{"id":9064,"date":"2017-05-01T17:46:02","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T17:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=9064"},"modified":"2017-05-02T17:53:41","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T17:53:41","slug":"blasphemy-isnt-just-a-problem-in-the-muslim-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/blasphemy-isnt-just-a-problem-in-the-muslim-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Blasphemy isn’t just a problem in the Muslim world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Pinkerton<\/a>, Case Western Reserve University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Recent weeks have brought renewed attention to the problem of blasphemy in the Muslim world. \"The<\/p>\n

In March, Pakistan sought Facebook\u2019s<\/a> aid in government efforts to \u201cremove and block<\/a>\u201d blasphemous content from social media. Subsequently, there was a wave of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan, including two<\/a> murders<\/a> and an attempted lynching<\/a>. In Indonesia, meanwhile, prosecutors recommended<\/a> an unexpectedly light sentence \u2013 two years\u2019 probation \u2013 for the outgoing governor of Jakarta, who stands accused of speaking irreverently against Islam.<\/p>\n

These news items are hardly surprising, coming as they do from parts of the world that regard blasphemy as a serious criminal offense.<\/p>\n

Yet active blasphemy laws also exist in many Western, secular nations. According to the Pew Research Center<\/a>, nearly one-fifth of European countries and a third of countries in the Americas, notably Canada<\/a>, have laws against blasphemy. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Mohammad Mashal Khan, a student, in Karachi, Pakistan, was killed recently over alleged blasphemy, drawing nationwide condemnation.<\/span>
\n AP Photo\/Fareed Khan<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In my research for a new literary study of blasphemy<\/a>, I found that these laws may differ in many respects from their counterparts in Muslim nations, but they also share some common features with them. <\/p>\n

In particular, they\u2019re all united in regarding blasphemy as a form of \u201cinjury\u201d \u2013 even as they disagree about what, exactly, blasphemy injures.<\/p>\n

The hurt of blasphemy<\/h2>\n

Cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood<\/a> says that many devout Muslims perceive blasphemy<\/a> as an almost physical injury: an intolerable offense that hurts both God himself and the whole community of the faithful.<\/p>\n

For Mahmood that perception was brought powerfully home in 2005, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Interviewing a number of Muslims at the time, Mahmood was \u201cstruck,\u201d she writes<\/a>, \u201cby the sense of personal loss\u201d they conveyed. People she interviewed were very clear on this point:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe idea that we should just get over this hurt makes me so mad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would have felt less wounded if the object of ridicule were my own parents.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The intensity of this \u201churt,\u201d \u201cwounding\u201d and \u201cridicule\u201d helps to explain how blasphemy can remain a capital offense<\/a> in a theocratic state like Pakistan. The punishment is tailored to the enormity of the perceived crime.<\/p>\n

That may sound like a foreign concept to secular ears. The reality, though, is that most Western blasphemy laws are rooted in a similar logic of religious offense. <\/p>\n

As historians like Leonard Levy<\/a> and David Nash<\/a> have documented<\/a>, these laws<\/a> \u2013 dating, mostly, from the 1200s to the early 1800s \u2013 were designed to protect Christian beliefs and practices from the sort of \u201churt\u201d and \u201cridicule\u201d that animates Islamic blasphemy laws today. But as the West became increasingly secular, religious injury gradually lost much of its power to provoke. By the mid-20th century, most Western blasphemy laws had become virtually dead letters.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly true of the U.S., where such laws remain \u201con the books\u201d in six states<\/a> but haven\u2019t been invoked since at least the early 1970s<\/a>. They\u2019re now widely held to be nullified by the First Amendment.<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet looking beyond the American context, one will find that blasphemy laws are hardly obsolete throughout the West. Instead, they\u2019re acquiring new uses for the 21st century.<\/p>\n

Religious offense in a secular world<\/h2>\n

Consider the case of a Danish man who was charged with blasphemy<\/a>, in February, for burning a Quran and for posting a video of the act online.<\/p>\n

In the past, Denmark\u2019s blasphemy law had only ever been enforced to punish anti-Christian expression. (It was last used in 1946<\/a>.) Today it serves to highlight an ongoing trend: In an increasingly pluralist, multicultural West, blasphemy laws find fresh purpose in policing intolerance between religious communities.<\/p>\n

Instead of preventing injury to God, these laws now seek to prevent injury to the social fabric of avowedly secular states. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s true not only of the West\u2019s centuries-old blasphemy laws but also of more recent ones. Ireland, for instance, passed a law in 2009 that prohibits the \u201cpublication or utterance of blasphemous matter.\u201d<\/a> More specifically, it targets any person<\/a> who \u201cutters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

With its emphasis on the \u201coutrage\u201d blasphemy may cause among \u201cany religion,\u201d this measure seems to be aimed less at protecting the sacred than at preventing intolerance among diverse religious groups.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Illustrations of prophecy: particularly the evening and morning visions of Daniel, and the apocalyptical visions of John (1840).<\/span>
\n Internet Archive Book Images. Image from page 371.<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The law itself has caused outrage of a different sort, however. Advocacy organizations, such as Atheist Ireland<\/a>, have expressed fierce opposition to the law and to the example it sets internationally. In late 2009, for instance, Pakistan borrowed the exact language<\/a> of the Irish law in its own proposed statement on blasphemy to the United Nations\u2019 Human Rights Council. <\/p>\n

Thus, Atheist Ireland warns<\/a> on its website that \u201cIslamic States can now point to a modern pluralist Western State passing a new blasphemy law in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blasphemy in modernity<\/h2>\n

That warning resonates with the common Western view of blasphemy as an antiquated concept, a medieval throwback with no relevance to \u201cmodern,\u201d \u201cdeveloped\u201d societies.<\/p>\n

As Columbia University professor Gauri Viswanathan<\/a> puts it, blasphemy is often used<\/a> \u201cto separate cultures of modernity from those of premodernity.\u201d Starting from the assumption that blasphemy can exist only in a backward society, critics point to blasphemy as evidence of the backwardness of entire religious cultures.<\/p>\n

I would argue, however, that this eurocentric view is growing increasingly difficult to sustain. If anything, blasphemy seems to be enjoying a resurgence in many corners of the supposedly secular West.<\/p>\n

The real question now is not whether blasphemy counts as a crime. Instead it\u2019s about who, or what \u2013 God or the state, religion or pluralism \u2013 is the injured party.<\/p>\n

Steve Pinkerton<\/a>, Lecturer in English, Case Western Reserve University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Pinkerton, Case Western Reserve University Recent weeks have brought renewed attention to the problem of blasphemy in the Muslim world. In March, Pakistan sought Facebook\u2019s aid in government efforts to \u201cremove and block\u201d blasphemous content from social media. Subsequently, there was a wave of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan, including two murders and an attempted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":9065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[2253,2254,2255],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9066,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9064\/revisions\/9066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}