Second, criticism of other cultures and religions is not about a moral right, it’s about arguments. If, as someone not from Zimbabwe, I say that Robert Mugabe is a lunatic, the question is not whether I have the moral right to call Mugabe a lunatic. The only thing that matters is the quality of my analysis and the arguments I put forward. To claim that non-Muslims are less entitled to express their opinions about Islam than Muslims is absurd. Essentially, it’s a totalitarian demand. Muslims are fully entitled to criticize and make fun of Europe, Christianity, and Judaism, and the same is true of Europeans. Why should a Muslim enjoy a greater moral right to draw a cartoon of Muhammad than you? Where is the rational argument? Is Muhammad not a man of this world? It’s nonsense. Everyone has the right to say what they want about Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie, and Afshin Ellian are all more or less the same age, born between 1966 and 1969, at a time when the dissident movement in Eastern Europe was taking shape. A line of continuity runs from Eastern Bloc dissidence through the triumph of freedom in the Soviet Union in 1989–1991 to the struggle for civil rights that is going on today.
Russian writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel received long prison sentences in 1966 for publishing works of fiction in the West. Their trial set off a storm of protests in the Soviet Union that lay the groundwork for the human rights movement. During a dramatic court case brought against four critics of the Soviet system in Moscow in 1968, two prominent dissidents sent out a declaration to the world.8 It was the first time dissidents had addressed the outside world over the head of the Soviet regime on an issue of human rights. It was a new departure, and it was to be a yardstick for the dissidents’ insistence on making respect for human rights an issue in East–West dialogue.
Recall that also in 1968, Andrei Sakharov published his famous manifesto on “Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” in which he so clearly worded the idea of the close link between respect for human rights and freedom on the one hand, and peace and security on the other. The idea was taken up in the latter part of the 1970s by the Helsinki Groups that were set up behind the Iron Curtain and were significant to Eastern Bloc collapse. The first issue of the Soviet human rights movement’s legendary Chronicle of Current Events was published in the spring of 1968 with the aim of registering violations of citizens’ rights and establishing a forum of news and debate.9 In many ways, the year 1968 proved epochal in the history of the Soviet human rights movement. It was also a crucial year in Central Europe.
In August 1968, the Prague Spring had become such a threat to Kremlin rule that troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and shattered the dream of the human face of socialism. On January 30, 1968, Warsaw’s National Theatre played its final performance of Forefathers’ Eve, a Romantic drama by Poland’s national poet Adam Mickiewicz, following demands by the regime that it be canceled. The play was about the struggle of the Polish people to win freedom under foreign rule. Although set in the 19th century, it was interpreted by all as a comment on current events. Rumors of its censorship had abounded, and the final performance turned into a demonstration when students without tickets showed up in droves to express their support.
After the final curtain, an enraged audience tumbled out into the winter night and gathered at Mickiewicz’s memorial. Here, banners were unfurled demanding an end to the regime’s violations of the freedom of speech. A number of students were arrested; still others arrived to join the demonstration; and in the weeks that followed, protests were stepped up in support of Article 83 of the Polish Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech and the right of assembly. Unrest culminated in March 1968 in clashes between demonstrators and security forces. Hundreds of students and professors were either jailed or forced into exile, and a malicious anti-Semitic campaign ensued.
Among those arrested was 22-year-old Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Polish youth rebellion. Later sentenced to three years in jail for rioting, he was released after a year though prohibited from continuing his university studies in history. Michnik carried on his involvement in the anti-communist underground until the final collapse, following which he was elected to the Polish parliament and became editor-in-chief of Poland’s biggest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.
“For my generation, the road to freedom began in 1968. While students in Paris and Berkeley were rejecting bourgeois democracy, we in Prague or Warsaw were fighting for a freedom that only the bourgeois order could guarantee,” Michnik told the UNESCO Courier following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.10
The main difference between us and revolutionary movements was that we, the anti-communist opposition, did not harbor any illusions about the ‘utopia of a perfect society.’ . . . Western intellectuals have made a specialty of placing their hopes in the Vietcong, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, the Soviet Union, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and I don’t know what else. Our movement—that of Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, Russia’s Andrei Sakharov, Solidarity, did not strive for utopia. What we wanted was a return to “normality.”
The political upheavals on either side of the Iron Curtain in 1968 were of vastly different character. Revolutionary students in the West demonstrated for a socialist utopia to be realized by abolishing the constitutional state, whereas dissidents struggled for its establishment in the East, even going to prison for their insistence on a civil order. Dissidents like Michnik, Havel, and Sakharov put their faith in a society that for all its imperfection was open, whereas rebels in the West insisted on the perfect society, attaching their hopes, as Michnik noted, to a string of totalitarian regimes, each of which left its own particular trail of blood.
During my time in the Danish Gymnasium (upper secondary school or senior high school) in the 1970s, many convinced themselves that the youth rebellion still taking place at European and American universities heralded a new age in which the socialist utopia lay waiting on the horizon, while Eastern Bloc intellectuals saw their own protests as the beginning of the end for organized socialism. Today, we know that the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain were right.
When I look back on 1968 and all it brought with it, the dissidents from the Baltic to the Black Sea are for me the great historical victors. Their struggle for freedom was a guiding star. They practiced what they preached; for them, there was no divide between words and actions, even though in many instances, it cost them dearly. They were the exact opposite of the Western generation of 1968, who spoke with passion but whose private actions often directly contradicted their speech. In the human rights movement of Eastern Europe, there were no easy rides. Everyone who got involved knew that they could wind up incarcerated for years behind barbed wire, careers spoiled, families split.
For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie, and Afshin Ellian, there is no moral free lunch either, even though they all live in the West. They pay a price for stepping forward and insisting on the right to say no to religion. When they demand the same critical approach to Islam as to Christianity and other belief systems, they know the price will come in the form of death threats and ruptured families and friendships.
When ex-Muslims insist on their right to say no to religion, when they stress that individual rights take precedence over group rights, they are saying exactly the same to Muslims around the world as the seven courageous people who, in August 1968, protested on Moscow’s Red Square against the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. On a banner they managed to unfurl before being taken away by the KGB were the words, primarily addressing the Czech people but in principle addressing all those in the Eastern Bloc, “For Your Freedom and Ours.”11 It was a quote by Russian author Aleksandr Herzen, who had supported Polish rebels fighting for their independence from Russia in the 19th century. In January 1991, I noticed that those same words appeared again during demonstrations in Moscow in support of the Baltic countries’ struggle for liberty in the wake of attacks by Soviet troops in Lithuania and Latvia. When ex-Muslims insist on the right to say no to their religion, and stress t
hat individual rights have priority over group rights, they are saying exactly the same thing.
10. A Victimless Crime
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.
—Bob Dylan
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
On August 12, 1553, a middle-aged man arrived in Geneva, one of the centers of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. He was on the run from the Catholic Inquisition in the French town of Vienne, where he had been charged with heresy and inciting rebellion. Evidence of the man’s heresy had been sent by Jean Calvin, the head of the Reformed Church of Geneva, who had corresponded privately with the man. That act was highly unusual. To draw a Cold War parallel, it would be like Jesse Helms informing on a Soviet dissident to the Kremlin.
Michael Servetus was a 42-year-old theologian, physician, and book editor of Spanish descent.1 He was aware that the most prominent theologian of the Protestant Church had given him away to the Inquisition. Why he decided to pass through Geneva after he escaped his arrest in France remains a mystery. Some believe he entertained plans of a coup to remove Calvin. According to Servetus himself, he intended to remain in the city for only a few days.
Some years before, Servetus and Calvin had engaged in an impassioned and polemical correspondence. Servetus had stated that he would be prepared to travel to Geneva to meet his old acquaintance and opponent face to face should Calvin so wish. Calvin mentioned that possibility in a letter to a friend, noting, “If he comes, I shall never let him go out alive.”
And so it came to pass. The day after his arrival, Servetus attended a church service in the St. Pierre Cathedral where Calvin preached. Attendance was compulsory, and perhaps he feared drawing unnecessary attention to himself by remaining behind. Inside the church, however, he was recognized by Calvin, who ordered that he be detained.
There was a lengthy trial. Thirty-nine charges were brought against Servetus, encompassing his early writings, claims of the mortality of the soul, mockery of the Church in Geneva, pantheism, infant baptism, and the denial of the Trinity. All but the last two were dropped during the trial. Servetus denied the doctrine of the Trinity to which both Catholics and Protestants subscribed, that is, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three entities in one divine Being. He also did not believe in the need to baptize children since unlike Calvin, he did not consider children to be sinful beings in the same way as adults. That view outraged Calvin, who in a fit of anger declared, “Servetus deserves those sweet, innocent little chicks of his to dig out his eyes a hundred thousand times.” A written dispute in Latin between Calvin and Servetus was the highpoint of the process. Servetus held that the idea of man as a sinful and depraved being from the moment of birth, and the claim that human destiny is predetermined, reduced him to little more than a dead creature with the free will of a stone. By contrast, Calvin felt Servetus elevated man to divinity, blaspheming.
On October 27, 1553, sentence was passed. Servetus would be burned alive at the stake.
It took an hour for the procession to reach the Plateau de Champel, the place of execution. Heading it were local officials in capes and the garb of authority, members of the city council, church dignitaries, clergy in their priestly robes, and the chief of police. Behind them came the guards, officers, and archers on horseback. The citizens of the city brought up the rear in order of civil rank and status. Along the way, prayers were said.
The clergy continued their efforts to talk Servetus into confession. Weak and tormented, he refused. When the procession arrived, the condemned man was brought to a high pile of firewood and green branches. A crown of straw and leaves covered with sulfur was placed on his head. Then, he was fixed to the pyre with chains, and a copy of his book The Restoration of Christianity—the work that had sparked the accusations of his heresy—was tied to his arm. A thick rope was wound around his neck four or five times; Servetus pleaded that it not be bound tighter. When the executioner stepped forward with a lighted torch, Servetus let out a howl so violent that many in the crowd were transfixed in terror for a moment. With Servetus still breathing, onlookers threw fresh branches onto the fire. It took half an hour or so for him to die.
Michael Servetus was the first man to be executed for heresy by the Reformation Protestants in Geneva. That deed sparked international protests and kicked off a major debate on religious tolerance. Thousands of people had already been executed on grounds of heresy, and there were many more to come. But here, for the first time, the Calvinists were resorting to the same macabre methods for which they had criticized the Catholics.
The Reformation challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on correctness of faith. In Germany, Martin Luther spoke out in favor of complete freedom of faith. Faith—or indeed incorrectness of faith—was a free matter for the individual. To the extent the secular authorities violated that freedom, they overstepped in Luther’s view the bounds of their powers and could be disobeyed. Luther’s distinction between the secular and the spiritual was a significant step in a development that would later bring forth the rights of free speech and free religious exercise, and indeed secular democracy, although there is little to indicate that it was what Luther intended.
In the early 1520s, that German father of the Reformation found himself engaged in an intense confrontation with the Catholic Church and secular authorities. In 1521, the pope excommunicated him. His teachings were branded as heretic; orders were issued to seek out and burn his books; and printing, selling, and buying them were made punishable offenses.
Yet later, when Luther’s Protestantism had been officially introduced in a number of German principalities, Luther lent support to the execution of people who believed in other schools of thought, and he distanced himself from the kind of tolerance he had previously championed. He condemned the Catholic Mass as an abomination and a crime of blasphemy that authorities should suppress. When a town or a principality converted to Lutheranism, Catholic dogma, the Mass, and the adoration of the Virgin Mary and various saints were forbidden. Altars, images, and ornaments used in Catholic rituals were destroyed, and monasteries were closed down.
“I can envisage no reason why tolerance should be justifiable to God,” Luther wrote in a letter in 1541.2 With the execution of Servetus, the Protestants in Geneva demonstrated their religious intolerance. Europe was to be infested by religious wars for the next 150 years.
The Reformation forced Catholics to address a question with which they had no particular reason to concern themselves for a thousand years: who are we? Even though there had been clashes with the Muslim world—and although Europe was also home to a number of Jews—the established Church had seldom before been challenged so fundamentally with regard to its identity. In many ways, it was a situation similar to that in which Europe finds itself now at the beginning of the 21st century. Who are we? What does it mean to be a European in the 21st century? What does it mean to be a citizen of a liberal democracy? What is freedom of speech and of religion in a multicultural society? What rights does the citizen possess, and what are his responsibilities? How can people of different cultures and religious backgrounds live together in peace and democracy?
The religious divisions of the 16th and 17th centuries sparked a theological mobilization of all Christians. Previously, individual religious practice had broadly concerned ritual rather than substance. Prayers were recited in Latin (a language few understood), and religious festivals were observed, yet most people had only a vague understanding of what their faith actually implied in a dogmatic sense. That had not mattered much in a world in which everyone shared the same Christian faith. But that changed with the Reformation. Competing dogmas emerged. Suddenly, faith required discovery of the fundamentals of religion, what it entailed, and where it differed from other faiths. The Christian Churches began to conduct religious identity politics focusing not on points of similarity with other Christian doctrine
s, but on what separated them. Lines were drawn.3
In a way, the lines drawn then were similar to those drawn between groups in the present-day multicultural society of modern Europe, where a tribal mentality and cultivation of religious and cultural separation are often seen as a basis of democratic society, to the detriment of common, universal values that safeguard all citizens’ equality before the law. They are similar, too, to the lines drawn during the Cold War, when the world was split in two, each side considering the other to be the embodiment of evil: truth against lies, black against white, capitalism against communism.
In the 16th- and 17th-century confessional state, dissidents were viewed as a threat and did not enjoy the same rights as those who subscribed to the dominant Church. Cultivation of other beliefs was an offense to God and the state. Freethinkers were considered to be potential traitors, regardless of how loyal they might be to the authorities. In Britain, France, and Poland, that view of religious dissidents was widespread until the mid-18th century or later. In Denmark, the Lutheran Evangelical Church enjoyed a monopoly of faith until 1849, when the country adopted a constitution that ensured freedom of religious expression.
But the execution of Michael Servetus sparked the first major European debate on religious tolerance. Was there an alternative to enforced orthodoxy? Could any multireligious society exist, and how could it then be organized? Some 200 years later, the debate culminated in the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in 1791 and 1789, respectively, both of which embodied the principles of free speech and free religious exercise. But long before either, a dialogue began between the two most brilliant scholars of the French Reformation, John Calvin and Sebastian Castellio.4
Castellio was a theologian who had known Calvin personally—had even stayed with him in Strasbourg in 1540, after witnessing the first Protestant heretics being burned at the stake in Lyon, an experience so horrific that for the rest of his life he would champion humanism as the essential core of Protestant thought and practice. Later, at Calvin’s suggestion, Castellio moved to Geneva as rector of the Collège de Genève, but following a disagreement with Calvin, he moved on to Basel in 1545, where he was appointed professor and lived until his death in 1563. Basel was where an anonymous account titled Historia Mortis Serveti (Account of the Death of Servetus) was published in 1553; although its author was never identified, scholars believe—and Calvin clearly felt—it was written by Castellio.
The Tyranny of Silence Page 23
