The events in the five examples—each its own Cartoon Crisis—took place in Egypt, Russia, India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. There is no doubt that today, religious pressure on free speech comes especially from the Islamic countries and from Muslims in the West, though not exclusively so. I have included two cases, from India and Russia, illustrating attacks by militant Hindus and Christians on the right of free speech; the exact same arguments and demands are put forward as in cases involving Islam.
ABDUL KAREEM NABEEL SULEIMAN
In 2003, in Egypt’s second-largest city, Alexandria, a play titled Once I Was Blind, Now I See was performed in a Christian Coptic church. It revisited a Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man and involved a young Christian who decides to convert to Islam. After much anguish, he discovers that his new religion doesn’t work for him, whereupon he returns like the prodigal son to his original Christian faith; but when Islamists learn of the man’s decision to renounce their religion, they become enraged and try to kill him on grounds of apostasy.
Initially, the play caused not a ripple of reaction among Muslims of the city. But two years later, when it was released on DVD, Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Alexandria took such offense that they resorted to immediate action. Coptic spokesmen emphasized that the play was in no way meant as an attack on Islam as such, but was more a comment targeting religious extremism as it begets intolerance and violence. Nonetheless, angry protesters of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the church in which the play had originally been performed. They set cars alight in the Christian Maharram Beh neighborhood and plundered Christian shops. Riots went on for several days, and news reports suggested 3 were killed and more than 100 injured, among them an elderly nun who was stabbed in front of her church.
Those events were witnessed by a 21-year-old Muslim by the name of Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, later to be known by his pen name, Kareem Amer. Kareem was a law student at the world’s leading Islamic university, Al-Azhar, whose main campus was in Cairo. From a strongly religious family, he had also attended Al-Azhar’s preparatory school. His main interest was in natural science, and his preferred subject had been biology.
Gradually, Kareem had become more critical of the worldview he encountered at the university. To Kareem’s mind, the distinction made by religion between believers and infidels was a source of division and unrest leading to unnecessary tensions and hostility toward non-Muslims. The day after the riots had subsided, October 22, 2005, a shocked and distressed Kareem wrote as follows on his blog:
The Muslims have taken off their masks and shown their true hateful face, and they have demonstrated to the world that they are at the top of their brutality, inhumanity, and pillage. They have clearly revealed their very worst features and have shown that in dealing with others they are ungoverned by any moral codes.29
He continued:
Some may think that the actions of the Muslims do not represent Islam and bear no relation to the teachings of Islam that were brought to us fourteen centuries ago by Muhammad, but the truth is that their actions cannot be separated from the original teachings of Islam whereby believers were urged to deny others, to hate them, and to kill them and take their property.
He concluded:
Before you put on trial the people who are responsible for the crimes that occurred on this Black Friday in Maharram Beh, you should first put on trial the foul teachings that prompted them to go on a rampage of stealing and plundering and looting. Put Islam on trial and sentence it and its symbols and execute them figuratively so as to make sure that what happened yesterday will never be repeated again. For as long as Islam exists on this planet, all your efforts to end wars and disputes and upheavals will fail, because Islam’s filthy hand will be found behind every catastrophic event to befall humanity.
It was a powerful and impassioned broadside. If anyone in Europe had expressed his opinions in the same way as Kareem, he would have been branded an Islamophobe—someone with a pathological fear of Islam. He might have been reported to the police for hate speech: speaking ill of a minority on account of religious faith. Others would have defended Kareem’s right to express himself in a democratic society, though by no means would they necessarily have been in agreement with his opinions. Still others would have declared themselves in complete agreement and characterized his description as a precise and sober analysis of reality.
How was Kurt Westergaard’s drawing—coming as it did in the wake of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks that took place in London in July 2005—any different from Kareem’s shocked and scathing comments on the Alexandria riots in October that same year? One very major difference was that Westergaard’s cartoon was a form of speech protected by law in Denmark, whereas Kareem ended up in jail. Three days after posting the comment on his blog, police pulled in Kareem for interrogation and detained him for 12 days. Following his release, he continued to speak out against Islam, against Al-Ahzar (from which he was expelled in the spring of 2006), and against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Al-Azhar, he claimed, was a breeding ground for terrorists, where, as part of the curriculum, students were taught to hate freethinkers.
Kareem also criticized the fact that the university would not admit Christians, though it was funded by all Egyptian taxpayers, and voiced dissatisfaction with its segregation of men and women, which meant female students were excluded from certain subjects.30 In November 2006, Kareem was arrested again, and in February 2007, he was sentenced to four years in prison for the things he had written on his blog: three years for having defamed Islam and one year for slander against President Mubarak. Kareem’s father, a retired teacher of mathematics, disowned his son two days before the ruling and urged the court to judge him in accordance with Islamic law. The court gave Kareem three days to repent his contempt of Islam; his father voiced the view that if he declined, Kareem should be executed. “They turned disapproval into libel and slander, and they took criticism of a terrorist ideology to be defamation of religion,” Kareem later said.31
Was there anyone in Egypt besides the Copts prepared to defend Kareem? Fortunately, yes there was; support came from unexpected quarters. Two Muslim women set up a website at freekareem.org. Although making it clear that they disagreed with his views on Islam, they nevertheless insisted on defending his right to say what he believed. Here, then, were Muslims who fully lived up to that Enlightenment belief many in Europe seemingly had forgotten: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
It was people like Kareem whom Egypt and the other OIC members had in mind when they sought UN support for punishing those who defame Islam.
YURI SAMODUROV
From the mouth of the Nile, we now turn north to Moscow, where Yuri Samodurov, director of the city’s Sakharov Museum, found himself involved in two cases concerning defamation of religion.
Following a visit by a group of men to the Sakharov Museum in January 2003, the word “blasphemy” was found scrawled on one of the gallery walls. It was clearly aimed at an exhibition titled Caution, Religion! Among the works on display was Alexander Kosolapov’s depiction of Christ with a Coca-Cola logo and the words, “This is my blood.” Another was a sculptural installation by Alina Gurevich representing a church composed entirely of empty vodka bottles. Disgruntled visitors to the exhibition had already sprayed paint on several works and vandalized others with knives and an axe. A quick-thinking custodian managed to close off the exit before the perpetrators had time to get away, and they were quickly arrested by police. The exhibition had been running for only three days; only 20 people had seen it.
“As the owner of the work, I am upset,” said Alexander Kosolapov who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975 to settle in New York, where he had made a name for himself as a leading representative of so-called Sots Art, mixing sacred Soviet motifs with icons of Western pop culture. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, he began to employ religious and national rather than Soviet symbols, which were no
longer as provocative as they used to be. “Still, as an artist I am proud. I think the action adds value to my art, since it still is able to provoke such strong reactions,” he added in a comment to a Russian art publication.32
An investigation was launched. Four of the six activists, who all belonged to Moscow’s Russian Orthodox Church, were released without further charges, despite having been caught red-handed inside the gallery. A charge of vandalism was brought against the remaining two, only to be dropped on the grounds that the men could not be held responsible for their actions. They had been provoked by blasphemous and offensive artwork and had in fact probably prevented a crime rather than committing one. The judge justified the decision as follows: “These Russian Orthodox faithful were shocked, and that is neither exaggeration nor metaphor. . . . The theory of frustration and aggression explains the subsequent aggressive behavior of these religious people following their visit to the exhibition; they reacted with frustration to the exhibited works’ destructive sociocultural effect.”33
Thus, perpetrators were transformed into victims, victims into perpetrators. The distinction between critical words and violent actions, between a picture and a violent reaction, between tolerance and intolerance, civilization and barbarity, dissolved. That is what happens if you fail to grasp the distinction between words and actions.
The reasoning of the Russian judge brings to mind the Pakistani diplomat who, following the terrorist attack on the Royal Danish Embassy in Islamabad in 2008, accused Jyllands-Posten of being responsible for the attack; because the Muhammad cartoons had been so offensive, any violent reaction was the newspaper’s fault.
The case against the Russian Orthodox vandals took place in an atmosphere of intimidation and coercion on the part of religiously and nationalistically inclined writers, filmmakers, and artists, such as Vasiliy Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Ilya Glazunov, all of them well-known artists outside Russia. Angry protesters demonstrated outside the courthouse, demanding all charges be dropped. A petition was started in support of the iconoclasts. The case took a new turn when three victims of the attack—gallery director Yuri Samodurov, a curator, and an artist—found themselves under investigation, while the vandals, now released, were accorded the role of victims. The Russian Orthodox Church urged parliament to step in to ensure that the faithful in the future would not risk being confronted by such offensive and blasphemous exhibitions. And in March 2005, the Russian parliament raised the penalty for inciting religious hatred from three to five years in prison.
The debate between supporters and critics of the exhibition raised a number of fundamental questions. What kind of speech is entitled to protection, and who draws the line? Are religious sentiments special, or can religion be treated in the same way as other ideologies? What does it mean to defame a religion? Who in this particular case personified tolerance and who intolerance, and how far does tolerance go?
The result: in the spring of 2005, Samodurov and the exhibition curator were found guilty of “inciting religious hatred.” The court ruled the exhibition to be “openly insulting and blasphemous.”34 The third person accused, a female artist, was acquitted. (She later committed suicide in Germany.) Samodurov and his curator were each fined 100,000 rubles (around $3,600). The intervention of a highly placed friend managed to ease them out of prison sentences.
The case prompted Elena Bonner, widow of human rights champion Andrei Sakharov, to comment that the whole affair had discredited the Russian Orthodox Church in much the same way as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had discredited Islam. It demonstrated that the Church sought to take on the role of moral arbiter and censor in matters of ideology that had formerly been occupied by the Soviet Communist Party. And it showed, too, how Christians in the space of only some 20 years had gone from being a persecuted minority in Russia to becoming a powerful institution ready to oppress and persecute others.35
Samodurov and the museum’s curator, Lyudmila Vasilevskaya, appealed their sentences to the European Court of Human Rights, which in the spring of 2010 decided to adjourn examination pending further information.36 It was a decision that gave rise to considerable concern. Particularly interesting was the reference made to the court’s support of the British film censor’s ban on a 19-minute short, Vision of Ecstasy, in 1989. That film contained no dialogue. It explored Saint Teresa of Avila’s sexual fascination for the crucified Christ, culminating in images of the sexually aroused nun’s caressing of his body and lips.
The film and the ban slapped on it triggered heated debate in the United Kingdom at the time, with prominent figures Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie lending public support to director Nigel Wingrove.37 But in 1996, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the ban, declaring that although freedom of speech was fundamental to a democratic society, it was a freedom accompanied by duties and responsibilities, among them “a duty to avoid as far as possible an expression that is, in regard to objects of veneration, gratuitously offensive to others and profane.”38 In other words, Wingrove’s right of free speech extended only to the point where the Christian faithful considered their sentiments to be offended. No wonder Muslims were surprised that the Muhammad cartoons could not be outlawed.
The trial of Samodurov and his curator made it easy to grasp why Russia consistently voted for OIC proposals in the UN condemning defamation of religion. The judgment ran to some 40 pages and contained analyses of selected works from the vandalized exhibition, among them Alexander Kosolapov’s Coca-Cola ad featuring Christ and the words “This is my blood”:
The work is clearly offensive and defamatory. . . . Mockery of Christian ritual, and in particular of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Gospel, is manifest. The work has a deliberately shocking, provocative nature, since it consciously compares what is sacred and revered with that which is ordinary and vulgar. Thus, its originator deliberately provokes in the viewer a hostile reaction, an aggressive action on religious foundation, and incites religious hatred.39
It was the same logic used by Danish comedian Anders Matthesen and filmmaker Erik Clausen in claiming that Muslims were unable to react to the Muhammad cartoons in any way other than with violence; therefore Jyllands-Posten itself was to blame when targeted by terrorists.
In the spring of 2003, Yuri Samodurov publicly defended Caution, Religion! in an article.40 It was an impassioned expression of his concern for what would happen if society bowed down to the kind of grievance fundamentalism that had been used to justify vandalism of the exhibited artwork. He warned against restrictions on the right of individuals to address religious symbols in science, film, journalism, visual art, theater, and other fields:
This would entail an attack on all institutions of society and culture: museums, galleries, publishing houses, newspapers, universities, political parties, and so on. If we were to welcome such constraints, would Russian museums then be able to put on exhibitions dedicated to the Gulag and documenting the crimes of the Soviet Union? Would Russian publishers be allowed, in Moscow and Kazan, to publish books and organize conferences on the norms of Sharia law as seen from the viewpoint of modern Western legal systems? Would exhibitions of works of art dealing with the Russian Orthodox Church and its clergy be permitted? Would schoolchildren be permitted to study Lermontov’s The Demon and Goethe’s Faust? Would a film such as ‘Andrei Rublev’ even be conceivable?
Samodurov was describing a society in which grievance fundamentalism is consistently practiced—where nothing meaningful can be uttered, since any speech of any sort may potentially be characterized as offensive to some person or group. His queries reminded me of a similar list of 60 questions that philosophy professor Frederik Stjernfeldt asked the public in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen in 2006 in an attempt to gain an overview of the code of behavior that had emerged following the Cartoon Crisis: “May Jesus be caricatured? May Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ still be distributed? May Human Rights Watch continue to publish its reports on violations of human rights in Muslim
countries?” Stjernfeldt emphasized that his questions were by no means intended to be read as ironic.41
While Samodurov awaited the European Court of Human Rights’ decision, he found himself embroiled in a new and similar case. In 2006, he was contacted by art historian Andrei Yerofeyev of the Tretyakov Gallery, who specialized in modern and contemporary Russian art. Yerofeyev had created a collection of some 3,000 works. Although many had been exhibited at home and abroad, a considerable number had still not been shown in any Russian gallery.
Censorship and self-censorship had not disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. When religion regained a dominant social position in the wake of communism, many galleries were reticent to display works that used religious symbols in contexts other than those prescribed by the Church. The public was still suspicious of and confused by modern art, and many works were categorized as unsuitable for exhibition in public museums. So Yerofeyev proposed that the Sakharov Museum put on an exhibition highlighting “forbidden art.” Samodurov was enthusiastic, believing it could kick off a debate on censorship and self-censorship in the Russian museum and gallery world.
Thus, March 2007 saw the opening of Forbidden Art—2006. Fourteen artists—13 individuals and 1 group—were represented by 23 works, among them an installation by Ilya Kabakov, paintings by Mikhail Roshal-Fedorov and Alexander Kosolapov, and caricatures by Vyacheslav Sysoev, whose drawings had cost him two years in a labor camp in the mid-1980s. The exhibition spanned the period from 1966 to 2005 and according to Yerofeyev deliberately excluded works that could be construed as directly offensive. One painting showed a Russian icon with black caviar where the sacred image should be and a caption asking, “Have you eaten caviar lately?” Another depicted Jesus on the cross, his countenance obliterated by the face of Vladimir Lenin and the hammer and sickle; a third showed a Russian general raping a rank-and-file soldier and the words “Long Live Russia.” Viewers saw the works only through small peepholes.
The Tyranny of Silence Page 26
