If there is a divinely ordained plan for each of us, then mine seems to involve a grand scheme whereby I experience each and every world religion at close quarters. Mine is one of those complicated multi-ethnic and multi-religious families: the product of immigration, spiritual curiosity, globalisation and intermarriage (in some cases, multiple intermarriages my fathers four marriages have involved women of four different ethnic and religious identities).
Shakira Hussein is responding to Salman Rushdies article, Defend the right to be offended (February 2005)
Chutnification
Last year, I attended the weddings of two of my brothers. In London, my devoutly Muslim brother, born and raised in Pakistan, finally married his straight-talking Sikh girlfriend, having agreed to a Sikh as well as a Muslim ceremony. A few months later, in Australia, another brother married in a ceremony that combined readings from his chosen spiritual teacher, the Indian Parsi Meher Baba, with the brides Buddhist faith. Then there is my youngest brother, who is thus far quite happy with his own Godshaped hole, but who cheerfully attends Eid at the Islamic Centre with me, or Christmas Mass with our Catholic mother; the sister who is currently considering converting to Coptic Christianity; and the fact that thanks to two years as a live-in housekeeper to an Iranian Orthodox Jewish family, I know how to keep a kosher kitchen and prepare a three-course Passover meal for ten at short notice.
Theres more, but you get the idea. There is no shortage of religious debate in our family, there is occasional religious offence but there is also the knowledge that it is possible to love as well as to tolerate those whose religious opinions are profoundly different to ones own.
This kind of hybridity was not the norm in the Australian Bible-belt small town where I grew up. I was not (as too many people assumed) confused about my identity, but I had no available descriptions of the world as I experienced it until, at 14, I read Salman Rushdies Midnights Children. I was captivated, of course, by Rushdies dazzling prose, but much more than this, he gave words to the experience of plurality and multiplicity, and to the way that people have of leaking into one another, like flavours in chutney. I adored Midnights Children with the fervour that others save for the Bible, the Quran, or the Torah. I carried it in my schoolbag at all times, thrust it onto nonplussed teachers, and reviewed it for every possible English essay (including one on science fiction). It was the first and deepest love of my adult reading life.
All of which is a long way off explaining both why I take a great deal of notice of Rushdies objections (in his English PEN speech and openDemocracy essay, Defend the right to be offended) to any proposed restriction of free speech in the name of preventing religious hatred, and why, ultimately, I disagree with him not on the detail of particular legislation, but on general principles.
The borders of race and religion
I believe that people have the right to subject any religion to analysis, criticism, satire, and yes, blasphemy, and to do so with the full protection of the law. Expression of this kind can be invigorating, joyous, and necessary. Yet I also believe that there is a case to be made for regarding religious vilification in similar terms to racial vilification. Rushdie sees such legislation as representing another kind of Anschluss of liberal values in the face of resurgent religious demands. But any such law would apply to hate propagated by, as well as against, the religious, and thus holds the potential to strengthen rather than dilute liberal values.
Nor do I accept in its entirety the distinction between racial and religious vilification made by Rushdie and others (people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas). Because race is an idea, as surely is religion.
Our choice of racial identity is obviously constrained by the perceptions of those around us, but, as Rushdie more than anyone has eloquently articulated, we live in a world of mongrelhood and make our own sense of what that may mean. While at one level, our race is a concrete, hard and inescapable fact with real and measurable effects on our social acceptance, employment prospects, and even our physical safety, on another level it is an idea whose form may differ between people of the same gene pool.
Only the crudest of racists now openly reject people purely on the basis of biology. Racism may be underpinned by the same old fear of differences in the texture and tone of skin and hair. But it is now expressed as an antipathy toward certain behaviour and ideas an alleged tendency towards criminality or welfare dependence, backward and threatening cultural practices, or consumption of limited resources, and more and more, an allegiance to a different and dangerous religion.
Racial hatred is increasingly being recoded in religious terms, and frankly I dont think it is our ideas that are at issue much of the time. Committed atheists are subjected to Islamophobia along with devout believers on the basis of their Arabic names or middle-eastern appearance.
Nor is religious identity simply about our ideas in any abstract sense. Its about the community to which we belong, our families, the significance of certain days, places, or events. People may associate us with a particular religion not only because of our beliefs, but also because of our names, style of dress, physical appearance, even our diet signifiers as shallow as any racial marker. My young pink and white daughter is already highly aware of the anti-Islamic prejudice that confronts her, prejudice which has nothing to do with who she is or what she thinks. I want my daughter to be legally protected against religious hate, as I am protected against racial hate.
Lessons from Australia?
In some Australian states, she already is. The Australian experience with religious vilification legislation has been cited in the British debate, with the actor Rowan Atkinson saying that he understood that it had led to problems. He was almost certainly referring to Islamic Council of Victoria v Catch the Fire Ministries Inc. This case, the first under Victorias Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, saw a Christian evangelist group successfully sued for the vilification of Muslims. (The Victorian legislation differs from that proposed in the United Kingdom, in that while in the UK, cases would only be bought by the attorney-general, in Victoria it is the vilified party that lodges the complaint.) The penalty is yet to be determined, but the judge has made clear that it will be a fine rather than the possible six-month jail term.
In Australia and internationally, this verdict was greeted as a crippling attack on free speech and religious freedom. Catch the Fire Ministries, it was claimed, had been punished simply for preaching what the Bible taught that Christians had a monopoly on holy truth and salvation, that Islam was wrong.
If this were all that was said, I would have no problem with it. I grew up in the Bible belt; several of my high-school friends were Christian Pentecostalists who, in Rushdies words, believed that I was damned to various kinds of eternal hellfire. Our friendship was possible because wherever they thought I was destined to end up, in this world they saw me for myself, not as a dangerous alien, not as an enemy.
But the allegations made by Catch the Fire in a seminar, newsletter, and website went far beyond claiming a Christian monopoly on virtue and truth. They crossed the line delineated by Rushdie: they do not vilify our ideas, they vilify us. Crucial in this regard was Catch the Fires claim that Muslims are liars.
This claim has more profound implications than may first appear. According to Catch the Fire, Muslims all Muslims were to be regarded as untrustworthy because Islam authorised them to lie if it would facilitate the spread of Islam. Therefore, moderate, apparently friendly, statements or behaviour by Muslims could not be trusted they could well be part of a cunning Muslim conspiracy to conquer Australia and render it an Islamic state. When this happened, Australian women would be regarded as spoils of war, and therefore legitimate targets of rape. (This last claim had particular resonance in Australia at the time, as a series of highly publicised gang rapes in Sydney had led to claims in the media that young Muslim men believed that raping non-Muslim girls was a cultural entitlement.)
Here, then, is a vilification which states that regardless of what an individual Muslim may say or do, he or she may be part of an unholy and violent conspiracy. This does not attack Muslim ideas; it ignores them, or worse, sees them as a smokescreen for our true, evil selves. It is an attack on the self, analogous to racism. It is a far, far cry from The Satanic Verses (whose publication and availability in Australia is under no current threat) and surely it is possible for the law to distinguish between the two?
I believe, then, the judges decision was correct. That does not mean, however, that this was necessarily the best case for the Islamic Council to choose to fight. Given the enormous amount of time and money consumed, the Council could arguably have kept its ammunition dry for more influential targets.
The case also generated more anti-Muslim coverage than the original offence could ever have hoped to achieve. And the trial even had its Kafkaesque moments, as lawyers argued about translations of the Quran or arcane theological points. Yet claims that the case increased religious tensions in Australia are questionable. Certainly, many evangelical Christians were outraged, but a Catholic priest and an Anglican academic testified on behalf of the Islamic Council, and the verdict was welcomed by Jewish, Catholic, Quaker, and Uniting Church leaders.
The line between speech that attacks people and speech that attacks ideas may need careful delineation, but it exists and can be clearly defined. Some people may indeed hope for a law that would outlaw The Satanic Verses or Bezhti, but it is possible to retain the right to offend while ditching the right to incite hate.
