Blasphemy and terrorism: Catchall phrases to repress dissent
By James M. Dorsey
Blasphemy has joined terrorism as a catchall phrase to intimidate, incarcerate and kill critics and political opponents as well as stifle unfettered debate and settle scores.
There is, however, one difference: terrorism is a justification for curbing freedom of expression often used by governments irrespective of how democratic or undemocratic they may be. Blasphemy serves not only as a tool for governments, but has also empowered religious ultra-conservatives, frenzied mobs, and extremist groups and individuals.
A four-decade long, massively funded Saudi public diplomacy campaign has created an enabling environment in Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, where alleged blasphemers and atheists have been kidnapped, abused and sometimes killed in recent months and years.
Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations have been lobbying in recent years for the criminalisation of blasphemy in international law, in a move that would legitimise curbs on free speech and growing Muslim intolerance towards any open discussion of their faith.
The Saudi campaign was designed to implant Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism in Muslim communities across the globe as an antidote to the faded zeal of revolutionary Iran, and to position the kingdom rather than the Islamic republic as the dominant power in the Middle East and the Muslim world beyond. It has fostered a world of ultra-conservatism that lives its own life, often independent of the kingdom.
A Saudi court last month sentenced a man to death on charges of blasphemy and atheism. The sentence sparked debate on Twitter with many applauding the sentence. Another Saudi was last year sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing atheist sentiments on social media.
Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations have been lobbying in recent years for the criminalisation of blasphemy in international law, in a move that would legitimise curbs on free speech and growing Muslim intolerance towards any open discussion of their faith. The kingdom’s ability to further its efforts was enhanced last November when it was elected as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Assertions of blasphemy and terrorism have become favourite terms employed by illiberal, authoritarian and autocratic leaders to crush their opponents. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used terrorism allegations to arrest tens of thousands and fire more than 100,000 civil servants, teachers, professors, journalists, judicial personnel, and police and military officers. In January, persons believed to be associated with security forces kidnapped and abused five Pakistani bloggers critical of the military under the guise of blasphemy.
The Pakistani government last month put social media companies like Facebook and Twitter in a bind by demanding that they help identify users so they could be prosecuted on charges of blasphemy that carry the death sentence. The demand was part of a clampdown on blasphemous material on social media.
… many of Egypt’s schoolteachers had either worked in Saudi Arabia or been trained at Saudi-funded satellite campuses of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University…
Some of them would separate Muslim and Coptic students in their classrooms to emphasise the differences in their religious standing. History lessons would ignore Egypt’s pre-Islamic Coptic heritage, leaving students with the impression that Copts were migrants rather than Egyptians with a history in the country that pre-dated Islam…
The Saudi public diplomacy effort was frequently enhanced by governments who saw mileage in polishing their religious credentials for politically opportunistic reasons at the cost of building societies that embraced principles of tolerance and pluralism. The result is pervasive intolerance that sparks frequent attacks on minorities. Recent events in Egypt and Pakistan serve as evidence.
Writing more than a decade before last month’s attack on two Coptic churches in Egypt that left 43 people dead, Egyptian writer and politician Milad Hanna noted that many of Egypt’s schoolteachers had either worked in Saudi Arabia or been trained at Saudi-funded satellite campuses of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, one of the world’s foremost institutions of Islamic learning.
Some of them would separate Muslim and Coptic students in their classrooms to emphasise the differences in their religious standing. History lessons would ignore Egypt’s pre-Islamic Coptic heritage, leaving students with the impression that Copts were migrants rather than Egyptians with a history in the country that pre-dated Islam or had been converted to Islam in the 19th century by foreign missionaries.
“A belief in the superiority of Muslims…is drummed into Egyptian schoolchildren from their earliest years through the state education system. This is reinforced by unequal laws (the president can only ever be a Muslim, for example) and practice (Copts were long excluded from senior positions in the police, army and even academia),” said Gerard Russell, a former British diplomat and United Nations official, echoing recent Islamist opposition in Indonesia to a Christian being governor of Jakarta.
Mr Russell added:
The recent mob killing in Pakistan of 23-year-old journalism student Mashal Khan (pictured above) illustrated how unproven blasphemy charges incited mob justice and can be abused by branches of government, local institutions, and individuals to either suppress criticism or settle scores.
Mr Khan’s killing was, nonetheless, a rare instance in which some ultra-conservatives joined liberals in condemning mob justice in a country that has draconic anti-blasphemy laws on its books that date back to the period of British colonial rule and has allowed the killer of a prominent critic of the law to be celebrated.
According to Pakistani security analyst Mohammad Amir Rana,
Mr Khan criticised his university for poor management on local television three days before an angry mob shot him dead and then beat and stomped his bloodied, lifeless body in a frenzy that was filmed and posted online.
A document that surfaced after the murder suggested that the university had banned Mr Khan and two other students from entry to campus while a committee investigated their alleged “blasphemous activities”.
“The accusation of blasphemy was a tool to inflame sentiment,” said one of Mr Khan’s teachers.
Mr Khan’s death has sparked debate in Pakistan about an amendment, opposed by Islamists and ultra-conservatives, that would explicitly reiterate the state’s exclusive prerogative to prosecute blasphemy cases.
The degree to which ultra-conservatism has fostered violence and intolerance was highlighted two weeks after Mr Khan’s killing when hundreds of worshipers attacked a man after weekly prayers in Pakistan’s remote northern Chitral region.
The mob accused the man of blaspheming in the mosque. Police took him into custody, but people stormed the station house and demanded that he be handed over. Police officials, who said the victim might be mentally impaired, had to use tear gas and fire into the air to disperse the mob.
As the scholar Mohammad Waseem said,
The threat goes beyond Mr Waseem’s concerns. The threat is the abuse of labels like terrorism and blasphemy by governments, institutions, religious and political groups and individuals alike that creates an environment that not only fosters intolerant violence and disrespect for the other, but also enables vigilantism, extremism and radicalisation. It renders the rule of law impotent and legitimises extra-judicial killings whether by mobs in Pakistan or the authorities in the Philippines.
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