Abstract
Almost all those who argue for the validity of legal restraints on free speech do so in relation to gender (pornography), race, sexuality and disability.1 Very few are willing to consider restrictions on religious grounds. In the US, this may be the consequence of an intepretation of the First Amendment which sutures freedom of speech to religious freedom, and which prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have advanced arguments that have problematized the discourse of free speech in relation to blasphemy and what Mahmood calls ‘moral injury’ but have refrained from extending them to matters of law (indeed, Mahmood explicitly cautions against juridical approaches), whilst Stanley Fish’s intervention into the controversy about the (non-)publication of The Jewel of the Medina represents another skirmish in his ongoing battle with First Amendment ‘fundamentalists’, but he stops short of calling for legal restrictions.2 In Britain, until the several attempts by the then Labour government to introduce protection from incitement to religious hatred in the first decade of the twenty-first century (first in 2001, then again in 2005 and finally in 2006), Simon Lee, Tariq Modood and Bhikhu Parekh had been the only major philosophers who had argued for extension of the incitement to hatred legislation in the wake of the Rushdie affair.3 In the broader public sphere, however, even those far from absolutist liberals who were happy to accept limitations on speech in relation to sex, gender and race drew a line when confronted with the possibility of a restriction in relation to religious groups.
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Notes and References
See Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech And It’s a Good Thing Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Abigail Levin, The Cost of Free Speech: Pornigraphy, Hate Speech, and their Challenge to Liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Kevin Saunders, Degradation: What The History of Obscenity Tells Us About Hate Speech (New York: New York University Press, 2011);
Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993);
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Understanding Words That Wound (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004); and the various and extensive publications of Catherine MacKinnon.
Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, Townsend Papers in the Humanities no.2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009);
See Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005);
Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and
Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (London: Faber, 1990).
Modood, Multicultural Politics; Parekh, Rethinking Secularism; Susan Mendus, ‘The Tigers of Wrath and the Horses of Instruction’ in Free Speech: Report of a Seminar (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1990) pp. 3–17;
Peter Jones, ‘Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie’, British Journal of Political Science, 20:4, 1990, pp. 415–37.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For a more detailed discussion of Asad’s genealogy of religion, see Chapter 4. See also
Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, new edn. (London: Vintage, 1997);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, new edn. (London: Routledge, 2006);
Robert Miles, Racism, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2003);
Les Back and John Solomos, eds. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999).
John Horton, ‘Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration’ in John Horton, ed. Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993) pp. 2–3.
Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2012) Kindle edition, ‘Rules for Censors (1)’, p. 21 [loc 506–517].
Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009) p. 183.
Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (New York: Ecco, 2010) p. 489.
Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blapsphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and ‘The Satanic Verses’ (Southwold: Orwell Press, 1990).
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) p. 42; p. 39.
Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) p. 135; Emmanuel Levinas, cited in ibid. p. 140.
Levinas, Noms Propre, p. 36, cited in Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge, 1999) p. 31.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) p. 117.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) p. 101.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).
David Parker, ‘Introduction: the turn to ethics in the 1990s’ in Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker, eds. Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 8.
Derek Attridge, ‘The Impossibility of Ethics: On Mount Moriah’ in Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) p. 58.
Simon Critchley notes that, for Levinas, ‘ethics occurs as the putting into question of the ego, the knowing subject, self-consciousness’ (The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 5). James Meffan and Kim Worthington reasonably interpret Levinasian ethics, therefore, as ‘self-applied and not directed to the Other except as that Other effects the process of self-critique’. ‘Ethics before Politics: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’ in Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001) p. 135.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Reading The Satanic Verses,’ Public Culture, 2.1, 1989, p. 87.
Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 21.
Toni Morrison, cited in James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1996) p. 174.
Hans Robert Jauss, cited in Susan R. Suleiman, ‘Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism’ in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crossman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 35.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) p. 17.
Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson, ‘Not Reading Brick Lane’, New Formations, 73, 2011, p. 102.
Allison Weir, ‘Feminism and the Islamic Revival: Freedom as a Practice of Belonging,’ Hypatia, 28:2, 2013, pp. 323–40. See also my discussion of alternative conceptions of freedom in Chapter 6.
Christopher S. Taylor, ‘Rushdie’s Insensitivity’, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 March 1989, cited in
M.M. Ahsan and A.R. Kidwai eds. Sacrilege versus Civility: Muslim Perspectives on The Satanic Verses Affair (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1993) p. 87.
Séan Burke, The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) pp. 36–7.
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p. 7.
Cited in Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006) p. 34.
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© 2014 Anshuman A. Mondal
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Mondal, A.A. (2014). A Difficult Freedom: Towards Mutual Understanding and the Ethics of Propriety. In: Islam and Controversy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466082_4
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