Is Blasphemy Illiberal?

It’s not artful, exactly, but the recurring metaphor of time travel suggests something more than just laziness or exhaustion. That one cannot be murdered for irreligious speech is, for most people in the West, a basic assumption. No one in Rushdie’s first adopted country, England, has been legally executed for blasphemy since 1697; no one in his second adopted country, the United States, has ever been so, although heresy and witchcraft executions notoriously persisted in colonial New England. So the belated stabbing of Rushdie was “antique” not just in terms of his own life, but in a broader historical sense.

In another way, though, the Satanic Verses controversy was thoroughly contemporary. It was made possible by the redefinition of blasphemy around the feelings of religious believers, and it brought that concern to bear on the complications of a diverse, pluralist society.

in england by the mid-nineteenth century, as the legal historian Leonard W. Levy tells us in his 1993 book Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, “the time had passed when the government claimed to prosecute because of the affront of blasphemy to God, religion, or Christianity.” Instead, the government’s stated concern was with the sensitivities of believers, a legal rationale that remained in place for the whole of the twentieth century.

In 1977, the editor Denis Lemon became the last person to be convicted for blasphemy under English law. Lemon’s offense was to publish an erotic devotional poem, “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name” by the poet James Kirkup, in the British journal Gay News. A monologue spoken in the voice of a Roman centurion, the poem presents its speaker tenderly taking Christ down from the cross and then having sex with his body. Throughout, Gospel imagery is given a pornographic turn: “in each wound—his side, his back / his mouth—I came and came and came.” From this erotic salvation, the poem modulates into an indirect call for civil rights and recognition, which it grounds in Christian love. The soldiers who remove Christ’s body “were glad for us / and blessed us, as would he, who loved all men.” The last line looks forward to a day when “the love that now forever dares to speak its name” will have supplanted the forbidden love that dares not speak.

The whole idiom is consciously fin de siècle—the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name,” reversed in Kirkup’s title and final line, famously belongs to Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and the poem was accompanied by an illustration of the centurion and Christ in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. But a more sinister Wildean echo was surely unintended and unanticipated by Kirkup. Although Gay News had a very small circulation and although blasphemy law had largely fallen into desuetude, the social crusader Mary Whitehouse got wind of the poem and decided to make an example of it. Over eighty years after Oscar Wilde’s conviction for sodomy, James Kirkup’s publisher was put on trial for gay verse.

Incredibly, Gay News lost. Even more incredibly, it lost again on appeal, twice, in 1978 and 1979. In upholding the conviction, one of the judges even proposed that British blasphemy law, which prohibited offenses against the established Church of England but not against any other church, be rewritten to encompass more religions. “In an increasingly plural society,” the judge wrote, “such as that of modern Britain, it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings, and practices of all, but also to protect them from scrutiny, vilification, ridicule and contempt.”

This was a remarkable development in the legal annals: a diversity-based argument for outlawing blasphemy. Although Whitehouse was a cultural conservative and the appellate courts’ failure to seriously consider the element of minoritarian protest in the poem reflected their default homophobia, the logic of their decision was driven by a central tenet of multicultural liberalism. It reflected a general sense that in pluralistic modern democracies, respect for “the other” must be enshrined in law.

In this modern understanding, blasphemy largely became a question of manner, not matter. Publishing logical proofs of the nonexistence of God was not blasphemy; scurrilously insulting Him as a fraud might well be. In the twentieth century, scurrility was overwhelmingly associated with sexual depictions of Christ, especially in film—depictions that, it was assumed, could only be intended in a spirit of disrespect. Even in countries without laws against blasphemy, the pressure to avoid offense could be very serious. In 1988, a screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ was the target of a terrorist attack in France. In 1999, the British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili’s mixed-media painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which included pornographic cutouts, triggered a court case when the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, attempted to withdraw funding to the Brooklyn Museum, where the work was being exhibited. “It offends me,” Giuliani explained. He lost the case.

Or consider the case of The Devils, Ken Russell’s 1971 film adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 book The Devils of Loudun, about a group of seventeenth-century French nuns who become convinced that a local priest has bewitched them. This was an authentic historical episode, but the film’s representation of the nuns’ sexual frenzies caused it to be banned in several countries. Where it was shown, a four-minute montage in which the nuns mime the sexual assault of a statue of Christ—the so-called “rape of Christ”—was deleted, despite Russell’s insistence that it was “the key scene” in the film.

To my surprise, no unexpurgated edition of The Devils is available in the United States even today, Warner Brothers having declined cinephiles’ requests for the film’s debowdlerization. I learned this recently, after streaming the censored version of The Devils on the Criterion Channel. It seemed wrong that, more than half a century after it was made, I still couldn’t see Russell’s film as he intended it. It annoyed me. What century were we living in? It felt anachronistic.

in knife, the most eloquent arguments for understanding blasphemy as an anachronism are to be found in Rushdie’s account of the appallingly literal harm that the concept has done him. The book is at its best in its clinical cataloging of the pain, fear, and humiliation of his physical recovery in the months following the stabbing. His liver is lacerated; he hopes he will not turn yellow. He loses part of his small intestine; he loses the use of a hand. At one point, when things are otherwise going well, he loses his ability to urinate.

He has stitches everywhere, even his tongue. As it happens, a conventional punishment for blasphemy, practiced in Britain and some American colonies into the eighteenth century, involved boring a hole in the offender’s tongue with a hot iron. Other nonlethal punishments included the cropping of ears and the branding of the face with a “B” for “blasphemer,” a cruelty suffered by the English Quaker James Nayler in the 1650s. Rushdie’s right eye, which is eventually stitched shut, swells up “like a sci-fi movie special effect,…hugely distended, bulging out of its socket and hanging down on my face like a large soft-boiled egg.” He now covers it with a blackened lens—a modern-day brand, a “B.”

Less compelling are any of Knife’s ideas about speech, art, and religion, which assume whatever interest they have only because of the peculiar authority of the author. Rushdie himself seems to recognize that his rote reflections—on the necessity of artistic freedom, on the evil of religious murder—are not terribly novel, although unobjectionable. “Fortune,” he writes, “has turned me into a sort of virtuous liberty-loving Barbie doll, Free-Expression Rushdie.” Free-Expression Rushdie quotes from a 2015 statement he gave after the Charlie Hebdo massacre: “Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.” His treatment of these themes never rises above cliché.

As with many of us, Rushdie’s thoughts on blasphemy hew to a progressivist historical narrative. According to this familiar story, gains in scientific rationality should entail corresponding decreases in the punishment of spiritual or supernatural offenses. As an empirical matter, this story has something going for it, although there are many exceptions. In colonial New England, for instance, some of the Puritans who persecuted witches were also members of the scientific vanguard which introduced smallpox inoculations. In modern-day Iran—a civilization possessing a degree of scientific expertise of which the Puritans could only dream—blasphemy remains a capital offense; last year, two men, Yousef Mehrdad and Sadrollah FazeliZare, were executed for “desecration of the sanctities.” No matter how modern, such punishments often seem, to their critics and perhaps even to their executives, like throwbacks to an earlier era: more righteous, if you support them; more barbarous, if you don’t. As Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, put it, “The execution of Yousef and Sadrollah for ‘insulting the Prophet’ is…a cruel act by a medieval regime.” Recourse to such temporal adjectives is hard to resist.

Although capital punishment for blasphemy disappeared in the West, the legal offense remains on the books in many European countries—but not, as it happens, in England, for reasons having something to do with Rushdie himself. In 1985, several years after the Gay News case was upheld, England’s Law Commission (an independent body devoted to reviewing and reforming the law) issued a report on “Offences Against Religion and Public Worship.” Three of the five members of the commission recommended repealing England’s blasphemy laws, but the two dissenting votes argued for “the duty on all citizens, in our society of different races and of people of different faiths and of no faith, not purposely to insult or outrage the religious feelings of others.” They endorsed extending blasphemy protections “to any religion” and recommended a maximum penalty of two years in prison for violations of the law. Many English religious groups, not only Muslim but also Christian and Jewish, favored maintaining some kind of law against blasphemy. In the event, Parliament failed either to cancel or to expand the existing law.

Then, in September of 1988, The Satanic Verses was published. Within a month, it had been banned in India; within two months, in South Africa. In January of 1989, book burnings were conducted in the English city of Bradford. There were riots in Pakistan (at least five killed) and India (at least thirteen killed). Bookstores in Berkeley, California, were firebombed. In Brussels, an imam and his assistant, both of whom opposed censorship of Rushdie’s book, were executed in their own mosque.

The controversy over The Satanic Verses was a watershed moment in the attempt to accommodate blasphemy law to multicultural liberalism, a process that depended on the theory that blasphemy constituted a unique emotional and dignitary harm for religious groups. As political scientist Tariq Modood put it in 1989, “the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.” When an association of Muslim organizations called for the British government to prosecute Rushdie for blasphemy, prominent Jewish and Christian leaders were sympathetic. “I firmly believe,” the archbishop of Canterbury said, “that the offence to the religious beliefs of the followers of Islam or any other faith is quite as wrong as offence to the religious beliefs of Christians.” England’s chief rabbi likewise insisted that the publication of Rushdie’s book was wrong because “we should…not tolerate a form of denigration and ridicule which can only breed resentment to the point of hatred and strife.”

Notwithstanding such pressure from religious leaders, a committee of the House of Lords ruled in 1989 that the law could not be bent to apply to non-Christian faiths. Though blasphemy laws in England would continue to protect only Christians, the effort to expand them brought together an unprecedented alliance between some orthodox Muslims, hard-right Tories, and liberal multiculturalists committed to shielding the feelings of the religious from scurrilous insult. (It wasn’t until 2008 that, in the words of the U.K. Parliament’s official webpage on “religion and belief,” “the old crime of blasphemy was abolished.”)

The refusal of Parliament to pass a multiculturalist blasphemy law may have stemmed in part from the sense, bolstered by the international outbreaks of lethal violence following the publication of The Satanic Verses, that “adherents of religions who are exceptionally intolerant of criticism,” as the 1985 Law Commission report put it, would too zealously apply the law to their own case. The proposed law’s rationale—the protection of the religious from dignitary harms—risked admitting of no rubric beyond the wounded feelings of the religious themselves. The government perceived that a formula like Madood’s would effectively grant the most sensitive groups veto power over cultural expression.

the theory of multiculturalist sensitivity had an indeterminate, but troubling, relationship to an earlier rationale for proscribing blasphemous speech—that of keeping the peace. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in a 1989 essay in Public Culture, was clear-eyed about the continued relevance of considerations of public safety, at least abroad. “There was something a little absurd, even surreal,” Taylor writes, about Rushdie’s “letter chiding Rajiv Gandhi,” then the prime minister of India, “for banning The Satanic Verses.” After all, “there are things which are so inflammatory that they are a danger to public order, to life and limb.” Taylor sees that public-order justifications for suppressing blasphemous speech might also have some claims in Western democracies where blasphemy is no longer a crime, but he doesn’t pursue the problem, except to say that, because “international migration is making all societies less culturally uniform,” the West will “need some inspired adhoccery in years to come.”

To defenders of free expression, Taylor’s words raise some ominous questions. What would this “adhoccery” look like? Which religious constituencies would end up benefitting from it—the largest? The most organized? The most litigious? The most violent? And who speaks for the religious? For all its subtlety, Taylor’s analysis of the Rushdie affair can also seem naively apolitical. Like many thinkers who are sympathetic to the argument that blasphemy can constitute a dignitary harm for the orthodox, Taylor neglects to ask: Who benefits from fanning the flames?

It seems unlikely that masses of average people would have been morally harmed by Rushdie’s blasphemies if inspired political actors hadn’t alerted them to the supposed insult. In the case of Iran, we know that the outrage over The Satanic Verses was anything but organic. As Amir Ahmadi Arian explained recently in the London Review of Books, “To ordinary people in Iran, the fatwa came out of nowhere.” Unlike on the subcontinent or among diasporic communities in the West, Arian argues, most residents of Iran were scarcely aware of Rushdie’s book. Nor was the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was dying, at all concerned about it at first. That would change only when two Englishmen, Kalim Siddiqui and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, convinced Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s minister of culture, to elevate the book to a national threat.

Khomeini, “a savvy politician who understood sociopolitical crises as opportunities for consolidating power,” in Arian’s description, saw his chance and pounced. His goal, quite transparently, was to distract public attention from the manifold failures of his administration. “It was God’s plan,” he explained in a “message to the clergy,” that “we stop simplifying things and attributing all our issues to mismanagement. Not everything is our fault. The imperial powers are determined to destroy Islam and the Muslims.” In Khomeini’s convenient conspiracy theory, Rushdie was cast as a vicious pawn of Western powers who hated Islam. This was an act of calculated scapegoating. To the extent that religious Iranians suffered any dignitary harms on account of The Satanic Verses, they did so only after the Ayatollah forced the book, or rather his idea of it, onto them.

It is difficult to see what dignitary harms Hadi Matar, the New Jerseyan who attacked Rushdie, suffered from Rushdie’s writing. In Knife he comes across as an aimless and inarticulate young man (“his powers of self-expression lacked a certain sophistication,” Rushdie writes). Matar, who lived in his mother’s suburban basement, was apparently radicalized after a visit to his father in Lebanon, although it is hard to know what that meant for him. He had not read The Satanic Verses, but he had seen some videos of Rushdie lecturing on YouTube. When a reporter from The New York Post asked him why he did it, Matar said: “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. I don’t like him.” And later: “I don’t like people who are disingenuous like that.” This is hardly the fanatical rhetoric of a religious firebrand. As Rushdie quips, Matar’s “decision to kill me seemed undermotivated.”

But Rushdie fails to see how interesting, in its way, Matar’s haplessness is. He contemplates arranging an interview with Matar, although—unfortunately for the book—his wife dissuades him. Instead, he fictionalizes their meeting in a chapter that pits his own rational argumentation against Matar’s robotic religious radicalism. It is a profoundly uninteresting dialogue. Rushdie knows enough about Matar to know that he cannot be made into a convincing ideologue—he is not a character out of Dostoevsky—but he does not know what else to make of him. The deep religious wounds that were presumed to motivate the violence around The Satanic Verses hardly, in Matar’s case, seem to apply. Religious feeling survives here only as a kind of congealed alibi for a violence altogether more random and meaningless. Matar’s undermotivation is the most fascinating aspect of his case. Rushdie perceives this—Matar, he writes, is “wholly a product of the new technologies of our information age”—but he doesn’t know quite what to do with it.

None of this is to suggest, of course, that Matar’s attack was not an act of religious terrorism. However tenuous and arbitrary Matar’s own religious imagination might be, he would never have attacked Rushdie if not for the fatwa. The ghostly tentacles of the dead Ayatollah’s writ flicker still across the internet, where Matar, like so many other maladjusted malcontents, found his true home.

Is blasphemy necessary? Why can’t the irreligious simply refrain from travestying the symbols other people hold sacred? Taylor’s answer to this question is worth attending to: “There does seem to be something uniquely powerful about religious language and symbols which makes even those who reject them need them in order to explore their own universe. These symbols are as indispensable to those who want to negate them as they are to those who live by affirming them.” As long as that is true—as long as the sacred symbols remain as compelling, in their way, to the doubters, scoffers, and skeptics as they do to the believers, then the doubters, scoffers, and skeptics, too, have a right to them. They are no one’s property, and everyone’s. This was Rushdie’s implicit assertion in The Satanic Verses, which drew on scriptural and traditional sources Rushdie felt to be his own, even though, as he writes in Knife, he has “never felt the need for religious faith to help me comprehend and deal with the world.”

There is a special case of such rights to negation: blasphemy as a necessary tactic in the difficult project of emancipation from a religion one has come to experience as a prison. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, dissident groups of irreligious Jews would defy religious law on Yom Kippur by throwing public parties, where they would drink, smoke, and dance. This insult to the faith of their fathers was, for them, a path to freedom. Or consider the Indian philosopher and activist B. R. Ambedkar, who in the late 1920s publicly set fire to Hindu holy texts in protest of caste oppression, which was rooted in scripture. Another protest by Ambedkar’s movement saw Dalits (“untouchables”) drinking from a public water source from which they were religiously prohibited. Here, blasphemy and civic emancipation are literally indistinguishable.

Or consider, in a somewhat different key, James Kirkup’s “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name,” whose legal travails bore directly on the Rushdie controversies. The poem blasphemously queers the body of Christ in order to make a political claim: same-sex lovers deserve the same respect as anyone else. Does the sexualization of Christ impose a dignitary harm on orthodox Christians? Very well, the poem seems to say—what about the harm imposed on sexual minorities by the invocation of Christian authority to oppress them? Kirkup borrows the poignancy, and the ethical force, of the Christian Passion because he feels there is no more appropriate idiom for his point. Dignity is a two-way street, and the irreligious have theirs too. It is their good fortune that religion has bequeathed them a treasury of imagery and poetry with which to make meaning in a world without gods.