Profane: Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age

Humans have been uttering profane words and incurring the consequences for millennia. But contemporary events—from the violence in 2006 that followed Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed to the 2012 furor over the Innocence of Muslims video—indicate that controversy concerning blasphemy has reemerged in explosive transnational form. In an age when electronic media transmit offense as rapidly as profane images and texts can be produced, blasphemy is bracingly relevant again.

In this volume, a distinguished cast of international scholars examines the profound difficulties blasphemy raises for modern societies. Contributors examine how the sacred is formed and maintained, how sacrilegious expression is conceived and regulated, and how the resulting conflicts resist easy adjudication. Their studies range across art, history, politics, law, literature, and theology. Because of the global nature of the problem, the volume’s approach is comparative, examining blasphemy across cultural and geopolitical boundaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520958227

Book preview

Profane

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Bentley University.

Profane

Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age

EDITED BY

Christopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, and David Nash

Foreword by

Martin E. Marty

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Profane : sacrilegious expression in a multicultural age / edited by Christopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, David Nash.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27722-9 (cloth, alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-95822-7 (electronic)

    1. Blasphemy.    2. Swearing.    I. Grenda, Christopher S.

BL65.B54P76    2014

    179’.5—dc232014000733

Manufactured in the United States of America

23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Martin E. Marty

Introduction: On the Modern Confluence of Blasphemy, Free Expression, and Hate Speech

Christopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, and David Nash

PART ONE. CREATING SPACE FOR SACRILEGIOUS EXPRESSION

1. Thick-Skinned Tolerance: Satire, the Sacred, and the Rise of the Modern

Christopher S. Grenda

2. The Productive Obscene: Philip Roth and the Profanity Loop

Jacques Berlinerblau

3. Defaced: The Art of Blaspheming Texts and Images in the West

David Lawton

PART TWO. SACRILEGE AND DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT

4. Blasphemy and Free Thought in Jacksonian America: The Case of Abner Kneeland

Paul Finkelman

5. Secular Blasphemies: Symbolic Offense in Modern Democracy

Robert A. Yelle

PART THREE. CIVILITY, THE SACRED, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

6. Muslim Political Theology: Defamation, Apostasy, and Anathema

Ebrahim Moosa

7. Protesting Sacrilege: Blasphemy and Violence in Muslim-Majority States

Ron E. Hassner

8. The Indonesian Blasphemy Act: A Legal and Social Analysis

Asma T. Uddin

9. Profound Offense and Religion in Secular Democracies: An Australian Perspective

Elizabeth Burns Coleman

10. Blasphemy versus Incitement: An International Law Perspective

Jeroen Temperman

Afterword: Blasphemy beyond Modernism

David Nash

List of Contributors

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

3.1. Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary

3.2. Myra Hindley

3.3. Maurizio Cattelan, HIM

3.4. Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Body

3.5. Alexander Kosolapov, This Is My Blood

3.6. Alan Schechner, Self Portrait at Buchenwald: It’s the Real Thing

3.7. Alan Schechner, Bar Code to Concentration Camp Morph

3.8. Alan Schechner, The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine

3.9. Theo van Gogh, still from Submission

3.10. Gérard Garouste, Passage (Autoportrait)

TABLES

7.1. Occurrence of cartoon riots in Muslim-majority states

7.2. Cartoon protests and riots in states with significant Islamist movements

Foreword

MARTIN E. MARTY

Blasphemers, profaners, and producers of the sacrilegious are to be found in most cultures, especially those that hold religion in high regard. Readers of this book will soon learn that attacks on and undercuttings of religions acquire many names, usually in terms of what they oppose, and what they oppose changes so often that the attackers are usually very busy people.

Because I am a historian of religions, I had to ask why the editors and authors gave me the privilege of helping to introduce their volume. We scholars of religion don’t usually employ inflammatory words such as blasphemy or profaneness, instead preferring abstract terms to deal with such phenomena. Secularization had long been one such term, perhaps because it sounds neutral. Yet while it is still at home in some scholarly discourse today, it almost always gives harbor and encouragement not merely to nonreligion but also to whatever might subvert religion.

The authors in this collection venture far from the conventional boundaries of the study of religions. They do so in pursuing the logic of their respective disciplines as well as in crossing disciplinary boundaries as their subjects and contexts demand. When I began work in this field three score years ago, one of its key areas was described as a dialectic of belief and unbelief. Ever since I began to publish, unbelief has been a specialty of mine. It showed up in a doctoral dissertation, later spruced up and published as The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961) and tidied up still further as The Varieties of Unbelief (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Official Catholicism established a Vatican Secretariatus Pro Non Credendibus, which held conferences in which I participated in Rome and Baden bei Wien in 1976. Out of the Rome conference came a book, The Culture of Unbelief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), and later the two-volume Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1985). Terms such as blasphemy and profaneness did not appear in any of these, though they were clearly vital to the culture of unbelief.

Significantly, in the post–World War II era, Western scholars played up the conflict between belief and unbelief, thus accenting the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of religious expression. What stunned me as I read Profane was how time bound and culture bound that imagined conflict was. Contributors to the present collection do justice to the doctrines and the intellectual substance of religious belief over against unbelief. But recent generations of scholars, including authors in this book, are not content to consider the propositional or dogmatic sides of belief and its antagonists. They want to get closer to their religious and antireligious subjects and tease out the meaning and significance of blasphemy and profaneness.

None of their terms are novel. Blasphemy has always erupted and interrupted where religious cultures are vibrant and their importance taken for granted. In previous eras and other cultures, it was easier than now—as evidenced in the chapters ahead—to define, censor, legislate, or police the blasphemer. But it is the fact of the protean, viscous, and sometimes elusive character of the blaspheming violators that draws attention and demands inquiry now.

Similarly, the profane has been observed, isolated, and inquired about as long as there has been a well-defined understanding of the sacred, however described. The profane (pro-fanum, across the threshold of the sanctuary) is simpler to discuss when it manifests itself in a homogenous religious culture, where the sanctuaries are readily identifiable. In this book, however, the authors have to deal with multireligious expressions that may have little to do with state-sanctioned sanctuaries. They find such expressions newly invigorated in an age of images. For an introduction to this perspective, explore the ubiquitous digital phenomena that, as David Lawton’s chapter 3 explains, challenge traditional textual expressions. How is the blasphemer censored when he or she is not easily taken captive as a specimen for study? Every day, social media generates countless opportunities for public dissent or affirmation—such as Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button and Twitter’s Retweet option—which can subvert religious authority in an instant.

As for sacrilege, the term survives, but it demands different approaches than it might have when the sacred was more easily isolated and defined. Many of the following pages revisit historic inventors and purveyors of sacrilegious phenomena, but the volume’s contributors are busiest when they deal with contemporary expressions. Sacrilege, as Christopher S. Grenda shows, thrives on satire (see chapter 1). Satire abounds in popular and high culture alike. As this foreword is being written, wildly popular comedians host late-night news shows that regularly and derisively feature religious topics. So far as I can tell, religious viewers make up no small part of their audiences. What does it mean when such iconic figures display ambivalence or casual irreverence toward religion? Comic portrayals may have corrosive effects on religious communities, but these communities are too fluid, kinetic, and vulnerable to provide a stable object of sacrilege. Yet something important, perhaps even something sacred, is being subverted.

The word communities in that sentence points to a revealing and appropriate notice explicit in Grenda’s and Lawton’s essays and implicit in others: blasphemy is an assault on community. Blasphemy has always been most effectively proscribed when community boundaries have been sharply defined and church-state authority robust. It was not difficult for Grand Inquisitors or their less grand inferiors to locate, censor, punish, or kill those who were seen as undercutters of the Catholic imperium in all its forms or of Protestantdom when it emerged. It was easy for Puritans, empowered by the laws of England and New England, to pursue and punish blasphemers. There was then little difficulty in naming the blasphemer and pointing out how her or his expressions jeopardized community.

The authors in this book, however, know that at least in Western Culture, where church and state have been largely separated and where civil constitutions recognize a vast number of religious communities and expressions as being protected by law, pursuing and punishing the sacrilegious is a more fraught exercise. This does not mean that putative or alleged violators have disappeared. The targets have merely changed and the goal posts moved. Which is to say that in any study of blasphemy, profaneness, unbelief, or sacrilege, the scholar has to be discerning and, because religion in some form or other is usually a target, has to at least provisionally determine what is religious and what is not.

The readiest location in which to find the alternative to conventionally studied religion in pluralist societies is not the established sanctuaries but different kinds of public gathering, witness, testimony, and celebration. The most obvious and most obviously powerful among these appear in what Robert Bellah and whole schools of political scientists, sociologists, and theologians have called civil religion (see especially Bellah, Civil Religion in America, Daedalus 96, no. 1 [1967]: 1–21). Such an entity, evident in Muslim-majority states as well as secular democracies, is at home in countries such as the United States, which disestablished religion centuries ago, substituting for it the veneration of the people and its national symbols.

To observe examples of all this, students of this subject have to make at least tentative and preliminary stabs at defining religion and locating where its power resides in the present and the past century. To see in the previous century how instant, efficient, and radical was the censorship of those who were viewed as violating the sanctity of a nation, a race, or a culture, one need only consider Fascism, Nazism, Communism, or other repressive forms of government. In the past century, millions were imprisoned or executed for their blasphemy against such sacralized political movements. Irreverence directed at the swastika, the fasces, the hammer and sickle, the red star, or the crescent has been the beleaguered object of our modern inquisitors and imprisoners.

Today the civil definition of the sacred is most assiduously and self-consciously analyzed in what Marshall Hodgson, in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), calls Islamdom. Salmon Rushdie and other targets of Muslim outrage make unsurprising appearances on the pages devoted to Muslim-majority states. Drawing on historic texts, especially the Qurʼan, Muslim governments or movements make daily news because of their intolerance for obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy. Violators of the norms of community, be they legal or cultural, know that they invite death when they bring their causes to the open field known as the public. Ebrahim Moosa (chapter 6) and Ron E. Hassner (chapter 7) chronicle this well in the succeeding pages.

In the introduction, the editors observe how their subject has reemerged from the shadows and is now the object of lively global media attention. Some of the awakened interest in blasphemy occurred because historians in the West, who had long regarded secularization as the dominant paradigm, had to reconsider their working assumptions. They had been neglecting the religious voices all along. But then came events that provoked more considered responses. An illustration: In 1988, when I was charged to colead a six-year, five-volume study of militant fundamentalisms in the various religions, my colleague R. Scott Appleby and I monitored differing understandings of religion in various cultures. Fresh in our minds were the American military and governmental leaders who did not know what to make of the lethal potential of some movements behind the 1979 Iranian revolution. When we asked military, political, and intelligence leaders how that revolution, which helped to unseat the James Carter administration and embarrassed the United States, had surprised American officials, we encountered various responses, including the argument that the leaders had routinely overlooked religious elements in Muslim-majority states and movements. The United States, we heard from the apologists, knew much about Iranian education, business, military affairs, music, and more. To paraphrase the thrust of the feeble explanations for intelligence failures, the only thing we paid no attention to was religion, because everyone knows that religion has no power in the modern world.

Several years later, Appleby returned from domestic and world travels with word that the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, which had once virtually ignored religion, had now gotten it. The reawakening of strong religions, the tragedy called 9–11, and the events that headlines cover daily have brought religion, including that which opposes blasphemy, profaneness, and sacrilege, unequivocally to the fore. Certainly the place of religion in governmental, diplomatic, and military affairs assures that its study will remain urgent for an indefinite future.

My reading led me to approach this book for the light it throws on grand and often ominous movements of our time. That is where its findings and proposals will likely have the greatest impact. But I have to confess that as I read, I found another reason to encourage others to do the same: that is, for the way that the people about whom the authors write generate genuine curiosity and enjoyment in learning. For sixty years I have generally devoted my attention to mostly settled-down, orthodox, staid, and spent or half-spent religious sects, cults, denominations, and movements. For me, dealing with unbelievers, blasphemers, and profaners has produced few dull moments. But I cannot assume that those who have less reason to write or read the history of religious movements share that spirit. Let me invite them, then, simply to notice how often, from ancient times to postmodern ones, it is the heretics, the unbelievers, and the blasphemers who make the religious story come alive. They may do so simply by giving expression to aspects of human aggression. The blasphemer may attack one sacred front, then, when it wanes, move on to another. This is in the spirit of John Dewey’s trenchant observation that people do not shoot at targets because they are there. They set up targets to make the act of shooting more meaningful.

On the other hand, sometimes the satirist acts in a spirit of vocation and hope. The poet W. H. Auden observed that while the comic may be a pessimist—think of gallows humor, for example—the satirist (see chapter 3) is a kind of optimist (Auden, introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Byron [New York: New American Library, 1966]). He thinks that by poking desperate fun at the pretentious or the self-assured holders of power, he might persuade them to reconsider their place and/or be toppled. A cartoonist friend of mine suggested that being a satirist was a cherishable and enviable profession. He said, I get up every day knowing that I am professionally called to be an equal-opportunity assailant, taking on people on both sides of every polarizing issue. In the period when my work focused on the infidel, I could not help but notice how much more fun the Mark Twains and Voltaires had than did their sober and contented clerical targets.

Thus, the authors of the following chapters regularly demonstrate that they are having a good time grappling with the charmingly obstreperous, emphatically fallible, and often outrageously imaginative characters who have so nettled people in power and provided fresh openings for thought about the most pressing, philosophically rich, and often downright entertaining issues of earlier times, as well as our own.

Introduction

On the Modern Confluence of Blasphemy, Free Expression, and Hate Speech

CHRISTOPHER S. GRENDA, CHRIS BENEKE, AND DAVID NASH

A minor legal revolution occurred in 2008. That year, the United Kingdom decriminalized blasphemy as a common-law offence.¹ Though little debate preceded the move, which passed as a minor amendment to a broader bill for combating crime and disorder, this was no exercise in symbolism. Just a few years earlier, a parliamentary committee had affirmed blasphemy as an offense of strict liability, meaning that the intent of the accused was not relevant for prosecution.² An English newspaper editor was successfully prosecuted under this standard near the end of the 1970s, and in 1996 the British government surprised a filmmaker by censoring his film for blasphemous content. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld both decisions.³ Thus, with the passage of the 2008 statute, a long epoch of blasphemy prosecution appeared to have ended.

Yet concerns over contemptuous and disparaging speech—especially about religion—have proved more vexed and intractable than earlier observers could have anticipated. An ostensible relic of bygone eras, blasphemy has reemerged as an explosive transnational phenomenon. Violent reactions to the low-budget American film trailer The Innocence of Muslims and to Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, the indictment of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his cinematic critique of Islam, and a spate of blasphemy-related murders in Pakistan and Syria have refocused world attention on the legitimate scope of free expression in religious matters. While the Islamic world has been the scene of the most conspicuous eruptions, tensions between critical expression and religious incitement smolder across the globe. European and Australian legislation against disparaging religion or ridiculing religious persons and a United States–backed United Nations resolution against hostility toward religious believers underscore the world’s fractured understandings of both the sacred and the sacrilegious.

Humans have been uttering profane words—and punishing them—for millennia. But these recent incidents signal uniquely modern currents rippling across the contemporary world.

The U.K. story is a case in point. Amid the uproar over the Danish cartoons, Parliament unwittingly took a step toward the abolition of blasphemy prosecution by legislating against a new form of offensive speech. The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalized incitement to religious hatred, defined as stirring up hatred against persons on religious grounds.⁴ In enacting this new law, Parliament commenced a movement from the criminalization of older offenses of blasphemy (contempt of deity) and sacrilege (disparagement of religion) to prohibitions on the newer offense of religious hatred (inciting hostility or violence against religious persons).⁵ The transition was not completed until the abolition of the Common Law of Blasphemous Libel in 2008, which capped a process fraught with lingering unease about the abolition of blasphemy restrictions.

Other Western democracies have similarly shifted their approach to profane expression. In the decades after World War II, many formerly Christian countries replaced or revised blasphemy laws protecting established churches and prescribed beliefs with laws protecting the religious beliefs of all citizens, or hate speech legislation protecting religious believers or persons. The German criminal code includes both types of provisions, one protecting all religions against insult and another protecting religious persons against hatred and assaults on their dignity.⁶ Austria’s penal code prohibits the disparaging of religious precepts.⁷ Ireland’s Defamation Act of 2009 criminalizes blasphemous matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion.⁸

The enactment of these European strictures has coincided with broader transnational efforts to shield Islam from criticism.⁹ Since 1999, the fifty-seven-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has sought a United Nations resolution criminalizing hatred against religious believers and protecting religion by defining the defamation of religions as a human rights violation.¹⁰ To date, liberal proponents of free speech have successfully blocked its adoption. A revised 2011 resolution veered closer to the contemporary European legal formulas that seek to protect religious persons, prohibiting discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief. As a consequence, the latest OIC effort has drawn significant support from both Europe and the United States.¹¹

There are substantive differences between the way that secular European regimes approach irreverent speech and the way that Muslim-majority countries approach it. Whereas Muslim-majority regimes protect the established faith of the state, contemporary democratic regulations tend to protect a broad range of religions or their adherents. Punishments also diverge. Western and Western-inspired democracies generally rely on the deterrent effects of fines, probation, or suspended sentences (with a criminal record), while blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority states prescribe imprisonment, corporal punishment, and even execution.¹² Iran’s penal code from 1991 states that "anyone who insults the Islamic sanctities or any of the imams . . . should be executed if his insult equals to speaking disparagingly of Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise, should be imprisoned from one to five years."¹³ Pakistan’s relevant criminal code, developed in the 1980s, similarly protects Islamic sanctities with penalties for blasphemy that include long imprisonment and capital punishment.¹⁴ Sudan’s 1991 criminal code guards both religion and religious believers, punishing insults against religion or expressions of contempt for adherents with imprisonment, fines, and flogging. The code also prescribes death for apostasy from Islam.¹⁵

Yet these stark legal fault lines obscure something more fundamental and more tenacious in human affairs: a nearly universal substratum of esteem for singularly venerated and inviolable things. Across regions of the globe, religious cultures, and regime types, societies invariably single out privileged aspects of social life for unique recognition and protection against profanation. These sacred objects range from dominant religions (in, e.g., Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan) through sanctities more generally (in, e.g., Ireland, Austria, and Germany) to the personal dignity of religious believers (in, e.g., the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada) and sensibilities concerning national symbols (in, e.g., the United States).

Whatever the objects protected, most societies strive to manage the social effects of derisive expression. The means of identifying offenders are often similar as well. Wherever they exist, restrictions paint irreverent speech in broad, imprecise strokes. Vague concepts such as insult, offense, ridicule, contempt, hostility, disparagement, and incitement generate captious legal formulas with the potential to entrap activists, artists, dissidents, writers, populists, and even the occasional social media malcontent, whether they intended to blaspheme or not.

The improbable modern convergence of speech regulation is crystallized in the widespread invocation of defamation. Its traditional meaning in democratic societies focuses on individual persons. Civil prosecution of defamation penalizes expression only when it is shown to harm a person’s reputation and livelihood. Many thus view the campaign by the OIC and others to criminalize the defamation of religions as an attempt to change the meaning of the concept. Yet as Robert A. Yelle indicates (chapter 5), the personally affective way many Muslims identify with the Prophet Mohammed may predispose them to view derogatory speech about the religious figure as violating their persons, a verbal form of attack. Elizabeth Burns Coleman suggests a correspondingly symbiotic relationship between beliefs and person among some Aboriginal Australians (chapter 9).

The conviction that defamation should extend beyond matters of personal reputation and livelihood to encompass communal esteem, as Jeroen Temperman points out (chapter 10), poses serious practical and legal challenges for liberal regimes premised on free speech.¹⁶ Whatever its impact, advocates of an encompassing conception of defamation remind us that religious persons may not be as easily abstracted from religious belief as secular advocates of censorship suggest.¹⁷ As the ECHR declared in 2005, believers may legitimately feel themselves to be the object of unwarranted and offensive attacks when their beliefs are insulted.¹⁸ On this view, religious identity—what makes individuals religious persons—is nearly always entwined with belief. That tends to distinguish it from racial and ethnic identity.¹⁹ But the fact that it is relatively independent of physiology or skin color does not make religious identity less constitutive of a person’s sense of self or, as the ECHR suggests, less deserving of protection from public ridicule or disparagement.²⁰

These fine distinctions make the criminalization of religious hate speech a delicate endeavor in liberal democracies. The relatively mild speech restrictions enacted in the Canadian province of Manitoba illustrate the challenge intrinsic to distinguishing religious beliefs from the people who hold them. Prohibiting the publication of a libel against a race, religious creed or sexual orientation, Manitoba’s criminal code Section 19(1) seemingly protects religion (rather than religious persons). Yet the provision describes the prohibited libel as that which is likely to expose persons belonging to the race, professing the religious creed, or having the sexual orientation to hatred, contempt or ridicule.²¹ Like speech codes in other Western states, Manitoba’s statute makes provision for irreverent expression about religion and seems to prohibit only verbal hostility against the persons of religious believers.²² However, the law curtails expression about religion that is likely to expose religious believers to hatred or ridicule without specifying the nature of the exposure (the degree of imminence and proximity) or its extent (the degree of intensity and persistence) and without identifying how and when ridicule of religion becomes ridicule of the religious person. We have here more an allusion to a distinction than a clarification of it, requiring future definition by government prosecutors, judges, and regulators, often in the heat of prosecution itself.

The Manitoba law’s imprecise formulation reflects its complex purpose, which is to shield vulnerable groups by criminalizing vile and inciting speech without endangering free expression. Balancing both aims by distinguishing criminal expression from noncriminal expression is a difficult task. Australia has encountered a similar conundrum. The state of Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act of 2001 singles out persons for special protection in prohibiting a statement about religious belief or activity that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of religious adherents.²³ The issue there is not simply how and when ridicule of belief incites ridicule or hatred of believers but subtle degrees of expression, namely when seemingly permissible expressions of contempt or ridicule become severe contempt and serious ridicule, which are criminal. Sensing these difficulties, the chief executive of the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria attempted to clarify the law as prohibiting ad hominem vilification but not offense.²⁴ But if ad hominem vilification resulted in demonstrable harm, it would amount to standard defamation and thus not require the 2001 legislation.

The legal and ethical quandaries arising in Manitoba and Victoria resonate in liberal, diversity-friendly democracies across the globe. Exactly when does expression become criminal? When do spirited, open debate and criticism reach such a degree of derision and incitement as to require criminalization? Who should adjudicate when strong disagreement is interpreted as contempt? Are liberal states equipped to craft definitive legal answers to these questions? And then we confront the problem whose urgency has become evident over the past quarter century: what happens when such judgments about expression are made across national and cultural boundaries?

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF BLASPHEMY

In 1988, the Western world received the first intimation that blasphemy might be revived in new, harrowingly transnational form. That was the year Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a whimsical and determinedly impudent rewriting of core Qurʼanic themes, touched off a cultural and political firestorm.²⁵ The novel, Rushdie explained, addresses Islam’s revelation from the point of view of a secular person.²⁶ By the time he published it, he had already acquired widespread renown in the English-speaking world for literary and political irreverence. The Satanic Verses had a truly global impact, marking the rise of profanation as a conspicuous international phenomenon.

Neither moderate nor conservative Muslims were amused. Islamic authorities regarded The Satanic Verses as derogatory for a number of reasons, including its substitution of Mahound for the name of Islam’s holiest prophet and Jahilia for its holy city of Mecca. Brash threats and occasional violence ensued. Five months after the book’s publication, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for all zealous Muslims to execute Rushdie, a resident of London, along with all publishers who were aware of its contents.²⁷ The British Muslim Action Front simultaneously called for Rushdie’s prosecution under England’s existing law of blasphemous libel. However, because English law protected only the Church of England and its version of Anglican Christianity (as the church established by law), Rushdie was immune from prosecution in the United Kingdom.²⁸

As a secular, left-leaning British author who was born in India and raised a Muslim, Rushdie embodied a new era, in which relatively isolated worlds of speech regulation and heightened religious sensibilities made increasingly regular and uneasy contact. One source of this change is technological. Electronic media now transmit offense as rapidly as image and text—nearly as fast, in other words, as profane words are uttered. Objects of religious indignation and offense can be distributed, recontextualized, and summoned at the click of a mouse.

The global flood of electronic media has occurred in conjunction with a worldwide renaissance of religion and religious politics in the past half century, a phenomenon that Peter Berger calls the desecularization of the world.²⁹ Despite regular forecasts of its demise, faith thrived in many regions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. More importantly, devotedly literalist and proselytizing forms of faith flourished. This was true among America’s Christian evangelicals as well as in northern Africa and southern Asia, where an energized postcolonial generation of Muslim activists rejected Western secularism in favor of religiously informed political movements and religious nationalism.³⁰ In some cases, such as Iran, the religious dimension was explicitly revolutionary. In others, such as Pakistan, it was grafted on to the older postwar secular state.³¹ Though such religious movements promised a return to undefiled beginnings, as the overextended term fundamentalism suggests, their ideologies often proved culturally innovative and politically fecund. In many instances, they ended up tethered to authoritarian regimes that criminalized expression critical of both religious sanctities and political authorities.³² These movements have not always been without humor, and many have proved commercially savvy, but they are generally less inclined than their languishing liberal counterparts to accommodate the twenty-first-century onslaught of digitally paced ridicule and raillery.

Adding to the disruption that the cascading rush of electronic media and religious politics caused was the ethnic and religious diversification of the world’s democracies. Vigorous multinational migration has provided the demographic foundation for a thorough transformation of diversity’s value and social function. Both secular and religious variants of multiculturalism gained traction, especially in Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and India.³³ As multiculturalists and new minorities challenged entrenched commitments to nationalism and individual-rights liberalism, they also fostered emphatic expressions of identity difference.³⁴ Public spaces that had been relatively homogenous became sites for the assertion of religious and ethnic distinctness.

While spirited defenses of cultural assimilation and the priority of national identity have been common in Europe and America over the past few decades—and bouts of xenophobia hardly unknown—modern rights-protecting states have largely responded to the new social realities by accommodating diversity, especially religious diversity, through policies of social recognition and cultural tolerance.³⁵ One consequence has been the replacement of blasphemy laws premised on the sacred character of a specific religion with prohibitions on the disparaging of all religions and/or hate speech legislation premised on the dignity of persons as members of religious groups. In the wake of the Rushdie affair, Britons debated whether the offense of blasphemy should be retained, repealed, or extended to protect all U.K. religions equally rather than just the established church. An interfaith group of English religious leaders belonging to the World Conference on Religion and Peace issued a statement advocating equal treatment in our multi-cultural society by extending the blasphemy law so that all minority religions will be fully protected.³⁶ Likewise, in 2002, the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony petitioned Parliament to extend existing religious offences (notably blasphemy) laws to all major faiths practiced in the United Kingdom so as to promote better understanding in our multi-cultural and multi-faith society.³⁷ The logic behind the proposed expansion of England’s blasphemy law was mainly secular (criminalizing inciting irreverence) and multicultural (equally protecting the beliefs of all adherents, native and immigrant). The denouement came when Parliament criminalized incitement to religious hatred against any group, in 2006, and then, two years later, abolished its blasphemy law.

The coincidence of digitally accelerated technological change, surging religious politics, and Western multiculturalism has laid the groundwork for a reconsideration of freedom—and its appropriate limits—in Western democracies. Early modern demands for liberty of conscience sought to limit state powers in religious matters, especially the government’s capacity to impose religious uniformity. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for example, forbids Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin famously termed it, presumed a high degree of individual autonomy and what Christopher S. Grenda calls thick-skinned tolerance (see chapter 1).³⁸ The implications of such rights, the products of countless travails, were that (1) individuals were free to express political and religious opinions and (2) those who objected would not respond with violence. In other words, conceiving religious liberty in negative terms has usually implied the toleration of unwelcome speech about religion.

The concurrent postwar development of multicultural and authoritarian movements has resulted in a two-sided offensive against this negative liberal doctrine of free speech, now often criticized as insufficiently attentive to cultural differences. Recent moves to restrict blasphemy derive from a positive conception of liberty.³⁹ In contrast to negative liberty, positive liberty sanctions state efforts to support a hospitable social environment for the maintenance of identities and exercise of beliefs, which may be enhanced by limiting certain kinds of critical expression.⁴⁰ This perspective informed a 2008 report of the European Commission for Democracy through Law that examined regulations throughout Europe. Its title, Analysis of the Domestic Law Concerning Blasphemy, Religious Insult and Inciting Religious Hatred, points to the proximity of blasphemy and hate speech restrictions. Citing the Austrian penal code, which prohibits the disparaging of religious precepts, the commission explained the constitutional freedom of religion by taking it as both a positive and a negative right vis-à-vis the state. The positive aspect of the freedom leads to a constitutional obligation to protect religious feelings in order to guarantee religious peace.⁴¹ Roughly a decade earlier, the ECHR, referencing Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, made a similar point more succinctly: The manner in which religious beliefs and doctrines are opposed or denied is a matter which may engage the responsibility of the State.⁴²

These multicultural restrictions on expression, and the more positive conceptions of liberty accompanying them, have resulted in the occasional confluence of efforts by democracies to protect minority groups within their borders and efforts by authoritarian societies to limit criticism and curtail minority rights within theirs. What both enterprises share is a presumption that dignity is inseparable from respectful characterizations of groups and nations, which satire, derisive rhetoric, denigrating images, and other forms of critical expression threaten.⁴³ As the secretary general of the OIC explained in 2012, Freedom of speech is one thing, but usage of your freedom should not be to offend others or advocate hate speech or provoke to violence.⁴⁴ To be sure, democratic efforts often seek to protect minority identities rather than a hegemonic religion and thus are distinguishable from traditional and authoritarian blasphemy laws in fundamental ways. Yet being democratic, such efforts still require majoritarian authority for legal enactment and/or the status of a majoritarian social norm to be effective, what John Stuart Mill called the ascendancy of public opinion.⁴⁵

THE SCHOLARSHIP ON SACRILEGIOUS EXPRESSION

Until recently, scholarly discussions of blasphemy and the censoring impulses that motivate it have tended to treat these phenomena as curious vestiges of a remote past, moldy legal constructions that have outlived their ideological infrastructure. In the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, for example, the American scholar Leonard W. Levy expanded an earlier and less ambitious history⁴⁶ into a much larger and widely cited volume, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). The latter examines cases of verbal offense from ancient origins through the modern English-speaking West, concluding with Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and the pluralist question of the day, Should all religions be protected or none?⁴⁷ Yet even in exploring contemporaneous authoritarian and multicultural interests in blasphemy regulations, Levy presented blasphemy as a relic of a distinctly traditional and predominantly Christian practice. He thus offered a hopeful forecast of blasphemy’s ultimate demise.⁴⁸ His contemporaries saw matters progressing along similar lines. While some employed newer methodologies to explore the social texture of blasphemy as a practice structuring community life, they also tended to treat it as the residue of an outdated and parochial world view.⁴⁹

Scholarship since the turn of the millennium has evinced an awareness that blasphemy can no longer be understood primarily as the fading pulse of Christian medievalism. Instead, human aversion to the sacrilegious seems more and more like a durable palimpsest on which many different kinds of culturally specific needs are inscribed. It reflects both deep individual longings and tireless collective desires to protect the sacred and restrict expression that threatens it. Different cultural traditions—and different eras within traditions—yield alternately robust and retiring approaches to speech restriction. Yet over time and across cultures we can discern historical patterns in the formation and application of blasphemy laws as repeated efforts are made to mark off sacred and inviolable realms of life for special recognition and protection.

By almost all accounts, we are living through an especially restive era of both irreverent expression and speech regulation. Paul Marshall and Nina Shea have not only examined the severe penalties inflicted on those who have defiled Islamic sanctities in countries such as Pakistan and Iran but also explored how the European Commission on Human Rights and the ECHR have punished authors and censored their works in order to protect human rights—namely, ‘the right of citizens not to be offended in their religious feelings.’⁵⁰ David Nash has suggested that the blasphemy industry is poised for significant growth and notes the prodigious human capacity to offend and incite.⁵¹ Scholars, however, do not agree on the value of unrestricted speech. In fact, the philosopher Elizabeth Burns Coleman and the sociologist Kevin White argue that blasphemy regulations foster an inclusive pluralism in multicultural Australia. They conceive of laws against defamation as secular instruments for recognizing and sheltering the diversity of sacred perceptions, that is, for protecting difference.⁵²

Profane enters these churning cultural and legal waters by treating blasphemy as a constituent feature of modernity—not an aberration from it—just as it was a constituent feature of earlier forms of social organization. The volume’s tripart structure points to the multifaceted relationship between blasphemy and modernity, which cuts across time and space and thus resists reduction to a problem unique to any particular culture, religion, or geopolitical region.

Part 1 investigates struggles to create space for sacrilegious expression in Western culture and society. Christopher S. Grenda opens the section by examining conflicts over religion-related expression in early modern Europe and North America. His chapter suggests that the Enlightenment’s great iconoclasts, such as David Hume, along with its orthodox Christian exponents, such as John Witherspoon, developed modern conceptions of toleration by turning satire into an agent of religious tolerance. Of course, much Enlightenment sacrilege appears tame by today’s standards. In their chapters on modern sacrilege, Jacques Berlinerblau and David Lawton chart the self-consciously provocative nuances of late twentieth- and early twentieth-century artistic expression. Both draw attention to the audience-dependent character of sacrilege. Exploring the exuberant obscenity of Philip Roth’s fiction, Berlinerblau contends that the author’s brilliant and irreverent tales unleashed a cycle of incendiary responses that demonstrate how frictions between profane authors and outraged audiences generate creativity. Lawton posits a similarly productive dynamic between producers and consumers of profane images. Modern visual art, he concludes, demands that viewers engage the feelings of disorientation and offense that blasphemy provokes. Like Grenda and Berlinerblau, Lawton illuminates the paradoxes surrounding conflicts over expression in Western societies committed to freedom of conscience and free speech. Collectively, the three authors make the case for blasphemous expression, though not simply by recourse to a liberal doctrine of free speech. Rather, they suggest that expression’s disruptive power has the capacity to undermine, transform, and constructively engage cultural forms and institutions that have grown rigid with time.

Part 2 focuses on the United States as the world’s first modern democracy with a rights-laden secular constitution and a vibrant religious culture. It is presented here not as a beacon of liberal free speech but as a democratic nation beset by persistent conflicts over religion-related expression. Paul Finkelman’s chapter offers a case study of the sometimes unsettling ways that democratic norms and liberal values are reconciled with religious speech restrictions. Charges of sacrilege, Finkelman contends, cannot be reduced to controversies over religious belief. Rather, as the early nineteenth-century case of the famed