Islam and the freedom of expression

One of the main criticisms of Islam and the Shari ‘a in the West is that Islam is undemocratic, which is fundamentally untrue; democracy is the will of the majority (or the rule by the populous), ergo if Islam is chosen by the majority as the means of governance then it is democratic. The other objection is that Islam represses the freedom of expression, which is true enough, Islam does. Yet this is hardly extraordinary.

The freedom of expression is not an inalienable, universal or moral right, it is a philosophical concept within jurisprudence; the very concept of legal rights exists only in jurisprudence; and all moral rights are abstract legal rights. This might rattle a few Americans, but nevertheless it is an important philosophical point: rights are not universal unless the corpus juris (body of law) is universal. Universalism is dependent upon the concept of a God viz., a supreme moral being. Without, some universal basis to morality, the ethos of a particular society may or may not be transferable but would not be universal, unless universally and necessarily accepted by every society.

If this were the case then every society would have already adopted them, for they could not have established any alternative ethos. Yet this is clearly not so. Therefore, there are no such things as inalienable rights without the existence of God. If one accepts the existence of God, then one can talk of inalienable rights as a matter of theodicy: yet, in which case one would have expected them to be known a priori or to have been revealed. Again as this is not the case, so it is rather strange that anyone could claim that these are divine rights.

Thus rights, such as the freedom of expression are civil rights ergo they only pertain to a particular civil society at a particular point in time. So when we look at the freedom of expression, as a concept of jurisprudence, we can ask ourselves is it ever right to suppress the freedom of expression? No civil society that I am aware of has ever existed that does seek to suppress the freedom of expression to some degree. Thus the freedom of expression is at best the freedom to do anything that one so desires, so long as it does not harm or impede anybody else’s liberty. The question here is harm: we are free to express any view (like Galileo) unless (like Galileo) we are deemed do harm; then we are not allowed to express ourselves at all. The sum of which is that the freedom of expression is the freedom to say anything the law allows you to say.

In the US the freedom of expression is intrinsically linked to the freedom of the press, a right that is superseded by treason, libel, obscenity and national interest. Constitutional freedoms are a matter for civil society, in the UK freedom of speech is even more curtailed; the Government will slap a D notice on anything it thinks it can get away with. The UK libel laws are the most pernicious in the West if not the World, yet until the Mac-libel case, a defendant did not receive public funding in libel cases. Also, in both the US and the UK there are pernicious anti-vilification and anti-incitement laws. These are major infringements on freedom of expression.

It is frankly ludicrous to think that there is freedom of expression in any country; the reality is that every country has varying degrees of freedom of expression that pertain to the civil society; it is also rarely the case that one nation’s freedoms are greater or lesser than another’s; it is better to say that they are different. For example the US has the most restrictive patent laws in the World that is a major restriction on the freedom of expression. Potentially the most oppressive restrictions on the freedom of expression are the anti-terror laws: acts preparatory to terrorism, indirect incitement and conspiracy.

It is necessary for every civil society to reflect upon freedom of expression, the fact that nations change in character and composition only reinforces this. In the US and France, which are both legally secular states, blasphemy laws are an anathema, however in the UK where blasphemy, sedition and libel are very much part of the statute books: in fact restrictions on the freedom of expression account for more statues than property (or so the rumour goes – I doubt anyone has actually counted). Yet I very much doubt in the US or France that one could indulge in a bit of iconoclasm in a Catholic Church or desecrate the Bible in a Lutheran Church without being arrested.