedom of religion shallalso be conducted with responsibilities”:64 “The exercise ofthe rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carrieswith it special duties and responsibilities. It may thereforebe subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only besuch as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) For re-spect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) For the

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protection of national security or of public order (orderpublic), or of public health or morals.”65

The court also relied on the ICCPR’s Article 18,66 whichstates that religious freedom “may be subject only to suchlimitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary toprotect public safety, order, health, or morals or the funda-mental rights and freedoms of others.”67 The court heldthat these limits justified the Blasphemy Act’s state-backedcensure of religious interpretations that “could trigger re-actions that threaten security and public order if [they are]expressed or practiced in public.”68 In other words, the gov-ernment could limit blasphemous statements as a means ofpreserving public order, including a mere statement of be-lief by a minority religious group deemed blasphemous forits nonconformity to state-defined orthodoxy.

The court struck a similar tone with regard to the Indone-sian Constitution. According to the court, the Constitutionwas the product of a “compromise process among twoschools of thought.”69 “The principle of a secular state wasdeclined as well as an Islamic state,”70 but the Constitutionreflects an agreement that “the State shall be based uponthe belief in the One and Only God.”71 As such, “in thename of freedom, no individual or group shall be allowed toundermine the spiritual level of the society that has beeninherited as the values that constitute various laws and reg-ulations in Indonesia.”72 Claiming that the Constitution’s“mutual agreement among [the] Indonesian people”73 re-jects the concept of religion as merely a private matter, thecourt explained that “limitation shall not always be inter-preted as discrimination.”74 In fact, “if a limitation is aimedat protecting other people’s rights and applied in the or-derly life of the . . . state . . . it . . . shall be regarded as aprotection of other people’s human rights” and as a

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protection of the Indonesian people’s “cultural . . . and reli-gious identities.”75

These last points are key. In upholding the BlasphemyAct, the court indicated it was respecting identities and pro-tecting human rights. However, especially in keeping withits earlier contrast between Indonesia and the West, itmakes clear that it defines human rights differently thanthe West. For one, in Indonesia there is greater emphasison communal rights (as opposed to individual rights).76 In-dividual rights cannot trump the rights of the larger group.Moreover, the rights in question are not the rights tochoose or change one’s religion or freely to express oneselfin the public square. Rather, the language of human rightsis used in this context to delineate a supposed right not beoffended or insulted in one’s religious sensibilities, as ifthey were a kind of property the law protects against tres-pass. To define human rights in this way means criminaliz-ing not only the intentional mocking or ridiculing of reli-gion but also genuine doctrinal disagreement. To be an Ah-madiyya Muslim in this context is to violate the rights ofother Muslims, regardless of how respectfully one expressesone’s views. To express Ahmadiyya beliefs, in other words,is to violate human rights. By describing the Blasphemy Actas within human rights norms, the Indonesian court thusused the language of human rights to put severe limits onthe freedoms of religion and expression. Such use rendersgenuine dialogue extremely difficult, as the language of hu-man rights becomes more an ideological tool than a mean-ingful standard.

Such a reading of human rights is all the more problem-atic given that after defending the Blasphemy Act on inter-national law and constitutional grounds, the court concededthat it had been applied in problematic ways. The court

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viewed the abuses endemic to the act, however, as simplyincidental, stemming merely from a problematic applicationof the law, which thus did not necessitate its repeal: “TheCourt is of the . . . opinion . . . that the imperfection of theapplication of the Law on the Prevention of Religious Blas-phemy at the contextual level occurred due to misapplica-tions; therefore it does not necessarily nullify the norms en-shrined in the Law on the Prevention of Religious Blas-phemy.”77 The court feared that repealing the act withoutfirst enacting a better substitute would lead to “horizontalconflicts, anarchism and religious misuse in the society.”78

This would also leave a legal vacuum, an “absence of gener-al guarantee of protection which raises the concern aboutvigilante actions because [the] law enforcement apparatuswill forfeit their legal basis . . . to prevent religious misuseand/or blasphemy.”79 The irony is that the types of vigilant-ism and disruptions to public order that the court sought toavoid were already occurring under the guise of the Blas-phemy Act it upheld.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT’S FLAWED REASONING

The court’s reasoning is severely flawed in three primary re-spects. First, it misinterprets both the U.S. legal standard of“incitement to violence” and the public order exception ofthe ICCPR’s Article 18(3). Second, it focuses on the protec-tion of religions rather than of religious adherents. Andthird, it confuses the relationship between secularization onthe one hand and broad free speech and religious freedomrights on the other.

Misunderstanding the Public Order Exception

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There are numerous problems with the court’s reasoning,foremost among them that it fails to properly understandIndonesia’s obligations under international law. Indonesiais a signatory to the ICCPR and the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights (UDHR) and has further outlined its commit-ment to these international instruments in its HumanRights Act of 1999 (HRA), whose preamble states, “As amember of the United Nations, the nation of Indonesia hasa moral and legal responsibility to respect, execute, and up-hold the [UDHR] promulgated by the United Nations, andseveral other international instruments concerning humanrights ratified by Indonesia.”80 The HRA goes on to acknow-ledge that these instruments are “legally binding in Indone-sia.”81 Indonesia ratified the ICCPR in 2006 without reser-vations and, in doing so, pledged to protect the comple-mentary freedoms of expression, association, and equal pro-tection, for both religious majorities and minorities.82

While the ICCPR states that these rights may “be subjectto certain restrictions . . . (a) For respect of the rights orreputations of others; (b) For the protection of national se-curity or of public order (order public), or of public healthor morals,” it notes that “these shall only be such as areprovided by law and are necessary.”83 Though the conceptof necessity is potentially vague, it at least suggests theleast intrusive means of achieving the allowable restric-tions. Yet the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of theselimits broadens their scope to the point where they threatento swallow the rights themselves. As the UN Human RightsCommittee’s official commentary on the ICCPR’s Article18(3) makes clear, the limiting clause is to be construedvery narrowly: “Restrictions are not allowed on grounds notspecified there, even if they would be allowed as restrictionsto other rights protected in the Covenant, such as national

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security. Limitations may be applied only for those purposesfor which they were prescribed and must be directly relatedand proportionate to the specific need on which they arepredicated. Restrictions may not be . . . applied in a dis-criminatory manner.”84 The Indonesian attorney general’sauthority to prosecute expression that might “potentiallyendanger people and country”85 far exceeds the ICCPR’spublic order exceptions. The word potentially itself is anopen-ended invitation to prosecutorial discretion.Moreover, linguistically, “public order” encompasses farless than the court held it did. For example, the French ver-sion of the ICCPR sheds greater light on the circumstancesthat the court claims justify the limitations imposed by theBlasphemy Act. Rather than the term ordre publique, theFrench ICCPR uses the term la protection de l’ordre, whichstrongly suggests that concrete violent disturbances posingimminent safety threats are what trigger permissible inter-ferences with religious freedom.86

This conception of public order is at the heart of the “in-citement to violence” standard in U.S. free speech jurispru-dence, the contours of which shed light on what constitutesa legitimate threat to public order under international law.In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court held thatthe government can punish inflammatory speech if and onlyif it is not only directed to inciting but likely to incite im-minent lawless action: “The constitutional guarantees offree speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid orproscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation ex-cept where such advocacy is directed to inciting or produ-cing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or pro-duce such action.”87 Under this standard, even laws thattarget generalized advocacy of violence are struck down asoverly broad.88 In Noto v. United States, the court

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confirmed that the “mere abstract teaching . . . of the moralpropriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force andviolence, is not the same as preparing a group for violentaction and steeling it to such action.”89

Even with such stringent standards, the U.S. SupremeCourt consistently recognizes that the public order argu-ment is easily misused, and cautions strongly against limit-ations on speech: “When clear and present danger of riot,disorder . . . or other immediate threat to public safety,peace, or order, appears, the power of the state to preventor punish is obvious. Equally obvious is that a state may notunduly suppress free communication of views, religious orother, under the guise of conserving desirable condi-tions.”90 The ICCPR mirrors this standard under bothArticle 18’s public order exception and Article 20’s incite-ment clause,91 the latter of which Jeroen Temperman exam-ines in detail in chapter 10. The UN special rapporteurs forracism and freedom of religion or belief have stated thatlowering this threshold is likely to promote an atmosphereof religious intolerance.92 In stark contrast, the IndonesianConstitutional Court construed the ICCPR’s “public order”limit as referring merely to general public sentiment, whichmakes it notably more subjective and vastly more prohibit-ive of speech and expression.

Also instructive are the three elements that the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights (ECHR) requires to be satisfied be-fore the ICCPR’s Article 18 rights can be limited. First,“limitations can only be imposed by law, and in particular,by laws that comport with the rule of law ideal.”93 Thus,“limitations may not be retroactively or arbitrarily imposedon specific individuals or groups; neither may they be im-posed by rules that purport to be laws, but are so vague that

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they do not give fair notice of what is required or they allowarbitrary enforcement.”94

Second, a limitation will not be valid unless it is enactedin furtherance of the strictly construed social ends listed inthe ICCPR’s Article 18(3), that is, public safety, public or-der, health and morals, or rights and freedoms of others.95

And third, there must be genuine necessity,96 which theECHR has said cannot be found unless the limitation on re-ligious freedom responds to a “pressing social need” in amanner “proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.”97

Discriminatory and arbitrary governance cannot pass thegenuine necessity test.98 Again, unlike broad blasphemylaws that purport to respect the “rights and freedoms ofothers”—as the Indonesian Constitutional Court claimedthe Blasphemy Act does—ECHR- and ICCPR-justified limita-tions on speech must be narrowly tailored to serve a legit-imate aim (and according to the ECHR-ICCPR framework,protecting individuals from insult or ideas from criticism isnot a legitimate aim). Moreover, the restrictions must benecessary, proportionate, nondiscriminatory, andnonarbitrary.

The Blasphemy Act does not meet any of these conditions.It makes it unlawful “to, intentionally, in public, communic-ate, counsel, or solicit public support for an interpretationof a religion or a form of religious activity that is similar tothe interpretations or activities of an Indonesian religionbut deviates from the tenets of that religion.”99 Advocacy ofinterpretations that deviate from the teachings “consideredfundamental by scholars of the relevant religions”100

(Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism,Buddhism, and Confucianism) is subject to civil and crimin-al penalties,101 including up to five years in prison102 foran expression or act “which principally ha[s] the character

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of being at enmity with, abusing or staining a religion ad-hered to in Indonesia” or has “the intention to prevent aperson to adhere to any religion based on the belief of thealmighty God.”103 The act thus discriminates in favor of thesix approved religions and against all others. Even withinthose faiths, it protects only those interpretations “con-sidered fundamental” by some scholars and not others.

Moreover, the Blasphemy Act’s vague language results insubjective interpretation and prosecution, increasing thepotential for abuse by government officials and creatinglegal uncertainty. While the act threatens citizens with rep-rimands, sanctions, and prison for engaging in “religiousactivities [that] are similar” to those of government-ap-proved religions and “interpretations and activities thereof”that “deviate” from the “tenets of the religion,”104 itprovides virtually no instruction to law enforcement (or toIndonesian citizens) as to the scope of such “deviant” beha-vior. The Constitutional Court’s reassurance that a judgewill have the authority to “assess the gravity of punishmentin accordance on case-by-case basis”105 does little to allevi-ate such concerns.

Indonesia also cannot successfully argue that the act re-sponds to a “genuine necessity.” Although the court alludedto potential “horizontal . . . conflicts and . . . hostilities inthe society,”106 it offered no evidence besides the “highsensitivity level of religiousness of the Indonesianpeople”107 to support its contention that diversity of reli-gious expression would lead to violence. In fact, the courtadmitted that whether or not annulment of the law wouldresult in anarchism and vigilantism was essentially a toss-up: “There is no guarantee that the above-mentioned twopossibilities will happen.”108 However, according to thecourt, “the current condition in Indonesia has shown that

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there are some groups in the society [that] commit vigilanteviolence due to the blasphemy committed against their reli-gion. . . . Hence, for the sake of public protection and to an-ticipate conflicts in the society . . . the Law on the Preven-tion of Religious Blasphemy is important.”109 This view isexactly backward. It shifts the standard for prohibiting ex-pression from a speaker intending to incite likely imminentviolence to some groups desiring to use violence as a re-sponse to unwanted expression. It thereby incentivizes viol-ence as a tool that various groups can employ to hamper orprevent speech they deem undesirable.

Thus despite the court’s concerns about the effect of alegal “vacuum,” repealing the act would go a long way to-ward more effectively achieving public order. Analyzing so-ciological data on just this point, Brian J. Grim and RogerFinke explain that “while governments typically view reli-gious regulation as a necessity to maintain order and re-duce potential violence, the irony is that more regulationleads to increased persecution, which means less order andmore violence, as shown by the data.”110 Grim adds that“data shows that countries with no restrictions on conver-sion, in particular, tend to have higher levels of fundament-al freedoms, better lives for women, and less overall armedconflict.”111 The laws a government enacts incentivize cer-tain kinds of behavior, and blasphemy laws incentivize theviolent intolerance of minority opinion. This approach thusproduces a culture of impunity, invariably leading to more,not less, social violence.

Indeed, as the former U.S. diplomat and international af-fairs scholar Thomas F. Farr observes, state repression ofreligious expression “reflects and portends” religious ex-tremism.112 Allowing government authorities to pick win-ners and losers in the “marketplace of (religious) ideas”

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induces a form of market failure: ideas that are given amonopoly on truth are isolated from competition, allowingthat which might not stand up to critical review or popularsentiment to avoid the natural consequences of such rejec-tion.113 The deleterious effects of protecting such monopol-ies of opinion from competition have been decried for cen-turies, as Christopher S. Grenda’s chapter 1 indicates. Bythe same token, ideas entirely excluded from the publicsquare ferment in isolation, taking on more extreme con-tours than they would in the light of day.114

Rather than clamping down on all manner of peacefulspeech that might potentially offend the highly sensitive,Indonesia can protect public order through effective en-forcement of already existing criminal statutes—punishingviolent behavior by enforcing laws against, for example, bat-tery, assault, murder, and arson. There is no legal vacuumthreatening social anarchy so long as law and order is main-tained through legal pressure on those threatening or in-flicting actual violence.

Protecting Ideas, Not People

The Indonesian Constitutional Court expressed concernsthat public dissemination of contrarian religious views“could trigger reactions from the people, which in the endcould trigger social chaos, because the related religiouscommunity would feel religiously blasphemed and insultedby the said deviant interpretation.”115 Indeed, far from be-ing a narrowly tailored restriction or legislation of last re-sort, the Blasphemy Act functions preemptively, asking al-most nothing of adherents of the government-approved reli-gions in the way of controlling their own hostile reactions.In this way it fails to comport with the rule of law as

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understood in most liberal democracies. The BlasphemyAct, by restricting the expression and exercise of religionsthat “deviate from the tenets of [an approved religion],”places more importance on protecting religious ideas thanon protecting religious adherents.116 In so doing, it under-mines the foundation of human rights law, which is the pro-tection of the individual human being, not religions, ideolo-gies, or governments. Advocates of blasphemy laws,however, argue that human rights protections should in-clude beliefs as well persons. Because such beliefs are asso-ciated with minority views in some contexts and formerlycolonized societies in others, this use of human rights lan-guage can be alluring.117 The reality, however, is that theappropriation often performs a very different, rigidlystifling, function.

As a signatory to several international documents, includ-ing the UDHR and the ICCPR, Indonesia is obligated to up-hold human rights to conscience, speech, assembly, and thepress. The UDHR and the ICCPR protect the individual hu-man being and state that everyone is free and “equal in dig-nity and rights” and “endowed with reason and con-science.”118 The principal ICCPR religious freedom articlesexplicitly protect expression of thought, conscience, and re-ligion, without regard to the content of this expression. It isimportant to note this critical distinction, as the ICCPRdoes not guarantee protection of particular ideas from dis-tortion or challenge in the public square but instead en-sures that those expressing such beliefs—particularlyminority or unpopular beliefs—are protected.

Rather than using the power of the state to protect an in-dividual’s right to freely express unpopular (or even popu-lar) thought, the Blasphemy Act sanctions state repressionof individual speakers’ rights. Free to act on their

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prejudices, local officials and judges empower violent actorsagainst critics and dissenters. Yet the ability to express dis-agreement and dissent on the most sensitive matters is pre-cisely what international law seeks to protect. By deviatingfrom the state’s legitimate role in protecting each speaker’sright of expression, Indonesia has made itself the arbiter ofwhich ideas warrant protection and which do not.119

The 2009 arrest of members of the Sion City of AllahChristian sect perfectly illustrates both the tragic and theabsurd effects of the act. The police alleged that the sectblasphemed Protestant Christianity120 because (1) itsteachings are based on the Bible’s Book of Jeremiah alone,(2) it prohibited church attendance on Sundays, and (3) itrejected communion and wedding ceremonies conducted bythe Timor Evangelical Church, the largest Protestant organ-ization in the province.121 The Timor Evangelical Church,whose teachings the state claimed it was protecting, wasnot consulted and did not approve of the prosecution. Notonly did the state use the Blasphemy Act to inject itself intointernal religious questions, but it did so to “protect” a reli-gion from practices that the allegedly aggrieved organiza-tion did not deem offensive. As the head of the local policeunit responsible for investigating the incident remarked,“We hope the church will not interfere into the case.”122

Conflating Broad Rights with Secularization

In its opinion upholding the Blasphemy Act, the IndonesianConstitutional Court noted repeatedly that Indonesia is, inapparent contrast to the Western world, an intrinsically re-ligious country. The court added that the Blasphemy Actfurthers the constitutional directive to “protect all thepeople of Indonesia” by protecting its six officially

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sanctioned religions from public reproach. This, in turn, en-sures that the public at large will remain committed to reli-gious principles.123

However, the court was mistaken in equating broad reli-gious freedom and free speech rights with antireligious sen-timent. While advocates for these rights do envision a placefor “irreligious” ideas in the public square, efforts to repealthe Blasphemy Act do not seek to undermine Indonesia’sspiritual foundations. In fact, it is precisely because “In-donesia is a nation that believes in God and not an atheistnation”124 that the freedom to engage in contentious reli-gious discourse is so vital.

The court was not incorrect in noting that “an interpreta-tion can lead to the truth but also has the potential to bewrong.”125 It is, however, ultimately a great strain on a reli-gious society when the marketplace of religious ideas is notopen and free.126 Much as free competition in the market-place for consumer goods necessitates improvement and re-sponsiveness to one’s constituency, the free marketplace ofreligious ideas forces religious speakers to improve theirrhetoric, refine their preaching, and reflect on their teach-ings.127 Moreover, openly questioning religious precepts al-lows believers to arrive at the answers intellectually andthrough sincere spiritual conviction, which can lead to reli-gious flourishing. Legislation cannot and should not serveto ensure a state of religious homeostasis.

Religious flourishing is relevant to both majority andminority religions in Indonesia, and to theological and oth-er discourses. The Blasphemy Act makes it difficult forpeople of all faiths to debate the issues of the day in theirreligious tradition for fear of challenging status quo (andgovernment-backed) interpretations and facing criminal

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prosecution for blasphemy. In a deeply religious nation, thiseffect is clearly harmful.

NOTES

I thank the Becket Fund interns Abrar Qadir and Iten Naguib fortheir assistance with this chapter.

1. Richard C. Paddock, “Separation of Mosque, State Wanes in In-donesia,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2006, A1; U.S. State Depart-ment, “International Religious Freedom Report 2007,” “Indonesia”section, accessed December 29, 2009, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90137.htm.

2. Minister of Religious Affairs Muhammad M. Basyuni, AttorneyGeneral Hendarman Supandji, and Minister of the Interior H.Mardiyanto, “Indonesian Joint Ministerial Decree (SKB) against Ah-madiyah,” June 9, 2008, accessed December 18, 2009, www.theper-secution.org/world/indonesia/docs/skb.html (hereafter cited as JointDecree).

3. Asian Legal Resource Centre, “Indonesia: Attacks on ReligiousMinorities Remain Largely Unchallenged by Justice Institutions,”Persecution of Ahmadiyya Musilm Community, www.persecu-tionofahmadis.org/indonesia-attacks-on-religious-minorities-remain-largely-unchallenged-by-justice-institutions/. See also U.S. State De-partment, “International Religious Freedom Report 2008,” “Indone-sia” section, accessed February 28, 2013, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2008/108407.htm.

4. Asian Human Rights Commission, “Indonesia: Blasphemy LawShould Be Repealed to Show Indonesia’s Commitment to the Protec-tion of Freedom of Expression,” June 7, 2012,www.humanrights.asia/news/alrc-news/human-rights-council/hrc20/ALRC-CWS-20-04-2012.

5. “Annual Report of the United States Commission on Interna-tional Religious Freedom,” Indonesia chapter, May 2009, accessedFebruary 28, 2013, www.uscirf.gov/images/AR2009/indonesia.pdf.See also U.S. Department of State, “International Religious FreedomReport 2008,” “Indonesia” section, which details many examples oflocal enforcement of blasphemy laws.

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6. Melissa Crouch, “The Indonesian Blasphemy Case: Affirmingthe Legality of the Blasphemy Law,” Oxford Journal of Law and Reli-gion 1, no. 2 (July 2012): 1–5.

7. “Indonesia Profile,” BBC News, accessed September 5, 2010,www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14921238.

8. Brian Padden, “Tensions Test Indonesia’s Moderate MuslimImage,” Voice of America, August 1, 2010, www.voanews.com/eng-lish/news/asia/Tensions-Test-Indonesias-Moderate-Muslim-Image-99757334.html.

9. Joko Mirwan Muslimin, “Islamic Law and Social Change: AComparative Study of the Institutionalization and Codification ofIslamic Family Law in the Nation-States Egypt and Indonesia(1950–1995)” (PhD dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2005), 97(on file with author).

10. Arskal Salim, Challenging the Secular State: The Islamizationof Law in Modern Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,2008), 123.

11. Michael Finkel, “Facing Down the Fanatics,” National Geo-graphic, October 2009, 76, available at http://ngm.nationalgeograph-ic.com/2009/10/indonesia/finkel-text/1.

12. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assist-ance, “Religious Pluralism,” www.idea.int/publications/country/up-load/11_religious_pluralism.pdf.

13. See M. Syafiʼi Anwar, “The Paradox of Indonesia’s Democracyand Religious Freedom,” Freedom at Issue (blog), Freedom House,June 21, 2012, www.freedomhouse.org/blog/paradox-indone-sia%E2%80%99s-democracy-and-religious-freedom#.Uvyc70JdU5A.

14. Gonzalo Vina, “Cameron Says Indonesia’s Democracy OffersHope to the Muslim World,” Bloomberg, April 11, 2012, www.busi-nessweek.com/news/2012-04-11/cameron-says-indonesia-s-democracy-offers-hope-to-muslim-world.

15. “W. Java the ‘Least Tolerant Province,’” Jakarta Post, Decem-ber 20, 2011, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/12/20/w-java-least-tolerant-province.html.

16. Soekarno issued it exactly one week after withdrawing Indone-sia from the United Nations. Presidential Stipulation No. 1/PNPS/1965, cited by Trisno S. Sutanto, “The Challenges of Religious Free-dom: An Indonesian Experience,” paper delivered at the 56th

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General Assembly of Ekumindo (Consortium of European Missions),Stuttgart, Germany, September 14–16, 2006, 5, accessed December23, 2009, www.scribd.com/doc/20317516/The-Challenges-of-Religious-Freedom-in-Indonesia.

17. Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005), 146. Nasakom is an abbreviationof nationalisme (nationalism), agama (religion), and komunisme(communism).

18. Elucidation of Enactment of the President of the Republic ofIndonesia No. 1/PNPS of 1965 Concerning the Prevention of Reli-gious Abuse and/or Defamation, § I(2) (hereafter cited as Elucida-tion). The Blasphemy Act was rarely enforced prior to 1998. Sincethen, however, there have been about 120 individuals convicted un-der it because of their alleged deviant religious views. Crouch, “In-donesian Blasphemy Case,” 2.

19. Sutanto, “Challenges of Religious Freedom.” The present-daycitizen identification card regulations require a declaration of eachperson’s official religion. See Crouch, “Indonesian Blasphemy Case,”4.

20. Presidential Stipulation No. 1/PNPS/1965 was formalized asLaw No. 5/1969, the Law on the Prevention of Blasphemy and Abuseof Religion (hereafter cited as Blasphemy Act).

21. The 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia, ch. X-A,art. 28 E(1)–(3) (hereafter cited as Constitution).

22. Ibid., art. 28 I(1): “The right to freedom of thought and con-science, [and] the right to embrace a religion . . . are basic humanrights that may not be derogated under any circumstances”; ibid.,art. 28 D(1) guarantees that “every person shall have the right of re-cognitions, guarantees, protection, and certainty before a just law,and of equal treatment before the law.” Translations are fromwww.embassyofindonesia.org/about/pdf/IndonesianConstitution.pdf.

23. Opinion of the Court, [3.34.1]. The opinion was published inBahasa. All quotes from it here are the work of a translator I hired.

24. Blasphemy Act, art. 1, makes it unlawful “to, intentionally, inpublic, communicate, counsel, or solicit public support for an inter-pretation of a religion or a form of religious activity that is similarto the interpretations or activities of an Indonesian religion but de-viates from the tenets of that religion.”

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25. Elucidation, § I(3).26. Ibid., § 11, art. 1.27. Ibid., I(4).28. Ibid.29. U.S. State Department, “International Religious Freedom Re-

port 2007,” “Indonesia” section, accessed December 29, 2009,www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90137.htm.

30. Blasphemy Act, art. 2(1).31. Blasphemy Act, art. 2(2).32. Criminal (Penal) Code of the Republic of Indonesia, art.

156(a), available at www.papuansbehindbars.org/?page_id=212(hereafter cited as Criminal Code). Article 4 of the Blasphemy Actadds Article 156(a) to the Criminal Code. The penalty applies to anyexpression or act “which principally ha[s] the character of being atenmity with, abusing or staining a religion adhered to in Indonesia”or has “the intention to prevent a person to adhere to any religionbased on the belief of the almighty God.”

33. Criminal Code, art. 157.34. Public Prosecution Act, Law No. 16/2004, art. 30(3), states

that the attorney general maintains public order and safety by “(c.)supervising the distribution of printed material; (d.) supervisingforms of belief that potentially endanger people and the nation; (e.)preventing the mistreatment and/or contamination of religion.”

35. Freedom House, “Policing Belief: The Impact of BlasphemyLaws on Human Rights—Indonesia,” October 21, 2010,www.refworld.org/docid/4d5a700a2d.html; Melissa Crouch, “JudicialReview and Religious Freedom: The Case of Indonesian Ahmadis,”Sydney Law Review 34 (2012): 545–72; letter of instruction issued byPAKEM Central Bureau, No. 34/Pakem/S.E./61 (April 7, 1961), citedin Sutanto, “Challenges of Religious Freedom,” 4.

36. Elucidation, § I(1). Blasphemy laws have allowed prosecutionfor “unreasonable” and “offensive” speech. These standards havebeen read to include giving charitable aid, criticizing a religious be-lief, or even telling someone that God would be happier if that per-son followed a different religion. There is no religious believer—in-cluding those who promote such laws—who does not value the abilityto assert that his or her beliefs about religious truths are not onlybetter but true. Indeed, freedom of conscience and its expression

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are rooted in the truth of the inherent dignity of the human person,not in the fickle will of the state.

37. Joint Decree.38. U.S. State Department, “International Religious Freedom Re-

port 2009,” “Indonesia” section, October 26, 2009, www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2009/127271.htm. General Soeharto created the MUI, acouncil of Muslim leaders, “as a means of mobilising Muslim sup-port for the government’s development policies.” The Indonesianminister of religion in 1985 stated that its function was “to translategovernment policy into language that the ummah [Muslim com-munity] understands,” such as by issuing fatwas to give legitimacyto these policies. See Tim Kell, The Roots of the Acehnese Rebellion,1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 50. The MUIwas not envisioned as restricting the speech of others but as an or-ganization for community outreach, which is a legitimate and com-mendable form of government interaction with religious groups.

39. United States Commission on International Religious Free-dom, “USCIRF Annual Report 2012—The Commission’s Watch List:Indonesia,” March 20, 2012, www.refworld.org/docid/4f71a66bc.html.

40. U.S. State Department, “International Religious Freedom Re-port 2009,” “Indonesia” section.

41. See Islamic Path, “Pillars of Islam,” July 3, 2013, http://islam-icpath.org/pillars-of-islam/.

42. The creed states that there is no God but God, and that theProphet Mohammed is the last prophet and messenger of God.Qurʼan 33:40 says, “Muhammad is not the father of any one of yourmen, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets; Godhas knowledge of everything” (A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted[London: Allen and Unwin, 1955], 126). See also Ahmad Shafaat,“Muhammad—the Last Prophet,” Islamic Perspectives, August 2004,www.islamicperspectives.com/MuhammadTheLastProphet.htm.

43. Patung, “Al-Qiyadah al-Islamiyah: Mini Theocracy in Bogorand Padang,” Indonesia Matters, October 10, 2007, www.indonesia-matters.com/1435/theocracy.

44. Asma Uddin, “Blasphemy Laws in Muslim Majority Countries,”Review of Faith and International Affairs 9, no. 2 (Summer 2011):

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47–55, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa-pers.cfm?abstract_id=1885757.

45. Penal Code No. 58 of 1937 (Egypt), art. 98(f).46. Amnesty International, “Egypt: Muzzling Civil Society,” MDE

12/021/2000, September 19, 2000, www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3b83b6e817.html.

47. Freedom House, “Policing Belief: The Impact of BlasphemyLaws on Human Rights—Egypt,” October 21, 2010,www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?docid=4d5a700b2d.

48. “Police Arrest Two Christian Activists from Canada-BasedCoptic Group over Anti-Islamic Postings,” Worldwide ReligiousNews, August 9, 2007, http://wwrn.org/articles/25891/?&place=africa&section=orthodox.

49. “Egypt Blogger Jailed for ‘Insult’” BBC News, February 22,2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385849.stm.

50. Pak. Penal Code §§ 295A–295C. § 295A states, “Whoever, withdeliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feel-ings of any class of the citizens of Pakistan, by words, either spokenor written, or by visible representations insults the religion or thereligious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonmentof either description for a term which may extend to ten years, orwith fine, or with both.”

51. However, as is often the case in such circumstances, there arevarying accounts as to what happened and whether anyone saw herburn anything at all. Jon Boone, “Pakistani Girl Accused of QurʼanBurning Could Face Death Penalty,” Guardian, August 19, 2012,www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/19/pakistan-christian-tensions-quran-burning-allegations.

52. Qaiser Zulfiqar, “11-Year-Old Mentally Challenged ChristianGirl Jailed For Blasphemy,” Express Tribune, August 19, 2012, ht-tp://tribune.com.pk/story/424084/11-year-old-%20mentally-challenged-christian-girl-jailed-for-blasphemy/.

53. Boone, “Pakistani Girl Accused of Qurʼan Burning.”54. Aziz Ahmad Chaudhry, The Promised Messiah and Mahdi (Til-

ford, Surrey: Islam International Publications, 1996), 136.Pakistan’s government condemned the anti-Ahmadi demonstrationsof 1953 as a threat to public order and treated Ahmadi persecutionas an attack on its policies. See Amjad Mahmood Khan, “Persecution

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of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan: An Analysis under Inter-national Law,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (Spring 2003):224. The Muneer Inquiry, a 387-page report by Lahore High CourtJustice Muhammad Muneer and Justice M. R. Kiyani on the cause ofthe 1953 riots against Ahmadis, condemned the political motivationof Muslim fundamentalist groups.

55. Asian Human Rights Commission Urgent Appeals Programme,“Pakistan: In a Hate Campaign against the Ahmadis the Police Tor-tured to Death an Innocent School Teacher,” April 3, 2012, www.hu-manrights.asia/news/urgent-appeals/AHRC-UAC-057-2012.

56. Usman Ahmad, “A Murder Most Foul: How Master Abdul Qu-doos Was Tortured and Killed,” Pak Tea House, April 2, 2012, ht-tp://pakteahouse.net/2012/04/02/a-murder-most-most-foul-how-master-abdul-qudoos-was-tortured-and-killed/.

57. “UK: Shaheed Master Abdul Qudoos Death by Torture MatterRaised during Parliamentary Q&A,” Ahmadiyya Times, April 30,2012, http://ahmadiyyatimes.blogspot.com/2012/04/uk-shaheed-master-abdul-qudoos-death-by.html.

58. Joint Decree.59. Melissa Crouch, “Judicial Review and Religious Freedom,”

550.60. Opinion of the Court, [3.34.9].61. Ibid., [3.34.4].62. Ibid., [3.34.11].63. Ibid., [3.34.10].64. Ibid., [3.34.17].65. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Decem-

ber 16, 1966, S. Treaty Doc. No P5-20, PPP U.N.T.S. 171, art. 19, ht-tp://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDe-tails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-4&chapter=4&lang=en (here-after cited as ICCPR).

66. Opinion of the Court, [3.52].67. ICCPR, art. 18(3).68. Opinion of the Court, [3.52].69. Ibid., [3.34.7].70. Ibid.71. Constitution, art. 29, par. (1).72. Opinion of the Court, [3.34.5].

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73. Ibid., [3.34.25].74. Ibid., [3.34.24].75. Ibid., [3.32.23].76. Crouch, “Indonesian Blasphemy Case,” 3.77. Opinion of the Court, [3.65].78. Ibid., [3.42].79. Ibid., [3.41].80. Act Concerning Human Rights (Law No. 39/1999), Preamble

(d) (Indon.).81. Ibid., art. 7(2).82. ICCPR, arts. 19, 21, 26, 27.83. Ibid., art. 19 (emphasis added).84. UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment Adopted by

the Human Rights Committee under Article 40, Paragraph 4, of theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ¶ 8, UN Doc.CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.4 (Sept. 27, 1993) (emphasis added).

85. Law No. 16/2004 on the Public Prosecution Service (Undang-Undang Kejaksaan Republik Indonesia), art. 30(3).

86. Manfred Nowak and Tanja Vospernik, “Permissible Restric-tions on Freedom of Religion or Belief,” in Facilitating Freedom ofReligion or Belief: A Deskbook, ed. Tore Lindholm, W. Cole DurhamJr., and Bahia G. Tahzib-Lie (Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff,2004), 152n23.

87. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447 (1969). But see Gitlowv. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), where the Supreme Court em-ployed a “bad tendency” standard for limiting free speech, which re-sembled the Indonesian court’s “potentially endangering” standard.The U.S. Supreme Court, however, subsequently rejected this stand-ard in Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242 (1937).

88. See Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S., where the court held that Ge-orgia could not criminalize participation in the activities of a politic-al party simply because its doctrine may refer to an ultimate resortto violence against organized government at some indefinite point inthe future; Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), where thecourt held that a trial judge’s instructions were unconstitutional be-cause they allowed for conviction of mere advocacy of forcible over-throw of the government in the absence of evidence regarding thepotential efficacy of such advocacy.

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89. Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290, 298 (1961).90. Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 308 (1940).91. UN Doc. A/HRC/2/3 (September 20, 2006), pars. 39, 47, 50.92. Ibid.93. Sunday Times v. the United Kingdom, 30 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A)

at 30 (1979).94. Religionsgemeinschaft der Zeugen Jehovas and Others v. Aus-

tria, Eur. Ct. H.R., App. No. 40825/98 (July 31, 2008), § 71.95. Ibid.96. Sunday Times, 30 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) at 30.97. Kokkinakis v. Greece, 17 E.H.R.R. 397 (1994) (Eur. Ct. H.R.,

May 25, 1993), par. 49.98. Sahin v. Turkey, Eur. Ct. H.R., App. No. 44774/98 (Grand

Chamber, November 10, 2005); Dogru v. France, Eur. Ct. H.R., App.No. 27058/05 (April 3, 2009), pars. 116, 118.

99. Blasphemy Act, art. 1.100. Ibid., § I(4).101. Ibid., art. 2.102. Criminal Code, art. 156(a).103. Blasphemy Act, art. 4.104. Ibid., art. 1.105. Opinion of the Court, [3.67].106. Ibid., [3.51].107. Ibid., [3.61].108. Ibid.109. Ibid., [3.70] (emphasis added).110. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke, “Religious Persecution in

Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Reli-gious Economies?,” American Sociological Review 72 (August 2007):654.

111. Brian J. Grim, “Religious Freedom: Good for What Ails Us?,”Review of Faith and International Affairs 6, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 5.

112. Thomas F. Farr, “The Widow’s Torment: International Reli-gious Freedom and American National Security in the 21st Century,”Drake Law Review 57, no. 4 (2009): 853.

113. “Roger Trigg: On Religious Freedom and Religious Extrem-ism,” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Geor-getown University, September 9, 2011,

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http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/rfp/essays/roger-trigg-on-religious-freedom-and-religious-extremism.

114. “Jean Bethke Elshtain: On Religious Freedom and ReligiousExtremism,” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs,Georgetown University, September 9, 2011, ht-tp://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/rfp/essays/jean-bethke-elshtain-on-religious-freedom-and-religious-extremism.

115. Opinion of the Court, [3.55].116. See Blasphemy Act, art. 1.117. For example, see Elizabeth Burns Coleman’s chapter 9.118. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217, UN

GAOR, 3d Sess., UN Doc. A/810 (1948), art. 1.119. In a like manner, Muslims attempting to enforce an “anti-

vilification” law very similar to “defamation of religions” measuresargued in a court case in Victoria, Australia, that “truth is not a de-fense” when the defendant, a Pakistani Christian pastor, attemptedto read from the Qurʼan during his court testimony to show that hisstatements regarding Islam were Qurʼanic. Local authorities havealready used this law to forbid the reading of the Qurʼan in publicbecause some Muslims deemed certain passages, read out of con-text, to be defamatory of Islam. “Islamic Council of Victoria v. Catchthe Fire Ministries, Inc., Australia, (2005),” Becket Fund, accessedFebruary 24, 2014, www.becketfund.org/islamic-council-of-victoria-v-catch-the-fire-ministries-inc-australia-2005/.

120. Yemris Fointuna, “Seven Declared Suspects of Blasphemy,”Jakarta Post, June 4, 2009, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/06/04/seven-declared-suspects-blasphemy.html.

121. Yemris Fointuna, “Religious Leaders Regret Police Arrests of‘Defiant’ Sect Figures,” Jakarta Post, June 9, 2009, www.thejakarta-post.com/news/2009/06/06/religious-leaders-regret-police-arrests-defiant039-sect-figures.html.

122. Ibid.123. Opinion of the Court, [3.34.23].124. Ibid., [3.34.3].125. Ibid., [3.52].126. Grim and Finke, “Religious Persecution in Cross-National

Context,” 654.127. Farr, “Widow’s Torment,” 853.

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CHAPTER 9

Profound Offenseand Religion inSecular DemocraciesAn Australian Perspective

ELIZABETH BURNS COLEMAN

In debates concerning the treatment of sacred objects, sym-bols, and figures in multicultural societies, questions oftenarise as to what it means to treat beliefs with respect. Re-sponses from a Millian liberal tradition have generally ar-gued that the idea of treating beliefs with respect is incon-sistent with freedom of expression and that it is illogical toexpect people to respect beliefs and practices with whichthey fundamentally disagree. This chapter explores this re-sponse in relation to an episode in which an Aboriginal Aus-tralian claimed that a book should be pulped for advocatingthat girls learn to play the didgeridoo. Drawing on sociolo-gical and philosophical accounts of identity and civility, thechapter provides an alternative understanding of what itmeans to treat beliefs with respect. It argues that “respectfor beliefs” is best understood as respect for the social

identity of persons and consists in ordinary codes ofpoliteness.

In 2008, the then director of Melbourne University’sCentre for Indigenous Education and general manager ofthe Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, Mark Rose,attacked the HarperCollins book company for publishing abook, The Daring Book for Girls, which includes a sugges-tion that girls might learn to play the didgeridoo. Rosestated that this was a danger equal to “encouragingsomeone to play with razor blades,” as the didgeridoo is amen’s ceremonial instrument that would cause infertility ingirls if they touched it.1 Moreover, he thought that this wasa particularly serious cultural faux pas, a point he under-scored by pointing out that he would not let his daughterstouch a didgeridoo, “out of cultural respect.” Calling for thebook to be pulped, he opined that the chapter was objec-tionable for the manner in which it displayed ignorance ofAboriginal culture and cheapened it through tokenism. Thecompany initially questioned whether all Aboriginal peoplewould be equally offended and declined to respond toRose’s demands but later apologized “unreservedly” to anyAboriginal Australians who were offended and agreed to re-place the relevant chapter in subsequent reprints.2

A liberal society, as Peter Jones has noted, “stands op-posed to a society in which people are compelled to live inaccordance with beliefs they do not share or which, in otherways, pays no heed of the conscientious convictions of thosewho make up its citizens.”3 Rose, though, clearly arguedfrom different premises. He did not advocate criminal pun-ishment for women who play the didgeridoo. He did,however, successfully seek to censor the mere suggestion ofa religious transgression. A liberal might acknowledgeRose’s right to publicly oppose girls playing the didgeridoo

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but would see censorship of the idea of girls playing the in-strument as an unwarranted restriction on the right of cit-izens to express their opinions.

Remarkably, while the incident was widely reported in theAustralian and international press, it did not cause publicdebate or controversy. The response from HarperCollins,which focused on the offense to Rose and other Aboriginalpeople, suggests that it did not accept the premise that awoman would lose her fertility or that the authors and pub-lishers were causing harm to young women. There was alsocomplete silence on the question of whether offense wassufficient reason to pulp a book or to remove a chapter.

There are obvious ways in which breaking religious ta-boos might be considered problematic for cross-cultural re-lations. From at least one perspective, women and girlsplaying the didgeridoo is the equivalent of something likeblasphemy or sacrilege, and advocating that they shouldbreak this taboo might be seen as the equivalent of incite-ment to crime. Moreover, there are elements of cross-cul-tural forms of appreciation that seem entirely innocent,such as aesthetically appreciating a ceremonial mask, thatthe producer society may perceive as akin to blasphemy.4

However, the idea of a specific moral sense of blasphemy orsacrilege has largely been lost in mainstream Australia.5 In1992, the Australian Law Reform Commission recommen-ded that blasphemy be removed from federal legislation andthat legislation that protects religious sensibilities be re-cast in terms of “offensive material,” a recommendationthat was not followed.6 In any case, there has been no suc-cessful prosecution for blasphemy since 1871, and fewcases since then.7 This long disuse appears to have pro-duced a society in which there is no moral distinction madebetween blasphemy and offensiveness.

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This chapter explores what respect for beliefs mightmean in an Australian context and whether this examplehas any implications for rethinking liberal theory. It is intwo parts. The first part uses this incident as a case study toshow there is a stalemate in Australian public and academicdiscourse that liberal theory does not adequately address. Itbegins with a critical examination of Rose’s positionthrough the framework of Jones’s argument that the idea ofrespecting belief is incompatible with an argument for free-dom of expression based on truth and collapses into ab-surdity.8 Through this framework, it is clear that Rose’sviews are not liberal. This next section shows that the argu-ment for freedom of expression from truth is unlikely tosway someone like Rose because it is based in an objectivistaccount of truth that he rejects as an ideology of colonialdomination. The second part of the chapter explores publicdebate and cross-cultural engagement in Australia with aview to bringing this discussion back to critique Jones’s in-terpretation of respect for beliefs. The first section in thispart briefly discusses political correctness, exploring thereasons that some indigenous Australians have expressedfor wishing to suppress facts about their communities, andrecognizing academics’ reasonable fears of offending indi-genous people or of seeming to be unsympathetic. Butagainst the interpretation that all self-censorship is bad, itpresents an argument for a right not to be offended, as away in which to analyze the morality of public debate. Thesecond section argues that the concept of respect for be-liefs is best understood as a deference code of politeness,and the final section draws together observations from thisAustralian experience to suggest some very general conclu-sions about the moral limits of debate in multicultural soci-eties. The morality of expression is logically distinct from

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its legality and from what the legal limits of expressionshould be. Accordingly, this chapter will not address the de-sirability or otherwise of blasphemy laws or religious or ra-cial vilification statutes.

A LIBERAL POSITION EXTENDED

In his influential article “Respecting Beliefs and RebukingRushdie,” Peter Jones responded to Muslim protests overthe publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The SatanicVerses with what may be considered a standard liberal in-terpretation of the limits of society to restrict the acts andexpressions of its members.9 In the novel, the central char-acter, Mahound, is a secularized version of the Prophet Mo-hammed. He is represented as an insincere businessmanand, in the words of Shabbir Akhtar, “a calculating oppor-tunist devoid of conscience, making and breaking the rulesas he pleases, confusing (or perhaps deliberately identify-ing) good with evil as the mood takes him.”10 The depictionof Mohammed in this manner led to international protestsby Muslims and a widely criticized fatwa imposing the deathpenalty on Rushdie for his blasphemy.

Jones begins from the widely accepted premise that in or-der to achieve a liberal society, we should agree to the prin-ciple that everyone should be able to live according to theirown beliefs and desires, so long as these do not harm oth-ers. This is known in political philosophy as the harm prin-ciple, first developed by J. S. Mill in On Liberty (1859). Ac-cording to Mill, the only exceptions to this principle con-cern people who do not have responsibility for their actions,such as children and people with a mental illness or infirm-ity.11 The harm principle justifies laws that would preventgirls from playing the didgeridoo if doing so actually caused

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infertility.12 Yet as Jones notes, it does not restrict othersfrom criticizing a belief or from acting in a manner contraryto it.13 The harm principle allows women to choose to playthe didgeridoo (irrespective of whether it causes themharm) and parents to decide whether their children shouldbe allowed to play.

Offense to Others

While Mill suggests that the only legitimate grounds a soci-ety may have for restricting actions or speech is based onharm, Joel Feinberg has pointed out that liberal democra-cies also restrict behavior simply on the grounds that it isoffensive.14 Similarly, there is a widespread moral intuitionthat perhaps we should limit what may be said or done inrelation to other people’s most cherished religious beliefson this basis. People can acknowledge that something maycause offense to others, even when they do not share thebeliefs in question and consider them to be mistaken.15

Offense is an unpleasant state including a wide range ofexperiences that may be displeasing, annoying, irritating, ordisgusting. Other forms of offensive behavior against whichliberal states have laws concern feelings, such as respectfor the dead, reflected in laws against the desecration ofgraves. Feinberg suggests that all experiences of offenseare a type of harm, although liberal states do not protectpeople from all kinds of offensive experiences. Feinberg dis-tinguishes between two types of offense: an “offensive nuis-ance” is caused by proximity to something unpleasant; a“profound offense” may be deep in that it upsets peopleemotionally and potentially traumatizes them, even whencaused by the sheer knowledge of something’s existence.Feinberg argues that the legal restriction of offensive

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nuisance is compatible with freedom of expression, al-though legally restricting profound offense is not. One wayof distinguishing between the two kinds of offenses is thatif mere offense is morally wrong, it is wrong because it isoffensive, while profound offense is considered offensive be-cause it is believed to be morally wrong.16

It might be thought that Rose’s dislike of The DaringBook for Girls was caused by the fact that it advocatedbreaking an Aboriginal religious taboo concerning womenand girls playing the didgeridoo. If so, his concern must bebased on a profound offense, as he was offended by the bareknowledge that this had been advocated.17 It might be thecase that Rose, or some other Aboriginal person, is very dis-tressed by the idea that, somewhere in Australia, womenand girls are playing the didgeridoo. But this distress can-not be the basis of a legal restriction in a liberal society. AsH. L. A. Hart emphasized, if this kind of distress is con-sidered a harm, “the only liberty that could coexist with thisextension of . . . the principle is liberty to do those things towhich no one seriously objects.”18 So a law protectingpeople from profound offense cannot be made consistentwith liberal principles.

A legal principle of offense is also considered problematicbecause what offends one person might not offend another.In addition, individuals take different levels of offense. Thestrength of the offense taken cannot be considered a clearindication of how offensive something is, as there may bemanufactured offense, and some people take offense far tooeasily, with very little reason. The extremity of Rose’s sens-itivity can be highlighted by means of comparison with whatMuslim groups were responding to when they expressedoutrage over the publication of The Satanic Verses. ShabbirAkhtar explained why he found the novel offensive: “The

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Satanic Verses is written in a language that is at times gra-tuitously obscene and wounding. In the controversial sec-tions about Mahound, the locales Rushdie selects are al-most always sexually suggestive . . . and sometimes even de-grade human nature.”19 In contrast, The Daring Book forGirls did not intentionally ridicule or deride Aboriginal be-liefs. The book did not encourage girls to play the didgeri-doo as a provocative gesture. In addition, Rose’s views maybe considered extreme in comparison with other Aboriginalpeoples’ views.

The Koori Mail, an Aboriginal fortnightly paper with asmall circulation, was the only newspaper that questionedwhether Rose’s view was representative of those of other in-digenous groups. It reported that the Yolngu people did notshare his claim that women and girls, especially Western-ers, should not play the didgeridoo. Its reporters inter-viewed Dhangal Gurruwiwi, who helps her brother, a yidaki(the term for didgeridoo in the Yolngu language) custodian,Djalu Gurruwiwi, run a yidaki business that includes hold-ing workshops about how to play for people of bothgenders. The Mail reported her as saying, “Djalu says that itis okay for other nationalities to play yidaki.” However, oneof its journalists reported that when she attended theGarma festival (a yearly festival organized by Yolngu), shehad observed Yolngu women playing yidakis but was told byother Yolngu people that women never play the instru-ment.20 This contradiction between action and statement isnot irresolvable. The ethnomusicologist Linda Barwickstates that while it is true that in northern Australia womendo not play in traditional ceremonies, there are few restric-tions on women playing in an informal capacity. “The areain which there are the strictest restrictions on women play-ing and touching the didgeridu,” she observes, “appears to

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be in the south east of Australia, where in fact didgeriduhas only recently been introduced.”21 The Garma FestivalYidaki Statement of 1999 set out the appropriate use ofdidgeridoos. It was proposed by Yolngu clan elders, and theanthropologist Karl Neuenfeldt reports that “the statementasserts the clan elders’ custodianship of the yidaki as in-cluding ‘the right to permit the use and teaching’ of it, andit seeks to find ‘ways that Yolngu and Balanda [white/colo-nial Australia] worlds can coexist on the basis of mutual re-spect, shared rituals, and reciprocal obligations.’”22 In1997, the Yolngu elder Mandawuy Yunupingu, “an import-ant media spokesman for his clan,” commented that“Yolngu understand the Yidaki has become an Australianicon and accept that non-Yolngu people throughout theworld now use it for informal purposes and enjoyment. Beaware, however, that its origins are sacred and secret toYolngu men. . . . In Yolngu society women are forbidden toplay it, as its origins are sacred to men.”23 Neither theFestival Yidaki Statement nor the comment by Yunupinguassert that non-Aboriginal women and girls should not playthe didgeridoo. Rather, they assert that the cultural originsof the instrument should be acknowledged and respected. Itis the group with the fewest ties to the didgeridoo and themost intolerant attitudes that Rose represents. This raisesthe questions of who has authority to speak for AboriginalAustralians and why none of them publicly responded tothis kind of “ultraorthodox” representation of their beliefs.However, the answers to such questions could only be spec-ulative. Needless to say, there could be no freedom of ex-pression if the level of offense taken by the most illiberalgroups in a society were used as the basis for laws concern-ing what could be seen or read.

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The intuition that people’s sensibilities about their mostcherished religious beliefs should be protected does not ex-tend to an intuition that others should not be able to makerepresentations that are contrary to those beliefs. As Jonespoints out, blasphemy law evolved in Christian societies toallow freedom of expression so long as the “decencies ofcontroversy” were observed. This allowed even the veryfoundation of Christianity to be attacked in debates overthe existence of God.24 If this same intuition were appliedin relation to Aboriginal beliefs, it would still allow peopleto argue that Creation Beings did not form the earth andthat touching or playing a didgeridoo does not cause infer-tility in women. Indeed, this intuition would allow such be-liefs to be condemned. The assertion that didgeridoo play-ing causes infertility has strong similarities to the religiousclaim that masturbation leads to infertility: both dress mor-ality as fact. The claim that women would become infertileis an instrument of control that aims to justify their exclu-sion from participation in certain roles in religious cere-monies. Sexism remains a problematic area in relation tomulticultural and indigenous rights, in that a person com-mitted to equality in society could not condone discrimina-tion against women in Aboriginal societies.25 Accordingly, aliberal feminist might suggest that as the belief is false anda method of social control, the cultural practice and beliefshould be not only ignored but condemned. What this per-son would not do, and could not do, is respect such beliefs.

Respect for Beliefs

While HarperCollins focused on the issue of offense, Roseemphasized not just the religious sensitivities of a particu-lar group but respect for Aboriginal culture in general. As

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he explained in an interview, “I would say from an indigen-ous perspective,” The Daring Book for Girls was “an ex-treme mistake, but part of a general ignorance that main-stream Australia has about Aboriginal culture.” “I won’teven let my daughter touch [a didgeridoo],” he continued,out of “cultural respect.” Rose feared that the inclusion ofthe didgeridoo lesson in the book sent out a “tokenistic”message about Aboriginal culture. “That’s the issue thatperturbs me the greatest,” he said.26

Appealing to a principle of respect for beliefs changes thenature of the moral issue. According to Jones, the moralwrong of offending others is consequentialist. If no one isoffended, then there is no moral wrong. In contrast, “re-spect for beliefs,” as Jones presents it, is a rights-based no-tion based on the dignity of persons. The argument for thisright is that people are entitled to respect, and, as theyidentify with their beliefs, an attack on their beliefs is an at-tack on them.27 The object of concern is not the belief itselfbut the person who holds it. Jones suggests that if a prin-ciple were to be drawn from the idea of respect for beliefs,it would mean that all citizens (regardless of their religionor lack thereof) should display mutual respect by avoidingconfronting one another’s beliefs.

Jones hypothesizes that the intuition we have about re-specting beliefs is limited. Such respect would concern notall the beliefs a person might have but only those that arecentral to a person’s life and being, as Robert Yelle’schapter 5 also notes. Moreover, some argue that respect forbeliefs is something a person can demand as a condition of“their accepting the obligations of citizenship”—such as be-ing forced to live according to laws with which they may notagree.28

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To suggest that there is a requirement on citizens of aliberal society to respect other people’s beliefs implies that“not only should people be allowed to conduct their lives inaccordance with their most deeply held beliefs, [but] theyshould not have to endure attacks on those beliefs.”29 Ac-cordingly, the injunction to respect beliefs would demandthat no one challenge the beliefs of others with criticismsdesigned to undermine those beliefs. A liberal, however,could not accept this as a moral principle. Mill’s argumentfor freedom of expression based on truth is crucial here. Ac-cording to Jones, “If we are serious about wanting to pos-sess true beliefs, and presumably anyone who professes a‘belief’ must be concerned that it is a true belief, we mustbe willing to live in a society in which all beliefs are open toquestion and none is immune from scrutiny.” But as hepoints out, such an argument would not persuade a personwho believes in revelation as a source of truth, as they thinkthe truth of their beliefs are without question and “ordinarystandards of evidence are irrelevant.” Jones emphasizes,“The fact that people take this view does not entail thatthey rightly take that view.”30 In addition, he concludes, thesuggestion that truth is not an issue in religious beliefwould, or should, be unwelcome by religious adherents whoregard their beliefs as true.

But ultimately, Jones argues that the idea that subjectinga belief to serious examination means not treating the be-lief with respect leads to absurdity. He argues that it ismore insulting to have one’s beliefs treated as though theirtruth or falsity were of no consequence, as then they wouldnot be treated seriously as beliefs. Beliefs aim at truth; wecannot hold a belief and not believe it to be true. But if wewere to accept that people are entitled to have their beliefsrespected, then all beliefs would need to be treated as

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equal. This view falls into contradiction as soon as we real-ize that beliefs both overlap and contradict. When beliefscontradicted one another there would be a need to chooseamong them, to determine which were worthy of protectionand who the victim(s) and the assailant(s) were. There canbe no neutral way of sorting this out. Jones concludes that“the only way of honouring the principle that no-one’s be-liefs should be subject to attack, either explicitly or impli-citly, would be to require, absurdly, that no-one ever givevoice to a belief.”31

The importance of truth is also fundamental to the reasonthat Jones rejects the idea that it is important to maintaintraditional beliefs and customs. He points out that multicul-turalists often fall into the position that what is particularlyimportant is that there should be a diversity of opinions andbeliefs about the world. Jones claims that to think diversityis important is to think “it matters less that peoples’ livesshould be grounded in falsehood than that their existing be-liefs, and the ways of life grounded in them, should remainundisturbed.” This, according to him, is to “freeze beliefs ina social museum, reducing them to mere objects of curios-ity.”32

Yet what if the problem is not knowledge but ignorance?Throughout his discussion, Jones assumes that the beliefsin question are known. The context of Rose’s concern is dif-ferent. He worries about people’s ignorance of Aboriginalculture, or what in another context he has called “the silentapartheid.” This apartheid, he believes, enables the misap-propriation of indigenous culture at the same time as itdenies the validity or truth of indigenous knowledge sys-tems. As Rose has explained, this kind of knowledge segreg-ation is “one of the last bastions of colonial endeavour, the‘colonisation of the mind.’ The silence of this apartheid is

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aided by its invisibility. In it there are no segregated buses,schools, diners or washrooms on which to target rage, butrather an ever consuming intangible ignorance which isharder to recognise.”33 The result of this is that non-Abori-ginal Australians know little about Aboriginal culture otherthan that Aboriginal people are spiritual and have a deepconnection with the land. Yet though Rose decries the wide-spread ignorance about many Aboriginal beliefs, he wouldnot likely wish to see the truth of those beliefs interrogatedas Jones suggests. Nor would he see open debate aboutsuch beliefs as a sign of respect. Rather, he indicates thatAboriginal customs should be observed even when no Abori-ginal people are present because he defines respect for be-liefs as the acceptance of beliefs. He views such acceptanceas necessary for the “cultural competency” required forcross-cultural engagement, where cultural competencymeans “the ability to understand and value Indigenous per-spectives.”34

Rose is clearly not a liberal. He does not endorse indi-vidual liberty short of harm to others but suggests thatpeople should observe the most intolerant Aboriginal be-liefs and customs, such as taboos concerning the didgeri-doo. Nor does he accept that people should be free to readwhat they choose, but calls for the suppression of books iftheir content is inconsistent with those customs. For him,respect does not mean “genuine respect,” in Jones’s senseof considering something worthy of debate and subject totests of its truth claims. Rather, Rose wants non-Aboriginalpeople to gain information about Aboriginal beliefs and cus-toms and to “respect” them without debate.

Rose’s view of respect derives from a different under-standing of the nature of knowledge and truth. He is cor-rect that the religious or spiritual beliefs that advocates

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often refer to as “indigenous knowledge” are excluded fromthe academy. The explanation for this is not simply thatacademics do not know what Aboriginal people believe butthat it is rejected as genuine knowledge. There are tworeasons for this: first, because religion and religious au-thority are central to this knowledge, and second, becausethe epistemology of indigenous knowledge prohibits its crit-ical interrogation.

“Indigenous Knowledge” and Truth

Rose has developed what he describes as an indigenous re-search methodology combining elements of narrative in-quiry with Japanangka, Errol West’s indigenous standpointtheory.35 The Japanangka paradigm is an “Aboriginal cul-tural holistic” comprising “a set of diverse and sophistic-ated cultural norms and practices” that ensure “a context ofcomprehensive cultural maintenance . . . through the capa-city to value all information, expression, theory, action andre-action in the context of the eight Japanangka sub-paradigms.” These subparadigms are categorized as cultur-al, spiritual, secular, intellectual, political, practical, per-sonal, and public. What is particularly interesting aboutthis paradigm is that the “sub-paradigms . . . provide thecapacity to comfortably retain conflicting views, competitiveconcepts and antithetical hypotheses without causing con-flict or confusion that may block the analytical pro-cesses.”36

West combines this paradigm with standpoint theory, avariety of perspectivism.37 This suggests that there aremany different “truths,” some of which may contradict oneanother. Rose has adopted an epistemology based on nar-rative inquiry rather than standpoint theory. Narrative

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inquiry may be described as “a form of epistemology” that,based on a premise that “humans are storytelling organ-isms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives,” isused in education research on the view that “education isthe construction and reconstruction of personal and socialstories.”38

The significance of this different view of knowledge andtruth cannot be overstated. Millian liberals, such as Jones,accept that truth and the objectivity of knowledge are pos-sible. These are achieved through what Jones describes asthe “ordinary” requirements of evidence and rules of logic,such as the law of noncontradiction. Acceptance of this epi-stemology is fundamental to engagement in rational de-bate.39 Jones might possibly concede that people learn andmake sense of the world through narrative (making it a use-ful educational tool or framework), but he would also thinkthat this is entirely consistent with people holding false be-liefs or holding beliefs for poor reasons.

In addition, West’s theory places great emphasis on thedifference between Western and indigenous knowledge. Thebasis of indigenous knowledge is spiritual: “Western epi-stemology differs from Koori epistemology in that . . . we, asAborigines, the traditional ‘owners’ and ‘first owned’ of thiscontinent, already know the origin, nature, methods andlimits of our knowledge systems. . . . The secret of ourknowledge is the unbreakable connection between the spir-itual realm and the physical Earth Mother.”40 The EarthMother is not generally a feature of “traditional” Aboriginalreligions, which describe spirits and ancestors creating theland.41 What is interesting in this context, however, is theconnection between the religious and the spiritual in an on-tology that is considered final or secure.

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West’s perspective on epistemology may be comparedwith that of the devoutly religious person Jones mentions,who does not accept the “ordinary” criteria for the evalu-ation of knowledge, if these involve a process of empiricalevidence and debate according to rational argument. Ac-cording to West, this process would be “ordinary” only inWestern societies.

In all probability, an indigenous person who accepts reli-gious knowledge as the foundation of a relationship withland and law would feel him- or herself deeply at odds withthe argument for freedom of expression from truth and withMill’s process for establishing that something is true. Thisis because some religious knowledge is secret, and thissecrecy is fundamental to the structure of Aboriginal societ-ies. As the anthropologist Peter Sutton has reported, in theWestern Desert region of Australia, “men’s religious su-premacy and the power of senior men over others tradition-ally rested squarely on their highly elaborate secret life inritual and their secret knowledge of the many hidden nar-ratives of the landscape.” Social sanctions to maintainsecrecy included “the threat of physical execution.”42

Execution for disclosing religious secrets emphasizes justhow illiberal some indigenous cultures were and under-scores just how hostile Aboriginal people may be to otherpeople knowing what these beliefs are, let alone to debateon a belief’s veracity. The process of debate would involveholding up belief, and even secret-sacred knowledge, forevaluation. This process itself would undermine traditionalcustodians’ authority. Even if all their beliefs were found tobe true based on a rationalist and empirical methodology,their religious knowledge would no longer be secret.

Like West, Rose identifies Aboriginal identity with spiritu-ality. On one web page he refers to his Aboriginal identity

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and the call of the ancestors, writing, “I stand as a testimo-nial to their power, influence and wisdom. . . . For I am aBlackfella.”43 Rose also appears to agree with West’s cat-egorization of knowledge into “Western” and “Indigenous”knowledge. For Rose, empiricism is a weakness of Westernepistemology and is politically aligned with the colonizationof indigenous people. As he explained, “The Western sys-tem, without being too critical, has been tied up in measur-ing. Charles Darwin used to measure our skulls to see howhuman we were or weren’t. In the search for measurablerealities a whole lot of other realities have been dissipated.”He continued, “We’re working collaboratively looking atdrawing on [indigenous community] knowledge . . . [and]over-turning the destructive experience that research hashad in the lives of many Aboriginal people. It was researchthat under-pinned the removal of many of our people likemy father.”44

It is unclear what the causal connection between the is-sue of “knowledge,” or empirical research techniques, andthe removal of children from indigenous families may be. Asstated, it may be interpreted as a form of ad hominem argu-ment, designed to undermine any knowledge based on em-piricism and rationalism by associating it with an injustice.Yet Rose has a point. In the nineteenth century, both liberaland socialist thinkers agreed that the “great nations” werecivilized and carriers of historical progress, while smallernationalities were “primitive and stagnant, and incapable ofsocial or cultural development.”45 Ideas of progress andfreedom of expression are intimately connected to the senseof superiority of Western nations over indigenous peoples.Mill valued scientific discovery and truth, arguing that theprogress of civilization depends on this openness to debate.He contrasted societies that accepted such debate and

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liberal freedoms with those bound by custom and traditionand argued that the colonization of the latter was justifiedon the basis of the superiority of “civilization” over customand tradition.46 For Mill, the improvement of such societiesjustified policies of paternalism.

Both standpoint theory and narrative theory are based ona concept of knowledge as experience and of truth as “relat-ive to a culture, form of life or standpoint, and therefore,ultimately representing a particular perspective and socialinterest.” As Rob Moore and Johan Muller have pointed out,these experiential truths are in contrast not with falsity ofbelief but with a so-called dominant knowledge, which isidentified as bourgeois, male, or white, that marginalizesthis knowledge. The critique of the claim to objective know-ledge (and the undermining of the status of science, reason,and rationality by representing it as simply the expressionof a dominant group) “is understood as facilitating a movefrom social and educational exclusion to inclusion and so-cial justice.”47 Moore and Muller further draw out the con-trast between the two epistemologies by explaining,“Whereas critical rationalism as an historically radical forcesystematically attempted to separate knowers claims fromknowledge claims (things are not true simply because theChief, the party or Pope says so),” narrative and standpointtheories privilege the knower or the knower’s imputedmembership of a group as the truth criterion.48 The prob-lem with this approach is that it introduces criteria thatcannot be subjected to evaluation, such as personal experi-ences or feelings. In doing so, these theories introduce anabsolutism about truth and an authoritarian form of argu-ment. Standpoint and narrative theories can be consideredwhat Basil Bernstein described as “horizontal discourses.”These are realized in events, cultural situations, and

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practices and lack the structure or procedure for generat-ing nonarbitrary knowledge claims. Vertical discourse, incontrast, takes “the form of a coherent, explicit, and sys-temically principled structure, hierarchically organised, asin the sciences, or it takes the form of a series of special-ised languages with specialised modes of interrogation andspecialised criteria for the production and circulation oftexts as in the social sciences and humanities.”49

Because of this, Rose would recognize what Jones con-siders a respectful interrogation or debate about the truthof belief, or taking those beliefs seriously, not as a form ofrespect but as a form of colonialist imposition that margin-alizes Aboriginal knowledge. There may be good reason forthis. There may also remain the scent of the sense of “su-periority” of people who accept rationalist epistemologiesin their engagement with those who do not. The philosoph-er T. M. Scanlon notes this in passing when he writes, “Ifirmly believe that ‘creation science’ is bogus and that sci-ence classes should not present scientific theory and reli-gious doctrine as alternatives with a similar and equalclaim to the same kind of assent. I therefore do not think itis intolerant per se to oppose creationists. But I confess tofeeling a certain kind of partisan zeal in such cases, a senseof superiority over the people who propose such things anda desire not to let them win a point even if it does not costanyone very much.”50 One suspects he is not alone in hispartisan zeal. In addition, for a standpoint or narrative the-orist, any attempt at interrogating the truth of an idea is lit-erally an attack on the person who holds it, by questioningthe equality of their belief or the authority of their per-spective. The issue of the equality of people becomes con-fused with the issue of equality of belief, and all beliefs arenot equal.

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If West and Rose are correct that for indigenous people,deeply held metaphysical concepts are foundational con-cepts that cannot be questioned, and West’s claim that adesirable epistemology for indigenous research needs todisregard the law of noncontradiction is true, then there isa deep impasse in relations between Aboriginal Australiansand those non-Aboriginal Australians who subscribe to free-dom of expression based on the argument from truth. ForJones, to treat religious belief with respect would be to treatAboriginal beliefs as truth claims that may be rigorously ex-amined. However, what counts as “respect for beliefs” for aliberal academic, and the respect demanded by an indigen-ous standpoint, which takes religious belief as a startingpoint or foundational belief that cannot be examined,means that the two positions cannot address each other interms that the other will accept. The political importance ofthese different ideas about knowledge and truth is that thedisjunction between them makes “rational debate” an im-possible method for resolving differences of opinion. The“victim” here is predetermined—it is the indigenous indi-vidual or group, whose knowledge is marginalized. Any at-tempt to engage on the basis of empirical evidence and lo-gic will be regarded not as respect for belief but as the im-position of a dominant and indeed colonialist ideology. It istempting to conclude, as Jones suggests, that if respectingbeliefs means not affronting the beliefs of other people,then it appears the only way to universalize the position isto withhold one’s opinion, or self-censorship.

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PUBLIC DEBATE, LACK OF IT, AND POLITICALCORRECTNESS

The decision by HarperCollins to remove the chapter on thedidgeridoo from The Daring Book for Girls appears to be aclear case of submission to political correctness. Despitedisagreeing that the book would harm girls or even that allAboriginal people would find it offensive, the publisher re-moved the chapter, presumably to avoid harm to its brandand the sale of the book. Much resentment toward politicalcorrectness concerns the association (rightly or wrongly) offormerly “acceptable” words or actions with racist or sexistprocesses that performatively rearticulate disadvantage anddiscrimination in society.51 The idea that giving offense iswrong and associating offense with intolerance (such assexism, racism, or religious bigotry) may be an effectivestrategy for suppressing the speech of others.

Concern about being accused of racism may have played apart in the silence over Rose’s comments regarding thedidgeridoo. While he equivocated about whether the issuewas harm to girls, profound offense at the breaking of a re-ligious taboo, or cultural respect, he definitely accused non-Aboriginal people of cultural insensitivity. Moreover, thereis no way to criticize or reason about his beliefs, or the indi-genous beliefs that he discusses, that he would not take asa form of colonial domination.52

In relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Aus-tralians, the fear of being seen as a colonialist or a racistappears to be common and well founded. Peter Suttonprovides evidence that some indigenous people attempt tosilence nonindigenous commentators, generally by accusingthem of racism. For example, the anthropologist DianneBell and her coauthor Topsy Napurrula Nelson faced severecriticism for a 1989 paper on the topic of domestic violence

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and sexual abuse in indigenous communities: “Their paperwas met with severe opposition from twelve Aboriginal wo-men. . . . The group disputed that intra-racial rape was‘everyone’s business.’ It was ‘our business how we deal withrape and have done so for the past 200 years quite well. Wedon’t need white anthropologists reporting business thatcan be abused and misinterpreted by racists in the widercommunity. They feed like parasites to this type ofthing.’”53 This group of women was also reported as sayingthat “sexism does not and never will prevail over racialdomination in this country.” Such a race-centered narrativeintentionally diverts the attention from the abuse of women.Bell subsequently reported that a number of qualified re-searchers in the area were “intimidated,” “appalled,” orsimply “tired” by the “tenor and raw emotions of exchangessuch as these” that occur at public events and as a resultwere “tempering their reporting and withholding informa-tion for fear of attack on their personal and professional in-tegrity.”54 Sutton goes on to describe a practice, termedmaūmauing, of publicly disciplining “guilty white liberals,”presumably through embarrassment and intimidation.55

Yet in fairness, the Aboriginal women in the above quota-tions are also expressing what seems to be a widespreaddistrust of the media and politicians to report about Abori-ginal issues and without sensationalism. For instance, SamJeffrey asserts, “There’s this uncanny ability by the mediaand politicians to create a perception that dysfunction isrife in a [an Aboriginal] community when it’s an incidentthat involved ten or twelve people maybe, you know?”56

Muriel Bamphlett is even more emphatic, claiming that themedia are “the ones that persecute us, they’re the ones de-priving us of rights, they’re the ones that are disempower-ing us. They actually make us hated in our own country. . . .

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The only time you ever read anything it’s bad. . . . The me-dia has to change and they have to be held accountable forwhat they’re doing to Indigenous people in Australia.”57

This distrust of academics, media, and politicians illus-trates that some Aboriginal Australians do not see anyspace for open debate in civil society, even if they wanted it,on the basis that their communities’ reputations would bedamaged or individuals would lose dignity in the process.Meanwhile, many non-Aboriginal Australians fear the re-sponse if they speak out without the “authority” or permis-sion of an Aboriginal community.

Mill accepted that there is a morality that should informthe use of freedom of expression and called on its abuse tobe roundly condemned.58 Indeed, he thought the worst of-fense that a polemic could commit “is to stigmatize thosewho hold a contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.”59

This stigmatization is the point of accusing those peoplewho think that it is wrong to be offensive of being “politic-ally correct” or indeed accusing people who disagree withAboriginal opinions or criticize Aboriginal societies of being“racist.” What is unfortunate is that public debate shoulddescend to this level of name-calling at all.

While political correctness is a problem, one should notthink that all self-censorship is based on such negativereasons for withholding opinion. There can also be positivereasons for silence, such as concern for the dignity andpeace of others. It is worth going back to Jones’s positionthat if respecting beliefs means not affronting the beliefs ofothers, then the only way to universalize the position is towithhold one’s opinion. This would clearly be inconsistentwith freedom of expression, but only if universalizablemeans “absolute.” However, his conclusion is overstated.

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Jeremy Shearmur has argued that self-censorship is con-sistent with the argument for freedom of speech fromtruth.60 In our daily lives, people generally live according towhat he calls “necessary fictions.”61 These are the views wehave of ourselves and the world that we implicitly take to becorrect and that we are not interested in having challenged.The point of withholding one’s criticism of such a fictionmay be to protect someone from needing to defend them-selves on a daily basis. For instance, a person who holds anunpopular religious or political position may simply notwish to debate it, because constantly defending the belief isexhausting. This wish might be respected, even if the beliefis not. Another reason for withholding one’s criticism isthat some people are not accustomed to having their beliefschallenged in a vigorous academic fashion, and to challengethem in this way would be to drag them into an unfair con-test, in which they, as the weaker debater, would lose andmight well become distressed in the process. Withholdingcriticism of beliefs for these kinds of reasons is not incon-sistent with freedom of expression. The argument fromtruth requires that there be a context in which such thingsas the truth of religious belief are discussed, such as aca-demic journals, not that all issues be discussed in all con-texts. Jones suggests that withholding criticism of religiousbeliefs is paternalistic because it treats a person’s point ofview as something less than rational, a preference like ajudgment of taste. Moreover, it treats the person who holdsthat belief as unequal intellectually or educationally. Shear-mur accepts Jones’s point that to have one’s point of view orone’s capacity for rational thought and argument discoun-ted in this manner is patronizing, and potentially insulting.Withholding criticism in order to protect a person from hav-ing to defend their beliefs is paternalistic, but, Shearmur

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thinks, it may be justified paternalism. He suggests that anindividual opens themselves to debate about the truth oftheir necessary fictions only if these ideas impinge on thoseof other people or if they begin proselytizing about them.Needless to say, Rose, who has four degrees (a bachelor ofarts, a diploma of teaching, a master of education, and aPhD in management education) and is now a professor andholds a chair in indigenous knowledge systems in the Insti-tute of Koorie Education at Deakin University, would notqualify for such paternalism. We can safely assume he is ac-customed to academic discussion. Moreover, he seems tothink it appropriate to impose his ideas on other people.His ideas about whether girls should play the didgeridooshould be debated.

A similar moral reasoning for restricting our speech andactions extends beyond debates about truth and respect forbelief in Jones’s sense. Contrary to the opinion that there isno right not to be offended, there is a good argument forsuch a position. The political philosopher Alan Haworth haspresented an argument of this kind that appears to besound and recognizes the consequentialist nature of theharm. He begins with the obvious point that what is offens-ive to one person will not be offensive to others. An equallyevident point is that to offend someone is to do somethingbad to them, something hurtful, disrespectful, or insult-ing—the evidence of this comes from the meaning of theterms themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary defines of-fend as “to cause to feel annoyed, upset, or resentful” andoffensive as “causing someone to feel deeply hurt, upset, orangry.” The logical conclusion from these two truths is that“if you are someone who considers the feelings of oth-ers—who tries to avoid hurting, disrespecting, or insultingthem, for example—you have a reason for not behaving in

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ways which are offensive to them, even when it is your ownopinion that the behaviour in question is not at all offens-ive.” And, as Haworth concludes, “since there is a duty—ifonly a duty of politeness—not to offend other individuals,then there must be a corresponding right on the part ofthose individuals not to be offended—ergo, there is such athing as a right not to be offended.”62 It might be thought,as many philosophers do, that the rules of politeness arequite different from the rules of ethics and that thereforethis fails as a moral argument for a right not to be offen-ded. However, this contrast that philosophers like to makeis mistaken, because it ignores the elements of mannersand politeness that relate to care and consideration for oth-ers, as well as their role in virtue ethics.63 Behavior orspeech that is acceptable in one situation is unacceptable inanother when it might be offensive to people. So the conclu-sion to be drawn from a right not to have one’s beliefs af-fronted would not be absolute, and only if it were absolutewould it be a direct contraction of freedom of expression.

Haworth points out that a right not to be offended is aprima facie right. It may be overridden in certain circum-stances, for example in the public interest, such as whencommunities are unsafe because of violence, rape, or childabuse. While Aboriginal people may have good reasons fordistrusting the sensationalism of the press and feel justifi-able offense when their societies are uniformly representedas dysfunctional, they cannot justifiably argue that theirhurt in such situations is sufficient moral reason for de-manding that some issues should not be addressed publicly.To insist that feelings of offense and insult should overrideothers’ rights to safety may be considered as failing to pri-oritize one’s values appropriately.

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Corresponding to the nature of offense as a feeling, tak-ing offense can also be criticized as irrational. A feeling offear may be considered irrational if it is not supported byempirical evidence, such as in the case of phobias. Whetherone is right to be offended and whether other people shouldsympathize with that offense depends on the rationality ofthe offense taken. Rose, in this case, appeared to be takingoffense irrationally.

Given the ubiquity of didgeridoos and their wide availabil-ity from Aboriginal sources, people have assumed that it isacceptable for women and girls to play them. It is difficultto believe, in a context in which Aboriginal people producedidgeridoos, sell them to non-Aboriginal people, and teachnon-Aboriginal women and girls to play, that women andgirls would or should not feel perfectly free to play. This is asituation of implied consent, and it is hard to interpret thesuggestion that girls should learn to play the didgeridoo asa cultural faux pas. The belief that it is acceptable for non-Aboriginal women and girls to play the didgeridoo is en-tirely consistent with Aboriginal peoples’ behavior.

A second reason for considering Rose’s suggestion thatthe Daring Book for Girls was offensive is his claim that it isa symptom of a tokenistic approach to Aboriginal culture,evidence of a lack of knowledge of that culture. It may wellbe true that non-Aboriginal people know little about Abori-ginal culture and should know more. The Daring Book forGirls chapter offered one avenue for acknowledging indi-genous culture and explaining Aboriginal peoples’ claimsabout the rights to produce and use the instrument. But todemand respect for a substantive belief that didgeridooplaying will cause infertility in women—or to call it indigen-ous knowledge—appears to misrepresent Aboriginalpeoples’ beliefs. There is little evidence that many

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Aboriginal people genuinely believe this, or they could notin good conscience produce and sell didgeridoos. Even inthose societies (such as the Yolngu) where people pay lipservice to this belief, women play the didgeridoo in nonce-remonial contexts. It easier to believe that the spoken con-sent to this belief is a result of the authoritarianism of Ab-original society concerning religious dogma rather thanthat it is a belief to which many people are committed. Oth-er Aboriginal societies have endorsed experiments on thehealth benefits of playing didgeridoos. It is against theweight of this evidence that Rose should be prepared to ex-plain how his view is representative of contemporary Abori-ginal cultures or of indigenous belief.

To acknowledge that individuals have a right not to be of-fended does not imply that they have a right to control whatother people might do when they are not present or thatthis right should take precedence over other rights, such asthe right to safety. Finally, those people who take offensemay be criticized when their offense does not meet stand-ards of rationality. The claim that respect for beliefs leadsto an absurdity when it is held to be consistent with free-dom of expression is false. Withholding certain speech actsfor paternalistic reasons in some situations or condemningthe immorality of certain speech acts that are gratuitouslyoffensive cannot be considered forms of censorship incom-patible with freedom of expression.

Reconciliation and the Rules of “Civility”

It might be argued, as this chapter’s introduction suggests,that the primary reason why Australians should show spe-cial concern for Aboriginal religious sensibilities is the pro-cess of reconciliation. This seems to imply that what is

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acknowledged here is some kind of group right. However,the argument presented above was based on universalgrounds and need not be presented in the context of grouprights or identities at all. Moreover, it makes no referenceto particular historical context. Yet the attempt to reconcilethrows into sharp relief that there is something not quiteright with much liberal discourse about freedom of expres-sion, in particular the claim that freedom of expression isabsolute, regardless of the content of the opinionexpressed.

The process of reconciliation for many Australians, Abori-ginal and non-Aboriginal, involves the recognition that indi-genous people in Australia “have been injured and harmedthroughout the colonization process and just recompense isowed.”64 As Larissa Behrendt has written, “In the heart ofmany Aboriginal people is the belief that we are a sovereignpeople. We believe that we never surrendered to the British.We never signed a treaty giving up our sovereignty or givingup our land. We believe that we are from the land, that weare born from the land. . . . Land, in our culture, cannot bebought or sold. It always was Aboriginal land. It always willbe Aboriginal land.”65 For some time, Australian sover-eignty was justified under the legal fiction of terra nullius.The Aboriginal population was thought of as a backwardpeople whose laws and customs were not equal to those oftheir English colonizers and who therefore did not ownland.66 The reconciliation process, long and painful as ithas been, acknowledges that the occupation of their landand the dispossession of Aboriginal people is Australia’s un-finished business.

This political context, in which two groups of people witha violent colonial past attempt to engage and resolve prob-lems, makes its own demands on what can be expressed,

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how, and when. In particular, it creates a perceived need toavoid giving offense. A recent case that illustrates this isthe condemnation of an opposition federal parliamentarian,Dennis Jensen, who told an Aboriginal woman on Twitterthat she was “being a victim” and to “get over” coloniza-tion. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin commentedthat “it’s extremely disappointing to see comments like thisfrom a Member of Parliament. We should all be working to-wards reconciliation.” Jensen later issued a statement inwhich he regretted using the medium of Twitter and ex-pressed a desire to engage with the indigenous community“constructively” and for “true indigenous advancement.”67

The medium of communication, however, is only one as-pect of this issue; the content is another. If Jensen were“working towards reconciliation,” as Macklin suggests heand others should, presumably he would have been requiredto withhold the sentiments he expressed in that form. Inconfronting the stance he believed the woman was taking(that of a victim), he undermined any chance he may havehad for addressing the broader policy issues he is inter-ested in, which is whether affirmative action policies havefailed Aboriginal people and are inequitable. His comments,regardless of whether one agreed with them in that context,were widely understood as a lapse in civility.

Civility is a socially accepted code of behavior (oftentermed politeness)68 that displays a preparedness to en-gage with another person regardless of what one thinks ofthem. In doing so, it enables people to maintain the possib-ility of cooperation “by offering token reminders” that theyregard others as “worthy of respect, tolerance, and consid-eration.”69 Erving Goffman described these token remind-ers as deference codes. They contain, he argues, a kind ofpledge to treat others in a certain way, affirming “that the

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expectations and obligations of the recipient, both sub-stantive and ceremonial, will be allowed and supported bythe actor.” Deference codes are internalized codes of com-munication that recognize an individual’s social role andmaintain their face. These codes include rituals such as sa-lutations, invitations, compliments, and minor services, aswell as avoidance behavior, which consists in the “verbalcare that actors are obliged to exercise so as not to bringinto discussion matters that might be painful, embarrass-ing, or humiliating to the recipient.”70 One might add thatactors should also avoid matters that cause offense topeople. The more general point of avoiding certain content,however, is to protect the face of individuals and their capa-city to engage in social roles. This deference also protectsthe identity of people. Where face may be defined as “thepublic self-image every individual wants to claim for him-self,”71 identity is “that part of an individual’s self-conceptwhich derives from his knowledge of his membership of asocial group (or social groups) together with the value andemotional significance attached to that membership.”72

Standard interpretations of the relationship between socialidentity and face are temporal and interrelated. Social iden-tity is considered durative and is identified in terms of thepunctual acts that are interpreted in relation to face, whileexplanations of punctual actions related to face refer to thedurative characteristics of a social identity.73 Civility pro-tects not only individuals’ sense of self-esteem but also so-cially disesteemed groups against “the emotional exhaus-tion of having to cope with others’ displays of hatred, aver-sion, and disapproval.”74

Deference codes, which are generally honorific and po-litely toned, may convey appreciation of the person to whomthey are addressed in ways that are more complimentary

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than the actor’s true sentiment might warrant. Extra punc-tiliousness in the observance of the codes may conceal lowregard for a person.75 Accordingly, one has ideals such asprofessional behavior, in which people can behave withoutintroducing personal elements like feelings. Such codes areparticularly important in tense or emotionally fraught situ-ations, and the more fraught the situation becomes, themore useful such codes are for formalizing and containingthe emotions.76 This is what occurs through the use ofetiquette in courts of law, for instance. Similarly, this form-ality may be expected to structure and contain the emotionsof discussions surrounding indigenous policies.

Civility, then, provides an alternative model for whatmight be termed cultural respect, or respect for belief. Cul-ture and religious belief are simply characteristics that mayform an element of an individual’s identity but are no moreor less important than physical characteristics such asgender or race. Civility involves deferential behavior towarda recipient’s social identity and face through symbolic actsand rituals. It is not genuine respect or tolerance, as genu-ine respect or tolerance requires a person to hold certainideas or emotions.77 It is a symbolic display of respect insocial interactions, which may or may not express the act-or’s genuine thoughts or feelings. We cannot expect every-one to feel respect for others all the time, but we can expectthem to engage in displays of respect as a precondition ofcooperation. While civility is not the positive valuation orrespect for beliefs that Rose desires, neither is it, as Jonessuggests, a respect of beliefs on liberal terms.

The possibility of superficiality should not be thought ofas a problem for or lack in civility. We teach children to say“thank you” before we expect them to understand theconcept of gratitude, and we hope that one day they will

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come not only to understand gratitude as a concept but tofeel it when they use the phrase. Until such time, we acceptthe emptiness of the words as a condition for social engage-ment and cooperation.

An argument against this interpretation of respect for be-liefs might be that if everyone followed these deferencecodes, there would be a general lack of discussion or ex-change of opinion and, if widely adopted, such deferencewould stifle freedom of expression. It might be thought thatexpression would be freer and in that regard better if soci-ety were less civil and less concerned for the feelings of oth-ers. This would be inconsistent with Mill’s views. He arguedthat offensive speech undermines rather than promotesfreedom of expression: “In general, opinions contrary tothose commonly received can only obtain a hearing by stud-ied moderation of language, from which they hardly everdeviate even in the slightest degree without losing ground:while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of pre-vailing opinion, really does deter people from professingcontrary opinions, and from listening to those whose pro-fess them.”78 This seems correct. As pointed out above, anattack of this kind makes political correctness so effective.Mill argues that “in the interests of truth and justice” it isnecessary to restrain such disincentives to expression andto encourage people to listen to alternative opinions, butthis should not be undertaken by legislation. Rather, hethought moral condemnation of offensive speech the mostappropriate method of moderating expression: “Opinionought in every instance, to determine its verdict by the cir-cumstances of the individual case; condemning every one,on whichever side of the argument he places himself, inwhose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or

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malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest them-selves.”79

Free speech absolutists seem to assume that becausethere should be no legal restrictions on expression otherthan protecting people from harm, offensive speech istherefore morally acceptable. But this does not follow. Toargue that speech should be less civil regardless of its of-fensiveness is to argue that the world would be better if itwere less caring in respect of people’s feelings and sense ofwell-being. There is no such moral argument. Moral con-demnation of offensive speech, even where this condemna-tion expresses the majority opinion, cannot be consideredan unjust restriction, since it is desirable that people real-ize if their speech is offensive and wrong. It would be an un-just restriction on speech if other social sanctions were em-ployed, such as shunning or exclusion or other actions thatpunish people for their beliefs.

Finally, a critic might argue that civility, as a set of cul-tural conventions, cannot be a basis for intercultural en-gagement. The fundamental question, the critic might sug-gest, is who, exactly, is in whose country? Whose rules forcivility apply? These questions suggest that there are twodistinct cultures in Australia, with a sharp racial differencebetween them. But this misrepresents reality to the extentthat it implies that what the term intercultural means is abridging between distinct cultural groups. In many respectsthere are distinct Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups inAustralia, but there are also urban Aboriginal peoples andindividuals in outback Aboriginal communities who displaya capacity for and are accustomed to political engagementwith other peoples. As Francesca Merlan has suggested,there is another sense of the term intercultural, whichdrives social change and adaptation. This, she states, “is

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the ‘inter-’ of categories, understandings, modes of practic-al action, as reproduced and reshaped in interaction, inter-relationship and event. . . . This directs us to consider thesocial conditions of the production of commonsense andpractice.”80 While Merlan’s expression is obscure, she is in-terested in the cultural changes that emerge from sharedenvironments and that shape individuals’ understanding ofconcepts such as education and its value but also of rightsand practices, such as whether girls should play thedidgeridoo.

Reconciliation is something that must be created in theintercultural space of “Australia.” It is not simply under-taken between representatives with different group identit-ies but emerges from the engagement of individuals ineveryday life as they adapt their ideas and expectations.Rituals of deference also emerge in this context, such as thecustomary acknowledgment of country given at the begin-ning of an academic conference, the flying of the Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australianflag on public buildings, and the recently introduced wel-come to country as part of the opening ceremony of parlia-ment. Such rituals acknowledge a difference betweengroups while introducing new protocols and codes of prac-tice that have emerged from the engagement between indi-genous and nonindigenous Australians.

There is nothing particularly special about the idea of re-conciliation that requires indigenous sentiments to betreated with greater respect than those of other groups. Theintercultural context and the genuine attempts by Aborigin-al and non-Aboriginal Australians to engage differently andto have a different future show that we cannot afford to of-fend minority groups in society. Many Australians are com-mitted to liberal freedoms and as a consequence would not

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respect a society where rights and liberties were based onreligious law, and religious authority and secrecy providethe foundation for the society’s structure, or people are ex-ecuted for disclosing religious beliefs. However, civility re-quires them to withhold that judgment in certain contexts.Civility contains strong emotions while enabling social act-ors to engage and participate in joint activities, and it pro-tects groups that have been disesteemed from emotional ex-haustion in their daily lives. Moreover, Australians cannotafford incivility; without civility, our ideas cannot be heardand others may not be offered or listened to. It is entirelyconsistent with liberalism to believe that if other societiesdo not subscribe to liberal principles, such as freedom ofexpression, then they should. But the defense of freedom ofexpression does not require the defense of immorality, suchas a lack of consideration for the feelings of others.

Criticizing Jones

There is much to be admired in Jones’s discussion of re-spect for beliefs. Yet his account does not entirely fit thekinds of issues that arise in countries such as Australia,with indigenous populations whose societies are not openbut based on secret sacred knowledge. Such societies wouldnot recognize as respect the open debate of their beliefs. Itis all very well for liberals such as Jones to say that peopleshould accept certain kinds of evidence and structures ofreasoning, but this is likely to be ineffective; their intendedaudience is not necessarily listening, and if it is, it may notbe willing to accept the advice. The terms of reference fordiscourse have not been accepted. But Jones’s account ofrespect for belief is also overstated. According to him, sucha principle could not be made compatible with freedom of

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expression. If respect for belief meant that people shouldnot accept attacks on belief, he reasoned, the only way touniversalize the idea would be to withhold all beliefs. Yet asShearmur’s argument shows, there may be good, if pater-nalistic, reasons for not holding other people’s ideas up forscrutiny, and this is not inconsistent with freedom of ex-pression, which does not require that all beliefs be debatedin all contexts.

Moreover, while it is an appealing idea that what mattersis the truth of those beliefs rather than the identity of thebeliever, this does not accord with the ordinary claims thatpeople make about their desire for cultural or religious re-spect. In seeking respect for religious belief, a person re-quests not that that belief be debated and scrutinized butrather that they and their belief be treated with deference,in other words, with civility. People feel, and are, entitled tobe treated with respect in social interactions, and this iswell recognized as a precondition for social cooperation.

Offense is a simpler manner of describing the issue atstake and adequately describes what people feel and whythey feel it. Identity in the sense of “that part of an indi-vidual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge ofhis membership of a social group (or social groups) togeth-er with the value and emotional significance attached tothat membership” is part of what we protect when, throughcodes of deference, we maintain a person’s face in any giveninteraction.81 Identity can be based on any number of char-acteristics, such as gender, age, interests, religion, educa-tion level, place of origin, income, profession, or race.These kinds of attributes are the ordinary ways in whichpeople discuss identity, and it is through observance of ci-vility codes that their identity is ordinarily maintained.

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Multiculturalism as a policy debate fundamentally con-cerns what legal rights members of a cultural group shouldhave to maintain the norms of that culture. In a strong ver-sion of multiculturalism, a liberal society would recognizesuch rights regardless of whether those norms maintainfreedoms for individuals within it. A weaker version of mul-ticulturalism might accord group rights except where theyundermine other liberal principles and freedoms. The rightsof indigenous peoples, however, are generally believed toinvolve particularly strong claims to the maintenance ofculture and religious laws, on the basis that, unlike migrantgroups, they have not chosen to become members of a soci-ety. Yet it should not be thought that this gives indigenouspeople special rights not to be offended on religiousgrounds.

However, apart from the policy of multiculturalism andits problems of determining which rights should prevail,one may also recognize that, in fact, one does live in a mul-ticultural society, which involves religious pluralism. Millwould welcome such diversity, though he would not sub-scribe to a view in which it was more important to maintainculture than to come to understand what is true. It is hardto imagine him changing his views regarding the value oftruth or the means of obtaining it through open debate. Yethe also suggests that it is in the interests of truth andjustice that everyone participate in that debate, or at leastfeel that they could, and have their ideas be consideredfairly. While he would not agree to different rights based onreligious or cultural membership, he was clear that freedomof expression requires moral regulation to ensure that dif-ferent perspectives are both offered and heard. As such, al-though Mill may not have agreed that blasphemy law shouldbe an instrument to maintain “the decency of expression”

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or to protect religious believers from offense, he did believeit appropriate that people observe propriety in their expres-sion and be condemned when they fail to do so. He de-scribed this as the morality of discussion. I have arguedthat this involves maintaining the code of civility, whichprotects individuals’ dignity and their religious and culturalidentities. Civility is a social code that is independent of anyspecific legal framework. I have not proposed that a newcode be adopted but have described the code that exists andattempted to articulate why it is valuable.

This argument does not apply merely in an Australiancontext. It is not an argument for the conclusion that Abori-ginal Australians’ religious beliefs are any more importantthan those of any other group. What is special here is notthat Australia is in a different situation than societieswithout indigenous populations or that indigenous peoplemight have rights that other minority groups do not. Rath-er, a situation such as that in Australia shows how groupswith very different political philosophies, if they are at-tempting to cooperate, will behave toward one another.

In contemporary multicultural and religiously pluralsocieties, self-censorship plays an important role. Yet thisself-censorship is not inconsistent with freedom of expres-sion. First, where there is an inequality between the parti-cipants in a discussion, respecting beliefs by withholdingcomments may be a form of justified paternalism. Whatfreedom of expression requires is that there should be ap-propriate contexts for debate, not that every idea should besubjected to scrutiny in every situation. Second, while thereis a right not to be offended, it is prima facie rather thanabsolute. Third, the practice of civility does not produceconformity of opinion but encourages people to express dif-ferent opinions, while incivility creates disincentives both to

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express and to consider opposing opinions. What may belost in the color of public debate will be made up for by itshealth.

One problem remains: how to explain the kind of situ-ation with which I began the chapter. In the context of aca-demic debate, where there is no reason for displays of pa-ternalism, Rose cannot expect to be treated kindly.Moreover, he had no rational grounds for taking offense.Thus, he has no grounds for protection from open and pub-lic criticism. However, the silence that followed his com-ments is probably best interpreted simply as the responseotherwise known as speechlessness. It’s not necessarily po-lite, but as H. P. Grice has pointed out, one also needs to beattuned to the implications of understatement.82

NOTES

1. “Aborigines Complain Daring Book for Girls Breaks Taboos byUrging Girls to Play the Didgeridoo,” Daily Mail, September 3, 2008,www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1052236/Aborigines-complain-Daring-Book-For-Girls-breaks-taboos-urging-girls-play-didgeri-doo.html. See also Angus Hohenboken, “Didgeridoo Advice for Girls‘A Faux Pas,’” Australian, September 3, 2008,www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/in-depth/girls-should-not-play-the-didgeridoo/story-e6frgd9f-1111117376821; “Didgeridoos a Don’tfor Girls: Expert,” ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) News,September 3, 2008, www.abc.net.au/news/2008-09-03/didgeridoos-a-dont-for-girls-expert/498040.

2. “Didgeridoos a Don’t for Girls;” “HarperCollins RemovesChapter from The Daring Book for Girls,” Australian, September 4,2008, www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/girls-book-commits-didgeridoo-faux-pas/story-e6frg6nf-1111117391344.

3. Peter Jones, “Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie,” Brit-ish Journal of Political Science 20, no. 4 (1990): 421.

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4. Elizabeth Burns Coleman, “Disrupting the Order of the World:Madonna with Piano Accordion,” in Negotiating the Sacred II: Blas-phemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, ed. Coleman and Maria-SuzetteFernandes-Dias (Canberra: Australian National University E-Press,2008): 37–53.

5. Anthony Fisher and Hayden Ramsay, “Of Art and Blasphemy,”Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 137–67; Helen Pringle,“Regulating Offence to the Godly: Blasphemy and the Future of Reli-gious Vilification Laws,” University of New South Wales Law Journal34, no. 1 (2011): 316–22.

6. Helen Pringle, “Regulating Offense to the Godly,” 320.7. Common-law provisions for blasphemy continue in New South

Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, though in Victoria, a judge hasquestioned this. It has been effectively abolished in the AustralianCapital Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia (however, inWestern Australia there is a reference remaining in the JettiesRegulations of 1940). See ibid.

8. Jones, “Respecting Beliefs.”9. Ibid.10. Shabbir Akhtar, cited in Richard Webster, A Brief History of

Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and “The Satanic Verses”(Southwold, Suffolk: Orwell, 1990), 39.

11. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, ch. 2, in “On Liberty” and Other Writ-ings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989).

12. This empirical possibility has not been explored scientifically,but there is some evidence that didgeridoo playing may have healthbenefits. See Robert Eley and Don Gorman, “Didgeridoo Playing andSinging to Support Asthma Management in Aboriginal Australians,”Journal of Rural Health 26, no. 1 (2010): 100–104; Milo A. Puhan,Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, andOtto Braendli, “Didgeridoo Playing as Alternative Treatment for Ob-structive Sleep Apnoea Syndrome: Randomised Controlled Trial,”BMJ 332 (2006): 266–70, doi:10.1136/bmj.38705.470590.55 (pub-lished December 23, 2005).

13. Jones, “Respecting Beliefs,” 419.14. Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice Hall, 1973) ch. 3.

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15. Jones, “Respecting Beliefs,” 419.16. Joel Feinberg, Offense to Others: The Moral Limits of the

Criminal Law, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 9.17. See ibid., 53–55.18. H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press, 1963), 46–47, cited in ibid., 63.19. Shabbir Akhtar, cited in Webster, Brief History of Blasphemy,

39.20. Kirstie Parker with A.A.P., “Didgeridoo Book Okay for White-

fellas: Yolngu Elder,” Koori Mail 10 (September 2008): 6.21. Linda Barwick, “Gender ‘Taboos’ and Didjeridus,” in The Did-

jeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet, ed. Karl Neuenfeldt (Sydney:John Libbey, 1997), 89.

22. Karl Neuenfeldt, “The Ongoing Debate about Women PlayingDidjeridu: How a Musical Icon Can Become an Instrument of Re-membering and Forgetting,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2006, no.1 (2006): 38. The Garma Cultural Festival Yidaki Statement may beviewed at www.didjeridu.com/wickedsticks/voices/moreyidaki.htm.

23. Neuenfeldt, “Ongoing Debate,” 39.24. Jones, “Respecting Beliefs,” 420.25. See Ayelet Shachar, “Group Identity and Women’s Rights in

Family Law: The Perils of Multicultural Accommodation,” Journal ofPolitical Philosophy 6 (1998): 285–305; Susan Moller Okin, “Femin-ism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions,” Ethics 108 (1998):661–84.

26. “Didgeridoos a Don’t for Girls.”27. Jones, “Respecting Beliefs,” 423.28. Ibid., 422.29. Ibid., 421.30. Ibid., 427.31. Ibid., 428.32. Ibid., 429.33. Mark Rose, “The Great Silent Apartheid,” October 11, 2007,

www.bsl.org.au/pdfs/Mark_Rose_community_development_11Oct07.pdf, 2.

34. Mark Rose and David Jones, “Contemporary Planning Educa-tion and Indigenous Cultural Competency Agendas: Erasing TerraNullius, Respect and Responsibility,” in ANZAPS 2012: Proceedings

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of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Planning SchoolsConference (Bendigo, Victoria: La Trobe University, CommunityPlanning and Development Program, 2012), 182 (italics added).

35. I am forced to try to understand Rose’s position through read-ing Errol West’s thesis, as it appears that Rose has not published histhesis.

36. Errol George West, “An Alternative to Existing Australian Re-search and Teaching Models—the Japanangka Teaching and Re-search Paradigm—an Australian Aboriginal Model” (PhD thesis,Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, 2000), 114.

37. For the view that there can be no objective facts, only per-spectives of the world, see Thomas Mautner, The Penguin Dictionaryof Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2005), 48.

38. F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin, “Stories of Experi-ence and Narrative Inquiry,” Educational Researcher 19, no. 5(June–July 1990): 2–14.

39. Alan Haworth, Free Speech (London: Routledge, 1998),93–115.

40. West, “Japanangka Teaching and Research Paradigm,”237–38.

41. See Peter Sutton, “Aboriginal Spirituality in a New Age,” Aus-tralian Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 1. (2010): 71–89.

42. Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australiaand the End of the Liberal Consensus (Melbourne: University of Mel-bourne Press, 2009), 78–79.

43. Mark Rose, excerpt of “Bridging the Gap: The Decolonisationof a Master of Business Administration Degree by Tactical and Ped-agogical Alignment with the Capacity Building Needs of the Abori-ginal and Torres Strait Islander Community” (n.d.), accessed April12, 2013, www.rmit.edu.au/kooricohort/students/markrose.

44. Deakin Research Communications, “Understanding the Indi-genous Knowledge Position,” May 18, 2009, www.deakin.edu.au/re-search/stories/2009/05/18/understanding-the-indigenous-knowledge-position.

45. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory ofMinority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 53.

46. Mill, On Liberty, chs. 1, 3.

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47. Rob Moore and Johan Muller, “The Discourse of ‘Voice’ andthe Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Educa-tion,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 20, no. 2 (June1999): 190.

48. Ibid., 194.49. Basil Bernstein, “Vertical and Horizontal Discourse: An Es-

say,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 20, no. 2 (June 1999):157.

50. Tim Scanlon, The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2003), 196.

51. Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Se-mantics and Culture (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 95–97.

52. At the same time, Rose has expressed concern about politicalcorrectness, because it contributes to the silent apartheid as aca-demics avoid discussing indigenous issues and cultures in their cur-riculum and, equally troubling, are “soft” on indigenous students,who then accept mediocrity as a standard. Rose, “Great SilentApartheid,” 3.

53. Jackie Huggins et al., letter to the editors, Women’s StudiesInternational Forum 14 (1991): 506–7, cited in Sutton, Politics ofSuffering, 70.

54. Diane Bell, letter to the editors, Women’s Studies Internation-al Forum 14 (1991): 507–13, cited in Sutton, Politics of Suffering,71.

55. Sutton, Politics of Suffering, 71.56. Sarah Maddison, Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Ab-

original Political Culture (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin,2009), 145.

57. Ibid., 215.58. Mill, On Liberty, 61–63.59. Ibid., 61.60. Jeremy Shearmur, “Blasphemy in a Pluralistic Society,” in

Coleman and Fernandes-Dias, Negotiating the Sacred II, 131–34.61. Ibid., 131.62. Alan Haworth, “Let’s Take Free Speech Seriously,” unpub-

lished paper given at LGIR (Department of Law, Governance and In-ternational Relations) Staff Seminar, London MetropolitanUniversity, February 20, 2008.

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63. Elizabeth Burns Coleman, “Etiquette: The Aesthetics of Dis-play and Engagement,” Aesthetics 23, no. 1 (June 2013): 68–91.

64. Mick Dodson, “Unfinished Business: A Shadow across OurRelationships,” in Treaty: Let’s Get It Right!, ed. Hannah McGlade(Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003), 33, cited in Maddison,Black Politics, 219.

65. Larissa Behrendt, Aboriginal Dispute Resolution (Sydney:Federation Press, 1995), 97–98, cited in ibid., 47.

66. Mabo v. Queensland, 175 CLR 1, 31–32 (Brennan J) (1992).67. Dan Harrison, “Liberal Politician Tells Aborigine to ‘Get Over’

Victim Mentality,” Age, April 18, 2013, 6–7.68. In this context, I am using the terms interchangeably. For an

extended analysis of the relationship between the two, see Coleman,“Etiquette.”

69. Cheshire Calhoun, “The Virtue of Civility,” Philosophy andPublic Affairs 29, no. 3 (2005): 266.

70. Erving Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,”American Anthropologist, n.s., 58, no. 3 (June 1956): 482.

71. Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: SomeUniversals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), 61, cited in John E. Joseph, “Identity Work and FaceWork across Linguistic and Cultural Boundaries,” Journal of Polite-ness Research 9, no. 1 (2013): 36.

72. Henri Tajfel, “Social Categorization, Social Identity and SocialComparison,” in Differentiation between Social Groups: Studies inthe Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. Tajfel (London:Academic Press, 1978), 63, cited in Joseph, “Identity Work and FaceWork,” 36.

73. Joseph, “Identity Work and Face Work,” 35.74. Calhoun, “Virtue of Civility,” 260.75. Goffman, “Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” 479.76. Judith Martin and Gunter S. Stent, “I Think; Therefore I

Thank: A Philosophy of Etiquette,” American Scholar (2001):237–54.

77. Calhoun, “Virtue of Civility,” 266.78. Mill, On Liberty, 62.79. Ibid., 63.

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80. Francesca Merlan, “Explorations towards Intercultural Ac-counts of Socio-Cultural Reproduction and Change,” Oceania 75, no.3 (March–June 2005): 170.

81. Tajfel, “Social Categorization,” cited in Joseph, “Identity Workand Face Work,” 36.

82. H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1989).

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CHAPTER 10

Blasphemy versusIncitementAn International Law Perspective

JEROEN TEMPERMAN

POLITICIANS VERSUS EXPERTS

Modern democracies harbor a fundamental contradiction attheir core. On the one hand, they cherish the right to free-dom of expression. On the other hand, they insist that cit-izens should be treated equally and protected from targeteddiscrimination and violence. States wary of written orspoken discrimination and violence may be inclined to com-bat forms of extreme speech. Indeed, some states havetaken measures to outlaw sources of social unrest and hos-tility that are liable to upset individual feelings, notably re-ligious feelings, by criminalizing speech through blas-phemy, religious defamation, or hate speech laws. Critics ofsuch policies respond that the only effective response to ex-treme speech is more speech. That is, they suggest that thefree market of ideas should be permitted to do its work: in aliberal democracy, extreme statements will garner

sufficient counterbalancing speech to ensure that fightingwords will remain just that—fighting words. Still others ar-gue that unbridled free speech sounds all well and good instates with a strong constitutional tradition of fundamentalrights protection but is less well adapted to nonliberal ornondemocratic states or states with a history of religious orethnic tensions. What, some ask, about “genocidal societ-ies”?1

For those concerned with international human rights law,the phenomenon of hate propaganda is particularly acuteand gets to the heart of the tensions in democratic speechlaws. Does the risk of discrimination or violence ever war-rant a priori prohibitions of—and thus state interferencewith—certain types of extreme speech? This chapter ex-plores what equilibrium (if any)—between allowing freespeech and avoiding hatred-based marginalization ofgroups—international law envisages. The key contention isthat international human rights law is increasingly distin-guishing between (unacceptable) laws that combat blas-phemy, religious defamation, and unqualified forms of“hate speech” on the one hand and (acceptable) laws thatspecifically target forms of incitement to violence and dis-crimination on the other. The underlying rationale of thisparticular development is that unqualified defamation andhate speech laws are liable to foster governmental abuse.Specifically, governments—potentially working in tandemwith the country’s dominant religion—could use such lawsto stifle unpopular speech and retain the status quo.2 Prop-er “incitement” (to violence and discrimination) legislation,by contrast, could arguably—in the abstract—offer an im-portant contribution to two of international human rightslaw’s foundational goals: equality and freedom from fear.This chapter outlines the substantial differences between

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acts of “defamation” of religion and acts of “incitement”and charts how international human rights law treats them.It is important to consider the latter body of law, given thatmost states that make up the world community of stateshave made specific agreements in the areas of free speechand extreme speech.

We will see in what follows that international law doesnot force states to adopt blasphemy laws. Quite the con-trary, international human rights law warns states againstthe risk that the religious sensitivities of dominant reli-gious groups may hijack the debate on how free speechshall be. International human rights law not only finds faultwith defamation and blasphemy laws but in fact concludesthat all unqualified hate speech laws must be dismissed.However, its emphasis on “incitement” implies neither thatthe legal notion of “incitement” is completely clear as of yetnor that national incitement laws could not be abused intheir own right. There is still much conceptualization ne-cessary by monitoring bodies and scholars to ensure thatnational incitement legislation is triggered only in relationto the most heinous forms of incitement to (religious) viol-ence. Specifically, it is necessary to ensure that incitementlaw’s main focus remains on imminent acts of violence (thatis, less on possible acts of discrimination or hostility).

Before analyzing current international standards andbenchmarks, let us briefly take stock of the fundamentallyopposed ideas of different players and stakeholders in thedebate on how to deal with extreme speech.

With respect to the issue of extreme speech about or mo-tivated by religion, we have recently witnessed two contra-dictory developments in the United Nations. For more thana decade, political bodies such as the General Assembly andthe Human Rights Council (and the former Commission on

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Human Rights) have pushed for more rigorous internationaland national measures combating so-called defamation ofreligion.3 Legal scholars have vehemently criticized the UNresolutions proposed by the Organization of the IslamicConference (renamed the Organization of Islamic Coopera-tion), arguing that combating defamation of religion wouldbe tantamount to destroying not only the core right of free-dom of expression but also the right to freedom of religion.4

The latter includes the right to manifest beliefs that may beheretical, defamatory, or blasphemous to another person.As of 2011, the tone of these resolutions has been moder-ated to accommodate Western criticism: they are now titled“Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping, Stigmatiza-tion, Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violenceagainst Persons, Based on Religion or Belief.”5 On theirface, the revamped resolutions accord better with standardsof international human rights law. However, in Western leg-al scholarship there remains real anxiety that these politic-al resolutions will serve as justifications for national prac-tices that unduly stifle speech critical of majority religions.6

While the General Assembly and the Human Rights Coun-cil have pushed for restrictions on religious defamation, theUN’s independent experts have been pushing states to af-firm existing international norms, especially by narrowingdefinitions of combatable speech. The timing of these ex-pert interventions suggest that they are in direct reactionto ongoing developments in the political bodies of the UN(the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council). Forinstance, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of religionor belief has held that defamation of religion does not in it-self adversely impact freedom of religion.7 Hence, the spe-cial rapporteur called national criminal bans on defamationof religion “counter-productive.”8 Since 2011, the Human

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Rights Committee—a UN body consisting of independent ex-perts that monitor compliance with the InternationalCovenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)9—has offi-cially treated blasphemy and religious defamation bans asviolations of international law and called for their removal.Its newly adopted General Comment No. 34 observes that“prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion orother belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incom-patible with the Covenant.”10 Thus, according to the com-mittee, states must not combat unqualified forms of reli-gious defamation (blasphemy, disrespect of religion, gratu-itously offensive speech, satire, religious criticism, etc.).

The genesis of this crucial section of the new generalcomment on the incompatibility of blasphemy laws with in-ternational human rights law is interesting and unique. TheHuman Rights Committee, steered by Professor MichaelO’Flaherty, who functioned as the rapporteur for this gener-al comment,11 has repeatedly sought the advice of stake-holders through dialogue with international organizations,nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic experts,and the wider civil society and received more than 350 sub-missions providing input. The different drafts were widelydisseminated to receive feedback. The section on blasphemylaws underwent significant final amendments.12 Indeed, the(unofficial) travaux préparatoires (recorded drafting his-tory)13 show that there was intense pressure from stake-holders, particularly liberal-minded academics and humanrights NGOs, to take an unequivocal stance against blas-phemy and religious defamation laws.14 For instance,Article 19 (a free speech–oriented international NGO) ar-gued that early drafts of the comment did not attack blas-phemy or defamation of religions laws severely enough. Itaverred that “laws on ‘defamation of religions’ have a

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discriminatory impact in practice however they are framed,and the concept of ‘defamation of religions’ has been em-ployed to stifle dissent and criticism from religious believ-ers, religious minorities and non-believers around theworld.”15 Other human rights organizations raised the samepoint.16

Not all committee members were immediately convincedthat an outright condemnation of blasphemy laws can bederived from the covenant.17 Nevertheless, the official posi-tion—the adopted consensus formulation—of the HumanRights Committee presently is: blasphemy / general defama-tion of religion laws are ipso facto contrary to internationalhuman rights law. That is, states are not to combat dis-respect or defamation of religion per se. However, Article20(2) of the ICCPR sanctions states to combat statementsthat can be deemed advocacy of religious hatred constitut-ing incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violenceagainst persons. If antidefamatory provisions stand ontenuous legal grounds18 and existing standards on combat-ing incitement would in fact provide better safeguardsagainst possible abuse, then an investigation of the differ-ence between defamation of religion / blasphemy and incite-ment is in order. Such research must include an investiga-tion of how governmental abuse can indeed best beprevented.

BLASPHEMY VERSUS INCITEMENT—OR THE“TRIANGLE OF HATRED”

By ratifying the ICCPR, 160 states19 have pledged to pro-hibit by law “any advocacy of national, racial or religioushatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostil-ity or violence” (Article 20[2]). We will now consider exactly

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which types of acts are to be prohibited and how this differsfrom restrictions on blasphemy and “defamation ofreligion.”

A careful examination of Article 20(2) supports the viewthat the threshold of this extreme speech provision is veryhigh. The article’s complex and qualified formulation leavesno doubt as to the extreme nature of the speech required totrigger the ban. First, Article 20(2) does not ban hatespeech outright but only requires the prohibition of certainqualified types of hate speech (religious, racial, national)that incite adverse responses (discrimination, hostility, orviolence). The drafters of the ICCPR realized that the com-munity of states is hardly in a position to ban all expres-sions of hatred, let alone hatred per se. The final text ofArticle 20, in the words of one of the delegates who pro-posed it, “included the word ‘hatred’ as the point of depar-ture and as the prime cause of violence. Naturally, the draftCovenant could not deal with the subjective aspects ofhatred but must condemn incitement to hatred only when itwas externalized, at which point it was quite readily determ-ined by the courts.”20 Given the qualified nature of the ad-opted prohibition, we must conclude that not even all ex-ternalized forms of hatred are subject to prosecution, onlythose externalizations that incite three specific forms of ac-tion: discrimination, hostility, or violence.

Because the United Nations, including the UN HumanRights Committee, which oversees implementation of theICCPR, has not offered a substantive definition of incite-ment, we must analyze the ICCPR’s incitement clause togenerate tentative answers about which types of acts—suchas speech or publication—come within its ambit and whichacts do not (prima facie). Through a complementary analys-is of other legal comments—historical travaux,21

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contemporary workings of the Human Rights Committee,and legal scholarship—we can piece together some initialworking definitions of the clause’s constituent terms. Untilrecently, the Human Rights Committee did not engage in-tensively with Article 20(2) ICCPR. Indeed, in addition tosome remarks in the concluding observations on state re-ports, only a handful of cases filed with the committeetouched on the issue of incitement. Moreover, these caseswere one sided, inasmuch as they concentrated mostly oninstances of Holocaust denial and other forms of anti-Semitism. As the following outlines, the committee has re-discovered Article 20(2) in its recent General Comment No.34, on freedom of expression.

“Advocacy”

First, what is the meaning of advocacy as used by Article20(2) ICCPR? The provision does not use hate speech orhate propaganda; also, it certainly does not use words suchas defamation. What act does advocacy imply (in the con-text of a provision dealing with hatred)?

From the travaux, it is unclear why advocacy was chosenand not propaganda (as is used in Article 20[1] ICCPR, onwar propaganda); delegates throughout the debates oftenused the term hate propaganda. In fact, when advocacy wasconsidered, it was often defined as “extreme propaganda.”For instance, one delegate held that advocacy must be un-derstood as “systematic and persistent propaganda.”22 Thedrafters were never clear about how extreme hate propa-ganda must be to come within the ambit of “advocacy ofhatred,” that is, within the meaning of the to-be-drafted in-citement clause. For the Brazilian delegate in the ThirdCommittee, it was “the repeated and insistent expression of

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an opinion for the purpose of creating a climate of hatredand lack of understanding between the peoples of two ormore countries, in order to bring them eventually to armedconflict.”23 This presupposes a high threshold: fosteringhatred with the ultimate intent of causing a war betweenpeoples or countries. Against the implicit background of theICCPR’s drafting efforts—the Holocaust and World WarII—this reading makes sense. That said, since the war pro-paganda clause and the incitement clause were ultimatelycodified as two separate provisions (in the same article), itcannot be maintained that advocacy of hatred requires allthose intentions on the part of the inciter. Nevertheless, un-derstandings of advocacy in the travaux suggest a highthreshold for Article 20(2) to be triggered. Throughout thetravaux one finds references to “systematic and persistentpropaganda” and “repeated and insistent expressions.”Thus most one-off types of (religious) defamation could notpossibly qualify as advocacy of hatred within the meaning ofthe covenant.

More important than the travaux are the contemporaryworkings of the global guardian of the ICCPR: the UN Hu-man Rights Committee. Indicative of the complex and per-haps still controversial nature of the clause, the HumanRights Committee has not yet provided a set of workingdefinitions of its constituent terms, including advocacy.24

This may mean the committee views states as having somediscretion and not being obliged to literally copy “any ad-vocacy”/“tout appel,” for instance opting instead for lan-guage such as “any hate propaganda” or “any hate speech”in their national laws. Alternatively, the committee may bepreoccupied with convincing state parties that national lawsprohibiting advocacy of certain types of hatred are mandat-ory—leaving precise definitions for later. Indeed, the

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relevant concluding observations that the Human RightsCommittee has issued tend to be very general—unlike themuch more sophisticated and demanding observations ofthe Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination(CERD). In fact, CERD has used its concluding observationsto communicate the message to states parties that thestandards of domestic legislative acts corresponding withArticle 4 of the International Convention on the Eliminationof All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)25 are closelymonitored. It consistently points out to states parties thatnewly adopted laws or amendments (or restrictive interpret-ations thereof in judicial practice) are still not fully in ac-cordance with the requirements of Article 4 ICERD.26 Whenthe laws in place are in accordance with ICERD, this com-mittee uses its concluding observations to inform statesparties that laws are inadequate by themselves under theconvention: there is a duty to investigate relevant cases,perhaps even a duty to prosecute relevant cases. In that re-spect, the committee has at times indicated that a state’shate propaganda laws have resulted in an alarmingly lownumber of convictions27 or indeed that more active prosec-ution is required.28

Also in its case law on individual complaints one will lookin vain for comprehensive definitions of advocacy. The Hu-man Rights Committee tends to take a commonsense ap-proach here, suggesting that it more or less knows whatconstitutes advocacy when confronted with it. Accordingly,the hateful messages that Mr. T in J.R.T. and the W.G. Partyv. Canada disseminated through a telephone system“clearly” constituted the advocacy that Canada had an ob-ligation to prohibit under Article 20(2).29 This case re-volved around tape-recorded messages that members of thepublic could listen to when they called T’s number. The

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anti-Semitic messages warned callers of the allegeddangers of international Jewry. In this case the applicabilityof Article 20(2) impacted the admissibility of the case. Butalso in cases where Article 20(2) informs the considerationof the merits of the case, the committee does not dwell onwhether the relevant publication or speech constitutes ad-vocacy. For example, in Malcolm Ross v. Canada, the stateand the applicant, a teacher, disagreed as to whether thelatter’s off-duty anti-Semitic pamphlets amounted to ad-vocacy.30 The committee implicitly and without extensiveargumentation acknowledged that they did.31

The Human Rights Committee considered defining ad-vocacy while drafting the general comment on freedom ofexpression but ultimately decided against it. An early draftof the comment stated, “By ‘advocacy’ is meant publicforms of expression that are intended to elicit action or re-sponse.”32 This definition does not cite Human Rights Com-mittee case law, concluding observations, or travaux. Mi-chael O’Flaherty appears to have come up with it himself.33

The emphasis on public forms of expression makes senseand does tap into travaux discussion on these matters. Thisemphasis presumably was not meant to imply that only pub-lic figures can commit hate speech; the criterion rather re-quires a minimal degree of public dissemination of the rel-evant speech or publication. An exclusive focus on publicauthorities in defining the crime of hate speech would nothave been unreasonable, given the historical backdrop: thestate-instigated hate propaganda of the Nazis fostered theHolocaust. Yet the drafters realized that these forms of hatepropaganda also occur horizontally among citizens. Accord-ing to Stephanie Farrior, ever since the early French pro-posals on freedom of expression and incitement, mostdrafters understood that the relevant provisions were to

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protect against private actors as well.34 The human rightslawyer and scholar Manfred Nowak, in his seminal book onthe ICCPR, argues that the ultimately adopted incitementclause requires national legislation and sanctions “applic-able equally to private persons and State organs.” However,he also thinks that if we interpret Article 20 ICCPR in thelight of its object and purpose, we must take account of “itsresponsive character with regard to the Nazi racial hatredcampaigns, which ultimately led to the murder of millionsof human being on the basis of racial, religious and nation-al criteria.”35 This means that Article 20(2) “does not re-quire States parties to prohibit advocacy of hatred inprivate that instigates non-violent acts of racial or religiousdiscrimination. What the delegates in the [Commission onHuman Rights] and the [General Assembly] had in mindwas to combat the horrors of fascism, racism and NationalSocialism at their roots, i.e. to prevent the public incite-ment of racial hatred and violence within a State or againstother States and peoples.”36 Accordingly, the incitementprovision applies to private parties in addition to state or-gans, but only to their public statements. This means thathateful speeches or inciteful music at a private gathering ofneo-Nazis would not necessarily engage domestic prohibi-tions derived from Article 20(2). Of course, any resulting vi-olent acts against others would be subject to regular crim-inal law. Moreover, a group’s intentions and biases could belegally relevant elements of aggravated hate crimes. Yetsuch crimes do not necessarily come within the scope ofArticle 20(2), unless combined with the public dissemina-tion of hatred (e.g., publish these views in a form that isavailable to a wider audience or organize more public gath-erings). The “Camden Principles on Freedom of Expressionand Equality,” a widely endorsed formulation of free speech

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principles by human rights lawyers, scholars, special rap-porteurs, and other independent experts under the auspicesof the INGO Article 19, similarly defines advocacy as “re-quiring an intention to promote hatred publicly towards thetarget group.”37 Consequently, all historical discussionsand contemporary attempts to define advocacy share a not-ably high threshold.

The second part of O’Flaherty’s (deleted) definition—“areintended to elicit action or response”—raises the crucialquestion of whether the offense of hate propaganda re-quires intention. O’Flaherty and supporters of the CamdenPrinciples give a central role to intention in their respectivedefinitions of advocacy. However, it seems aimed at slightlydifferent results in the two definitions: “action or response”according to O’Flaherty and “promotion of hatred towardsthe target group” according to Article 19.38

In sum, thus far the minimal elements for a hateful ex-pression to come within the scope of Article 20(2)–basedprohibitions are:

an advocator who promotes the hateful message,a publicly made message, anda target group.

“Hatred”

What is hatred within the meaning of Article 20(2) ICCPR?Only by highlighting the extreme nature of the speech thatsets off this article can we appreciate the differencesbetween the international incitement ban and domesticmeasures against blasphemy.

The same early General Comment No. 34 draft attemptedto define hatred: “By ‘hatred’ is meant intense emotions of

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opprobrium, enmity and detestation towards a target indi-vidual or group.”39 This definition is clearly based on theCamden Principles on Freedom of Expression and Equal-ity.40 It purports to show the types of extreme scenarios wemust think of when we consider the ICCPR’s hate propa-ganda clause: intense emotions of “opprobrium,” “enmity,”and “detestation.” This definition was also ultimately de-leted from the final comment. Though it doubtless wouldhave led to many debates among states parties (and schol-ars), one cannot but appreciate the attempt to devise work-ing definitions in this area, especially when such definitionsseek to narrowly demarcate the relevant forms of hatespeech.

The Camden Principles’ definition of hatred (and hostil-ity)41 similarly speaks of emotions and outlines the relevantstate of mind as composed of “intense and irrational emo-tions of opprobrium, enmity and detestation towards thetarget group.”42 Though irrational and emotions seemproblematic in a legal definition, they—and especially theword intense—highlight the extreme type of speech re-quired to set off the prohibition.

Some of the case law of the Human Rights Committee isuninstructive regarding the definition of advocacy becauseit often uncritically accepts or rejects a claim that state-ments come within the ambit of “hatred.” For instance, inFaurisson v. France, the committee concluded that RobertFaurisson’s negationist statements when “read in their fullcontext” were “of a nature as to raise or strengthen anti-semitic [sic] feelings.”43 In this notorious case, Faurisson, aBritish-French literature professor, was convicted in Franceunder the Gayssot Act.44 He had publicly cast doubt on theexistence of gas chambers for extermination purposes atAuschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in various

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statements and writings from the 1970s onward. The com-mittee’s views circumvent direct mention of Article 20(2).Nonetheless, they suggest that Faurisson’s crime underFrench law (revisionism) also amounted to a type of ex-treme speech to which ICCPR restrictions apply. Whereasthe committee mobilized the normal Article 19(3) restric-tions, both the state party45 and several committee mem-bers—notwithstanding sincere criticism regarding theoverly abstract Gayssot Act—wanted to designate revision-ism as “advocacy of hatred” in the meaning of Article 20(2).Rajsoomer Lallah held that it was “beyond doubt that, onthe basis of the findings of the French Courts, the state-ments of the author amounted to the advocacy of racial orreligious hatred constituting incitement, at the very least,to hostility and discrimination towards people of the Jewishfaith which France was entitled under article 20, paragraph2, of the Covenant to proscribe.”46 His explanation waspremised mostly on the element of incitement. ElizabethEvatt and David Kretzmer, in their concurring opinion, ex-plain why Faurisson’s statements can rightly be labeled ad-vocacy of hatred rather than “merely insulting speech.” Forthem what matters is that Faurisson not merely challengedthe Holocaust but accused Jews of concocting the wholeevent, thereby inciting hostility to Jews.47 Essentially, thesecommittee members sought to unveil a degree of opprobri-um, enmity, and detestation vis-à-vis Jews on the part of theauthor of this communication high enough to engageArticle 20(2).

Conversely, in Maria Vassilari et al. v. Greece, the com-mittee, again without much argumentation, rejected thatthe prima facie inciteful letter published in a local newspa-per came within the ambit of “hatred” as required by Article20(2). The anti-Roma letter was titled “Objection against

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the Gypsies: Residents Gathered Signature for Their Remov-al,” was the product of the representatives of local associ-ations of four districts of Patras, and contained twelve hun-dred signatures of non-Roma residents who lived in the vi-cinity of a Roma settlement. This case is extremely interest-ing, for it concerns the first communication brought by al-leged hate speech victims—as opposed to the typical scen-ario of a case brought by a person who was subjected tohate speech law restrictions, that is, an alleged inciter. Ac-cording to the committee, the authors of this communica-tion had “insufficiently substantiated the facts” in relationto Article 20(2).48 This resolution of the case may havehinged on the committee’s unwillingness at the time to de-clare Article 20(2) an autonomous human right (i.e., a fun-damental “freedom from incitement”). Abdelfattah Amorconvincingly argued in his dissenting opinion that Vassilariand others made a strong prima facie case in light of Article20(2).49 Admittedly, his observations point more towardproof of incitement (to be discussed shortly) to certain ad-verse actions than to advocacy of hatred per se, but as hesuggests, the communication satisfied the admissibility cri-teria. Whereas “advocacy of hatred” does not presupposeincitement in all cases, “incitement to discrimination, hos-tility or violence” is almost necessarily based on a degree ofhatred, whether explicit or not.

To determine what acts constitute hatred within themeaning of Article 20(2) and what acts do not, a case wouldneed to be brought before the committee right on the bor-derline between intense or systematic religious defamation(falling short of Article 20[2]) and religious hatred withinthe scope of Article 20(2). Thus the committee would beurged to neatly demarcate the two concepts—punishable in-citement versus unpunishable defamation—and provide

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reasons and factors why the statements would ultimately bepunishable or not. The pending case concerning the al-legedly inciteful statements that the Dutch politician GeertWilders made about Muslims (M.R., A.B.S. and N.A v. theNetherlands) is precisely such a case. Most of his state-ments can—on their face—be clearly deemed religious de-famation, but there was also a systematic pattern of behavi-or and speech underlying them that may further reveal “in-tense emotions of opprobrium, enmity and detestation to-wards a target individual or group.” Some of the statementsclearly incite action. Wilders used fighting words such asmust be stopped, fight, defend ourselves, and deportation,but only in relation to the religion of Islam and the ideologyof Islamization, never in relation to the persons of Muslims.The distinction is important and perhaps determinative ofwhether the statements amounted to incitement. The cru-cial questions to be resolved by the committee are thus two-fold: whether the call for action itself indicates opprobrium,enmity, or detestation, meaning whether the inciting of ac-tion is itself evidence of hatred, and whether one can actagainst a hated belief system or ideology without targetingthe persons holding the beliefs or ideology.

For now, the most instructive case on what constitutes“hatred” within the meaning of Article 20(2) remains Rossv. Canada. Ross worked as modified resource teacher for re-medial reading in a school district of New Brunswick. Hehad made negationist and other anti-Semitic remarks,though not in class but as part of his second life as apamphleteer. Throughout the period of his teaching posi-tion, from 1976 to 1991, he published booklets or pamph-lets—with such titles as Web of Deceit, The Real Holocaust,Spectre of Power, and Christianity vs. Judeo-Christian-ity—and made other off-duty yet public statements

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expressing his revisionist and anti-Semitic views, includingduring a television appearance and in letters sent to news-papers.50 A Jewish parent—whose children attended anoth-er school in the same district—filed a complaint with theHuman Rights Commission of New Brunswick. The domest-ic procedures against Ross indicate what was likely the finalstraw for this parent to file the complaint: his daughter hadwanted to watch a gymnastics competition at the schoolwhere Ross taught but was advised that she probably shouldnot go there because that was “where the teacher who hatesJews works” (she eventually did go but felt very anxious forfear of being attacked).51 The parental complaint againstthe school board argued that unless this board took discip-linary action against Ross, it would be implicitly condoninghis anti-Semitic attitude.52 Specifically, the parent submit-ted that the school board had breached a section of the NewBrunswick Human Rights Code on equal access to publiclyprovided educational services (i.e., without discriminationon the basis of religion or ancestry).53 The Canadian Hu-man Rights Commission established a Board of Inquiry tolook into the complaint. The board concluded that Ross’spublished writings and public comments were discriminat-ory against persons of Jewish faith and ancestry. He hadcalled on people to hold persons of Jewish faith and ances-try in contempt and had invited people to join his fightagainst Jews.54 In the light of that, the Canadian Board ofInquiry recommended a set of sanctions, including a relega-tion to a nonteaching position, which the Canadian Su-preme Court upheld.55

Ross complained before the UN Human Rights Committeethat Canada had violated his freedom of expression. Amongother arguments, Canada raised preliminary defenses

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against the admissibility of the communication based onArticle 20(2) ICCPR, on the need to prohibit incitement.56

This case best illustrates the point that not all discrimin-atory speech is illegal incitement under international law.What mattered to the Canadian authorities and to the Cana-dian Supreme Court was not merely the finding that thisteacher’s anti-Semitic publications denigrated the faith andbeliefs of Jewish people but above all the fact that he por-trayed Jews as the “enemy” of Canada and its predomin-antly Christian population. The Human Rights Committeeseconded this: what mattered most was not so much thatRoss questioned or criticized Jewish beliefs but that he hadcalled on “true Christians” to hold persons of the Jewishfaith in contempt, to identify Jews as the enemy, and to joinhim in his battle against Jews.57 Again we see the factorshatred and incitement come closely together: it is throughhis various calls for action (be it hostile action or acts ofdiscrimination) that we get further insight into the man’sexact level of opprobrium, enmity, and detestation vis-à-visJews.

In sum, triggers of Article 20(2) ICCPR must include anadvocator of a publicly made hateful message aimed at atarget group and indicating an intense degree of enmity (oropprobrium or detestation). The last factor distinguishesadvocacy of hatred from nonqualified forms of defamation,insult, or blasphemy. Only rarely do jurisprudential effortspinpoint what in a speech or publication amounts to hatred(the concurring opinions in Faurisson are good examples).Most often the element of hatred is identified with the ele-ment of incitement (as in J.R.T. and the W.G. Party andRoss v. Canada). This is understandable, since the ICCPRaims at eradicating not hate speech but hate speech “that

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constitutes incitement to . . .” The required advocacy ofhatred itself is qualified.

Accordingly, while the difference between defamation andhate speech is that the latter requires advocacy of intenseopprobrium, enmity, and detestation toward a target indi-vidual or group, the difference between hate speech thatfalls within the ambit of Article 20(2) and that which doesnot lies in the element of incitement. We can thus discernthree categories of extreme speech:

unqualified forms of insult to the religious feelings of others—reli-gious defamation and blasphemy—that do not necessarily amountto advocacy of hatred, since they lack an intense degree of enmityor an element of incitement;

forms of extreme speech that may qualify as hate speech but fallshort of the requirements of Article 20(2) because the element ofincitement is lacking; that is, statements that seem to amount toadvocacy of hatred without an express call on others to act in aspecific adverse manner, such as an Internet forum post stating “Ihate Jews” or “I hate blacks” (though other norms of internationallaw may cover such statements, as racist or anti-Semiticspeech);58

forms of inciteful hate speech that prima facie come within thescope of Article 20(2) because all required elements are present:an advocator of a publicly made message displaying an intense de-gree of enmity toward a target group and constituting incitement(see below) to discrimination, hostility, or violence (see below).

“National,” “Racial,” or “Religious”

An international law–driven discussion of extreme religiousspeech or extreme speech about religion inevitably focuseson the ICCPR. In the ICCPR, advocacy of religious hatred

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stands out because this is ground that the 1965 ICERD doesnot cover. The words national and racial, used by Article20(2) ICCPR, resonate well with the definition of discrimin-ation found in the ICERD. The fact that states must prohibitadvocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred means, ac-cording to the Human Rights Committee, that national lawsmust mention all three grounds quite literally.59

Our main question is what religious means in this provi-sion. Since the ICCPR elsewhere treats religion as a suspectground of distinction (i.e., a prohibited ground for distin-guishing people unless reasonable and objective argumentsindicate otherwise) and as a fundamental right (the free-dom to have and manifest a religion), we may reasonablylook there for answers. The most elaborate views of the Hu-man Rights Committee on religions that warrant the protec-tion of the covenant are found in General Comment No. 22on Article 18 (freedom of religion or belief). The definitionis extremely inclusive: religion there is broadly construed toinclude metaphysical and nonmetaphysical beliefs, old andnew beliefs, large and small beliefs.60

Such a broad construction raises the question of whetherreligious hatred means merely “all forms of hatred targetedat a religious group” or also “religiously motivated hatred.”Though hatred targeted at a religious group will typicallybe religiously motivated, religiously motivated hatred is notnecessarily aimed at a religious group. One could conceive,for example, of religiously motivated hatred vis-à-vishomosexuals.

With respect to this issue, we may first observe that un-der international law, it does not seem to matter how one’shatred is motivated: the Human Rights Committee in its rel-evant case law does not assess this question in depth whenestablishing incidents of religious hatred. In fact, instances

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of hatred almost necessarily combine both intrinsic and ex-trinsic motivations. On the extrinsic side, characteristics ofa religious group could be hated in and for themselves.Such hatred can point to an intrinsic motivation, such asthoughts of superiority. The inciter could make thesethoughts explicit in the process of expressing the hatespeech but may very well leave them entirely implicit. Asthe intrinsic motivation can be any belief the inciter holds,hatred without intrinsic motivation is nearly impossible. Ac-cordingly, for the Human Rights Committee it is ultimatelyirrelevant whether, for instance, anti-Semitic schoolteach-ers or “historians” express themselves as they do becausethey hate Jews in and for themselves or because they are re-ligious bigots who blame the Jews for crucifying Jesus. It isthe fact that Jews are hated and incited against that mat-ters for the committee; whether the inciter is intrinsicallyreligiously motivated does not. For instance, though in Rossv. Canada the state party and the applicant extensively de-bated whether Ross’s views were “religious” or“Christian,”61 the Human Rights Committee largely ignoredthe question in considering the merits of the case, suggest-ing that the matter is immaterial for the application ofArticle 20(2).62 In such cases as J.R.T. and the W.G. Partyand Faurisson, questions about the inciter’s possible per-sonal religious motivations in expressing telephonic hatemessages and Holocaust denial are absent altogether. Insum, according to the committee, religious in religioushatred (Article 20[2] ICCPR) chiefly if not exclusivelyrelates to the verbally attacked group of persons who can bedefined by their religious beliefs.

Thus, the prohibition of advocacy of religious hatred cov-ers in principle all forms of hatred aimed at a religiousgroup. Semantically, religious hatred could (additionally)

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denote hatred specially characterized by certain religiousbeliefs that the inciter holds. For instance, a Jew could ex-press hatred of Muslims (and vice versa) on account of doc-trinal differences on religious issues. This example entails areligious person hating others defined by their differing re-ligious affinity for religious reasons. Importantly, however,such religiously motivated hatred could be aimed at a groupof persons defined not by their religious beliefs but bygender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, among other char-acteristics.63 For example, a religious leader could expresshatred of homosexuals, citing religious sources. A religiousleader may incite to discrimination against women, invok-ing religious justifications. One could even think of incite-ment to violence against children “based” on religious au-thority (e.g., the burning alive of so-called child witches in-stigated by pastors in central African countries).64

Article 20(2) does not protect these atypical targetgroups if religious in religious hatred exclusively points to-ward a religious target group. As Manfred Nowak explains,“Incitement is only to be prohibited when it takes place byway of ‘any advocacy’ (‘tout appel’) of national, racial, or re-ligious hatred. This means a contrario that incitement to vi-olence against women, for example, does not fall under theprohibition of Art. 20.”65 The question is whether Nowak’sexample would be legally different if the incitement to viol-ence against women were expressly religiously motivated:would that amount to a form of religious hatred? Semantic-ally, this certainly is the case. Moreover, even if religious inreligious hatred exclusively points toward the target group,contemporary mainstreaming approaches focused on inter-sectionality66 may still bring the example of incitement todiscrimination against women under the required heading(a religious target group). Specifically, incitement of

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violence against women by a religious hate preacher couldtarget the women in the believers’ community or aim at de-monizing (e.g., branding someone as “infidel”) women out-side the community (or both). In the former instance, thetarget group’s main characteristic, gender, will always in-tersect with their belonging to this religious group. In thelatter instance, the target group’s main characteristic,gender, still intersects with a religion characteristic: in thiscase, being deemed a religious outsider.

Almost exclusively reflecting on the horrors of the Holo-caust, the travaux on Article 20(2) did not anticipate thesecontemporary forms of intersectional incitement and thusdo not help us much further.67 The Human Rights Commit-tee missed out on an opportunity to settle this questionwhen it adopted General Comment No. 34. We must wait fora case brought to the committee that revolves around inter-sectional incitement (or comment on this issue in the com-mittee’s concluding observations on a state’s practice) toknow the final dictum on this matter. An inclusive defini-tion of the prohibited grounds for incitement would cer-tainly be consistent with the UN’s gradual acceptance of in-tersectionality as a priority.68 As Nazila Ghanea has argued,intersectionality has “a bearing on our discussion of hatespeech, firstly in how intersectional hate speech is sufferedand secondly in how it is responded to.”69

“Incitement”

The most critical term in Article 20(2) ICCPR is incitement.It significantly raises the threshold of the hate clause.Indeed, incitement is what defines the advocacy provision:it turns Article 20(2) ICCPR from a hate speech clause intoan incitement clause proper. Incitement is perhaps best

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understood as an extreme subspecies of the genus hatespeech. To the advocator and the target group, incitementintroduces a third required actor: the audience. Con-sequently, incitement, unlike blasphemy and defamation ofreligion, is premised on a triangle of hatred. What we min-imally need under Article 20(2) is an advocator who ex-presses his or her intense (religious) hatred of a targetgroup and incites a third party, the inciter’s audience, toacts of discrimination, hostility, or violence toward the tar-get group. Blasphemy and defamation of religion may insultthe feelings of the target group, even provoke it to violence.Yet these considerations will be deemed utterly immaterialunder the incitement clause. There we are exclusively inter-ested in the question of to what extent a third party, theaudience, is mobilized to commit acts of discrimination,hostility, or violence against the target group. Violence(etc.) committed by the target group could constitute apublic order matter under the regular restrictions govern-ing freedom of expression, but there can be no role for it inincitement legislation. In fact, under regular public orderrestrictions on free speech, public outcry by the targetgroup must always be treated with much caution, lest alltoo easily overstated—and occasionally outright orches-trated—eruptions of religious sensitivities hijack a liberalsociety.

Let us explore this important point in more detail. Ac-cording to Article 20(2)’s incitement clause, only “advocacyof national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes in-citement” must be prohibited. These words suggest thatsome forms of advocacy of national, racial, or religioushatred constitute incitement and some forms do not andthat it is possible to distinguish between the two. But tomake this distinction, do we look at the advocator, the

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audience, or both? To begin, in the abstract, incitementcould be conceived as an expression of hatred that includesan express call for action (discrimination, violence, etc.).This would entail focusing on the advocator and specificallyon the content of the speech. Second, incitement could bean expression of hatred that creates a risk or likelihood thatsuch adverse acts (discrimination, violence, etc.) will resultfrom the hateful statements. Though this notion still com-mences with the advocator’s hate speech, by focusing onrisks we shift the emphasis to the larger context of the like-lihood of the audience responding to the speech by attack-ing or discriminating against the target group. Third, in theabstract, incitement could focus on the likelihood of speechitself doing direct harm to the target group, without theagency of an audience.

Let us begin by dispensing with the third conception. Thelanguage of Article 20(2) implies that the target group’sfeeling victimized, outraged, or dehumanized is not a relev-ant factor in establishing the presence of incitement. Thearticle requires incitement to discrimination, hostility, orviolence, meaning there must be a relation between an ad-vocator and an audience that could possibly engage in actsof discrimination or violence. Establishing the fact that thetarget group has directly experienced victimization does notaddress whether it is at risk of being harmed by the audi-ence. It is true that Article 20(2) does not prescribe whomust be engaged in the adverse acts (hostility, etc.).However, it is in line with the system of Articles 19 and20(2) ICCPR primarily to consider the hate speech audi-ence, not the target group. The word discrimination makesthis point clear: that act always presupposes the audience.(It takes a truly ingenious hate speech for the target groupto start discriminating against itself). “Hostility” and

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“violence” should be similarly construed as perpetrated byan audience. Certainly, a target group may become hostileor violent toward the advocator when confronted with hatespeech. However, including the target group in our defini-tion of incitement would mean the target group was alwaysin a position to turn a statement into incitement andthereby require the state to interfere with free speech.Orchestrated outrage could then decide the limits to freespeech. This outcome seems contrary to the robust freespeech standards of Article 19 (which already includes the“regular” reputation of others and public order restrictions)and the principles of 20(2) (which defines incitementclearly as an extraordinary category). Also, the history ofArticle 20(2)—a reaction to the public incitement to racialand religious hatred, indeed to genocide, by the ThirdReich—is exclusively linked to the audience as potentialharmful factor.

That leaves two plausible conceptions. First, incitementas expressly calling on the hate speech’s audience for cer-tain actions against the target group (discrimination, viol-ence, etc.). Second, incitement as an expression of hatredthat creates a risk or likelihood that the audience will per-petrate such adverse acts (discrimination, violence) againstthe target group. We need to assess which conception res-onates best with the meaning of Article 20(2). Indeed, doonly statements that literally call for “discrimination, hos-tility or violence” trigger Article 20(2), or can statements inwhich an express incitement (“Go harm them”; “Go discrim-inate against them”) is absent still engage Article 20(2) be-cause of the risk that “discrimination, hostility or violence”will ensue? And with respect to statements that do literallycall for “discrimination, hostility or violence” (qua content),is Article 20(2) here automatically triggered to the extent

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that states must enforce their incitement legislation, orcould a low risk of “discrimination, hostility or violence” bythe hate speech’s audience (context) remove the primafacie incitement element?

Until recently we had little information to go by to ad-dress this issue, as monitoring bodies had not been gener-ous with working definitions in this area. Not even in therelevant international case law could we discern detailedconceptualizations of incitement. In the run-up to the adop-tion of General Comment No. 34, the Human Rights Com-mittee and other stakeholders finally extensively reflectedon the matter. The second revised draft of General Com-ment No. 34 defined incitement as “likely to trigger immin-ent acts of discrimination, hostility or violence against aspecific individual or group.”70 This conception clearlyhinges on likelihood: an advocacy has “constituted,” withinthe meaning of Article 20(2) ICCPR, incitement as soon asthe likelihood of these adverse acts by a third party, thehate speech audience, against the speech’s target group isestablished.

The earlier Camden Principles definition of incitementagain resonates with Michael O’Flaherty’s (ultimately de-leted) definition: “The term ‘incitement’ refers to state-ments about national, racial or religious groups which cre-ate an imminent risk of discrimination, hostility or violenceagainst persons belonging to those groups.”71 The focus on“imminent risk”—echoing the U.S. judicial doctrine of aclear and present / imminent danger—again implies that forthe prohibition of Article 20(2) to be engaged, no causallink with already occurring acts of violence or discrimina-tion but rather the likelihood—here risk—that such actsmay occur in the very near future is required. And as wehave seen, as far as the two just-quoted conceptualizations

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of incitement are concerned, context is certainly a majorfactor. Whether or not an advocacy “creates an imminentrisk” or “is likely to trigger imminent acts” will dependpartly on its nature but also significantly on the overall (so-cial, political) context in which the speech is made.

Questions concerning the content of speech may include:

• Are fighting words used, that is, are there any discern-ible express calls for adverse action(discrimination, hos-tility, or violence)?

• How intense are the statements, that is, are emotions ofopprobrium, enmity, or detestation discernible?

• To what extent is the target group dehumanized or de-picted as inferior in the speech?

• How many times is the hateful message repeated (froma one-off expression of hatred to a systematic hatecampaign)?

Questions concerning the context of the hate speech mayinclude:

• What is the position of the advocator: politician, reli-gious leader, journalist, academic, artist, member of thepublic?

• How public is the speech; that is, what is its level of out-reach and what is the size of its audience? Notably:

• What is the medium used (Internet, book, documentary,pamphlet, interview, newspaper article, newspaper let-ter or column, magazine, statement on TV, etc.)?

• What is the setting of the speech (e.g., a ticketed con-ference, debate, or film; a political rally in the street; a

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TV debate; a church service)?

• What is the profile of the target group and its positionin society (e.g., religious minority or majority, with orwithout a history of recorded hate crimes against it)?

Arguably, of the relevant cases brought before the HumanRights Committee to date, Vassilari seems to most compre-hensively (prima facie) satisfy both content and context cri-teria.72 However, as alleged hate speech victims rather thana previously punished inciter brought this case, and as thecommittee (with the exception of member AbdelfattahAmor)73 did not yet dare to pronounce on the possibility ofstanding under Article 20(2) ICCPR, the committee chose touncritically dismiss this case as inadmissible.74 The beratedletter published in a local newspaper—an anti-Roma letter,calling for forceful “removal” and “militant action”—wouldprima facie seem to satisfy the incitement factor in themeaning of Article 20(2). Amor, underscoring both thefighting words used (such as militant action) and the vul-nerability of the group (Roma minority), convincingly ar-gued in his dissenting opinion that Vassilari and othersmade a strong case in light of Article 20(2). Accordingly,they should have been granted standing to argue their com-plaint, and the committee should have made a decision onthe merits. These merits, however, would have been atypicalwhen compared to standard Article 20(2) cases, where themain question typically is whether or not the article author-izes a state to interfere with the free speech of an allegedinciter. Here the merits of the case would have revolvedaround whether or not the letter amounted to incitementwithin the meaning of Article 20(2) and if so, whetherGreece should have taken measures with respect to the au-thors of the letter. This context assessment, revolving

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around the position of the Roma and the risk to them thatthe hateful letter posed, unfortunately was cut short as aresult of the committee’s questionable pronouncement onadmissibility.

Both content and context assessments can be found inother cases that the Human Rights Committee has decided.In Ross v. Canada, for instance, the committee scrutinizedthe content of Ross’s anti-Semitic pamphlets and came tothe conclusion that beyond merely being offensive, theycontain an objective incitement element.75 That is, the com-mittee put great emphasis on his literal call on others (theaudience) to act hostile vis-à-vis Jews. Context also appearsto be significant for the committee in this case. Specifically,it was not satisfied with the mere fact that a literal call foradverse action can be discerned in Ross’s statements; it stillmade a risk assessment. Some of the harm had already beendone, and the committee was in a position to simply affirmwhat the national authorities had concluded, namely thatthere was in fact a causal link between Ross’s hateful ex-pressions and a “poisoned school environment.”76

In Faurisson too, individual committee members used amix of content and context factors to establish incitementwithin the meaning of Article 20(2). France repeatedly ar-gued that Faurisson had committed incitement by denyingthe Holocaust.77 Therefore, it expressly invoked Article20(2) of the covenant.78 Faurisson denied that his negation-ist statements could be construed as incitement.79 GivenFrance’s direct invocation of Article 20(2) and the substant-ive disagreement between it and Faurisson as to the mean-ing and scope of incitement, it is all the more remarkablethat the committee largely ignored this issue and opted notto reflect on Article 20(2) in any direct way. The committeelargely resolved the case by reference to freedom of speech

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and the regular restrictions that Article 19(3) provides.80

Although one key sentence appears to hint at Article20(2),81 the committee’s reasoning clearly falls short of arobust analysis of why the statements would amount to il-legal incitement within the meaning of Article 20(2). Tomake that additional analysis, we need to assess the concur-ring opinions of individual committee members.

Taking account of the context of the statements (risinganti-Semitism in present-day France), the committee mem-bers Elizabeth Evatt and David Kretzmer (in an opinion co-signed by Eckart Klein) accepted the French courts’ evalu-ation of Faurisson’s negationist statements as being “of anature as to raise or strengthen anti-semitic [sic] tenden-cies.”82 Member Rajsoomer Lallah concurred with Evatt andKretzmer and also accepted the French courts’ findings ofillegal incitement.83 These concurring opinions imply thatHolocaust denial can be deemed incitement depending onthe specific social context, meaning that in another place ortime, the conclusion may be different. In their criticism ofthe national law at stake (the Gayssot Act, which prohibitsthe act of denying well-established perpetrated crimesagainst humanity) in the Faurisson case, said committeemembers identified themselves as proponents of the “likeli-hood” definition of incitement. Evatt and Kretzmer criti-cized the fact that the Gayssot Act seems to criminalize notincitement proper but, much more broadly, the denial ofcrimes against humanity (specifically the Holocaust).84

Moreover, they contend, “the Gayssot Act is phrased in thewidest language and would seem to prohibit publication ofbona fide research connected with matters decided by theNuremburg Tribunal. Even if the purpose of this prohibitionis to protect the right to be free from incitement to anti-semitism [sic], the restrictions imposed do not meet the

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proportionality test. They do not link liability to the intentof the author, nor to the tendency of the publication to in-cite to anti-semitism [sic].”85 Lallah had roughly the samereservations.86 A contrario, then, these committee memberswould require national incitement laws to incorporate botha requirement of intent and a risk factor. Both of thesewould importantly prevent states from abusing incitementlaws. The risk factor accords with Article 19 ICCPR’s re-quirements of necessity and proportionality with respect torestrictions on free speech. The requirement of intentwould place a heavy burden of proof on states, ensuringthat they can successfully combat only the most blatant andmost harrowing instances of incitement to violence and dis-crimination. In support of this reading is the Human RightsCommittee’s declaration that any Article 20(2)–based re-striction must satisfy the “regular” conditions for makingrestrictions under Article 19(3) ICCPR.87 O’Flaherty wasnot mandated to adopt a general comment on Article 20, ashe admits;88 it is nevertheless crucial that these importantsafeguards against governmental abuse of incitement lawshave now been stipulated.

Such a likelihood or risk factor, accordingly, is bound tofeature twice in any human rights assessment of a case inwhich national incitement laws have been enforced. First, if“likelihood” (e.g., in an early draft of General Comment No.34)89 or “imminent risk” (e.g., in the Camden Principles)90

is part of our very definition of incitement, this is bound toimpact what types of acts may and may not be prohibited.Generally speaking, it will thus be clear that only extremecases of hate speech are to be banned a priori: advocacy ofhatred likely to trigger imminent acts of discrimination,hostility, or violence against a specific individual or group.Second, “likelihood” or “imminent risk” (etc.) is a factor

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that is bound to recur in any subsequent assessment of thenecessity of the enforcement of a concrete hate speech lawin a concrete case of alleged incitement.

VIOLENCE VERSUS DISCRIMINATION AND HOSTILITY

Among the key terms in the covenant’s incitement clause,discrimination, hostility, and violence are most in need ofconceptualization by the Human Rights Committee and leg-al scholars, with an express view toward preventing govern-mental abuses of extreme speech legislation. The ICCPR or-ders states parties to ban incitement to “discrimination,”“hostility,” or “violence”—three forms of rather, say, uncoolbehavior, yet all very different. Specifically, on their face,their degrees of gravity vary enormously. Let us attempt tounderstand the meaning of these terms in the specific con-text of the incitement clause.

Discrimination resonates with the equality and nondis-crimination provisions of Articles 2 and 26 of the ICCPR(and General Comment No. 18 on Non-discrimination).91

That is, a distinction based on one of the “suspect grounds”(such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or oth-er opinion, national or social origin, property, birth)amounts to discrimination unless the criteria for such dif-ferentiation are “reasonable” and “objective.”92 In relationto religious discrimination specifically, the 1981 UN reli-gious tolerance declaration contains concrete definitions.93

Whereas discrimination at least has a counterpart in thecovenant, the same cannot be said for hostility or violence.The Human Rights Committee has not yet offered workingdefinitions of these terms (neither do early drafts of Gener-al Comment No. 34, which did define, as we have seen, suchnotions as advocacy, hatred, and incitement). The Camden

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Principles define hostility as “intense and irrational emo-tions of opprobrium, enmity and detestation towards thetarget group.”94 That renders it indistinguishable fromhatred, for which these principles give the exact samedefinition. If these notions are indeed synonymous, thatwould imply that incitement is achieved when the audience“simply” copies the hateful messages that the advocator hasdisseminated (i.e., without a need for additional acts of viol-ence or discrimination). This seems to be too low athreshold. Hate speech may very well lead to more hatespeech, but the necessity principle urges us to scrutinizethe additional question of whether the rights of thespeech’s target group are truly endangered. The INGOArticle 19 seems to go a bit beyond the Camden Principles(with which it clearly engages directly): “Hostility implies amanifested action—it is not just a state of mind, but it im-plies a state of mind, which is acted upon. In this case, hos-tility can be defined as the manifestation of hatred—that isthe manifestation of ‘intense and irrational emotions of op-probrium, enmity and detestation towards the targetgroup’. . . . Of particular importance is to determine thelevel of hostility requested under article 20.”95 Neither theHuman Rights Committee nor the Camden Principlesdefines violence. Article 19 provides the following defini-tion: “Violence shall be understood as the intentional use ofphysical force or power against another person, or against agroup or community that either results in or has a highlikelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm,maldevelopment, or deprivation.”96

So when, then, is Article 20(2) engaged? What type of in-citement is required? On the one hand, the word or seemsclear enough: the message must incite one of these adversereactions by the hate speech audience vis-à-vis the speech’s

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target group. An older draft of General Comment No. 34conceded as much: “It would be sufficient that the incite-ment relate to any of the three outcomes: discrimination,hostility or violence.”97 Though it seems obviously correct,this remark was dropped from the general comment. Fromthe moment of the ICCPR’s drafting until today, many law-yers have found fault with the words hostility and discrimin-ation in particular. The thresholds of incitement to theseacts, evidently, do not compare to that of incitement toviolence.

In fact, a 1953 draft incitement provision purported tomediate in such early definitional and threshold debates.While some delegations, notably those from the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom, felt that only violencecould be operationalized in judicial practice, other repres-entatives wished to go much further.98 The proposal of theSub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Pro-tection of Minorities (one of the ICCPR drafting commit-tees) had focused on “incitement to violence.” As a result ofa Chilean amendment, its focus changed to advocacy of reli-gious hostility “that constitutes an incitement to hatred andviolence.”99 The and here is not without meaning: it is pre-cisely the cumulative effect that was intended—thus appeas-ing those states that insisted that minimally real or immin-ent violence is required and those that argued “that anypropaganda constituting an incitement to hatred was noless serious than that constituting an incitement to viol-ence.”100 Because of the and, the threshold was exception-ally high at that particular stage of the drafting.

At roughly the same time in the early post-WWII period,the U.K. representative in the Commission on HumanRights argued that extreme speech limitations must only at-tend to “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, that

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was to say, conduct which, whether or not it actually resul-ted in violence, a reasonable person would conclude to belikely to lead to violence.”101 Sir Samuel Hoare proposedthis as an “objective” criterion, as opposed to more trickysubjective criteria that risk giving governments the powerto make a decision “on whether an opinion offended againstan accepted canon. No more useful weapon could be handedto a government disposed to abolish free discussion, or,perhaps, tempted to promote national hostility.”102 AJapanese delegate also seemed to imply that the hate propa-ganda provision may serve to combat only instances of in-citement to violence. If states were free to adopt repressivemeasures in situations in which advocacy of national, racial,or religious hostility did not lead to violence, this would be“very detrimental to freedom of expression.”103

As for the violence required, a related question of courseis whether incitement to violence as such is enough to trig-ger the incitement clause or whether violence must bealready visible (i.e., likelihood versus causality). A Saudirepresentative offered the following reaction to those deleg-ations that insisted there must be violence before the pro-hibition could be enforced: “That was not the case. Thephrase [‘incitement to violence’] clearly referred to propa-ganda and advocacy which were of a nature to incite to viol-ence and not which had incited to violence. Thus, if a lawenforcement officer overheard someone inciting a group ofpeople to attack a place of worship, he could immediatelydetain that person as an inciter to violence.”104

One common thread between the debates of the 1950sand those of more recent vintage is anxiety about an overlybroad range of adverse acts to which audiences can be in-cited. Some delegations in the 1950s deliberations clearlywished to concentrate exclusively on incitement to violence.

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Similar concerns still dominate legal discourse. Discrimina-tion in Article 20(2) is particularly problematic: essentiallythe word deletes, in one fell swoop, the threshold that thephrase that constitute incitement so importantly raises. Isit, as Nowak prompts us to ask, even possible to advocatehatred without at least inciting to discrimination?105

Indeed, what would nondiscriminatory hate speech looklike? Anyone who would go as far as articulating expresshatred for another group based on their distinctive race orreligion thereby incites some minimal degree of discrimina-tion. In sum, the word discrimination significantly destroysthe incitement threshold test, and we risk being back tosquare one, where all hate speech, regardless of actual risksto the rights of others, is to be combatted. That said, theobject and purpose of Articles 19 and 20 ICCPR taken to-gether surely cannot imply just that: Article 19 requires ro-bust protection of free speech, and Article 20 stipulates ex-treme exceptions to that rule. Hence, we see attempts inthe literature to enhance the meaning of discrimination.Using the object and purpose of the ICCPR (robust freespeech protection with exceptions in the most extremecases), one may attempt to upgrade the word or to and (i.e.,incitement to discrimination and violence). Or we couldcontemplate posing extra robust requirements based on ne-cessity and proportionality when Article 20(2) is engaged inrelation to allegations of incitement to discrimination. Forinstance, an additional test could be that incitement to dis-crimination may be combatted only if the state proves thatlesser interfering measures (e.g., education) would fail tosecure the equality rights of the target group.106 This couldbe proved in extreme cases by focusing on context, for in-stance a recorded recent sharp increase in hate crimes vis-

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à-vis the target group. That would also mean that any suchrestrictive measures can only be targeted and temporary.

Rather telling too is the fact that the UN special rappor-teur on freedom of religion or belief and the UN special rap-porteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimina-tion, xenophobia and related intolerance in their report onincitement to racial and religious hatred rather conspicu-ously omit the word hostility from their analysis.107 Theyemphasize that Article 20 was drafted against the back-ground of incitement by the Nazis. “Accordingly,” the spe-cial rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief argues, “ex-pressions should only be prohibited under article 20 if theyconstitute incitement to imminent acts of violence or dis-crimination against a specific individual or group.”108

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The Human Rights Committee’s unequivocal condemnationof blasphemy laws in 2011 was a milestone.109 Many un-qualified hate speech bills that are enforced worldwide,however, are just as detrimental for free speech as blas-phemy acts and defamation of religion bills. Although thereis obviously a long way to go in conceptualizing the rathercryptic Article 20(2) ICCPR, it is clear that this covenant’sincitement clause is premised on tackling extreme situ-ations and contains a host of built-in safeguards againstgovernmental abuse. In order to ensure that those safe-guards are indeed operational, it is essential that govern-ments be informed about the dos and don’ts in this area.Most crucial, in that respect, is the point that the reactionsof an extreme speech’s target group cannot regulate freespeech. Difficult to stomach though this may be for suchgroups, the necessity and proportionality of incitement law

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restrictions on free speech can be meaningfully checkedonly by assessing the risk of speech that mobilizes a thirdparty, the hate speech’s audience, to behave violently ordiscriminatorily. Fortunately, few instances of speech man-age to achieve that.

NOTES

1. In the words of William A. Schabas, “The road to genocide inRwanda was paved with hate speech.” Schabas, “Hate Speech inRwanda: The Road to Genocide” McGill Law Journal 46 (2000): 144.

2. E.g., for the chilling effect of the Indonesian Blasphemy Act,see Asma T. Uddin’s ch. 8.

3. E.g., Commission on Human Rights Res. 1999/82, Report on the55th Session, March 22–April 30, 1999, UN Doc. E/CN.4/1999/167 at280 (April 30, 1999) through Commission on Human Rights Res.2005/3, Report on the 61st Session, March 14–April 22, 2005, UNDoc. E/CN.4/2005/135 at 21 (April 12, 2005). See also Human RightsCouncil Res. 4/9, Report to the General Assembly on the 4th Sessionof the Human Rights Council, March 12–30, 2007, UN Doc. A/HRC/4/123 at 19 (March 30, 2007) through Human Rights Council Res. 13/16, Resolution Adopted by the Human Rights Council, 13th Session,UN Doc. A/HRC/Res/13/16 at 1 (March 25, 2010); G.A. Res. 60/150,UN Doc. A/RES/60/150 (December 16, 2005) through G.A. Res. 64/156, UN Doc. A/RES/64/156 (December 18, 2009).

4. A selection: L. Bennett Graham, “Defamation of Religions: TheEnd of Pluralism?,” Emory International Law Review 23 (2009):69–84; Sejal Parmar, “The Challenge of ‘Defamation of Religions’ toFreedom of Expression and the International Human Rights Sys-tem,” European Human Rights Law Review 3 (2009): 353–75; JeroenTemperman, “Blasphemy, Defamation of Religions and HumanRights Law,” Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 26 (2008):517–45; Allison G. Belnap, “Defamation of Religions: A Vague andOverbroad Theory That Threatens Basic Human Rights,” BrighamYoung University Law Review 2010, no. 2: 635–86; Rebecca J. Do-bras, “Is the United Nations Endorsing Human Rights Violations? AnAnalysis of the United Nations’ Combating Defamation of Religious

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Resolutions and Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws,” Georgia Journal of In-ternational and Comparative Law 37 (2009): 339–80. Asma T. Uddindemonstrates in ch. 8 how the Indonesian Blasphemy Act, in addi-tion to affecting freedom of expression, undermines the freedom ofreligion of both minority and majority (Muslim) believers.

5. E.g., G.A. Res. 66/167, “Combating Intolerance, Negative Ste-reotyping, Stigmatization, Discrimination, Incitement to Violenceand Violence against Persons, Based on Religion or Belief,” adoptedDecember 19, 2011 (A/RES/66/167); G.A. Res. 67/178, “CombatingIntolerance, Negative Stereotyping, Stigmatization, Discrimination,Incitement to Violence and Violence against Persons, Based on Reli-gion or Belief,” adopted December 20, 2012 (A/RES/67/178).

6. Robert C. Blitt, “Defamation of Religion: Rumors of Its DeathAre Greatly Exaggerated,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 62(2011): 347–97.

7. “Defamation of Religion and the Right to Freedom of Religionor Belief,” ch. 2 of “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom ofReligion or Belief, Asma Jahangir, and the Special Rapporteur onContemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobiaand Related Intolerance, Doudou Diène, Further to Human RightsCouncil Decision 1/107 on Incitement to Racial and ReligiousHatred and the Promotion of Tolerance,” UN Doc. A/HRC/2/3(September 20, 2006), pars. 36–39 (numbering omitted in quote). Ja-hangir prepared pars. 22–50 of this chapter.

8. Ibid., par. 42.9. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. Res.

2200A (XXI), 21 UN GAOR Supp. (No. 16) at 52, UN Doc. A/6316(1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force March 23, 1976.

10. Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 34: Article19: Freedoms of Opinion and Expression, CCPR/C/GC/34, adopted atits 102nd session, Geneva, July 11–29, 2011, par. 48 (emphasis ad-ded). General comments are the most authoritative, albeit strictlyspeaking nonbinding, interpretative pronouncements by UN treaty-monitoring bodies on both procedural and substantive human rightslaw.

11. Michael O’Flaherty, “Freedom of Expression: Article 19 of theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Human

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Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 34,” Human Rights LawReview 12 (2012): 26.

12. Ibid., 26–27. Interestingly, on these pages O’Flaherty makesno secret of the fact that as far as he was concerned, the first formu-lation was fine and these final adjustments overstate the case.

13. The International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) made aseries of invaluable notes during the public sessions dedicated tothe drafting of this general comment. See “Human Rights Commit-tee Adopts General Comment 34 on Freedom of Expression,” August10, 2011, accessed March 26, 2013, www.ishr.ch/treaty-bodies/1128-human-rights-committee-adopts-general-comment-34-on-freedom-of-expression, which has further links. The Open SocietyJustice Initiative also made detailed notes; see “UN Panel RevisesDraft Comment on Article 19,” April 8, 2011, http://freedominfo.org/documents/HRCnotesMarch2011.pdf.

14. Certain governments, on the other hand, provided commentsto the effect that (religious) defamation laws may in fact serve a le-gitimate purpose under international human rights law. Germany,for instance, brought to the attention of the committee (in a legalmemorandum titled “Germany’s Comments on Draft General Com-ment No. 34 on Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil andPolitical Rights”) the fact that states parties to the InternationalConvention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discriminationmust fight certain racist and discriminatory statements. In light ofthat, it would not be right for the Human Rights Committee to regu-late the matter in the most absolute (rejectionist) terms.

15. Article 19, “Statement on Draft General Comment No. 34 onArticle 19 of the ICCPR on Freedom of Opinion and Expression uponCompletion of the First Reading by the Human Rights Committee”January 2011, www.article19.org/pdfs/analysis/unhrc-com-ment-34.pdf, par. 47, “‘Defamation of Religions’ or BlasphemyLaws.”

16. The fifteen-page submission by the European Centre for Lawand Justice, an INGO with a major focus on religious freedom, is al-most entirely dedicated to persuading the committee to affirm thatblasphemy and defamation laws are inherently incompatible withthe ICCPR. ECLJ, “Draft General Comment No. 34 (Article 19

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ICCPR),” 2011, http://eclj.org/pdf/eclj_draftgeneralcomment-no34-article19_20110201.pdf.

17. The ISHR recorded this debate in its (unofficial) travaux (seen. 13) as follows: “There was a clear divide on how to approach thistopic with some members considering blasphemy laws to be inher-ently incompatible with article 19 and others insisting on their legit-imacy. The divide and, at the same time, collaborative effort of theCommittee was clearly illustrated with one member stating that‘while he would like to ban blasphemy laws outright, he felt that thiswould not enjoy widespread support and would actually underminethe body of General Comments of the Committee.’”

18. A premise also supported by Asma T. Uddin’s conclusions inch. 8, on the Indonesian Blasphemy Act, which cannot pass anygenuine necessity test, as it covers an overly broad range of speechacts about religion.

19. I.e., all ICCPR states parties minus the seven that haveentered reservations to Article 20 specifically. Australia, Belgium,Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the Un-ited States have deposited reservations or interpretative declara-tions that limit their obligations under Article 20(2), mostly to theeffect that these governments hold that no further national legisla-tion shall be required under the terms of this provision. The full textof these reservations is available at http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDe-tails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-4&chapter=4&lang=en. Anumber of states have entered reservations to Article 20(1), on warpropaganda.

20. UN Doc. A/C.3/SR.1082 (October 25, 1961), par. 5 (Braziliandelegate in the Third Committee).

21. Note that these are heavily politicized (because of the ColdWar).

22. UN Doc. E/CN.4/SR.174 (May 8, 1950), 9 (Mr. Malik,Lebanon).

23. UN Doc. A/C.3/SR.1079 (October 20, 1961), par. 2 (emphasisadded).

24. The committee has, however, repeatedly made the more gen-eral point that a national law corresponding with Article 20 ICCPR istotally lacking. E.g., A/60/40 vol. 1 (2005) 74 at par. 93(13)

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(Slovenia); A/50/40 vol. 1 (1995) 38 at par. 181 (New Zealand); A/50/40 vol. 1 (1995) 57 at par. 322 (Ukraine); A/59/40 vol. 1 (2003) 20 atpar. 64(20) (Russia).

25. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms ofRacial Discrimination, G.A. Res. 2106 (XX), Annex, 20 UN GAORSupp. (No. 14) at 47, UN Doc. A/6014 (1966), 660 U.N.T.S. 195,entered into force January 4, 1969.

26. E.g., CERD, A/50/18 (1995) 23 at par. 71 (Cyprus): “While wel-coming the enactment of Law 11 of 1992, which created offences re-garding acts amounting to racial discrimination, a question is raisedabout whether the wording of certain passages in section 2A meetcompletely the requirements of article 4 (a) of the Convention.” Seealso A/54/18 (1999) 13 at par. 33 (Austria); A/54/18 (1999) 35 at par.350 (Iraq); A/55/18 (2000) 38 at par. 197 (Zimbabwe); A/55/18(2000) 17 at par. 37 (Australia); A/56/18 (2001) 24 at par. 92 (Geor-gia); A/56/18 (2001) 68 at par. 415 (Vietnam); A/57/18 (2002) 50 atpar. 276 (Armenia); A/58/18 (2003) 47 at par. 254 (Tunisia); A/58/18(2003) 53 at par. 311 (Albania); A/60/18 (2005) 40 at par. 197 (Lux-embourg); A/60/18 (2005) 46 at par. 239 (Georgia).

27. E.g., CERD, A/51/18 (1996) 17 at par. 63 (Denmark): “It isnoted with concern that only three convictions have been registeredin the past six years against members of neo-Nazi groups, althoughinstructions have been issued to prosecutors.” See also A/51/18(1996) 22 at par. 116 (Hungary); A/52/18 (1997) 39 at par. 283 (Bul-garia); A/54/18 (1999) 39 at par. 394 (Latvia).

28. E.g., CERD, A/59/18 (2004) 58 at par. 316 (Madagascar): “Theperpetrators should be brought to justice in accordance with relev-ant domestic legislation, promulgated pursuant to article 4 of theConvention.” See also A/57/18 (2002) 69 at par. 425 (New Zealand);A/58/18 (2003) 35 at par. 159 (Poland); A/59/18 (2004) 14 at par. 64(Brazil); A/59/18 (2004) 29 at par. 151 (Netherlands); A/60/18(2005) 61 at par. 317 (Turkmenistan).

29. J.R.T. and the W.G. Party v. Canada, Communication No. 104/1981, UN Doc. CCPR/C/OP/2 at 25 (1984), par. 8(b).

30. Malcolm Ross v. Canada, Communication No. 736/1997, UNDoc. CCPR/C/70/D/736/1997 (2000), pars. 6.2–6.3 (state) versus par.7.2 (applicant).

31. Ibid., par. 11.5.

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32. Human Rights Committee, Draft General Comment No. 34,Article 19, 2nd Rev. Draft, CCPR/C/GC/34/CRP.3 (June 28, 2010),par. 53.

33. The Camden Principles definition may have served as a sourceof inspiration: “The term ‘advocacy’ is to be understood as requiringan intention to promote hatred publicly towards the target group.”Article 19, “The Camden Principles on Freedom of Expression andEquality,” April 2009, Principle 12.1(ii), www.article19.org/data/files/pdfs/standards/the-camden-principles-on-freedom-of-expression-and-equality.pdf.

34. Stephanie Farrior, “Molding the Matrix: The Historical andTheoretical Foundations of International Law Concerning HateSpeech,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 14 (1996): 23.

35. Manfred Nowak, UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:CCPR Commentary, 2nd ed. (Kehl am Rhein: N. P. Engel, 2005), 475(emphasis in original).

36. Ibid. (emphasis added).37. Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Article 12.1(ii) (emphasis

added).38. See ibid.39. Human Rights Committee, Draft General Comment No. 34,

Article 19, 2nd Rev. Draft, CCPR/C/GC/34/CRP.3 (June 28, 2010),par. 53.

40. See Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Art. 12.1(i).41. It is unclear why the Camden Principles lump together hatred

and hostility. This does not flow logically from the system of Article20(2) ICCPR, which after all speaks of religious and other forms ofhatred that must furthermore constitute incitement to hostility (orviolence, or discrimination).

42. Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Art. 12.1(i).43. Robert Faurisson v. France, Communication No. 550/1993, UN

Doc. CCPR/C/58/D/550/1993 (1996), par. 9.6.44. Loi no 90-615 du 13 juillet 1990 tendant à réprimer tout acte

raciste, antisémite ou xénophobe.45. Faurisson, pars. 7.7–7.8.46. Ibid., individual opinion (concurring) by Rajsoomer Lallah.47. Ibid., individual opinion (concurring) by Elizabeth Evatt and

David Kretzmer, cosigned by Eckart Klein, par. 10.

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48. Maria Vassilari et al. v. Greece, UN Doc. CCPR/C/95/D/1570/2007, Communication No. 1570/2007, Views of March 19, 2009, par.6.5.

49. Ibid., individual opinion (dissenting) of committee memberAbdelfattah Amor.

50. Ross v. Canada, pars. 2.1, 4.2.51. Ross v. New Brunswick School District No. 15, 1 S.C.R. 825

(1996), par. 40. On the domestic Ross case and other Canadian hatespeech cases, see Richard Moon, “Hate Speech Regulation inCanada,” Florida State University Law Review 36 (2008) 79–98.

52. Ross v. Canada, par. 2.3.53. Ibid., par. 3.4.54. Ibid., par. 4.2. See also Ross v. New Brunswick, par. 38.55. Ross v. Canada, pars. 4.6–4.8.56. Ibid., par. 6.2.57. Ibid., pars. 6.2 (Canada’s arguments), 11.5 (committee’s con-

siderations, largely following those that Canada presented).58. Notably, Article 4 ICERD.59. E.g., concerning laws in New Zealand, the committee held,

“The Committee is concerned about the fact that, while the HumanRights Act contains a provision corresponding to article 20, para-graph 2, of the Covenant, this provision does not include a prohibi-tion of advocacy of religious hatred” (UN Doc. A/50/40 vol. 1 [1995]38 at par. 181).

60. Human Rights Committee, General Comment 22, Article 18(48th session, 1993), in “Compilation of General Comments andGeneral Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights Treaty Bod-ies,” UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.1 at 35 (1994), par. 2.

61. Ross v. Canada, particularly pars. 2.1, 4.2 for the applicant’sviews on this issue; pars. 5.2, 5.4 on his alleged defense of“Christianity.”

62. Ibid., par. 11.5. At no point did the committee debate Ross’sChristian views. An alternative reading of this excerpt could be thatif Ross had called on “true Canadians” instead of “true Christians,”then Article 20(2) would not have applied. However, I submit that ifthat were the point of the committee’s considerations here, it wouldhave provided much more detail along those lines.

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63. E.g., in Vejdeland and Others v. Sweden, Application No. 1813/07, judgment of February 9, 2012, the European Court of HumanRights held that restrictions on homophobic speech (here leafletsdistributed in a school calling homosexuality a “deviant sexual pro-clivity”) may be legitimate and not contrary to free speech.

64. Though being a child is not a suspect ground under equalitystandards, international human rights standards of course recognizechildren as a particularly vulnerable group.

65. Nowak, UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 474–75.66. I.e., taking stock of the reality of multiple discrimination, spe-

cifically the fact that certain suspect grounds, such as religion,gender, or ethnicity, could cause an accumulated discriminatoryeffect.

67. E.g., incitement against homosexuals, also major victims ofthe Holocaust, is almost completely absent in the travaux.

68. See Nazila Ghanea, “The Concept of Racist Hate Speech andIts Evolution over Time” (paper presented at the United NationsCommittee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s Day ofThematic Discussion on Racist Hate Speech, 81st session, August28, 2012, Geneva), 6–7.

69. Ibid., 6.70. Human Rights Committee, Draft General Comment No. 34,

Article 19, 2nd Rev. Draft, CCPR/C/GC/34/CRP.3 (June 28, 2010),par. 53. This definition was deleted in the final comment.

71. Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Article 12.1(iii).72. Vassilari, pars. 2.1–2.7.73. Ibid., individual opinion (dissenting) of committee member

Abdelfattah Amor.74. Ibid., par. 6.5.75. Ross v. Canada, par. 11.5 (essentially seconding the finding by

the Canadian Board of Inquiry; see par. 4.2).76. Ibid., par. 11.6.77. Faurisson, par. 7.5.78. Ibid., par. 7.7.79. Ibid., par. 8.3.80. Ibid., par. 9.6.81. “Since the statements made by the author, read in their full

context, were of a nature as to raise or strengthen anti-semitic [sic]

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feelings, the restriction served the respect of the Jewish communityto live free from fear of an atmosphere of anti-semitism [sic].” Ibid.

82. Ibid., individual opinion (concurring) by Elizabeth Evatt andDavid Kretzmer, cosigned by Eckart Klein, par. 7.

83. Ibid., individual opinion (concurring) by Rajsoomer Lallah,par. 9.

84. Ibid., individual opinion by Evatt and Kretzmer, cosigned byKlein, par. 4.

85. Ibid., par. 9 (second and third italics added).86. Ibid., individual opinion by Lallah, par. 6.87. Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 34, pars.

50–52. This final part of the comment is titled “The Relationshipbetween Articles 19 and 20.”

88. O’Flaherty, “Freedom of Expression,” 21: “The rapporteur/present writer explained the inclusion of text regarding the relation-ship with Article 20. He acknowledged that he had not been man-dated to develop general comment guidance on that article. Never-theless, he argued that some analysis should be included in the Gen-eral Comment because of the intimate nexus between the two provi-sions and the extent to which Article 20 may serve to restrict Article19 rights.”

89. Human Rights Committee, Draft General Comment No. 34,Article 19, 2nd Rev. Draft, CCPR/C/GC/34/CRP.3 (June 28, 2010),par. 53.

90. Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Article 12.1(iii).91. Human Rights Committee, General Comment 18, Non-discrim-

ination (37th session, 1989), in “Compilation of General Commentsand General Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights TreatyBodies,” UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.1 at 26 (1994).

92. Ibid., par. 13.93. Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and

of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, G.A. Res. 36/55, 36UN GAOR Supp. (No. 51) at 171, UN Doc. A/36/684 (1981). See par-ticularly Article 2.

94. Article 19, “Camden Principles,” Article 12.1(i).95. Article 19, “Towards an Interpretation of Article 20 of the

ICCPR: Thresholds for the Prohibition of Incitement to

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Hatred—Work in Progress,” 7–8, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Expression/ICCPR/Vienna/CRP7Callamard.pdf.

96. Ibid., 7.97. Human Rights Committee, Draft General Comment No. 34,

Article 19, 2nd Rev. Draft, CCPR/C/GC/34/CRP.3 (June 28, 2010),par. 53.

98. Poland wanted to prohibit advocacy of “exclusiveness” and“contempt” (UN Docs. E/CN.4/SR.377 [October 16, 1953] at 4;E/CN.4/L.269), while the Yugoslav representative felt that the provi-sion “ought to be directed . . . against all propaganda that consti-tuted incitement to hatred and intolerance in every sphere” (UNDoc. E.CN.4/SR.377 at 6).

99. UN Doc. E/2447 (June 6, 1953) at 9.100. Ibid.101. UN Doc. E/CN.4/SR.377 (October 16, 1953) at 8 (emphasis

added).102. Ibid., 8–9. The Chilean representative found these remarks

on “objective” versus “subjective” notions “a very interesting prob-lem,” yet he wondered “what would be the opinion of lawyers on thatpoint” (13).

103. UN Doc. A/C.3/SR.1079 (October 20, 1961), par. 22.104. UN Doc. A/C.3/SR.1080 (October 23, 1961), par. 20.105. Nowak, UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 475.106. Nazila Ghanea, “Expression and Hate Speech in the ICCPR:

Compatible or Clashing?,” Religion and Human Rights 5 (2010):175; Robert Post, “Religion and Freedom of Speech: Portraits ofMuhammad,” Constellations 14 (2007): 83.

107. Jahangir and Diène, “Incitement to Racial and ReligiousHatred and the Promotion of Tolerance,” UN Doc. A/HRC/2/3(September 20, 2006).

108. Ibid., par. 47 (emphasis added). Jahangir prepared pars.22–50 of this chapter, “Defamation of Religion and the Right toFreedom of Religion or Belief.”

109. Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 34, par. 48:“Prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other be-lief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with theCovenant.”

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AfterwordBlasphemy beyond Modernism

DAVID NASH

When I commenced work on the history of blasphemy in1992, it was a comparative backwater—largely forgotten,unstudied, and still less understood. As such, personal in-terest (and a lingering legacy of initial historical work onthe Victorian secularist movement in Britain) spurred meon in what was lonely and, at this stage, arguably unprom-ising territory. The confluence of three partially relatedfactors substantially caused this neglect. First, the legalcommunity had every reason to believe that it had done itscivilizing business to find ways of liberating and enfran-chising all in the developed and democratic world.Moreover, the quest in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s for theextension of rights and cultural identities had focused al-most exclusively on race and gender. Legislation equalizingemployment rights and more progressive recognition thatgroups of citizens had been denied rights to live and ex-press identity became intertwined features of a political andcultural project in the West. Second, the implication of thisprogressive stance was to see religion as, in some senses, aprimitive, antimodern obstacle and stumbling block to themore modern aspiration of the achievement of rights and

identities for all. In modernist parlance, it had seeminglyjustified slavery, been at least partly responsible for the es-pecially slow emancipation of women, and retarded the ad-vance of social justice. From the perspective of the latetwentieth century, which enthusiastically embraced the ap-parent truism of secularization, religion was a quasi-embar-rassing part of our colonial, patriarchal, and pre-Enlighten-ment past. In short, religion was unwelcome and thought ofas an anachronism when held up to the promise of our secu-lar futures, assured by modernity. Third, historical studiesincluded developments in social and economic (and evencultural) history which plotted teleologies and chronologic-al pathways that served to marginalize arguments that sawreligion as in any way instrumental or influential.

The distance traveled since in the West since the early1990s (which really does seem something of a dim and dis-tant past) is evidenced by the vast plethora of work that hasmore recently made religion, religious toleration, and thehistory of religious strife utterly central to what we nowthink of as the culture we have beyond modernism. It issalutary indeed to discover from a major British publisherthat the consumption of books in all disciplines is in a de-gree of recession—with the one exception of religion and re-ligious studies, which is witnessing a modest (yetsignificant) year-on-year increase.

Christopher S. Grenda’s chapter 1 gives us a useful anddetailed history of philosophies for tolerance—at least as itwas theorized on both sides of the Atlantic before 1800. Indoing this, he notes how satire has an ongoing imperativethat can be driven by short-lived reactions to events and bydynamics such as outrage, ridicule, and visible manifesta-tions of identity such as class. Within his chapter the un-derlying history of manners is a subtext. The anticlerical

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Ralph Wallis, whose writings ridicule high church office,saw their “pomp” and species of pretension as themselvesbreaches of decorum and manners. In this, Christianitycould come to be considered vulgar and arguably un-couth—an accusation that later emanated from ThomasPaine, G. W. Foote, and Abner Kneeland in differentnineteenth-century blasphemy episodes. The concept ofmanners, however, was equally prominent in making toler-ance appear credible. Equating the latter with desirable be-havior was a useful stance that protected its overarching in-tegrity and provided a cultural and practical defenseagainst intellectual and physical assault. Toleration as anideal was powerful and later proved effective and malleablein the hands of England’s creator of modern secularism, Ge-orge Jacob Holyoake.

As Grenda also notes, it established limits to state powerthat look, rightly, like the foundations of a modern liberal-ism that Mill would recognize. As Grenda says, “the self [be-came] an expressive agent of moral discernment.” In a dif-ferent way this was also fostered by the deist position,which again identified the link between beliefs and situ-ations rather than people as anathema and clearly to beavoided. It was institutions that promoted the idea of sin,which could be unfavorably juxtaposed to the individual’s“moral striving.” Commentators such as Daniel Defoe like-wise focused on the want of manners that the failure to en-sure tolerance provoked and were prepared to stick theirnecks out to demonstrate this uncomfortable fact. AsGrenda also shows, Shaftesbury took this further, linkingthe philosophy of toleration intrinsically with the concept ofpoliteness. This took tolerance beyond an aspiration andmade it a tool of socialization, arguably one with still widergoals. As noble and apparently unimpeachable though this

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was, Grenda also reminds us that some spotted the abilitythat mere wit had to create disorder. This capacity for sub-version had entered the busy mind of David Hume.

The arrival of commentators like Paine altered the cultur-al landscape of this debate with the introduction of a great-er emphasis on plain speaking and the underlying class cri-tique that went with this. Paine’s critiques were more forth-right and less polished than his deist intellectual ancest-ors’, and they certainly led others, such as Richard Carlile,further into this territory. Christianity was henceforth to beactively denounced rather than chided and gently shamed.In some sense, this set the pattern for blasphemy to go bey-ond acceptable criticism by expressing profanity, crudity,and salaciousness, which would be remembered and pro-voke reaction. Into modern times, such blasphemy retaineda higher profile than sober, but no less heartfelt, criticismof Christian doctrines and their apparent amorality.

Jacques Berlinerblau’s construction of the “profanityloop” contains a survey of growing elements of tolerancethat characterized the middle of the twentieth century (seechapter 2). The optimism pervading this ideology of toler-ance is scarcely unique and has many counterparts in manyWestern countries—indeed, Berlinerblau creates a minipan-theon of questionable works and authors that could nowevade the modern censor (James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, and Allen Ginsberg). Theliberal histories of such nations (and their individual pan-theons) view the freedom of the artist as a social and cul-tural good. However, Berlinerblau’s assessment of PhilipRoth goes beyond this liberal moment to provide us with anexample of what an artist does in a society and culture thathave become permissive. Exploring these moments after

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permissive paradise gives us an important insight into theartistic process.

One issue that remained pertinent to Roth’s work, espe-cially in the American context, was the fog around decisionmaking in relation to censorship. While Berlinerblau isright to assert that a series of court decisions expanded andenhanced the impact of the First Amendment’s free speechclause, this scarcely unraveled the urge and will to censor.Still, as he suggests, the state was less closely involved thanexperts in judging literary fiction. But while the testimonyof such individuals may have carried the day in courtrooms,it reinforced in the public mind the difference between na-tional and local standards of decency. Arguably the law, theexperts it consulted, and its final decisions polarized opin-ion around what was acceptable and unacceptable. This alsoserved to feed the cultural politics that saw the national asamoral and cosmopolitan while viewing the local as sym-pathetic and in tune with the community—an understandingwe have encountered throughout this collection more thanonce.

This perhaps provides an answer to Berlinerblau’s ques-tion “How do we theorize the relation between the profaneand the profaner in such liberal conditions?” As he notes,“the obscene’ is what a given individual, community, or so-ciety claims to be obscene (the law, the final authority insuch matters, may or may not concur).” Communities, bothlocal and national, condition progress and make transitoryapparent victories and defeats. Although Burstyn v. Wilson(1952) made prosecution for sacrilege unconstitutional inthe United States, this did not stop lawyers and their clientsfrom finding other avenues with which to explore the statusof the offended.1 The repeal of the law in England that com-mences this book further emphasizes this issue. After

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blasphemous libel ceased to be an offense, an art gallery inNewcastle explored the alternative power of obscenity as away of proscribing blasphemous content. In such circum-stances, Berlinerblau’s chapter highlights, more than most,how profaner and profaned remain locked in a symbiotic re-lationship. While close together, the creation of offense andthe response to it are ironically about distance and ways ofmaintaining it. Roth was obviously dissident as he also be-came parasitic on the culture he criticized. Those who inturn criticized him pulled together and reinvigorated ideal-ized cultural concepts of what makes a culture viable and li-able for reverence—a process that conservatives in manycountries and historical contexts expect their culturalspokespeople to do. For all their powerful media of commu-nication and information, the societies of the twentieth(and perhaps twenty-first) century rely on spokespeoplewho are empowered by the silence of others. Invoking andacting on behalf of silent majorities has a long history, andits systematic study over space and time would be an espe-cially valuable project that could ultimately flow from thisbook.

Some parts of Berlinerblau’s chapter provide a useful re-minder that offense around issues associated with religion,gender, and race has a concrete existence, with real effects.When I commenced my work in the early 1990s, I occasion-ally encountered literary scholars who would tell me that Iwas, arguably, interested in the issue not of blasphemy butof transgression. In saying this they would emphasize theinherent playfulness of many literary constructions and howthese should be revered for their internal, self-referentialeffectiveness. Such an outlook (and the process that it ad-vocates) was difficult for me, as a historian, since it madesuch works exist solely in a vacuum, without context. But

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the anecdote is a useful reminder to me that Berlinerblau’schapter uncovers and foregrounds a defense I have neverthought to use—namely, that transgression relies on itscontext to be effective. Studying merely its apparent intelli-gence and accomplishments does not profoundly add to un-derstanding its effects or importance. In this, the concep-tion of the profanity loop becomes powerful and use-ful—precisely because it warns against isolated and isola-tionist readings of transgressive literary texts. Transgres-sion is not a stance but feeds off the culture it transgressesand the reaction it garners from reading and viewing pub-lics. This becomes evident in Roth’s contemplation of the“anti-Roth” reader he brings to mind when concocting anespecially explicit or offensive anecdote and in preciselyhow this reader’s (imagined) response functions as a spe-cies of encouragement.

We would also do well to consider Berlinerblau’s depic-tion of a more liberal moment in American culture, since itwarns that liberalization is neither an unstoppable nor anirreversible process. Removing liberalization as an idea alsoopens our minds to considering blasphemous and profaneworks in a different light. Because such works offend au-thority, observers too readily consider this authority a normthat is transgressed. Investigating the works and thoughtsof transgressors reveals their objections to real ideas,norms, and concepts, not simply pleasure in transgression.In Roth’s literary world, to transgress was to conduct an as-sault on “pastoral,” “hypocritical, shallow, artificial, andpatently false conceptions of life.” This is where the artisthas a link with the religious or political activist, who mani-festly sees certain beliefs, and their upholding, as abhor-rent. Thus those of us who seek to analyze profanity andblasphemy should never cease the search for motive and

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reason. Roth may deal with outrage “in the way that asculptor deals with clay,” but we must never lose sight ofthe fact that discontent with the way civilization is providesthe inspiration, or clay, to work with. As such, much rawmaterial, or clay, is evidence to the artist or activist—a fo-cus on its molding reinforces for us that blasphemy andprofanity will always remain two-way processes. It is equallyimportant to remember, as Berlinerblau has done, that suchtwo-way processes can produce considerable energy and“can have aesthetically significant results.”

In the context of the renewed and increasing interest inreligion mentioned above, David Lawton’s excellent chapter3 reminds us how important it is that informed and experi-enced scholars do more than simply catalogue profane andblasphemous events. Such events need to be read more ef-fectively, unpacked and thought about—but most of all feltby members of modern societies, something of an oneroustask given the ideological context described above. As such,Lawton’s chapter continues the valuable and interestingwork that he commenced in his book Blasphemy (Phil-adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). Althoughsome critics (myself included) didn’t realize it at the time,one needs to read this book alongside histories instead ofimagining that it can replace them. As Lawton said, textualreading of events is a valuable counterpoint to endless at-tempts simply to place them in context. As such, he per-forms a valuable service in forwarding the argument thatunderstanding the meanings of profane and blasphemousevents can come only from being caught up in the feelingsthey provoke rather than being a mere spectator.

Where the 1993 volume concentrates a great deal ontexts, his chapter here notes the renewed primacy of the im-age and the constraints this places on those using it as a

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form of expression in the digital age. Following issues ofpersonal reaction to the image, Lawton allows the under-standing of blasphemy to wax and wane around definitionsof offense and community. As he says, “community, evenmore than religion, is at blasphemy’s core.” Part of what isbeing said here is that blasphemy is a tool for demandingthe participation of individuals in the work of art. Lawton’sanalysis of Myra, HIM, and other works focuses on the factthat they actively and stridently demand a reaction fromtheir audience. Such works, as Lawton invokes them, chal-lenge or force audiences to rethink their conception of suchthings as evil, hate, belief, and religion. Thus, in a worldwhere law and tolerance had drawn religious belief down tothe realm of the personal, such works were an opening upof public space in which these issues might once again be-come publicly discursive and debated. Again this makes usthink of how far medieval and early modern images wereconsumed and persuades us to speculate still further abouta new culture dominated by the image. Text potentially nolonger shapes thought; it is the image that is now theenduring aide-mémoire of hope, aspiration, and the specu-lations that medieval and early modern people must havemade. From here it becomes still less possible to accept theassertion that unbelief was impossible before the dawn ofthe Enlightenment, as some have claimed.

Lawton’s chapter also reminds us that religion has alwaysprovided the vocabulary (whether textual or visual) forthinking about states of being (even atheism), and he steersus now to a conclusion that it offers the most succinct andsymbolically powerful vocabulary we possess for consider-ing the claims of community. All this points to blasphemyhaving a vital role to play in the wider world. Because it iscontroversial, it sparks interest and transmits other,

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otherwise neglected messages alongside its perceived of-fensiveness and capacity for attention-grabbing headlines.Because the modern instances of blasphemy that Lawtondescribes emerge as a conglomeration of signs, symbols,and messages, they too, it should be noted, have the capa-city to distort and shape culture anew. It is this culturalpurpose that, arguably, persuades Lawton to assert the ne-cessity of blasphemy’s imbuing those who undertake it with“a moral—and, one would hope, legal—right to be heard anddefended.” But like some other rights, these come with con-ditions, and such individuals have to know the culture theyare speaking about, have to have lived it and earned theright to be critical of it. This criticism becomes multiedgedwhen it is placed adjacent to the many contexts and culturaltransitions that some incidents and events unpack. SalmanRushdie, as a postcolonial interloper in two cultures, andTheo van Gogh’s interaction with the work of Ayaan HirsiAli provide stark evidence that identity politics is at the rootof Lawton’s conception of recent blasphemy incidents.These incidents are about conflict, but again, as the chapterusefully reminds us, they are also about the unease lyingclose to the surface of communities that write their ownhistory without being prepared to face their own nightterrors.

One section of Lawton’s chapter is titled “Blasphemy Dis-enchanted?” In it, disenchantment is a motif for describingthe inevitability of theocratic societies and their dramatic-ally enhanced vulnerability. While this may partly explainthe proximity of forms of fundamentalism to claims and ac-cusations of blasphemy, it perhaps also awakens us to an-other possible explanation of the term disenchantment.Where the triumphant secularization I described abovesought to carry all before it, the recasting, refashioning,

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and renewed credibility of blasphemy still speak to us of apassing modernization moment. Religious sensibilities havepersuaded the West to legislate and protect things it oncethought primitive and anachronistic. As such, quietly butwith a growing crescendo, blasphemy and its credible re-construction have succeeded in producing a strong and con-vincing dialogue about the widespread disenchantment withmodernism. Liberal assumptions about tolerance and thereliance on the forbearance of the citizen were questionedas they became arguably less tenable. Blasphemy was theone crime associated with species of violence that buckedthe trend that Norbert Elias and his “civilising process” hadoutlined for histories of violence.2 In this Elias suggestedthat the state became progressively more interested in reg-ulating and prescribing violence through ever more sophist-icated laws and mechanisms of punishment andreformation.

Blasphemy’s history contradicted this as liberal states didall they could to withdraw from direct regulation—leavinglitigation to individual outraged citizens, who had to provetheir offense in an uphill struggle against the liberalizingand modernizing tendencies already mentioned. Thus thecivilizing process emerged as one strand of a broad modern-ist project that also included secularization as an ally andpartner ideology. Disenchanted modernism saw blasphemyas a lingering flaw that would pull states back into a legis-lative relationship with what people held sacred. As such,the comparative willingness of Western democracies to per-mit litigation (in the guise of either blasphemy or hatecrime prosecution) and the closure of the discursive clearlymay not provide the optimistic outlook for the speech dis-cussion and exploration that Lawton sees as utterly essen-tial to blasphemy’s role in religious (and otherwise)

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communities. The danger is that we will be left with hisconception of “postblasphemy,” in which everybody is cap-able of reaching for offense but is increasingly less sure ofits provenance or why they are offended. This is part of theconcern when cultures and legal systems claim to protectthe feelings of others rather than more concrete belief sys-tems. It is also evident in unfocused and perhaps emotionalattachments to blasphemy as an idea where the movementto incitement laws occurs alongside a desire to retain somesemblance of the previous offense. The protection of feel-ings—which have potentially ephemeral connotations andare harder for us to define, consider credible, or police—isan elision from religion. All who are in the business of com-municating about religion, in whatever form, should ensurethat such arguments are treated seriously. This protectioncould threaten literature and communication itself as wemove to a literalist and instantaneous culture—as we move,that is, to a world stripped of allegory, metaphor, and cul-tural references, where the supposed literal meaning is tri-umphant. Ironically, this is occurring when the technologic-al tools for greater and deeper reflection exist for all to use.

Paul Finkelman’s examination in chapter 4 of the AbnerKneeland case reminds us of the fact that judicial authorityhas not always been careful or scrupulous in its applicationof the law. Kneeland’s case is also probably one of the firstmodern instances when defendants benefited from the sup-port of the intellectual community. This was also evident inthe Foote case in England in the early 1880s and becamewidespread after that.3 Kneeland’s precise attacks on Chris-tianity also remind us of the flippant nature of blasphemousutterance in the West—contrasting with the incidents thatMoosa describes. Kneeland and his blasphemy also demon-strate how this threat could be absorbed by the perception

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of other social threats, with which it was conflated. Theconnection with family limitation via birth control was im-portant here and was replayed and rehearsed in Britain andAmerica until well into the twentieth century. Likewise,some of the details remind us that critics of religion hadsimilar things to say on both sides of the Atlantic. The per-ception that his crime was somehow to deny salvation toothers also echoed Tory responses to Jacobinism in Eng-land. This particular phenomenon might prompt us to con-sider how far the crime of any blasphemer is the witting orunwitting creation of its audience. Attention to the audi-ence makes religious issues discursive, and as Finkelmanstates, “In our time, freedom of religion includes the rightto denounce or mock the practices of other faiths.”

Kneeland’s libertarian views on human relationships, asseen in his “Marriage Catechism,” closely mirrored theideas that Carlile and his circle expressed in England. Whilewe can draw parallels, it is equally true that some forms ofsocial radicalism have their own context—in particular,Kneeland’s assertion of the benefits and rights associatedwith interracial marriage belongs to its time and place.Likewise, some pronouncements associated with such casescan also introduce elements that later become importantelsewhere. The discussion in this pronouncement on thelegacy of English common law of how Kneeland’s crime wasassociated very much with manner predates by approxim-ately fifty years a similar reaction that occurred in England(in the final pronouncement on the law associated with theFoote case). The Kneeland case was also about protectingreligious opinion in a recognizably modern way, since “theprosecution was not designed to protect either an estab-lished church from a theological schism or a confessionalstate from a challenge to its religious ideology.”

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Nonetheless, as Finkelman suggests, the authoritieslearned their lesson about rash and ill-considered prosecu-tion, as they would again in late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century episodes.

Robert A. Yelle’s chapter 5 is informative about the fail-ure of notions of blasphemy and apostasy to disappear withthe alleged coming of the secular. In particular, he noteshow the twin notions of secularization and the secular con-stitute a mistaken triumphalist species of judgment that at-taches the pejorative to the categories of blasphemy andapostasy. He also notes that this narrative had a historicallysignificant existence, since modernity served to profane, bydefinition, all that was sacred, culminating in Karl Marx’ssneer that the creation of commodity fetishism was one ofcapital’s chief functions in modernity.4 Yelle also makes animportant point in his suggestion that the encouragementand creation of profanity in so many Western rituals andstructures surely argues against the discordant assumptionthat reverence was the norm in past (perhaps overly ideal-ized) societies.

As he also states, the Reformation’s introduction of aProtestantism that “posits the autonomy of the subject fromthe sign” problematized the image. It follows, as he sug-gests, that we should ask whether images were more im-portant for those who revered them or those who destroyedthem. Likewise, a commensurate growth in the scrutiny ofverbal forms of expression enhanced speech and its power.The sincerity of speech was debated, and even in the samelocation and historical context, precise responses to itsnature could be different.5 Yelle’s characterization of criti-cism and lampoon as agents of disenchantment has inter-esting implications because it posits the power of religiousimages to reenchant. As such, this criticism also relates to

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many postmodern conceptions of the religious that see itsrole as an express attempt to reenchant and, perhaps moreimportant, to disenchant whatever passes for being saved inthe secular world. As Yelle notes, there is a totemic token-ism that still inhabits the secular world, with reverence orrespect given to inanimate objects invested with meaningand authority that should not be transgressed or usurped. Aliberal secular society that maintains such ritualized pro-tection quickly runs into its perennial dilemma of protect-ing individuals while fostering the conception of general-ized freedom. Victims in such circumstances, as Yelle notes,also become totems, invested with everything from goodwishes to rash, ungrounded assumptions.

Ebrahim Moosa gives us important insights into Muslimpolitical theology and a nuanced analysis of Muslim debatesabout religious authority and its connection with the state.In particular, his chapter 6 reminds us of the differentthought processes that are at work in different approachesto blasphemy as a threat. There are important things saidhere that remind us that the debate has been ongoing forsome time and that seeking to analyze the consequences ofindividual incidents may not be giving us the whole picture.Very quickly our polarization of sacred and secular tenden-cies is shown to be simplistic, as is any sense of Islam as amonolithic religion. As with Christianity, Moosa argues, de-bates about Islam involve issues of politics, authority, andthe urge to establish legitimacy. This authority is not al-ways directly connected with religion, and the chapterpoints out a number of incidents in which accusations ofblasphemy have merely been attempts to silence criticism.

Although he alludes to incidents outside Europe, Moosa isalso critical of the context of some European blasphemycases. In this he notes how criticism of Islam has gone

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beyond criticism of religion to embrace concerns about im-migration and how freedom of speech has sometimes beenmerely a one-way street, with Western values designated forspecial protection. Islamic conceptions of theology andpolitics have involved a process, which occurred over a con-siderable period of time, in which the state increasingly re-flected the reverence and belief that the individual offers toGod. It is interesting to note that this is the reverse of whathappened in the Christian West, where religious belief em-bodied in the state diffused and devolved to individuals.This clear difference may explain much of the conflictbetween the two belief systems over issues such asblasphemy.

Whether the Western Enlightenment has enshrined theidea of freedom, political developments in Islam were “com-mitted to advancing the common welfare that was also inpart related to the order of salvation.” Connected with thiswere interpretations of the Prophet’s nature that envisageda vibrant political role alongside an ability to be “the teach-er of the transcendent good and wisdom.” This mingling ofthe political and the religious and their inseparability wereimportant factors in the perception of certain expressionsas blasphemous. While what Moosa has described hereseems at first sight to suggest homogeneity among Muslimsocieties, an important section of his chapter describes con-flicting views on the nature of the religious and political es-tablishment of Islam as a belief system. What follows is aninteresting elaboration on scholarly discussions aboutwhether contemporary instrumentality or transcendent val-ues should predominate, and it is interesting to speculateon whether such a discussion might be turned to look at as-pects of Christian attitudes to governance.

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Once again we find blasphemy used readily as an accusa-tion against opponents, and obviously this takes the issuebeyond the discursive and into the realm of political of-fense. Likewise, there is equally not an obvious sense ofsatire or lampoon, which inhabits post-Enlightenment cri-tiques of the Christian religion. Moosa notes that satire isconsidered to go beyond criticism, so thus it far more read-ily constitutes an offense within Islamic conceptions of reli-gion. Toward the end of Moosa’s chapter there are variousdescriptions of Islamic scholars who are seeking “a moretolerant and realistic face of Islamic teachings,” in Moosa’swords, to make them “relevant to the contemporary world.”While we will all concur that such discussions are valuable,Moosa also notes that there remains a sense of “indebted-ness to God,” which will not be outflanked or transcendedthrough simple ideas and processes. Related to this isMoosa’s analysis of the perhaps understandably ambivalentresponses of the modernist Muammad Iqbal. While Iqbalcraved an urgent renewal of conciliatory Islamic approachesto the West, he still could never escape his antipathy tolong-standing colonial tropes and manifestations of culturalassumption and power.

Ron E. Hassner’s chapter 7 gives an excellent expositionof responses to the Jyllands-Posten Danish cartoons affair.Hassner produces useful evidence that generalizations can-not be drawn about Islamic political systems or theirpropensity to produce specific reactions. He powerfully dis-sects arguments about politics, religious outrage, and mor-al threat, noting a number of their limitations. Instead hesuggests that context is important, as are less tangiblemodes of political expression, such as suspicion, rumor, andscarcely focused hostility. Nonetheless, Hassner feels con-fident that he has found a useful combination of these

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theories and, foregrounding the idea of “moral threat,” un-dermines some of the assumptions that Western criticshave made about Islam. His moral threat argument, he sug-gests, may also be useful in predicting violent tendencies innonreligious forms of expression.

Certainly, as a historian, I am struck that the concept ofmoral threat that particular political and cultural circum-stances trigger may have considerable mileage. The focuson the application of attention to religious detail, or Clif-ford Geertz–inspired “thick religion,” is something that his-torians have been doing for a while, with varying degrees ofsuccess. Taking this methodology back into the past mayhelp with analyzing the outbreak of some blasphemy pro-secutions, if not always explaining their trajectory orconclusion.

Asma T. Uddin’s exploratory and wise commentary inchapter 8 on the recent Indonesian Blasphemy Act providesan important and salutary lesson to activists and legalscholars alike. While all situations have their own dynamicsand context, it is clearly possible to see echoes in this caseof past struggles, victories, and defeats. The first thing thatis evident is the fundamental problem of governments thatseek to define religious orthodoxy and dissent and thatplace each of these categories on either side of the line de-fining their legality. As such, the law regulating preciselythe nature of religions to be tolerated undermines the in-tention of creating religious freedom and religious protec-tion. The finality and the inflexibility of the law furtherdemonstrate that our legislating for religious identity haslittle chance of keeping up with changes in belief and thenature of society.

Thus an apparently moderate country that prides itself onits “religious plurality” and “inclusive culture” has placed

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itself in the position of excluding peaceable religious wor-shipers from the protection of the law. However, the cre-ation of this law and the political circumstances surround-ing it remind us of past occasions when blasphemy, as bothan internal and an external threat, was an extremely usefulenemy to legislate against. Medieval societies saw cam-paigns against blasphemers as central to maintaining God’sfavor for individual monarchs or states. Likewise, earlymodern societies believed ensuring that action was takenagainst blasphemers would protect them from plague, inva-sion, or collapse. Indonesia, though, initially conceived ofits law as a method of creating an inclusive national unity.This law ostensibly had no precedent, supportive case law,or lineage and in this respect resembled a later law in theRepublic of Ireland that the Indonesian law later drew ana-logies with.6 Once again there is a comparison to be made,since both laws arguably were capable of placing restric-tions on orthodox religious practices and statements. Im-mediately after the construction of Ireland’s law, the organ-ization Atheist Ireland graphically demonstrated that manyorthodox Christian religious pronouncements could becaught in its web. Once again we might conceive of anothersimilarity, whereby those whom the law protects are givenwhat Uddin describes as hegemony over religious minoritiesthat might also be described as opponents or competitors.Both nations have appropriated the language of humanrights to construct laws that limit freedom of religion andexpression. As such, it would pay many of us to debate andobserve whether decisions like this demonstrate the furthereclipse of liberal democratic states via their inability totrust the function of their public spheres.

The Indonesian case also reminds us of how far religion,in its strength and cohesiveness, is seen as an adjunct to a

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similarly conceived cohesive and coherent national state.Thus it is possible for such laws to move beyond individualspeech acts and actions to instigate prior restraint on reli-gious dissidence. As Uddin suggests, this prior restraintprotects an individual’s right not to be offended, placingthe onus entirely on the speaker or producer of utterance.Any language about religion can be caught in this particu-lar web. This is in stark contrast to the progress of lawsabout profanity and blasphemy in the West, especiallyEurope. In these countries (e.g., Germany and France untilthe end of the twentieth century), individuals were respons-ible for ensuring that they were not offended. European cul-tures demanded that they observe, read, and act on warn-ings that those producing potentially offensive materialgave them. This is perhaps one crucial difference betweenthe slightly older, end-of-the-twentieth-century approach tolaw and the new use of hybridized human rights languageand ideas recast as forms of protection. Movement in thelatter direction enshrines the sanctity of the state at theprofound expense of “pluralist values and respect for differ-ent faiths.” Moreover, human rights approaches far tooreadily argue that the needs of the state trump the needs ofthe individual group, or indeed of democracy itself. Wemight also lament the fact that signing international agree-ments and imposing external standards of justice had only alimited impact on the actions of certain nations in this par-ticular circumstance. Paradoxically, religious societies suchas Ireland and Indonesia, which should thrive in a cultureof religious debate, have implemented laws that curtailsuch debate—condemning the religious and the nonreli-gious to a public sphere that excludes their questions.

Elizabeth Burns Coleman’s chapter 9 is interesting andproductive from a great number of perspectives. First, it is

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a valuable inventory of what we, in the twenty-first century,have discovered to be the destination of a number ofEnlightenment-inspired projects. The Enlightenment fo-cused on individual rights, discovering and assimilatingknowledge about the world and about tolerance for the be-liefs and lifestyles of others. Alongside this was a growingbelief in the transcendent power of empirical and rationalknowledge. Very quickly the incompatibility of the latterwith issues of rights and tolerance around religious beliefsbecame apparent. While all of these emphases may haveoriginated in Europe, it was soon necessary that they bebrought to bear in a colonial and eventually ex-colonial con-text. Coleman’s chapter outlines the current state of affairsaround Aboriginal (potentially) sacred artifacts—in thiscase the didgeridoo and who has legitimate access to it. Inthis she uncovers a striving to address the agenda of polit-ical correctness—itself arguably a clear outcome of the En-lightenment agendas of equality and tolerance.

Yet there is also clear evidence of the slumbering tensionthat indicts such attitudes for bringing with them species ofcondescension. This episode really demonstrates that it canbe difficult to surrender the apparent inbuilt intellectualsuperiority of Western liberalism. It is difficult to make thewhole issue of tolerance feel shared rather than gracefully,and most likely condescendingly, extended by a superiorculture. The direct connection with blasphemy here comesfrom Coleman’s investigation of the ideas of Peter Jonesand his arguments centering around the Rushdie affair andhis creative use of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle.” Es-sentially, Jones concludes that entertaining respect for thebeliefs of others may not compromise imperatives for themaintenance of free speech. In rehearsing and analyzingthis set of ideas, Coleman takes us through many of the

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philosophical pitfalls that have regularly attended this par-ticular problem. As she argues, freedom of expression is un-der threat if a society is forced to concede the rule of law tothe wishes of its most extreme groups.

Likewise, empowering the individual, as the Enlighten-ment was supposed to do, introduces once again theconcept of self-policing, in which individuals self-censorand regulate their exposure to potentially offensive materi-al. Coleman equally notes that the public sphere may confera legitimate power on individuals who seek to be offendedeasily, “with very little reason.” A corollary of this sugges-tion appears in her analysis of Jones’s argument around theidea of true beliefs. These are essentially seen as evidenceof a quid pro quo, for “if we are serious about wanting topossess true beliefs, and presumably anyone who professesa ‘belief’ must be concerned that it is a true belief, we mustbe willing to live in a society in which all beliefs are open toquestion and none is immune from scrutiny.”7 Likewise, therole of the liberal state is to protect, but equally how can it“require us to treat all beliefs as equal,” since “beliefs bothoverlap and contradict”? There is also within this critique anoteworthy distance from orthodox multiculturalist posi-tions. As Jones suggests, the multiculturalist touchstone ofdiversity as an intrinsic social good can often feel somewhatdevoid of context, since it serves to “freeze beliefs in a so-cial museum, reducing them to mere objects of curiosity.”8

Likewise, an important conclusion that Coleman reaches isthat there is a great temptation to practice a form of toler-ance by silence, maintaining the universal tolerance of be-liefs only through the withholding of opinion in a fairlyrigorous self-censorship.

However, there is an extremely interesting dimensionthat becomes evident in viewing Coleman’s argument

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through the eyes of a historian. The conclusions of herchapter perhaps deserve to be placed alongside some of theimplications of Lawton’s chapter, in particular the disen-chantment of modernism. Certainly the latter process mightsit comfortably alongside the inherent problems that Cole-man outlines. However, there is another interesting themethat emerges from attempts to historicize what Colemanhas told us. She reminds us that this negotiation betweenthe “modern” and the “primitive” (with all the judgmentaland pejorative baggage that goes with these terms) has nev-er been resolved and arguably cannot be resolved. Thissheds interesting light on previous teleological theoriesthat traced the coming of civilized humankind as an unequi-vocal truism and shaped Western and henceforth global so-ciety. We encounter one such teleology in the work ofNorbert Elias, where he portrays increased levels of interde-pendence as the essential element of modern life thatmakes us cooperate with one another. Moreover, such inter-dependence allegedly taught us how to manage our interac-tions and henceforth enjoy our lives as benevolent andhappy citizens of the modern globalized world.9 The inter-actions that Coleman depicts, however, indicate that thisprocess is scarcely at an end and will readily encounterobstacles in its attempts to smooth over the differences thatthreaten the security that interdependence provides.

Coleman’s chapter also points to the wider and deeperhistory of politeness. It is especially noteworthy that she re-lies on the words polite and politeness. An adjunct to Eliasand his civilizing process is a later history of politeness.Certainly in England this historiography was linked to theeighteenth century and was used to demonstrate a modern-ization of human relationships. In particular, the “comingof politeness” was seen as instrumental in altering

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expectations within marriage and the family unit. Import-antly, a number of historians saw politeness as a crucialcontributory factor to the removal of strife, conflict, and vi-olence from marriage and family interactions. The develop-ment of codes of behavior served to marginalize those whotransgressed them—in particular, from the eighteenth cen-tury onward, husbands who were violent toward their wivesfound themselves ostracized from polite society, even thoseon whom it had previously conferred forms of social andcultural status.10 Again, when Coleman highlights for usnonindigenous Australians’ “fear of being seen as a coloni-alist or a racist,” we can conceivably see this process still atwork. As much of blasphemy’s history reminds us, many so-cial processes and their historiographies, previously seen ascomplete, have been either long neglected through schol-arly complacency or resurrected by a changed context andan unconscious revisiting of previous circumstances.

Politeness and its implications also appear central to ar-guments in Coleman’s reiteration of Alan Howarth’s recog-nition of “the consequentialist nature of the harm” of of-fense. In the further assertion that “to offend someone is todo something bad to them, something hurtful, disrespect-ful, or insulting,” there is also the essence of the politenessdebate. This assumes a very developed sense of self-censor-ship and policing. It presupposes that individuals knowenough about their interactions to employ the machinery ofpoliteness—thus evading and avoiding contentious issuesthat will provoke feelings of offense in others. In this con-text it is especially interesting how many blasphemy laws, tothis day, assume that such politeness filters exist in allmodern men and women. In this, such laws assume that in-tention automatically begets the act. Those who transgresshave stepped beyond an established Western history of

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politeness and offense that should be so clear to all that itsuggests the act of offense must be deliberate. Again, theabsence of this intention, or as lawyers regularly term it,mens rea, has consistently been a criticism of all blasphemylaws—since it is notoriously difficult to establish the inten-tion to offend. This was one reason why such laws occasion-ally took a step backward (as in, for example, the redrawingof England’s blasphemy law after the Gay News case of1978; see introduction, note 3), seeking proof of publicationand ignoring the opportunity to seek proof of intention tooffend.

Those who debated the power and truth of the gospels atthe start of the twentieth century found themselves prosec-uted for public order offenses after haranguing a crowd oranswering the objections of hecklers.11 Thus it is salutaryfor Coleman to tell us at the start of the twenty-first centurythat impulse and recklessness equally exist in the publicsphere. The Australian parliamentarian Dennis Jensen, aswe are reminded, found that he “regretted using the medi-um of Twitter,” whose online immediacy and inherent brev-ity constitute a new species of public order problem. Cole-man concludes with a request that freedom of expressionfind a range of “appropriate contexts for debate, not[expect] that every idea should be subjected to scrutiny inevery situation.” To a historian, this looks like the history ofpoliteness, inspired by the problems that blasphemy andcultural conflict have bequeathed it, which will most likelyopen a new episode in it.

In chapter 10, Jeroen Temperman reminds us of the clas-sic dilemma of democracies—defending rights while pro-tecting the vulnerable. This, he tells us, relates to anotherclassic conception—the free market of ideas. To enable suchfreedom, he suggests, legal theory is addressing modern

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needs in distinguishing between unacceptable laws (blas-phemy) and more acceptable ones (incitement to religioushatred). A significant part of his argument elaborates onthe idea that blasphemy laws are discouraged while lawsagainst incitement to religious hatred may be quite en-abling in the longer term. The latter response may alsostrengthen the hand of the democracies that enact suchlaws, by ensuring that they punish only “the most heinousforms of incitement to (religious) violence.” Tempermanlists a considerable range of opinion, both official and unof-ficial, that impresses on states the need to remove blas-phemy laws. This is followed by similar material advocatinghigh thresholds, which Temperman argues should not belowered to catch lesser forms of expression. He then seeksto explore the labyrinth of defining hate and how this caninform the high threshold approach, quoting others onlevels of irrational emotions, opprobrium, enmity, and de-testation. He is right to do this, because in no credible legalcode will we ever find that it is illegal to hate! Crucial tothis line of thinking is a robust definition of the word in-citement. This turns hatred from a thought, perhaps a wish,into an action with consequences. This reinforces, for me asa historian, the fact that we have moved from policing be-liefs and opinions to policing deeds and actions. The en-dorsement by legal authorities of the use of incitement inthese laws is also scarcely a surprise, since legal and poli-cing authorities have, since the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, been comfortable with the conception of blasphemyand related crimes as a public order issue. They have alsofelt most empowered when assessing actual risk to individu-als and the wider public peace. Nonetheless, as Tempermanwarns us, vigilance and scrutiny are required to ensure thatappropriate tests of offensiveness do not slide into

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“governmental abuse of incitement laws.” Likewise, suchlaws should not give in to elevated levels of sensitivity. Tem-perman rightly contends that assessing incitement is thebusiness of governments and legal authorities, not of offen-ded individuals. Equally he quotes robust opinion from theCommission on Human Rights that governments need to bewatched closely, since such laws potentially empower themto interfere with free speech. Temperman concludes by as-serting that overwhelming opinion is now ranged againstcountries that operate blasphemy laws. Widespread discred-it has come to these countries, but nonetheless, ensuringthe removal of such laws is neither a straightforward nor aneasy task.

Thus, taken together, the contributions to this book pro-duce a range of insights indicating that blasphemy is afruitful area for the application of a number of methodolo-gies. It is a place where the discipline of history and its con-clusions have important things to say to contemporary per-ceptions. Historical understanding should also inform con-temporary analyses of law, and these fields must maintain asymbiotic relationship, to ensure the best possible out-comes for both. The insights from other disciplines, such asliterary studies, religious studies, the history and theory ofrepresentation, and film studies, add much to the develop-ment of blasphemy studies as a subject. There is emphatic-ally more to say, but this collection has taken a major stepforward in enabling us to say it.

NOTES

1. Burstyn v. Wilson 343, U.S. 495 (1952). See also David Nash,Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007), 177.

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2. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, ed. Eric Dunning, JohanGoudsblom, and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford:Wiley Blackwell, 2000).

3. For material on the Foote case, see David Nash, Blasphemy inModern Britain, 1789 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), ch.4. For an examination of blasphemy cases in the context of contem-porary literary history, see Joss Lutz Marsh, Word Crimes: Blas-phemy, Culture and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto(London, 1848); Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (London, 1867), pt. 1, ch.1.

5. For a detailed exposition, see Francesca Loetz, Dealings withGod: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a History of Reli-giousness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

6. Blasphemy was illegal under Article 40.6.1.i of the 1937 IrishConstitution but was confirmed and strengthened under Article 36of the Irish Defamation Act (2009).

7. Peter Jones, “Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie,” Brit-ish Journal of Political Science 20, no. 4 (1990): 427.

8. Ibid., 429.9. Elias, Civilising Process.10. See, for example, Elizabeth Foyster, “Creating a Veil of Si-

lence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household,”Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (December2002): 395–415.

11. See Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain, ch. 5.

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Contributors

CHRIS BENEKE is an associate professor of history at BentleyUniversity. He is the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Ori-gins of American Pluralism (2006) and the coeditor, with Christoph-er S. Grenda, of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intol-erance in Early America (2011).

JACQUES BERLINERBLAU is an associate professor of Jewish civilizationat Georgetown University. He is the author of five books, the mostrecent of which have attempted to make sense of the confusing andconfused concept of secularism. He also writes on and teaches aboutJewish American literature and serves as an editor of the scholarlyjournal Philip Roth Studies.

ELIZABETH BURNS COLEMAN is a lecturer in communications and mediastudies at Monash University, where she lectures on freedom ofcommunication and communication ethics. She has written numer-ous chapters and journal articles on blasphemy and the negotiationof the sacred and has coedited four books on this theme, Negotiat-ing the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society(2006), Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in theArts (2008), Religion, Medicine and the Body (2009), and ReligiousTolerance, Education and the Curriculum (2011).

PAUL FINKELMAN, the President William McKinley Distinguished Pro-fessor of Law at Albany Law School, is the author of more than 150scholarly articles and more than 35 books, including An ImperfectUnion (1981), March of Liberty (2012), and Slavery and theFounders (3rd ed., 2014). He was the chief expert witness in the law-suit over the constitutionality of the Alabama Ten CommandmentsMonument, and the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous other courtshave cited his scholarship on legal and constitutional history. Hehas published op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post,the Baltimore Sun, USA Today, the Huffington Post, and the Root.

CHRISTOPHER S. GRENDA is a professor of history at Bronx CommunityCollege of the City University of New York. He is the coeditor, alongwith Chris Beneke, of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance andIntolerance in Early America (2011). His work has also appeared inthe Journal of Church and State, the Journal of Law and Religion,and Politics and Religion.

RON E. HASSNER is an associate professor of political science at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and the codirector of its Religion,Politics, and Globalization Program. He studies the role of symbolsand ideas in international security, with particular attention to therelationship between religion and conflict. He is the editor of Reli-gion in the Military Worldwide (2013), a collection of essays on reli-gious practices in contemporary professional armed forces, and Waron Sacred Grounds (2009), an analysis of the causes and character-istics of disputes over sacred places around the globe and the condi-tions under which these conflicts can be managed.

DAVID LAWTON is a professor of English at Washington University inSt. Louis. His works include Faith, Text, and History: The Bible inEnglish (1991), Blasphemy (1993), and Public Interiorities: Voice inLater Medieval English Literature (2009). He is currently workingon The Norton Chaucer: Complete Works. He has published manyarticles in English literary and cultural studies and in medieval stud-ies and is a founding coeditor of the journal New Medieval Literat-ures. He has taught at the University of Sydney, the University ofTasmania, the University of East Anglia, and the University ofOxford.

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EBRAHIM MOOSA is a professor of religion and Islamic studies in theDepartment of Religion at Duke University. His work includesGhazali and the Poetics of Imagination (2005), named the Best FirstBook in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Reli-gion, and What Is a Madrasa? Practices and Politics of Salvation inContemporary Islam (forthcoming). He coedited Islam in theModern World (2014) and Muslim Family Law in Sub-SaharanAfrica: Colonial Legacies and Post-colonial Challenges (2010). He isalso the editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor FazlurRahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Funda-mentalism (2000).

DAVID NASH is a professor of history at Oxford Brookes University. Hehas written two books (Blasphemy in Modern Britain [1999] andBlasphemy in the Christian World [2007]) and a number of articleson the subject of blasphemy. He has also given advice on blasphemyin the contemporary world to members of the British, Australian,and Irish governments and to the United Nations.

JEROEN TEMPERMAN is an associate professor of public internationallaw at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the editor in chief ofReligion and Human Rights: An International Journal. He has(co)authored and edited several books on international humanrights law, including State-Religion Relationships and HumanRights Law (2010); Human Rights, coauthored with Kristin Henrard(2011); a book on socioeconomic rights in the European Union coau-thored with Rob Buitenweg and Kathalijne Buitenweg(forthcoming); and The Lautsi Papers: Multidisciplinary Reflectionson Religious Symbols in the Public School Classroom (2012).

ASMA T. UDDIN is legal counsel at the Becket Fund for ReligiousLiberty. She is also the founder and editor in chief of the webmagazine Altmuslimah, which explores topics in gender and Islam.In her Becket Fund and Altmuslimah capacities, Uddin has spokennationally and internationally. Most recently, she convened a work-ing group on free speech and religious freedom at the 2013 U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar.

ROBERT A. YELLE is an associate professor of history at the Universityof Memphis and, in 2013–14, the joint Tikvah / Senior Emile Noël

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Fellow at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization and theJean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Lawand Justice at New York University School of Law. A former Guggen-heim Fellow, Yelle is the author of Explaining Mantras (2003), TheLanguage of Disenchantment (2013), and Semiotics of Religion(2013) and a coeditor of After Secular Law (2011).

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Index

Aan, Alexander, 224Aboriginal Australians: beliefs of, 4, 13, 268, 329; distrust of the me-

dia, 264, 267; and identity, 260–61; knowledge of, 258; relation-ship with land, 260, 269; rights of, 275–76; right to speak for, 255

Abū Zayd, Naṣr Ḥāmid, 171, 179action vs. speech, 144, 148, 158–59Act of Toleration (1689), 30, 32advocacy, meaning of, 311n41Afghanistan riots, 207, 209Agamben, Giorgio, 146–47, 177The Age of Reason (Paine), 45–46, 145Ahmadiyya, 224, 228, 230, 233, 245n54Aikenhead, Thomas, 142Akhtar, Shabbir, 252–53Alcott, Bronson, 131Allen, Mary, 67al-Qaeda, 209Alter, Robert, 67–68Alvarez, Xavier, 152al-‘Alwānī, Ṭāhā Jābir, 181–82al-Amīn, Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan, 183

Ammar, Héla, 96Amor, Abdelfattah, 291, 301“Analysis of the Domestic Law Concerning Blasphemy, Religious In-

sult and Inciting Religious Hatred,” 9The Anatomy Lesson (P. Roth), 62–63, 72–73Angoff, Charles, 67antebellum America, 130–35anti-Ahmadi demonstrations (1953), 230anti-Muslim gestures, 200Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 150anti-Semitism, 285–86, 292–93Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), 15n4anti-vilification laws, 248n119apostasy in Islam, 181–84, 195, 199, 211, 221n94Appeal (Walker), 122–23Appleby, R. Scott, xii–xiiial-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, 210artistic expression, 11, 58–59artwork: destruction of, 83, 85; global context of, 103–12; Muslim,

215n21; offensive, 83–103; overview of, 82–83; protests against,85, 112–13n11

Asad, Talal, 143Astell, Mary: Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit, 35–36, 52n67atheism, 224Atheist Ireland, 327Atran, Scott, 211Auden, W. H., xivAustin, J. L., 158Austin, James T., 128Australia: cultures of, 272; decriminalization of blasphemy in,

250–51, 277n7; indigenous knowledge, 258–63Austrian blasphemy laws, 2, 9, 16n7authority, limitation of, 29

Bamphlett, Muriel, 264Bancroft, George, 131Bar Code to Concentration Camp Morph (Schechner), 93–94, 94fig.Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit (Astell), 35–36, 52n67

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“Bart’lemy-Faire Method,” 35Barwick, Linda, 254Beach, John, 40Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, 229Behrendt, Larissa, 269Bell, Dianne, 264Bellah, Robert, xiiBeneke, Chris, 47Benjamin, Walter, 156Bennett, Keith, 85Bentham, Jeremy, 145–46Berger, Peter, 6–7Berlin, Isaiah, 8Berlinerblau, Jacques, 11, 37, 135, 147, 317–20Bernstein, Basil, 262Bhatti, Shabbaz, 171Bible: Catholic vs. Protestant, 137n12; treatment of, 145birth control advocacy, 122, 137n10Blackstone, William, 145Blair, Tony, 192blasphemy. See also secular blasphemy: analysis of, 333; as an

artist’s tool, 82–83; based in community, not religion, 106, 320, xi;decriminalization of, 1, 147, 250–51, 277n7; definition of, 15n5,76n17, 193; differences among religions, 106; history of, 307–20,322–23; internationalization of, 6–9; legislation against, 1–6, 123,x; meaning of, 178–79; and modernity, 11; moral threat posed by,199–200; overview of, 13–14; as a positive disruptive power, 11; vs.profanity, 76nn15,17; prosecution of, 132–33, 139n47, 180–83; re-demption for, 195; scholarship on, 9–13; significance of, x; tolera-tion of, 130–35; typology of, 107–8; use of word, ix–x; violence re-lated to, 169–70, 322

—LAWS, BY COUNTRY: Austrian, 2, 9, 16n7; Canadian, 4–5; Dutch, 29,48n7; Egyptian, 229; English, 6, 36, 331; German, 2, 15–16n6,309n14; Indonesian, 12–13, 170, 328; Iranian, 3; Irish, 2, 16n8;Pakistani, 3, 171, 186n2; Saudi Arabian, 17n14; Sudanese, 3;Turkish, 17–18n18

Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Sal-man Rushdie (Levy), 10

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Blasphemy Act (1698), 52n66Blasphemy (Lawton), 320Blasphemy (Preston), 111Bloom, Claire: Leaving a Doll’s House, 69Blount, Charles, 30–32; “The Deist: A Satyr on the Parsons,” 30,

49n18; Oracles of Reason, 32Boston Investigator, 119, 123Brady, Ian, 85Bramly, Serge: I.N.R.I., 98Brandenburg v. Ohio, 157, 235The Breast (P. Roth), 62Brennan, William, 58British Board of Film Classification, 15n3Burger, Warren, 58Burstyn v. Wilson, 318Butler, Judith, 158

Cabantous, Alan, 23n49Calamita Cosmica (Dominicis), 89Calderoli, Roberto, 202“Camden Principles on Freedom of Expression and Equality,”

289–90, 299–300, 303–4, 311n41Canadian blasphemy laws, 4–5Canadian Human Rights Commission, 293The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 27capitalism, 146Carlile, Richard, 317, 323Carlin, George: “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 150carnivals, 147Carter, James, xiiicartoons and caricature, 150–51Catholics, attacks on, 134, 140n52Catholic vs. Protestant Bible, 137n12Cattelan, Maurizio: HIM, 87–89, 88fig., 109, 320Caution! Religion!, 90censorship: debate on, 76n5, 77n21; of literature, 57, 70; self- vs.

legal, 46, 276, 331CERD (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination), 287

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Channing, William Ellery, 120, 131Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 157Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury),

33–35Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales, 27children as a vulnerable group, 312n64Christianity vs. Judeo-Christianity (Ross), 292Christ in the House of His Parents (Millais), 108Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy, 108Church of England, 36Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 134–35, 140n55civil religion, xiiColeman, Elizabeth Burns, 4, 10–11, 13, 160, 328–32Collins, Anthony, 37–38; A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony

in Writing, 37, 52–53n80Commission on Human Rights, 283, 332–33Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), 287Common Law of Blasphemous Libel (2008), 2Common Sense (Paine), 45Commonwealth v. Aves, 130communal rights vs. individual rights, 233, 328community identity vs. personal identity, 99–100Congregation for Reform, 205Connolly, William, 155–56context and content, 301Cooley, Charles Horton, 76–77n18Cooper, Alan, 70Cortese, Anthony, 159–60The Counterlife (P. Roth), 59–60, 63, 76–77n18creationism, 262Crime and Disorder Act (1998), 15n4Criminal Justice Act (1967), 14n1crucifix, 215n20cultural competency, 258curses, 141–42, 164n28

Dadaism, 146Danchin, Peter, 159

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Danish cartoons of Mohammed, 1–2, 12, 143The Daring Book for Girls, 249–50, 254–56, 263, 267–68Darwin, Charles, 260Davis, Natalie Zemon, 198defamation: and free speech, 4, 17n16; meaning of, 4; of religion,

248n119, 282–84, 291–92Defamation Act (2009), 2, 16n8deference codes, 270–71, 273Defoe, Daniel, 52n67, 317; The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, 32,

50n30; The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, 32–33“The Deist: A Satyr on the Parsons” (Blount), 30, 49n18deist beliefs, 31desecularization, 6–7, 20n29Le désenchantement du monde (Gauchet), 105–6Dewey, John, xivDiagoras of Melos, 151Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 39, 53n89Dickinson, Jonathan, 39–40; The Nature and Necessity of Regenera-

tion, 39; The Scripture Bishop, 39didgeridoo: assumptions made about, 267; The Daring Book for Girls

on, 249; health benefits of, 277n12; infertility caused by, 252,255, 263, 267–68; sacredness of, 329

Diène, Doudou, 173dignity threatened by critical expression, 9A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (Collins), 37,

52–53n80disenchantment, 321–22, 330distrust of the media, 264, 267diversity, 7Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 109Dominicis, Gino de: Calamita Cosmica, 89“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” 158–59Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger, 196–97Dryden, John, 28Duchamp, Marcel: Fountain, 146Dunlap, Andrew, 124Durkheim, Émile, 155, 196–97Durrani, Tehmina, 98–99

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Dutch blasphemy laws, 29, 48n7Dworkin, Ronald, 46The Dying Animal (P. Roth), 62

Earth Mother, 259Ebadi, Shirin, 17n12Ecce Homo (Wallin), 107Ecclesiastical Characteristics (Witherspoon), 41ECHR. See European Court of Human RightsEdgar, David, 159Egyptian blasphemy laws, 229electronic media, 6–7Eleutherius Enervatus (Wetmore), 40Elias, Norbert, 322, 330Elisha’s curse, 141–42Ellis, George, 131el-Saadawi, Nawal, 98–99Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 120, 131employment rights, 315Engels, Friedrich, 146English blasphemy laws, 6, 36, 331English Blasphemy Statute (1698), 14n1English common law, 36Enlightenment, 11, 47, 325, 328An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 38Ensler, Eve: The Vagina Monologues, 150equality, 20–21n31Erasmus, Desiderius, 27–29, 48n6; The Praise of Folly, 27Ernst, Max, 101ethnic identity, 4Eurocentrism, 105European Centre for Law and Justice, 309n16European Commission for Democracy through Law, 9European Commission on Human Rights, 10European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), 1, 4, 9–10, 15n3,

17–18n18, 23n50, 236–37Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 196Evatt, Elizabeth, 290–91, 302

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Everyman (P. Roth), 60excommunication, 142, 144Exit Ghost (P. Roth), 73–74expletives, 164n28Ezzat, Peter, 229

face as a means of identity, 99–100, 270Faisalabad, bishop of, 186n2false representation, 152–54Fanny Hill, 136Farr, Thomas F., 238Farrior, Stephanie, 288Fatah, 210Faurisson, Robert, 290–91, 302Faurisson v. France, 290, 295, 302Fawzy, Adel, 229Feinberg, Joel, 252–53Felicity Party, 205festivals, 147“fighting words,” 157–58, 281, 292figural representation in Muslim art, 215n21figurative images, ban on, 193–94Fillmore, Millard, 140n52Finke, Roger, 238Finkelman, Paul, 12, 226, 323–24First Amendment, 8, 47, 131Five Books of Moses, 145flag desecration, 152, 154–57, 160Foote, G. W., 316, 323The Forbidden Phrases, 17–18n18Fortuyn, Pim, 99Fountain (Duchamp), 146Fowler, Edward: Reflections upon a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,

35Frazer, James, 193Freedom House rankings (2006–2007), 200–201, 218n51, 221n91

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free speech: challenged by defamation laws, 4, 17n16; and civility,272; and extreme speech, 281–82; vs. hate speech, 161, 282; legalprotection of, 59; meaning of, 223

Freud, Sigmund, 109fundamentalism, 7, 21n32, 104, 107–8

Galileo Galilei, 28Garma Festival Yidaki Statement (1999), 254Garouste, Gérard: L’Intranquille, 102; Passage, 102–3, 102fig., 108,

110Garrison, William Lloyd, 131Gauchet, Marcel: Le désenchantement du monde, 105–6Gay News case, 15n3, 159, 331Gayssot Act, 290, 302Geertz, Clifford, 326–27General Assembly, 283General Comment No. 34, 299, 303, 305Genesis Rabbah, 151German blasphemy laws, 2, 15–16n6, 309n14German criminal code, 2Ghamidi, Javed Ahmad, 182–83Ghanea, Nazila, 297The Ghost Writer (P. Roth), 69, 71, 74Gibbons, Gillian, 221n94Gibson, Edmund, 37Ginsberg, Allen: Howl, 58Girard, René, 162Girls Lean Back Everywhere (Grazia), 64Giuliani, Rudy, 83God, denial of existence of, 224Goffman, Erving, 270Gombrich, Ernst, 151Goodbye, Columbus (P. Roth), 60, 66, 69Gordon, Sarah Barringer, 139n47government, forms of, xiigovernment models of religious interaction, 21–22n35Grazia, Edward de: Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 64Grenda, Christopher S., 8, 11, 135, 145, 238, 316–17, xi

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Grice, H. P., 276Grim, Brian J., 238Gurruwiwi, Dhangal, 254Gurruwiwi, Djalu, 254

Hale, Lord Chief Justice Matthew, 36, 145Hamas, 205, 210“Handling/Respect of the National Flag,” 156–57Haque, Ziaul, 170The Harm in Hate Speech (Waldron), 23n44harm principle, 252HarperCollins, 250, 255, 263Harry Potter series (Rowling), 149–50Hart, H. L. A., 253Harvey, Marcus: Myra, 85–87, 86fig., 103–4, 320Hassner, Ron E., 12, 170, 326, xiihate crimes, 158, 289hate speech, 4–5, 18nn19,20, 152, 157–61, 282Haworth, Alan, 266–67heresy, 76n16Herman-Peled, Horit, 93Herndon v. Lowry, 246–47n88Hezbollah, 205, 210HIM (Cattelan), 87–89, 88fig., 109, 320Hindley, Myra, 85–87, 86fig., 112–13n11Hindu relics and shrines, 212Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 98–99, 321Hitler, Adolf, 87–89; Mein Kampf, 103Hoare, Sir Samuel, 305Hodgson, Marshall: The Venture of Islam, xiiHolocaust, 286, 288, 290, 312n67Holocaust denial, 285–86, 302Holyoake, George Jacob, 316The Holy Virgin Mary (Ofili), 83–85, 84fig., 109, 111homophobic speech, 312nn63,67hostility, definition of, 304Howarth, Alan, 331Howe, Irving, 68, 72–73, 79n72

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Howl (Ginsberg), 58human rights, 233–35, 239, 281–82, 285–87, 309n13, 309–10n17. See

also European Court of Human RightsHuman Rights Act (1999), 234Human Rights Committee, 284, 299, 303–4, 307, 309n14Human Rights Council, 283The Humbling (P. Roth), 62–63Hume, David, 11, 40, 138n32, 317; Dialogues Concerning Natural

Religion, 39, 53n89; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understand-ing, 38; Natural History of Religion, 38; A Treatise of HumanNature, 38

ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights): onblasphemy/religious defamation bans, 283–84, 309n16; conceptu-alization of, 307; on human rights, 239; implementation of, 285;and Nazi hatred, response to, 288; public order exception in,234–37; ratification of, 285; on religious freedom, 232, 239; reser-vations about, 310n19

—TERMS USED IN: “advocacy,” 286–89, 311n41; “discrimination,” 294,298, 303–7, 312n66; “hatred,” 289–94; “hostility,” 303, 305; “in-citement,” 297–303; “national,” 294–97; “racial,” 294–97; “reli-gious,” 294–97; “violence,” 303, 304–5

ICERD (International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms ofRacial Discrimination), 287

iconoclasm, 151–52identity, 4, 99–100, 260–61, 270, 274ignorance, 257–58Ihsanoglu, Ekmeleddin, 23n44images, power of, 149, 151, 193–94, 320–21incitement to religious hatred: advocacy, 286–89; vs. blasphemy,

285–86; definition of, 2, 285, 332; discrimination as a result of,303–7; legislation on, 282, 332–33; meaning of, 289–94, 297–303;national, 294–97; political opinions on, 281–84; violence as a res-ult of, 303–7

Index of Democracy, 218n51India, political dynamics of, 21n33indigenous knowledge, 258–63individual rights vs. communal rights, 233, 328

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Indonesia: blasphemy laws in, 12–13, 170, 328; Constitution of,226–27, 232–33; mandate of religious studies in schools, 231–32;Muslim population of, 223–25; population of, 224–25; riots in,207–8; United Nations, withdrawal from, 242n16

Indonesian Blasphemy Act: context of, 224–25, 242n16, 327–28; en-forcement of, 242–43n18; overview of, 225–29; punishable of-fenses, 227–28, 237, 244n36; purpose of, 225–26; repeal efforts,229–34; upheld in Constitutional Court, 223–24, 231–41; vague-ness of, 237, 310n18; vs. Western blasphemy laws, 328

Indonesian Criminal Code, 227Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI), 228, 244n38INGO Article 19, 289, 304The Innocence of Muslims, 1I.N.R.I. (Bramly), 98intent to harm with blasphemy, 1interdependence, 330International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial

Discrimination (ICERD), 287, 309n14International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. See ICCPRInternational Service for Human Rights (ISHR), 309n13, 309–10n17intolerance, 32, 263L’Intranquille (Garouste), 102Iqbal, Muammad, 185, 326Iranian blasphemy laws, 3Iranian revolution, xiiiIran’s penal code, 3Ireland, 327, 328Irish blasphemy laws, 2, 16n8irreverence, xiiISHR (International Service for Human Rights), 309n13, 309–10n17Islam: apostasy in, 181–84, 195, 199, 211, 221n94; blasphemy, acts

of, 170–73, 178–79, 186n2, 195, 216n25; criticism, protectionfrom, 2–3, 16n9, 17–18n18; geopolitical context of, 184–85,325–26; hadith-based approach to, 178; history of, 12, 184–85; in-tolerance for blasphemy, xii; methodology, 177–78; political theo-logy, 12, 169–70, 173–77, 186, 325; and the Prophet Mohammed,151–52, 174–77, 179–81, 194, 215n18; Qur’an-based approach to,178; salvation, 175; women of, 98–99

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Islamdom, xiiIslamic Courts Union, 205Islamic Defender Front, 205, 208Islamic Movement, 205Islamic Resistance Party, 205Islamic Revolution, 205Islamic Salvation Front, 205Islamism, 195–96Islamist Movements, 199, 205Israel, Jonathan, 141It’s the Real Thing (Schechner), 91–93, 92fig., 95, 108

Jackson, Andrew, 124Jamaat e-Islami, 205Japanangka paradigm, 258–59Jeffrey, Sam, 264Jensen, Dennis, 269–70, 331Jerry Springer: The Opera, 107Jesus, depiction of, 107Jesus, resurrection of, 215n20Jesus of Montreal, 109–10Jewish freedom in the United States, 134Jews accused of blasphemy, 140n54Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 20–21n31Johnson, Winnie, 85, 112–13n11Jones, Peter, 256–60, 262–63, 265, 274–76, 329; “Respecting Beliefs

and Rebuking Rushdie,” 251–52Jones, Terry, 170Joshua’s curse, 141–42Joyce, James: Ulysses, 58J.R.T. and the W.G. Party v. Canada, 287, 295Jyllands-Posten cartoons: circulation of, 189; as freedom of expres-

sion, 172–73; iconoclasm of, 151–52; reaction to, 162, 189–92,214n4, 326; riots over, 189–91, 190table, 214n6

Kadivar, Mohsen, 183Karzai, Hamid, 170Keane, Webb, 148–49Kekes, John, 197

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Kent, James, 133Khān, Mawlānā Vaḥīduddīn, 182Khomeini, Ayatollah Rūḥullāh, 6, 74, 172, 195, 216n28Kirkup, James, 15n3Klein, Eckart, 302Kneeland, Abner, 12, 316; blasphemy of, 124–30; early life of,

120–24; historical context of blasphemy case against, 135–36; jailexperience of, 135, 140n56; libertarian views of, 323; prosecutionof, 119–20, 323–24; A Review of the Evidences of Christianity, 121;A Review of the Trial, Conviction, and Final Imprisonment of inthe County Jail of the County of Suffolk, of Abner Kneeland for theAlleged Crime of Blasphemy, 135

Knowlton, Charles, 122Koori Mail, 254Kosolapov, Alexander, 90–91; This is My Blood, 90–91, 91fig.; This is

My Body, 90–91, 91fig., 108Krapac, Ben, 125, 126, 138n18Kretzmer, David, 290–91, 302Krupnick, Mark, 65Kuru, Ahmet T.: Secularism and State Policies toward Religion,

21–22n35

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 58Lallah, Rajsoomer, 290, 302, 303Lankarani, Mohammad Javad, 171Larner, Jeremy, 66Laskhar-e-Tayyaba, 203The Last Temptation of Christ, 108–9Latitudinarians, 29Law on the Prevention of Blasphemy and Abuse of Religion, 12–13,

223. See also Indonesian Blasphemy ActLawrence, D. H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 58Lawton, David, 11, 320–22, x; Blasphemy, 320Leaving a Doll’s House (Bloom), 69Lebanese riots, 207–9, 210The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine (Schech-

ner), 93, 95, 96fig.legal censorship vs. self-censorship, 46, 276, 331

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Lemon, Denis, 15n3A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (Shaftesbury), 34, 52n69Letting Go (P. Roth), 60Levy, Leonard W., 126, 130–32, 151; Blasphemy: Verbal Offense

against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, 10Lewis, Sinclair, 28Liberator, 122–23Libyan riots, 202, 210, 218n58Das Liebeskonzil, 16n7literature, censorship of, 57, 70literature, obscenity in, 57–59Locke, John, 47Lolita (Nabokov), 58Loring, Ellis Gray, 131Lumbrozo, Jacob, 140n54

Macklin, Jenny, 269–70Madison, James, 43Magna Charta (Wallis), 32Mahmood, Saba, 143, 148–49Malcolm Ross v. Canada, 287–88Manitoba criminal code, 4–5Manitoba Defamation Act, 4–5Mannes, Marya, 67Maria Vassilari et al. v. Greece, 291, 301Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus, 109marriage equality, 121–22Marshall, Paul, 10Marx, Karl, 146, 324Masih, Rifta, 230, 245n51Massachusetts act of 1782, 123, 137n12al-Māwardī, Abū al-Ḥasan, 175Mawlawi, Faisal, 208McAdam, Doug, 198McCarthy, Mary, 66McCormack, Sean, 192Mead, George Herbert, 76–77n18media, distrust of, 264, 267

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media, electronic, 6–7medievalism, 104Mein Kampf (Hitler), 103“Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Massachusetts, 136Merlan, Francesca, 272–73military honors, fraudulent claims of, 152–54Mill, John Stuart, 9, 256, 260–61, 265, 271–72, 275, 329; On Liberty,

252Millais, John Everett: Christ in the House of His Parents, 108Miller, Henry: Tropic of Cancer, 58The Miller’s Son, 125Miller v. California, 58Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics, 67minority groups, targeting of, 223–24Mohammed (Prophet): depicted in Danish cartoons, 1–2, 12, 143 (see

also Jyllands-Posten cartoons); depicted in The Satanic Verses,252; image of, 151–52, 216n22; insults against, 179–81, 204–5;and Islam, 151–52, 174–77, 179–81, 194, 215n18; as the LastProphet, 228, 244n42; personal identification with, 4; prohibitionon visual representation, 106–7, 162, 194, 215n18; successors of,175; two bodies of, 176, 187n9

Molière: Tartuffe, 28Moore, Rob, 261The Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie), 74Moors murders, 85Moosa, Ebrahim, 12, 193, 323, 325–26, xiiThe Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody (Shaftesbury), 34moral order, 197Moral Physiology (Owens), 122Mormons, 134–35, 140n55Morse, J. Mitchell, 68Moshaddeq, Ahmad, 228Mouawad, Nayla, 201Movement for Islamic Revival, 208Mubarak, Hosni, 229MUI (Indonesian Ulama Council), 228, 244n38Mujahid, Abubakar, 208Muller, Johan, 261

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multiculturalism, 7, 21n33, 161, 275Murray, James, 43–45; Sermons to Asses, 44–45; Sermons to Doctors

in Divinity, 45; Sermons to Ministers of State, 44Musharraf, Pervez, 202, 203Muslim art, 215n21Muslim Brotherhood, 169, 205, 208, 210Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, 8Muslim-majority approach to blasphemy laws, 3Myra (Harvey), 85–87, 86fig., 103–4, 320

Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita, 58Nahmod, Sheldon, 155name taboos, 149–50, 193Nāṣir, ‘Ammār Khān, 183Nash, David, 10, 82Nassralah, Hassan, 216n29National Islamic Front, 205Natural History of Religion (Hume), 38The Nature and Necessity of Regeneration (Dickinson), 39Nazi hate propaganda, 288“negative” liberty, 8–9Nelson, Topsy Napurrula, 264Neshat, Shirin, 98Neuenfeldt, Karl, 254New Brunswick Human Rights Code, 292–93The New Life (Pamuk), 111New York Free Inquirer, 125Nigeria, 221n92Nigerian riots, 207–89–11 terrorist attacks, xiiiNoto v. United States, 235–36Nowak, Manfred, 288, 296, 306Noyes, George, 131al-Numayrī, Jaʼfar, 171

obscene material, definition of, 58obscenity, 57–59, 147offense, definition of, 266Ofili, Chris: The Holy Virgin Mary, 83–85, 84fig., 109, 111

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O’Flaherty, Michael, 284, 288–89, 299–300, 303, 309n12OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), 2–3Oluwasesin, Christianah Oluwatoyin, 221n94On Liberty (Mill), 252Oracles of Reason (Blount), 32Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), 2–3Organization of the Islamic Conference, 283orthodoxy, 76n16Our Gang (P. Roth), 61–62Owens, Robert Dale: Moral Physiology, 122

Paine, Thomas, 43–46, 135, 316–17; The Age of Reason, 45–46, 145;Common Sense, 45

PAKEM (Tim Koordinasi Pengawan Aliran Kepercayaan Masyarakat),227–28

Pakistan, 221nn91,92; blasphemy laws of, 3, 171, 186n2; criminalcode in, 3; riots in, 202–3, 210; secularism of, 20–21n31

Pamuk, Orhan: The New Life, 111Pancasila philosophy, 226Pape, Robert, 221n92paradox of freedom, 105Parker, Samuel, 123–24, 126–28Parker, Theodore, 119, 131Passage (Garouste), 102–3, 102fig., 108, 110Penn, William, 29People v. Ruggles, 133persecution, 134–35, 140n55personal identity vs. community identity, 99–100philosophical method, 34Pipes, Daniel, 211Piss Christ (Serrano), 107–9, 150The Plot against America (P. Roth), 60politeness, use of, 39, 41, 330–31political correctness, 279n52political movements, 7Polity Project, 218n51Pope, Alexander, 28Portnoy’s Complaint (P. Roth), 60–61, 65, 67, 69, 70

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“positive” liberty, 8–9Post, Robert, 158postblasphemy, 110–11, 322post-World War II era, xPractical Treatise on Regeneration (Witherspoon), 41The Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 27Preston, Douglas: Blasphemy, 111Printemps des Arts, 96profanation, meaning of, 146profaneness/profanation, 147–52, ix–xprofanity, 76nn15,17, 164n28“profanity loop,” 59–60, 68–70, 74–75, 76–77n18, 135, 317propaganda, 182, 286, 288The Prophet Muhammad Had Been Sleeping with His Wife’s Maid,

224protest: and aniconism, 194–95; background of, 192–96; ban on, 203;

deaths resulting from, 203, 207–9; desecration, 196–97; govern-ment participation in, 200–201; implications of, 210–13; Islamism,195–96; and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, 189–92; moral threat,196–200, 206–7; overview of, 209–10; political manipulation,198–204; religious outrage, 199, 204–5; riots, 189–91, 190table,202–3, 206–10, 207table, 214n6; and taboo, 193–94; threat, per-ception of, 197–98; and violence, 192–93, 211

Protestant fundamentalists, 212Protestantism, 324Protestant literalism, 148Protestant majority, 133–35Protestant vs. Catholic Bible, 137n12public order, 235Public Order Act (1986), 19n22Pufendorf, Samuel, 29Pullman, Philip, 109Puritans, xiPurity and Danger (Douglas), 196Putnam, Samuel, 124, 129

Qaddafi, Mu‘ammar, 218n58al-Qaradāwī, Yūsuf, 182

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al-Qiyadah al-Islamiyah, 228Qudoos, Abdul, 230Quijano, Aníbal, 185Qur’an: on blasphemy, 195, 216n25; desecrations at Guantanamo

Bay, 211, 221n94; handling/treatment of, 157, 169, 170; illustra-tions in, 194, 216n22; reading of, 248n119

Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006), 2, 19n22Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001), 5racial identity, 4Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 196Ramadan, Tariq, 100Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 190, 192R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 158Rawls, John, 46–47The Real Holocaust (Ross), 292Reflections upon a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (Fowler), 35religion: defamation of, 248n119, 282–84, 291–92; and modernism,

315–16; religious, legal definition of, 294–97; as social regulation,105

religious belief vs. religious person, 4, 17n17, 18n20religious freedom, meaning of, 223religious hatred, meaning of, 295religious nationalism, 7, 21n33Rembrandt, 28“Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie” (Jones), 251–52reverence for sacred objects, 12A Review of the Evidences of Christianity (Kneeland), 121A Review of the Trial, Conviction, and Final Imprisonment of in the

County Jail of the County of Suffolk, of Abner Kneeland for the Al-leged Crime of Blasphemy (Kneeland), 135

Rex v. Taylor, 36Ribalow, Harold, 66–67Rice, Condoleezza, 192ridicule, 34–35, 52–53n80rights. See also human rights; ICCPR: of Aboriginal Australians,

275–76; communal vs. individual, 233, 328; employment, 315The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (Tindal), 52n67

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Ripley, George, 131Rome for Good News (Wallis), 30–31Room for the Cobler of Gloucester and His Wife (Wallis), 28Rose, Mark, 249–50, 253, 255–58, 260–63, 266–68, 278n35, 279n52Ross, Malcolm, 287–88, 292–94, 312n62; Christianity vs. Judeo-Chris-

tianity, 292; The Real Holocaust, 292; Spectre of Power, 292; Webof Deceit, 292

Ross v. Canada, 292, 295, 301Roth, Henry, 74Roth, Philip, 11; after obscenity hysteria subsided, 76n6; assessment

of, 317–20; awards won by, 66, 77n19; and the censorship debate,76n5, 77n21; and Christianity, treatment of, 63; criticism of,66–69; and Judaism, treatment of, 61, 63, 66–67, 71–72; obscenit-ies published by, 57–63, 147; outrage caused by, 66–69; profanit-ies to invoke censure, 64–66, 78n45; “profanity loop,” 59–60,68–70, 74–75, 76–77n18, 135; responses to critiques of, 69–73,79n76

—WORKS: The Anatomy Lesson, 62–63, 72–73; The Breast, 62; TheCounterlife, 59–60, 63, 76–77n18; The Dying Animal, 62; Every-man, 60; Exit Ghost, 73–74; The Ghost Writer, 69, 71, 74; Good-bye, Columbus, 60, 66, 69; The Humbling, 62–63; Letting Go, 60;Our Gang, 61–62; The Plot against America, 60; Portnoy’s Com-plaint, 60–61, 65, 67, 69, 70; Sabbath’s Theater, 62; When SheWas Good, 60

Roth v. United States, 57, 58Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter series, 149–50Roy, Muhammad Yusman, 223Roy, Olivier, 199, 201Rushdie, Salman, 109; dual culture of, 321; fatwa (death sentence)

against, 74, 108, 195, 216n28, 216n29; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 74;protests against, 252; The Satanic Verses, 6, 74–75, 172, 214n5,251–53; as a target of Muslim outrage, xii

Russia, Western influence on, 90

Sabbath breaking, 139n47, 212Sabbath’s Theater (P. Roth), 62sacred objects, 12, x, xiisacrilege, xi

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sacrilegious expression in Western culture, 11Salafi Hezb al-Tahrir, 210Salazar, John, 153The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 6, 74–75, 172, 214n5, 251–53satire: acceptance of, 187n20; as an agent of religious tolerance, 11,

28–30, 33–34, 38–39; fun of, xiv; history of, 27–30; overview of,46–47; penalties for, 180; popularity of, xi; Revolutionary, 43–46;in the 1700s, 30–43

Saudi Arabian blasphemy laws/penal code, 17n14Scanlon, T. M., 262Schechner, Alan: Bar Code to Concentration Camp Morph, 93–94,

94fig.; It’s the Real Thing, 91–93, 92fig., 95, 108; The Legacy ofAbused Children: From Poland to Palestine, 93, 95, 96fig.

Schudrich, Michael, 89–90The Scripture-Bishop (Dickinson), 39Searle, John, 158secular approach to blasphemy laws, 3secular blasphemy: beliefs, respect of, 249, 251–52; civility, 268–73;

decline of sacred, 144–47; offense to others, 252–63; overview of,141–44, 161–62, 249–51; political correctness, 263–68, 279n52;public debate, 263–68; vs. religious blasphemy, 143–44, 163n7;sacredness of secular objects, 146, 324; symbolic offenses in theUnited States, 152–57

secularism, 21–22n35Secularism and State Policies toward Religion (Kuru), 21–22n35secularization, 146, 324, ix, xiiSelect Committee of Religious Offenses in England and Wales, 15n2self-censorship vs. legal censorship, 46, 276, 331self-policing, 329Sensation, 83–87Sensus Communis (Shaftesbury), 34separation of church and state, xiA Serious Apology for “Ecclesiastical Characteristics” (Witherspoon),

41, 42–43, 54n108Sermons to Asses (Murray), 44–45Sermons to Doctors in Divinity (Murray), 45Sermons to Ministers of State (Murray), 44Serrano, Andres: Piss Christ, 107–9, 150

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Servetus, Michael, 165n32“Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” (Carlin), 150sexism, 255Sexual Politics (Millett), 67Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 33–36, 317; Char-

acteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 33–35; A LetterConcerning Enthusiasm, 34, 52n69; The Moralists, A Philosophic-al Rhapsody, 34; response to prosecution, 135; Sensus Communis,34

Shari‘a, 171, 186Shaw, Lemuel, 119–20, 128–30, 132, 137n12, 139n39Shea, Nina, 10Shearmur, Jeremy, 265–66, 274Shi‘a population, 210, 221n92The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (Defoe), 32, 50n30Shostak, Debra, 64simplicity vs. vulgarity, 68, 79n72Sion City of Allah, 240Sipah-e-Sahaba, 203Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (Woolston), 37Smith, Joseph, 135Smokey the Bear, 153social identity, 270social movements, 198Soekarno, 225–26, 242n16Spanish Civil War, 151Spectre of Power (Ross), 292speech vs. action, 144, 148, 158–59Spinoza, Baruch de, 141–42, 145, 149Stolen Valor Act (2005), 152–54structuralism, 196Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of

Minorities, 305al-Subkī, Taqī al-Dīn, 179Submission, 95, 97fig., 98, 99Sudanese blasphemy laws, 3Suleiman, Abdel Karim, 229Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, 205

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surrealism, 146Sutton, Peter, 260, 263–64symbolic interactionism, 76–77n18symbolic offense, 163n7symbolic value of objects, 152–54Syrian riots, 210Syrkin, Marie, 67, 68, 71

Tagi, Rafiq, 171Ṭāhā, Maḥmūd Muḥammad, 171, 179Taliban, 205, 209Tappaya, Sumardi, 223, 227Tarrow, Sidney, 198Tartuffe (Molière), 28Taseer, Salman, 171Taymīya, Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halīm Ibn, 180Taymīya, Taqīal-DīnIbn, 179Temperman, Jeroen, 4, 13, 227, 236, 332–33Temple of Buddha’s Tooth, 204Teplitz, Saul, 66Texas v. Johnson, 154Texas Venerated Objects Law, 154Thamrin, Yuri, 208“thick-skinned tolerance,” 8Third Reich, 299This is My Blood (Kosolapov), 90–91, 91fig.This is My Body (Kosolapov), 90–91, 91fig., 108Tilly, Charles, 198Tim Koordinasi Pengawan Aliran Kepercayaan Masyarakat (PAKEM),

227–28Timor Evangelical Church, 240Tindal, Matthew: The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted,

52n67tolerance, 316, 322, 330Tory Anglicanism, 32Traces du Sacré, 90, 100–103, 105, 110A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 38Tropic of Cancer (Miller), 58

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The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (Defoe), 32–33Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 125, 128Turkish blasphemy laws, 17–18n18Twain, Mark, 28

Uddin, Asma T., 12, 170, 310n18, 327–28UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 234, 239Ulysses (Joyce), 58unbelief, ix–xUN Declaration of Human Rights, 22n43UN Human Rights Committee, 235, 285–87United Council of Action, 203United States v. Alvarez, 152Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 234, 239Updike, John, 76n6U.S. Supreme Court, 235–36

The Vagina Monologues (Ensler), 150van Gogh, Theo, 95–98, 99, 321Vassilari, Maria, 291The Venture of Islam (Hodgson), xiiVickers, Brian, 149violent protest, 192–93, 211Visions of Ecstasy, 15n3vulgarity vs. simplicity, 68, 79n72

Wahhabi, 210Waldron, Jeremy, 46–47; The Harm in Hate Speech, 23n44Walker, David: Appeal, 122–23Wallin, Elizabeth Ohlson: Ecce Homo, 107Wallis, Ralph, 35, 316; Magna Charta, 32; Rome for Good News,

30–31; Room for the Cobler of Gloucester and His Wife, 28Warhol, Andy, 146Washington, George, 47Web of Deceit (Ross), 292Webster, Richard, 82, 211West, Errol, 258–60, 262–63, 278n35Western Enlightenment, 325Western influence on Russia, 90

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Western superiority, 261Wetmore, James: Eleutherius Enervatus, 40When She Was Good (P. Roth), 60White, Kevin, 10–11Whitehouse v. Lemon, 15n3Wilders, Geert, 1, 292Williams, Roger, 29wit, 36Witherspoon, John, 11, 40–43; Ecclesiastical Characteristics, 41;

Practical Treatise on Regeneration, 41; A Serious Apology for “Ec-clesiastical Characteristics,” 41–43, 54n108

women, cruelty toward, 98–99Woodsy Owl, 153Woolston, Thomas, 36–37; Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Sa-

viour, 37World Conference on Religion and Peace, 8World War II, 286

Yates, W. B., 28Yates v. United States, 246–47n88Yelle, Robert A., 4, 12, 324Yeni Hayat (Pamuk), 111Yolngu culture, 254–55Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang, 225

Zenger, John Peter, 138n16Zuckerman, Nathan, 69–70, 71–74, 80n80

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