In the last few weeks, Islamists have scored a series of victories suppressing free-speech across the world and intimidating critics of Islam. Mullahs brazenly issued death threats while the so-called moderate Muslims maintained that free-speech that offends Muslim sentiments cannot be allowed. Secularists unfailingly and actively supported the Islamist position. Let us look at four recent cases of aggressive Islamist suppression of free-speech:
1. Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses and Muslim apostate was to speak at the Literature Festival in Jaipur, India. Rushdie had earlier received a fatwa of death penalty from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for offending Prophet Muhammad and Islam. Indian Muslims protested against Rushdie’s visit and the mullahs publicly threatened that “Rushdie is an apostate and is liable to be killed.” Rushdie announced that he feared assassination and did not attend the festival. The mullahs declared victory.
2. Subramanian Swamy has been a brilliant Harvard faculty for decades and a fearless warrior against corruption in India. A few months ago he wrote an article denouncing Islamic terrorism and urged India’s Hindus to unite if they ever hoped to end Islamic jihad. He recognized the reality of dar-ul-Islam that motivates some Muslims to identify with the umma and not with their own countrymen, and insisted that India’s Muslims should earn the right to vote by abandoning the imaginary notions of dar-ul-Islam and recognizing their own Hindu ancestry. He also called for the restoration of 300 Hindu temples among the thousands the Muslim invaders had razed to build mosques during their subjugation of India and the Hindus. Harvard’s secular brigade, led by Diana Eck, characterized Swamy’s message as “a call for violence against Islamic holy places.” It never occurred to them that the demolition of the Hindu temples was violence in the first place and that Swamy had merely asked for legally restoring them! Eck led a successful campaign to issue a Harvard Fatwa to prevent Swamy from teaching at Harvard. The message was clear: If you criticize Islam secularists will go for the jugular and curtail your free-speech. One should not mistakenly assume that secularists such as Eck are concerned with offense to sentiments. They do not care one bit when the likes of the anti-Semitic Muslim professor Julio Pino of Kent State tell their Jewish students that “because they are Jewish they will burn in hell” or when the likes of the anti-Hindu professor Michael Witzel of Harvard declare that American Hindus are “hina” (a Sanskrit word meaning “inferior” or “lowly”) and characterize them as “non-returning Indians” (meaning that they don’t belong in the US and should return to India). It seems that for the secularists the only sentiment worth protecting is the Islamic variety.
3. The Vigilance Musulmane sued the Belgian academic Mark Elchardus for writing that there is a direct causal relationship between Islamic religious indoctrination and the resultant anti-Semitism some Muslims harbor.
4. The Pakistani Muslim Bollywood actress Veena Malik invited the ire of the mullahs for posing naked and for her on-screen intimacy with the Bollywood Hindu actors, and the mullahs promptly issued a fatwa against her. The mullahs never issue such fatwas if a Muslim actor displays on-screen intimacy with an actress of another religion. Oh yes, one forgets that according to Islam women of other religions are fair game for marauding! It is heartening to note that in the last case, Veena Malik not only dared to challenge the Pakistani mullah on live television but also ridiculed the Pakistani terror agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) by having the words ISI tattooed on her arms in her naked photo-op. However, it should concern us that Islamists and secularists have scared many others from criticizing Islam.
One does not need free-speech to utter things that are palatable to others. Free-speech is truly applicable when what is stated is disagreeable or even offensive to others. In effect, free-speech is first and foremost about the right to offend others’ sensibilities. One’s utterances of Islam might offend a Muslim, in which case a Muslim has two choices: either to ignore the utterance or to respond using free-speech. A Muslim cannot be allowed to use threats and protests that disrupt civic life to suppress free-speech. Of course, it is tempting to blame the Islamists alone for suppressing free-speech. What about those that claim to value it? Why do they not tirelessly exercise their right to offend Islam? Doesn’t this failure make them even more culpable than the Islamists? Islamists understand that threats are effective on those that dare to criticize Islam. Sadly, the rest prove the Islamists right every time. Standing up to Islamic and secular intolerance of free speech is not the duty of a Rushdie, Swamy, or Malik alone. It is every reasonable person’s duty. Daniel Pipes and Koenraad Elst, in their brilliant analysis The Rushdie Affair - The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West, have shown that nothing frightens Islamists more than a fictionalized attack on Islam and its prophet as it penetrates Muslim societies more effectively than scholarly non-fictional criticism. It is this most powerful weapon that non-Islamists have failed to effectively deploy. One must remember that such failures have consequences. It emboldens Islamists and propagates the depraved Islamic ideology resulting in the oppression of millions of innocent Muslim men, women, and children, not to mention that of the ‘infidels’ as evident from the fact that in the wake of scoring a victory against Rushdie’s free-speech, the fatwa factory run by the mullahs issued fatwas against yoga, jeans, and donating blood, as well as supporting divorcing a hapless wife by merely texting the word talaq (an Arabic word to pronounce divorce) thrice regardless of whether the message is delivered across the network!
Remember that free-speech is a precious thing. Only a few societies (or to be precise pockets within those societies) even have a semblance of free-speech. Islamist and secularist intolerance threatens to destroy it. One cannot protect free-speech against this threat unless one steadfastly exercises the right to offend Islam until Muslims (and their secularist bedfellows) understand that threats and disruptive protests are not options when dealing with free-speech. Why haven’t we yet seen a Hollywood movie (or even a YouTube cartoon) of Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) ‘making love’ to one of the defenseless women he captured as war booty and ‘married?’ We haven’t because most of us abide by the Islamic injunction against iconography. So, do we just blame the Islamists or ourselves too for not exercising the right to offend Islam?
