The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  “This is not an exhibition about art, it is an exhibition about exhibitions. It speaks neither about sex nor religion. In fact, it’s not about anything, except for a new and highly dangerous trend of fear and anxiety,” Yerofeyev explained.42

  Forbidden Art—2006 escaped vandalism but became instead the object of fierce criticism in the media. Demonstrations outside the museum called for a crackdown. Elena Bonner, who had defended Samodurov and the Caution, Religion! exhibition when it was attacked in 2003, distanced herself from Forbidden Art—2006, urging the museum’s governing board to close it down and opining that it ran counter to Sakharov’s legacy. She went so far as to call it an attack on the humanism and human dignity that her late husband had championed in his confrontations with the Soviet regime.43

  The chairman of the Board of Governors—Sergei Kovalyov, the grand old man of the Soviet human rights movement—dismissed Bonner’s charge. He noted that Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin had written poems so openly blasphemous that modern champions of a ban on sacrilege would have to ban his work and suggested organizing a conference on the boundaries of artistic freedom and the right of blasphemy. Copies of the exhibition’s most controversial works could be employed as arguments for and against.44

  The board decided to continue the exhibition as planned, though Samodurov would later be forced to leave his position as director. In August 2008, a case was brought against him and curator Andrei Yerofeyev, who in the intervening period had been sacked by the Tretyakov Gallery for his part in the controversial exhibition. In July 2010, the two men were found guilty of inciting religious hatred and abusing their positions of authority to damage the dignity of the religious faithful. The prosecution had called for three years of imprisonment, but Samodurov and Yerofeyev “got away with” fines of 200,000 rubles and 150,000 rubles, respectively (roughly $7,000 and $5,500).

  It is worth noting that Russian human rights groups had for years been citing Article 282 of the Russian Penal Code concerning incitement to religious, racial, or ethnic hatred; but they had done so in the context of frequent racist and anti-Semitic outbursts by politicians and other public figures in the Russian media. Here, the law was instead exploited to protect thugs who justified vandalism by reference to wounded religious sentiments. Again, legislation outlawing defamatory speech ended up being used counter to its intention.

  MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN

  In the spring of 2010, India’s greatest living painter, Maqbool Fida Husain, accepted an offer of citizenship from the tiny Gulf state of Qatar. It was a decision that once and for all put an end to his dream of returning to his homeland; the culmination of 15 years of harassment, vandalism, persecution, court cases, and death threats issuing from grievance fundamentalists who had forced the then 91-year-old artist into exile in another Gulf state, Dubai, one of the seven emirates making up the United Arab Emirates.

  Husain, a Muslim, had at various stages of his career created a number of works depicting naked deities of the Hindu mythology. A visit to any Hindu temple provides ample evidence of how often sex is depicted in the Hindu tradition. Hinduism encompasses a wealth of deities and many different scriptures to guide the individual’s way, and the relationship between God and the believer is a matter for the individual. Acceptance of diversity and tolerance are widespread.

  According to Indian-born journalist and writer Salil Tripathi,45 all that changed when the Indian authorities began to shift the principles of the secular foundation of the state. The initial aim was to accommodate minorities, but the steps they took opened an avenue to the militant Hindus of India’s majority population. In 1986, following a court ruling in favor of a Muslim woman that angered many Muslim men, the Indian government passed legislation depriving Muslim women of the right to alimony following divorce. In the view of the Supreme Court, that act was against the secular basis of the Indian Constitution, but the government ignored its opinion.

  Two years later, India became the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. As Tripathi sees it, the government was trying to appease extremists. It went on to censor newspapers, films, books, plays, visual art, and all manner of expression, and matters only snowballed. Calls for censorship were issued not only by religious and ethnic groups but also by professional groups like the police and lawyers, who protested a film in which a journalist told his attorney wife that all lawyers were liars. (The police also complained about their portrayal in a movie.) In 1989, a businessman demanded a ban on a film he felt would ignite tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Christians called on the authorities to cancel a play based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ. Grievance fundamentalism was allowed to run amok at the expense of secular principles and freedom of speech.

  Militant Hindus were quick to exploit the situation. Every time the government appeased another minority, the militant Hindus claimed their identity was being damaged. In the first 40 years after Indian independence, Hindu nationalists and militants had been isolated and occupied a marginal position on the political spectrum, but from the mid-1980s, their profile rose hugely. The nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party became the country’s biggest political party and in 1998, it came to power for the first time as part of a coalition government.

  Militant Hindu attacks on Maqbool Fida Husain began in 1996, when the magazine Vichar Mimansa ran an article about him and his work, accompanied by one of his sketches of a naked Hindu goddess. Court cases were brought against him in eight different cities for causing affront to Hindu sentiments; at one point, he faced 1,200 lawsuits. A gallery planning a major retrospective of his work was plundered, and police decided to arrest him for disturbing the peace.

  In September 2008, India’s Supreme Court dismissed five cases that had been brought against Husain on account of a painting showing India as a naked woman, Bharat Mata (Mother India). However, his lawyers told him there was little chance he could return to India without being arrested.

  Husain’s story was remarkable. Not only was he acknowledged as one of India’s greatest living artists; his dilemma demonstrated clearly that “speech” that would have raised hardly an eyebrow only a decade before was now met with outrage. The attacks on Husain, and the authorities’ handling of the situation, constituted, in Salil Tripathi’s view, an admission of India’s failure as a secular democracy.

  In India, as in Europe, laws restrict free speech in order to protect sentiments, identity, dignity, the public order, and so on. Article 295 of the Penal Code prohibited offending religious sentiments; Article 153 made it illegal to disturb social harmony and engender animosity between groups on grounds of religion, race, birthplace, residence, and language. The two provisions meant that a tidal wave of charges could be brought against writers, visual artists, filmmakers, historians, and journalists. The Indian state often opted to step in preventively and ban works it believed could be offensive to one or another group of society.

  Such restrictions created a climate in which intolerance was increasingly cultivated. Militant Hindus got away with attacking galleries, destroying mosques, raping and killing Muslims, withdrawing books from sale, and demanding censorship of historical portrayals that did not accord with their ideals. In 2008, they called for a ban on the Academy Award–winning film Slumdog Millionaire, which they claimed showed Hindus in a negative light. Two points of grievance were highlighted: a scene in which a boy dressed as the Hindu deity Rama sends a nasty look in the direction of some Muslim children running away from a Hindu–Muslim conflict; and the fact that a Hindu girl falls in love with a Muslim boy.

  Only Hindus had the right to relate Hindu history. Only Hindus had the right to paint pictures of a Hindu deity. Husain was a Muslim; therefore, the militant Hindus insisted, if he wanted to paint naked people, let him paint the Muslim prophet Muhammad with his child bride Aisha.

  SAYED PERVEZ KAMBAKSH

  Although the West spends billions on trying to wipe out a religious dictatorship in Af
ghanistan and to ensure a new and more democratic order, Afghans may still, even under their new constitution, be sentenced to death for offending Allah.

  In the autumn of 2007, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh read an article criticizing Islam’s view of women. It was written in Persian by an Iranian blogger living in Germany and bore the title “Verses of the Koran Discriminating against Women.” Kambaksh, a 22-year-old university student, highlighted the following statement:

  Muhammad often sinned. Muhammad oppressed women. The Koran portrays women as though they were not of a right mind. Islam is a religion that is against women. The Koran justifies Muhammad’s sins. When Muhammad wished for something, he would begin to sing a verse, claiming it came directly from Allah. He forbade everything that did not suit him, and he allowed the things he liked. It’s a joke. This is the true face of Islam, Allah, and Muhammad.46

  Kambaksh, who studied journalism at Balkh University in Mazar-i-Sharif, the principal city of the Uzbek part of northern Afghanistan, was known by friends and teachers alike as a rather rebellious type who enjoyed challenging accepted truths. He photocopied a few selected passages from the article, perhaps adding a couple of comments of his own, then printed out a few copies, which he handed out to fellow students with the aim of starting a discussion—just as he had done on other occasions with works by European philosophers and revolutionaries.47

  A number of students and teachers expressed distaste for the text Kambaksh had distributed on Muhammad and his view of women. A copy fell into the hands of the security police. Kambaksh was questioned, then released, but someone at the university had photocopied and distributed hundreds of copies of the text with Kambaksh’s name on it. Soon campus protests flared. Most believed that Kambaksh himself was the author. The clergy of Mazar-i-Sharif’s mosque demanded that the blasphemer be taken to task. Fearing for his safety, Kambaksh stayed away from lectures and sought refuge with friends and acquaintances. In late October 2007, Kambaksh’s elder brother, himself a journalist, was contacted by the security police. They wanted Kambaksh to turn himself in, to avoid falling foul of the mob. He did so the following day. After a week of questioning, Kambaksh signed a statement saying that he had copied the article from the Internet, added a couple of lines himself, and handed it out at the university. It was taken to be a confession.

  The court case against Sayed Pervez Kambaksh took place in Mazar-i-Sharif on January 22, 2008, in the presence of a prosecutor and three judges. According to Kambaksh, no others were present, and no lawyer or anyone else represented the accused. In his defense, Kambaksh spoke of freedom of speech under the Afghan Constitution, a document that furthermore also incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The prosecutor instead invoked the constitution’s reference to Islamic law; directly descending from Allah, it was by definition infallible and took precedence over secular, human codes. Article 1 of the Afghan Constitution defines Afghanistan as an Islamic republic; Article 3 states that no law may be counter to Islam.

  In the view of the court, Kambaksh’s interpretation of freedom of speech was counter to Islam. He was guilty of blasphemy for his spurious interpretation of the Koran, and defamation of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. He was sentenced to death.

  Afghan Minister of Justice Sarwar Danish defended the sentence, commenting in the German weekly Der Spiegel:

  He published things attacking our religion. The Koran is held in honor and respected by Muslims. Therefore one cannot expect Muslims to accept unjustified, hostile attacks. Such attacks must be considered to be blasphemy and punished as such. Blasphemy is forbidden all over the world, certainly also in Germany.48

  Der Spiegel confronted the judge who had imposed the sentence with Article 34 of the Afghan Constitution, which states that freedom of speech is inviolable. He responded: “Freedom of speech is a very valuable thing, but it does not mean that one has the right to offend religious sentiments. To defame a religion, any religion, has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It is a crime.”

  An adviser to the Afghan minister of culture told the British daily the Independent that he supported the verdict, contending that Europe restricted Holocaust denial in much the same way: “Every country has its own limits on freedom. European people have the right to protect their opinions about ideas which are supposed to be dangerous for their civilization.”49

  There was no consensus. The Afghan Journalists Association and the Committee for the Protection of Afghan Journalists were both critical of the verdict. But attempts to invoke international law to support Kambaksh’s freedom of speech were complicated by support within the United Nations system for the criminalization of defamatory speech targeting religion.

  “The concept of religious defamation serves to legitimize the violation of Kambaksh’s freedom of expression, guaranteed under the International Bill of Rights,” said Austin Dacey and Colin Koproske in a 2008 report titled Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations. “Islam does not need protection from Pervez Kambaksh. Pervez Kambaksh needs protection from those who speak in its name.”50

  Sayed Pervez Kambaksh was pardoned in secrecy and released in September 2009. The risk of encountering Muslims intent on carrying out his death sentence themselves meant that he was compelled to leave Afghanistan. He now lives somewhere in the West.

  YOUNUS SHAIKH

  It was October 1, 2000. Pakistani human rights activist Younus Shaikh was taking part in a symposium in the country’s capital Islamabad. The subject was tensions between Pakistan and India and the danger of nuclear war. Younus Shaikh was not an invited speaker, but at one point during the proceedings, he asked for the floor and spoke in favor of recognizing the existing demarcation line in the contested region of Kashmir as the border of the two countries. He leveled criticism at the Pakistani government’s support of terrorists on the Indian side of the line and warned that if India followed suit, the two countries might end up with a disaster on their hands equivalent in scale to the civil war of 1971 that had led to the secession of East Pakistan and the establishment of Bangladesh as an independent state.

  Shaikh’s speech enraged an officer of the Pakistani security police. According to Shaikh, threats were made. Two days later, Shaikh, a physician, was fired from his teaching job at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College and was shortly afterward arrested on charges of having offended the Prophet Muhammad and thereby having committed blasphemy, a crime punishable by death.51

  The charges were not formally motivated by Shaikh’s comments during the symposium. A complaint filed by an Islamic movement referred to comments Shaikh allegedly had made during a lecture he had given a few days before, according to a letter signed by 11 students. He was said to have claimed that the Prophet had not been a Muslim before reaching the age of 40, when he received his first revelation from Allah; that the Prophet’s parents had not been Muslims, since they died before the birth of Islam; that the Prophet’s first marriage at the age of 25 had not had an Islamic marriage contract; and that the Prophet was not circumcised and did not follow the Muslim practice of shaving the hair under his arms or around his genitals, since the tribe to which he belonged never had those customs.52

  “I had heard from the sermons in the mosques that those who blaspheme deserve to be killed immediately,” one student told the New York Times.53 “It was a weakness of faith that we did not do it,” he added. Another noted, “Only out of respect, because he was our teacher, did we not beat him to death on the spot.”

  Shaikh explained that his students had asked about shaving underarm and pubic hair, and that he had answered in accordance with the historical truth that Arabs had not practiced the custom before the arrival of Islam. While he sat detained behind bars, concerned relatives approached the Islamic movement that had filed the complaint, the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, to plead his repentance. The response of the movement’s secretary general, Abdul Wahid Qasmi, was, according to the New York Times: “Even if someone is only half
-conscious when speaking against the Prophet, he must die. . . . To be sorry now is not enough. Even if a man is sorry, he must die.”54

  Despite procedural errors and several discredited witnesses, the trial continued and in August 2001, Shaikh was sentenced to death. He spent the next two years in solitary confinement in a death cell at Rawalpindi, deprived of books and newspapers and medicine for his diabetes. Following a lengthy appeal process, a Supreme Court judge ruled that the case be retried on grounds of procedural error. However, fears of reprisal at the hands of Islamists meant that no attorney was willing to take on Shaikh’s defense. In the end, he had to act as his own lawyer. Friends managed to smuggle law books into the prison so that he could prepare his case.

  Eventually, Shaikh was acquitted. He was quietly released in late 2003.55 Like Pervez Kambaksh, fears that Islamists would take the law into their own hands forced him into hiding, and eventually he fled to Europe, where he was granted asylum in Switzerland. In Pakistan, taking the law into one’s hands to mete out “justice” against blasphemers is common. Some are murdered while in prison; others after they are released, or before police officially charge the suspect. Lawyers who defend blasphemers receive death threats, and in the mid-1990s, one retired judge who had acquitted a man of blasphemy charges was gunned down on a public street in Lahore.

  People killing alleged blasphemers are rarely convicted in Pakistan. On the contrary, if they are ever reported by witnesses or relatives of the victims, the killers are received as heroes in police stations around the country. In January 2011, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was killed by one of his security guards. Taseer had publicly called for a pardon for Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted for blasphemy, and had criticized Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. His killer was hailed as a hero in much of Pakistan. Two months later, the highest-ranking Christian politician in the country, Shahbaz Bhatti, was shot dead as an infidel. Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing.56