The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  But things went differently. Although the old enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union, joined in condemning Saddam Hussein and imagining a new and better world, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), numbering 57 Islamic countries across four continents, met in August 1990 in Cairo to adopt the Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.12 That event passed unnoticed. The eyes of the world were focused on Saddam Hussein’s army and its occupation of diminutive Kuwait, and few paid much attention to the OIC anyway.

  Since its inception in 1969, the OIC had seldom been able to reach agreement on anything. True, when foreign ministers of the OIC met in Riyadh in March 1989, they were able to put out a joint declaration condemning Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Rushdie and put a million-dollar price on the writer’s head. The novel had not appeared in Iran, but in the United Kingdom; thus, Khomeini’s death sentence and the OIC’s statement were in effect a demand that Islamic law be extended into the West. Thus, even in 1989, that magical year when freedom celebrated triumph upon triumph in Europe, the OIC claimed the right of censorship over what could be published in the West. It was to become a habit.13

  The Declaration on Human Rights in Islam was hammered out at a meeting of the OIC in Tehran in December 1989 and signed by 45 foreign ministers in Cairo in August of the following year. The collapse of socialist regimes behind the Iron Curtain suggested that the formerly communist world and the West were now in agreement on a new, joint value system grounded in universal human rights. A new era was heralded for the United Nations. The dictators of the Islamic world reacted by stressing that human rights were a Western invention. Using them as a yardstick of global norms amounted to imperialism. They were supported on that by many non-Muslim countries in Asia.

  The Islamic human rights declaration contained no protection of free speech or freedom of religion. There was no safeguarding of the rights of religious minorities, women’s rights, or the principle of equality before the law. As a political instrument, it was engineered to deflect criticism of human rights violations, such as using the death sentence against apostates; it was also a way of justifying the punishment of dissidents and religious minorities on the grounds of their offense against Islam. Sharia became the only legitimate source of citizens’ rights, and any previous agreements to human rights covenants were made conditional on their lack of conflict with Sharia.

  The Declaration was meant as both a sword and a shield. It would defend the Islamic world against criticism from without and would strike out at freethinkers from within. Although the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant to ensure the spread of civil rights throughout the world, the aim of the OIC’s Declaration on Human Rights in Islam was to make sure they were undermined.

  It wasn’t easy for the OIC in the early 1990s to get across the idea that there was a set of specifically Islamic human rights, but that changed with time. Russia and China began once again to see themselves as counterweights to the West; power gradually shifted away from the United States and Europe toward Asia. Support in the UN General Assembly for the European Union’s stance on human rights dropped from more than 70 percent in the 1990s to under 50 percent in 2008.

  In 2010, the Freedom House think tank, which compiled and published annual reports documenting the state of freedom in the world, noted that on the global level, freedom of the press had suffered for the eighth year in succession, mostly in the former Soviet Union, so that only one citizen in six in the world could claim to live in a country that enjoyed a free press.14 That same year, the human rights organization Article 19 noted that human rights were under pressure even in Western Europe. Several countries had seen violence and threats against journalists. Anti-terrorist legislation had constrained freedom of speech and made it more difficult for the press to protect its sources. Governments blocked Internet access to certain kinds of information. A number of countries maintained violation codes making it an offense to insult the honor of the armed forces, the nation, the president, members of the royal family, public institutions, courts of law, and even deceased persons. In Germany, a total of 193,617 criminal cases were brought in 2008 alone involving one or another form of defamation, and with British laws particularly amenable to cases of libel, the United Kingdom became a locus of so-called libel tourists: wealthy individuals of doubtful repute seeking to silence critical media, journalists, and scholars.15

  Meanwhile, in Geneva, the OIC continued to work to globalize censorship. First in the UN Commission on Human Rights and later in the Human Rights Council and General Assembly, the OIC pushed through resolutions condemning defamation of religion and urging UN members to adopt legislation to outlaw it.

  There was something symbolic about the OIC doing that in the city in which Calvin and his tyrants of piety imposed the death sentence on Servetus for offending God and challenging the existing order. Only a few kilometers separate the Plateau de Champel where Servetus was burned in 1553 and the Palais des Nations, where the OIC hectors the UN Council of Human Rights and garners support for laws criminalizing speech considered offensive to God, punishing it, in several instances, by death.

  In 2010, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, a human rights lawyer and author of a standard work on human rights and Islam, looked back on the resolutions that had been initiated by the OIC and adopted by the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council from 1999 to 2009.16 Her findings are not encouraging. The OIC has shifted from defending an Islamic version of human rights to attacking the West for supposed rights violations. When the EU states decline to punish people who allegedly offend religion—as in the Cartoon Crisis—the OIC sees that as violating the rights of Muslims. Some European opinion makers concur, seeing Muslims as “the new Jews” of Europe: a persecuted minority deserving of special protection from scorn, mockery, and ridicule. At the same time, they close their eyes to the OIC’s refusal of that logic when it persecutes minorities and freethinkers in its homelands.

  The OIC has learned to adapt its demands to modern human rights jargon. It no longer demands the protection of Islam as such. Instead, it pleads protection of Muslims, individually and collectively, and refers to Article 20, paragraph 2, of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which defines situations in which countries should constrain freedom of speech.

  Thus, in an interview given to Jyllands-Posten in 2008, OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu categorically rejected the notion that the OIC had anything against criticism of religion.

  “We have no problem with that. But when freedom of speech is abused in order to demonize and ridicule, with the intention of sowing seeds of hatred against a group of people or citizens, that is when the problems begin,” Ihsanoglu said. “What we are saying is that incitement to hatred should not be permitted as long as this specific action comprises a crime . . . under Article 20 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which obliges governments at the national level to take measures against incitement of religious hatred.”17

  In Ihsanoglu’s view, European countries violated universal human rights when they refused to criminalize the Muhammad cartoons. It was, he maintained, in contravention of international human rights legislation.

  The precise wording of Article 20, paragraph 2, is hardly as broad as Ihsanoglu claims, though the phrasing is vague and subject to interpretation. In Europe, Ihsanoglu’s vision of it is shared by many lawyers, politicians, and activists who support a far wider definition of racism. The paragraph reads as follows: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”18

  The wording raises several questions, though there is little consensus about their answers. How are we to define hate speech, and how do we decide when hate speech begins to incite discrimination and hostility? What is meant by hostility anyway? In 2009, the European Council commissioned a human rights lawyer to pre
pare a handbook of hate speech.19 The work ascertains that there is not a single approved definition, although the notion is widespread in the jurisprudence of the European countries. In a number of rulings, the European Court of Human Rights has referred to hate speech as “all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote, or justify hatred based on intolerance (including religious intolerance).”20 As such, it might on the face of it seem easy to agree with the OIC’s view that Kurt Westergaard’s depiction of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban constitutes incitement to religious hatred and promotes discrimination against Muslims.

  The basic problem in all definitions is that recipients of the speech are granted wide powers to decide whether it constitutes an expression of intolerance. That power turns the concept of tolerance on its head. Initially, tolerance was the ability to accept speech that one disliked. It meant that people of different faiths and nonbelievers could live in peace together, accepting that one’s neighbor preached a faith that saw itself as superior to one’s own. The imperative of tolerance applied to the person who heard the speech rather than to the speaker.

  Today, we make demands of the speaker. The territory in which we combat discrimination and inequality has become so broad that almost any speech may be branded intolerant or racist. That is how Jyllands-Posten’s publishing of the Muhammad cartoons was condemned as intolerant, while threats, violence, and calls for them to be banned were interpreted as the perhaps regrettable, though in principle wholly understandable, reactions of a persecuted minority. Rarely was such intolerance called by its proper name.

  Article 20, paragraph 2, was adopted in 1953 as part of the process of negotiating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The majority of the Western democracies voted against it, citing its vagueness and the accompanying risk of abuse. Several predicted that governments would be able to use it to silence critical voices, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who had presided over work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, warned against the wording’s lack of distinction between words and actions.21 Today, Article 20, paragraph 2, has become a trump card in the hands of the OIC, Russia, China, and other countries wishing to safeguard themselves against criticism on human rights.

  Besides reference to Article 20, paragraph 2, the OIC also invested much effort into linking offense against religious belief with racism. Secretary General Ihsanoglu put it this way in his interview with Jyllands-Posten:

  We believe that incitement to religious hatred is a new form of racism. Western institutions concerning themselves with Islamophobia agree that Islamophobia is worse than racial discrimination. In practice they may be difficult to distinguish, but when Muslim immigrants on a daily basis are subject to physical and moral attacks in Western countries it is the negative result of a campaign of hatred that undermines the human rights of those Muslim victims.22

  The OIC wanted relevant conventions to be rewritten to ensure that no one would be able to invoke freedom of speech when defaming a religion; moreover, it wanted the obligation of conventions banning racism also to encompass insults to religion.

  Equating racism and defamation of religion would oblige EU member states to introduce laws that would make the Muhammad cartoons a punishable offense. Moreover, would it be defamatory of Islam for a Muslim individual to leave the faith? Could demands on Muslims to obey secular laws in the West be perceived as defamation of the Muslim faith? All that may seem far-fetched, and most of us would undoubtedly be hard-pressed to imagine any of it happening in Europe. Yet as Kenan Malik observed, if Khomeini’s fatwa on Rushdie had within two decades become so internalized by Europeans that consensus now deemed that under no circumstances should Islam be defamed, then perhaps there were no limits to what fundamentalists could achieve.23

  In 2009, the OIC tabled a proposal in a committee of the UN to make defamation of religion part of international human rights legislation. It was a proposal that repeated word for word the content of legislation recently passed by the Irish government, which made it a crime to be “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.”24 In a decade, the OIC had turned criticism of Islamic human rights into a movement that took its point of departure from international agreements and the language of Western human rights movements. Instead of distancing itself from universal human rights as an expression of Western cultural imperialism, the OIC now ostensibly subscribed to the idea of such rights and had turned them on the West.25 It was a skillful maneuver. The only thing Europe can hope for, as one British diplomat in Geneva put it in the autumn of 2009, is to maintain the status quo. Any hope of progress in the struggle for human rights around the world is, in the view of many observers, little more than a pipe dream.

  How seriously should we take those OIC attempts? Are the many resolutions more than declarations of intent? Are they merely words on paper with no binding effect? Although they may be regrettable and detrimental to the image of the United Nations, many hold that they cannot seriously endanger freedom of speech and of religion in countries whose citizens enjoy full civic rights.

  Ann Mayer is of the opinion that the OIC offensive in the UN should be taken seriously, and people working for nongovernmental organizations in Geneva with whom I spoke in the period following the Cartoon Crisis share her view. They point out that the UN system has now assimilated the concept of defamation of religion. Resolutions are not merely words on paper but documents that are acted on. Reports are compiled in which concepts and wordings are repeated and reiterated. Conferences are organized, recommendations are made, and plans of action are prepared.

  According to Ann Mayer, from 1999 to 2009, the OIC succeeded in creating the impression that the world is under an obligation to combat defamation of religion. The concept is well on its way to becoming an accepted principle of international human rights law.26 So when Denmark and other liberal democracies in the not-too-distant future speak out in the UN and reject defamation of religion as a principle at odds with the right of free speech, the UN will, with reference to a new convention, dismiss that criticism as defending a specifically Western version of human rights having little bearing on universal principles.

  After World War II, a coalition of countries led by the Soviet Union exploited the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews to gain UN support for including severe constraints on freedom of speech in both the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It meant that the distinction between racist and discriminatory speech and actions was blurred. The oppressive regimes that voted for those constraints were subsequently able to employ them to justify laws used to incarcerate champions of national independence in the former Soviet Union. The OIC exploited the Muhammad cartoons in much the same way, to demand that the UN sanction further restrictions on free speech. Insisting on assigning rights to cultures and religions at the expense of the individual, those efforts overturned all previous understanding of the notions of human rights.

  Diplomats skilled in the language of international rights and the rhetoric of grievance demanded that the world crack down on Islamophobia—an ambiguous concept that had wormed its way into UN documents, covering a hodgepodge of legitimate criticism of religion and illegitimate discrimination against Muslims.27 They called for imposing sanctions on those who offended religious sentiments, while in their own countries, courts punished rape victims for extramarital sex; persecuted Bahá’is (Iran), Ahmadi Muslims and Christians (Pakistan), Shia Muslims (Saudi Arabia), and Copts (Egypt); and sentenced apostate Muslims to death and imposed long prison terms for blasphemy.28

  But to see all that, you had to actually go to the countries in question. If you did, it soon became apparent that governments and religious movements in the Islamic world viewed criticism by Westerners of the Muhammad cartoons as indirect support for their continued violations against freethinkers, dissidents, minorities
, and other deviants—because they all defamed religion.

  By attacking the Muhammad cartoons and the media in which they were reprinted, those Western leaders were trying to keep the peace. But it revealed a simplified view of the Islamic world. Muslim countries are by no means homogenous entities; all include religious minorities. And even in the Islamic world, there were different views on the Muhammad cartoons. I myself received numerous messages from Muslims in Iran who were supportive of the cartoons’ publication.

  Westerners often forget that Muslim communities in the West are diverse. When the media asked imams to speak out on behalf of the Muslim community, regardless of whether or not they spoke for a majority, important voices were being ignored. That approach polarized issues to the benefit of the radicals; it was provincial and narrow-minded, and the consequences were serious. There wasn’t a thought for what freedom of speech meant to those whose views were never heard.

  I would like to relate five stories from various countries. All of them demonstrate how claims of wounded religious feelings are used to persecute critics, dissidents, and other freethinkers. Critics of the Muhammad cartoons owe us an explanation of how they intend to maintain a distinction between their condemnation of the cartoons and the speech, images, and actions those five people discuss. Personally, I find it difficult.

  The universal rule of law is not right around the corner. But in a world where barriers are falling and increasing numbers of individuals of different religions, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds live alongside one another under the same laws, the question of whether the OIC’s “human rights” declaration will prevail is by no means irrelevant.