Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction by Nigel Warburton

Author:Nigel Warburton [Warburton, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199232352
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

My message was that the Quran is an act of man, not of God. We should be free to interpret it; we should be permitted to apply it to the modern era in a different way, instead of performing painful contortions to try to recreate the circumstances of a horrible past. My intention was to liberate Muslim minds so that Muslim women—and Muslim men, too—might be freer.

This is a radical message within orthodox Islam. Some Muslim leaders thought it an act of sacrilege and a deliberate provocation and denounced it. From Ali’s point of view, however, this was not her intention in the film; she was explicit about this in the original text of the script she took to Theo van Gogh, where she wrote: ‘I did not write this script to provoke anyone’. In a response to those who criticized her film, she responded that it was a plea for self-reflection within Islam, and that every form of self-expression should be allowed—except for physical and verbal abuse—in the pursuit of this self-reflection. Her aim was not to turn Muslims into atheists, but ‘to expose the blemishes of the culture, particularly in its cruel treatment of women’. She knew her film would be controversial. In making the film, however, she was acting well within the law in a country with a long history of protecting and valuing free expression.

In November 2004, Theo van Gogh, the film’s director, was shot and killed as he cycled down a street in Amsterdam. His murderer, Muhammed Bouyeri, pinned a five-page letter quoting the Qur’ān and threatening Ali to his chest. Ali was forced to go in to hiding for her own self-protection.

Are we to treat Ali’s assertion that she had no intention to provoke anyone as merely disingenuous? It is not clear how it would be possible to adjudicate this sort of case. It bears many similarities to the Islamic reaction to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, a reaction that symbolizes an impasse between those who believe in individuals’ freedom of expression on matters of religion and many other issues as a non-negotiable aspect of civilized democratic society, and those who insist that their religion should be held sacrosanct, that no one should be permitted to express anything that is in their view blasphemous.

Christianity and Islam are not the only religions capable of intolerance towards criticism or what their adherents perceive as sacrilege. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, in 2004 Sikh protests against Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti culminated in a crowd of over a thousand people storming the Birmingham Repertory theatre and three police officers being injured. The playwright had to go into hiding for her own safety. Like Aayan Hirsi Ali, Bhatti was explicit that she was not deliberately offensive in her work:

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