One of the recurrent controversies in the contemporary Muslim world is the notion of “blasphemy,” or the offence of the sacred. There are strict blasphemy laws in most of the world’s fifty Muslim-majority states that ban “enmity against God," or insulting the Qur’an or the Prophet Muhammad. Retributions can vary from prison sentences to corporal punishments such as flogging, to execution. And people can be found guilty of blasphemy merely by declaring their lack of faith, or their differing interpretations of the faith. In a 2017 case in Indonesia, a Christian politician was even sentenced to two years in prison merely for quoting the Qur’an to argue that Muslims can vote for non-Muslims as well.
The Islamic world, one could therefore say, from a liberal perspective, “a blasphemy problem.”
In the West, there are hardly any blasphemy laws that are still implemented, but some Muslims are not happy with this state of affairs. Muslim groups typically demand new blasphemy laws to protect their religion from insult, as has been in the case in the United Kingdom. They also campaign against the removal of old blasphemy laws from the legal corpus, as was the case in Denmark in 2017. Meanwhile, the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an international body of Muslim-majority states, has long lobbied for putting the “defamation against religions” on the human rights agenda of the United Nations.
As a Muslim who has been pondering on this burning issue of blasphemy, I beg to differ from this common Muslim attitude. As a Muslim, I don’t think we need blasphemy laws, in our own countries or elsewhere, to protect the dignity of Islam.
This is not because I don’t care about insults to my religion. For me, religion is sacred, and sacred is precisely what you don’t ridicule or defame. I also expect people to respect what is sacred for me, as I would respect what is sacred for them. I would not ridicule Hindu gods or burn the Vedas, for example, although I don’t believe in them. That would be disrespectful to millions of people, and I don’t want to do that. Such a culture of respect, I further believe, is what we should try to nurture all over the world.
The key question, however, is how do we should do this. By relying on blasphemy laws to punish those who offend our religious sensibilities, as most Muslims conservatives do? Or by attacking those who insult our religion, as some extremist Muslims have done? My answer, to both questions, is no. For both of these reactions are based on the feeling that we should impose respect. What we should rather do, in my view, is to cultivate respect.
One reason to accept this argument is that the effort to impose respect only backfires. Since the infamous “Satanic Verses” incident of the 1980’s, where British writer Salman Rushdi perceivably insulted Islam with his novel, Muslims are trying to impose respect to Islam, but only to face more insults. More and more people in the West offend our sensibilities by, say, making a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), or, as in the 2017 case in Denmark, burning a copy of the Qur’an. The more we say, “You are not allowed to do this,” the more they say “Yes, we are.” For they see our imposition as limitation on free speech, which is, undoubtedly, a cornerstone of the West’s most precious political achievement: liberal democracy.
So, there must be a better way to stand up for Islam. And as counterintuitive as it may sound to many Muslims, that better way is not to appeal to state power to ban blasphemy, let alone vigilante punishment of it, but to try to chance the negative perceptions about Islam which trigger those offenses in the first place. It is to control our own behavior, in other words, rather than trying to control the behavior of others.
Does this all sound too much Pollyannaism? Does it sound “un-Islamic”? Well, before making a decision, let’s look at the Qur’an. As I explained in my book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, the Scripture of Islam has no injunction that penalizes blasphemy. The verse that most clearly addresses this issue, 4:140, reads as follows:
“When you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”
Let’s note: The commandment here is not to try to silence those “disbelieve in and mock at” Islam, let alone to attack them. It is merely to not to “sit with them” as a sign of disapproval. A peaceful, non-dictating, civilized form of disapproval.
Another Qur’anic verse that addresses the same issue of insult from other groups is 3:186, which reads:
"O Believers… You will certainly hear many hurtful things from those who were granted the Book before you and those who have associated others with God in His divinity. If you remain patient and God-fearing, this indeed is a matter of great resolution.”
In this verse, too, the Qur’anic command to Muslims in the face of “hurtful things” is to “remain patient and God-fearing.” It is controlling our own behavior, in other words, rather that controlling those who utter “hurtful things.”
If the mainstream Muslim attitude to blasphemy takes this Qur’anic sprit, things will be much better for our faith. Non-Muslims will see a more mature, dignified, reasoned stance in the name of Islam, and they will feel more respect to it. They will also show more respect — and precisely because we are not trying to impose it.
Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and author with acclaimed books such as "Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty" (2011) and "The Islamic Jesus" (2017). He is a monthly contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, a TED speaker, and a frequent voice in global live and print media. He is a senior visiting fellow at the Freedom Project since Jan 2017.
A shorter version of this piece by Mustafa Akyol was published, in the Danish language, in the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad on July 1, 2017.