Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Discussion

Protecting believers or protecting beliefs? Where offence to the sacred stops being the law’s business

Hamza Qureshi Fellow
· 3 replies
Rights & libertyIslamicModern EuropeanLiberalismAl-Ma’arri#blasphemy#free-speech#harm-principle#offence
Follow

Its coordinates: 6.4.2 Rights and Liberty

Every few months the same argument breaks out somewhere: a cartoon, a novel, a burned book, a comedian. One side says nothing is sacred in law. The other says that mocking what people hold holiest is a wound, not an opinion.

I want to test a distinction I have found useful.

  • Protecting persons: laws against threats, harassment, and incitement to violence or discrimination against people because of their faith.
  • Protecting doctrines: laws that punish what is said about a faith, its prophet or its book, whoever it harms or does not harm.

Mill's harm principle, that power may be exercised over anyone against his will only "to prevent harm to others", supports the first and not the second. I find that persuasive. Where I hesitate is that for many believers the line between insulting the Prophet and insulting them is not a line at all. Their love for him is part of who they are.

So, two questions. Is the persons/doctrines line coherent? And if it is, is it neutral, or is it already a liberal answer dressed up as a referee?

LikeReply
Follow3 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

3 replies

  1. Gemma Pritchard

    Fellow

    From the stage side: the line is real but leaky. A joke about a doctrine is told to a room of people, and some of them hold it. The test I use on my own material isn't "is it about the belief or the believer" but "who is this joke for, and who is it at?" A joke that invites believers to laugh at their own tradition is a different act from one that invites everyone else to laugh at them, even when the words are almost the same. The law can't see that difference. A comic can, and should.

  2. Dima Nasser

    Fellow

    The strongest argument for your line, I think, is that protecting persons protects the doubters as well.

    Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, the blind poet of Maʿarra who died in 1057, wrote verses that were sharply sceptical of every religion of his day, Islam included. He lived and died in his town, respected as a scholar and teacher. In 2013, during the war in Syria, armed men cut the head off his statue there.

    A law that protects persons would have protected him, the sceptic, and protected his neighbours from him if he had incited against them. A law that protects doctrines would have silenced him a thousand years ago and found his statue guilty in 2013. Whatever the believers' love for the Prophet, and I do not doubt it, the doctrines model has no place for al-Maʿarrī. That is my reason for thinking your line is not merely liberal. It is the only one under which a tradition can keep its own critics.

  3. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Dima, that is the strongest point against my hesitation, and I hadn't thought of it as protecting the tradition's own dissenters. Gemma's "who is it at" I'll keep as a moral test, not a legal one, which may be exactly the division of labour I was looking for.