Religion and free speech: it’s complicated

For centuries, free speech and religion have been cast as opponents. Index looks at the complicated relationship between religion and free speech

Islam blasphemy riots now self-fulfilling prophecy

The protests against controversial film “Innocence of the Muslims” follow a pattern familiar since the days of the Satanic Verses fatwa, says James Kirchick. And so do the reactions of many western liberals

Film protests about much more than religion

Reducing the backlash over “The Innocence of Muslims” to a hysterical reaction to blasphemy ignores deep unease at the US’s role in the Arab world, says Myriam Francois-Cerrah

We need to talk about Islam

Fearing extremists reacting violently to the publication of books deemed to be offensive to Islam, many publishers have thought twice about what they release about the religion. Author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook Alom Shaha says it’s time to discuss faith properly

France, Charlie Hebdo and the meaning of Mohammed

Muslim defensiveness over taboo images is special pleading designed to shut down criticism, says Sara Yasin

Crazy Muslims. Like many Muslim-Americans, I have spent much of the past decade trying to distance myself from a crescendo of rubble, suicide bombings and shouts of “Allahu Akbar”.

After hearing about the petrol-bombing of the office of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, that featured a cartoon of prophet Muhammad in today’s issue, I had flashbacks to the Jyllands Posten furore. I could hear pitchforks being sharpened, and on the other hand, the “average” Muslims preparing the standard “this is not our religion” speech. Both reactions are problematic.

While condemning the violent reactions of other Muslims around the globe, many still frowned upon publishing the cartoons, and Danish Muslim rights groups were able to wrangle an apology from the Jyllands Posten, for having “undeniably offended” Muslims around the world. Carsten Juste, the editor-in-chief at the time, denied the view that the cartoons were a “part of a hate campaign against Muslims” as many critics argued.

Some of the trendy reactions in the Muslim community seemed to push for limiting free speech in the name of “responsibility”. Nadeem Kazmi, who was a representative for an Islamic organisation called Al-Khoei Foundation, said that while he embraces freedom of expression, he believes that “freedom comes with responsibility”, and calls for a more “legitimate” form of debate. Dr Yunes Teinaz, spokesman for the London Mosque expressed a similar sentiment, and said that “freedom of expression is not a license to attack a culture or religion.”

The incident sparked a global debate on whether or not images of Muhammad should be published. The fear of the offended Muslim, burning flags and brandishing petrol bombs became a reason for many publishers and writers to avoid controversy.

A great example of this is the 2008 publication of the Jewel of Medina, a fictionalised account of the life of Aisha, one of prophet Muhammad’s wives. Initially, the novel by Sherry Jones was set to be published by Random House, but the major publishing house decided to pull out, in fear of controversy. Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship, wrote that the decision showed “how far we have lost our way in this debate over free expression and Islam,” and I would have to agree. Fear is hardly a reason to avoid publishing a book in a free society.

In self-fulfilling prophecy, the home of the London-based publisher who decided to publish the novel was firebombed, and as a result the crazy Muslim took centre stage once again, overshadowing some of the conversations surrounding the book, such as charges that the book was riddled with historical inaccuracies, or I don’t know — whether or not the book was actually good.

Begging the world to play nice is not really a solution as much as it is a defence mechanism. Let’s face it: what many Muslims are really asking for is the right to be offended, which is an entirely different conversation.

As an amalgamation of Palestinian, Muslim, and American identities, I know how blurred the lines between culture and religion really are. A religion that is over 1,000 years old hardly exists in a vacuum, and so it is not the exclusive right of Muslims to critique the religion. While I have spent much of my life entrenched in a fight against the rantings of Jihad-watch type cowboys, in efforts to change the “Clash of Civilisations” narrative, I still think that such individuals have a right to share their opinion. No one group should set the rules for criticism. Conflating taboo with hatred sets a dangerous precedent, and silence in the name of avoiding offence is not a step in the right direction.

Censorship only serves as an indicator of a bigger problem: a fear of the savage and angry Muslim, which does not serve to challenge stereotypes or animosity towards Muslims. While the right to debate and the right to be offended are both valid, this does not mean that we should shy away from criticism, no matter what form that may take.

Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index on Censorship and a regular contributor to Muslimah Media Watch

The Charlie Hebdo bombing exposes a gulf in understanding between the secular French establishments and Muslim immigrants, says Myriam Francois-Cerrah

The firebombing of Charlie Hebdo offices following its decision to run an edition featuring the prophet Mohammed as “guest editor”, is a sad reflection of France’s uneasy relationship to Islam and religion more generally.Sadly, there are some who do not believe that Charlie Hebdo should have the right to publish a satirical issue, in which it presents Prophet Mohamed as the inspiration of the Arab revolutions and subsequent rise of islamist parties in the region (regardless of the accuracy of this link!). They are no doubt in a minority, just as those who committed this crime will no doubt be revealed to be a fringe group or renegade individuals.

But there is no denying the fact many Muslims are offended by the decision to run an issue entitled “Charia Hebdo”, with reference to “100 lashings if you don’t die of laughter” (chuckle) and a “halal aperitif” (ha!) and perhaps more pertinently, to run images of Prophet Mohammed.

Charlie Hebdo is renowned for being a highly satirical outlet which pushes the limits of public discourse on any given issue through its provocative illustrations and irreverent style. It has in its time, been accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and now Islamophobic to boot and would no doubt parade these accusations as badges of honour.

However the recent issue comes at a complex time in France’s political life. The far right has made large advances, gaining 15 per cent of the vote in recent regional elections and they have maintained the “immigration question” near the top of the political agenda, drawing parallels between Muslims praying in the street and the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, recent stats suggest that amongst the descendants of immigrants, 70 per cent, compared with 35 per cent amongst recent immigrants, consider that the French government does not respect them, including amongst those possessing university degrees and thus in theory, more “integrated” into the social fabric.

French Arabs face unemployment at a rate of 14 per cent compared with 9.2 per cent amongst people of French origin — even after adjusting for educational qualifications and are poorly represented at every level. Charlie Hebdo’s decision to poke fun at Islam, although completely inline with its treatment of other issues, comes at a time of intense polemics over the place of Islam within France, as debates over “laicite” galvanise the political spectrum.

Many Muslims appear to feel under siege in a political climate which continues to view Islam as an impediment to full adhesion to French national identity and where religious practise is associated with a social malaise. Indeed, a recent report by the French academic Gilles Kepel has reignited debate over the role Islam plays in the perpetuation of disenfranchisement in the suburbs, where Muslims are over-represented.

Some in France have sought to blame Islam for the high levels of unemployment, underachievement, violence and marginalisation in France’s ghettoised suburbs, while others have protested the Islamification of the discourse on the suburbs, decrying the use of confused and loaded terminology to overlook substantial economic and social problems in these areas. In France, with or without the caricatures, Islam is a sore topic with many recent polemics related to Islamic practises, whether the face veil debate, street prayers or the building of new mosques.

French Muslims are regularly told — even by the President — that you either “love France or you leave her”, reinforcing their status as outsiders, and a right-wing discourse which promotes ridiculous predictions of a Muslim take over of Europe through high birth rates and proselytising, is gaining ground. Christopher Caldwell, a contributor to the Financial Times recently published an inflammatory book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West which has gained widespread media coverage, including on mainstream French TV, with its thesis that Europe is doomed in the face of a Islamic cultural invasion. In this context, marked by fear of Islam’s alleged resurgence, intractability and incompatibility with “French culture”, as well as the inability of many French Muslims to present an alternative perspective on an equal platform, are the seeds of profound social malaise.

Satire of religion has a long history in France and Christians are not exempt from what some groups have deemed insensitive and injurious portrayals of sacred persons or ideas. Since its launch on 20 October, Christian groups have regularly interrupted the Paris based theatrical production of “On the concept of the face of the son of God” (Sur le concept du visage du fils de Dieu) for its perceived blasphemy and “Christianophobia”.

The play features an elderly man defecating on stage and his son coming to clean his back side, using the portrait of Jesus. The excrement collected is then used at the end of the play by children as missiles to be thrown at the portrait of Christ, whilst at the end of the production, a black veil of excrement glides down the portrait of Jesus. In April this year, an art exhibit entitled Piss Christ, featuring a crucifix immersed in a glass containing blood and urine was vandalised by Christians outraged by the piece. Some religious groups have accused the arts and the media to resorting to crass provocations to raise the profile of otherwise mediocre artistic endeavours which might not have garnered public attention without the controversy.

Charlie Hebdo’s current confrontation with Islamic polemics is not its first. In 2008, it won a legal case against accusations of incitement to racial hatred when it chose to reprint the Danish cartoons, launched by the French Muslim Council (CFCM) and the Grand Mosque of Paris. Interviewed on recent events, Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the CFCM has both condemned the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the printing of the irreverent images.

Describing the decision to print images known to be offensive to Muslims as “hurtful” and questioning the association of the caricatures of Prophet Mohamed with events in Tunisia or Libya, he defended the right of those who opposed the decision to protest as well as the freedom of the press to print the said images and explained that in a plural society, people’s relationship to the sacred will necessarily vary.

The attack on the press outlet, Charlie Hebdo is symptomatic of the broader unease French society is facing in light of a growing visible Muslim minority. While successive generations of “French” origin are getting more secular in their outlook, with around 60 per cent of youths saying in 2008 that they had no religious belief, the pattern among the children of immigrants from north Africa, Sahel and Turkey is the opposite, as religion gains in importance, particularly among the young.

How France negotiates an inclusive public sphere in which the views of all its citizens, including those who abide by a religious tradition, are reflected remains a stark challenge. It is telling that Charlie Hebdo chose Mohammed as “guest editor”, rather than a contemporary figure who could express an accurate reflection of French Muslim opinion on current affairs — instead, it chose the route of ease, ascribing archaic and reactionary ideas to a sacred figure, his ideas rigidified and frozen in a literalist caricature, which although undoubtedly humorous in parts, is completely out of sync with how most Muslims understand Islam’s relationship to the modern context. This issue might be its best-selling; the real question though ought to be, is it its best?

Myram Francois-Cerrah is a writer, journalist and budding academic

Shadow of the fatwa

It is 22 years since Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against the author Salman Rushdie. The author’s critics lost The Satanic Verses battle but won the war against free speech, argues Kenan Malik

‘Shadow of the Fatwa’ first appeared in Index on Censorship, Volume 37, Number 4, 2008

The Satanic Verses was, Salman Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death”. It was also a satire on Islam, “a serious attempt”, in his words, “to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person”. For some that was unacceptable, turning the novel into “an inferior piece of hate literature” as the British-Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it.

Within a month, The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie’s native India, after protests from Islamic radicals. By the end of the year, protesters had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, in northern England. And then, on 14 February 1989, came the event that transformed the Rushdie affair — Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa.

“I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,” proclaimed Iran’s spiritual leader, “that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses — which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the prophet and the Quran — and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”

Thanks to the fatwa, the Rushdie affair became the most important free speech controversy of modern times. It also became a watershed in our attitudes to freedom of expression. Rushdie’s critics lost the battle — The Satanic Verses continues to be published. But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case — that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures — is now widely accepted.

In 1989, even a fatwa could not stop the continued publication of The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were assaulted and even murdered. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese professor of literature and translator of The Satanic Verses, was knifed to death on the campus of Tsukuba University.

That same month, another translator of Rushdie’s novel, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, was beaten up and stabbed in his Milan apartment. In October 1993, William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was shot three times and left for dead outside his home in Oslo. None of the assailants was ever caught. Bookshops in America and elsewhere were firebombed for stocking the novel. It was rumoured that staff at the Viking Penguin headquarters in New York were forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to Rushdie’s novel [see pp121---126].

Today, all it takes is a letter from an outraged academic to make publishers run for cover: earlier this year, Random House torpedoed the publication of a novel that it had bought for $100,000 for fear of setting off another Rushdie affair. Written by the American journalist Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina is a historical romance about Aisha, Mohammed’s youngest wife.

In April 2008, Random House sent galley proofs to writers and scholars, hoping for cover endorsements. One of those on the list was Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history and Middle East studies at the University of Texas. Jones had used Spellberg’s work as a source for her novel. Spellberg, however, condemned the book as “offensive”. She phoned an editor at Random House, Jane Garrett, to tell her that the book was “a declaration of war” and “a national security issue”.

Spellberg apparently claimed that The Jewel of Medina was “far more controversial than The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons”, that there was “a very real possibility” of “widespread violence” and that “the book should be withdrawn ASAP”. The American academic Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times, rejected the idea that the Random House decision to pull the novel amounted to censorship. It is only censorship, he suggested, when “it is the government that is criminalising expression” and when “the restrictions are blanket ones”. Random House was simply making a “judgment call”.

There is indeed a difference between a government silencing a writer with the threat of legal sanction or imprisonment and a publisher pulling out of a book deal. It is also true that other publishers picked up Jones’s novel, including Beaufort in America, and Gibson Square in Britain. But Fish misses the point about the changing character of censorship. The Random House decision is not a classical example of state censorship.

It is, however, an example of the way that free speech is becoming more restricted — without the need for such overt censorship. The directors of Random House had every right to take the decision they did. But the fact that they took that decision, and the reasons for which they did, says much about how attitudes to free speech have changed over the past 20 years. In the two decades between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the pulling of The Jewel of Medina the fatwa has effectively been internalised.

After Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’s agent tried other publishers. No major house was willing to take the risk. Nor is it just publishers that worry about causing offence. These days theatres savage plays, opera houses cut productions, art galleries censor shows, all in the name of cultural sensitivity.

“You would think twice, if you were honest,” said Ramin Gray, the associate director at London’s Royal Court Theatre, when asked if he would put on a play critical of Islam. “You’d have to take the play on its individual merits, but given the time we’re in, it’s very hard, because you’d worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully.”

In June 2007, the theatre cancelled a new adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, set in Muslim heaven, for fear of causing offence. Another London theatre, the Barbican, carved chunks out of its production of Tamburlaine the Great for the same reason, while Berlin’s Deutsche Oper cancelled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in 2006 because of its depiction of Mohammed.

That same year, London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening, ostensibly for “space constraints”, though the true reason appeared to be fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbours. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube art gallery suggested that such self-censorship by artists and museums was now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted [it]”.

Islam has not been alone in generating such censorship. In 2005, Britain’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre cancelled a production of Bezhti, a play by the young Sikh writer Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, that depicted sexual abuse and murder in a gurdwara. There had been protests from community activists who had organised demonstrations outside the theatre.

In the wake of those protests, Ian Jack, then editor of the literary magazine Granta, nailed his colours to the cause of artistic self-censorship; a necessity, he believed, in a plural society. “The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the prophet,” he wrote. “But I never expect to see such a picture.” An individual might have the abstract right to depict Mohammed, but the price of such freedom was too high when compared to the “immeasurable insult” that the exercise of such a right could cause — even though “we, the faithless, don’t understand the offence”. And that a year before the cartoon controversy.

All this reveals how successful the fatwa has been, not in burying The Satanic Verses, but in transforming the landscape of free speech. From the Enlightenment onwards, freedom of expression had come to be seen as not just as an important liberty, but as the very foundation of liberty.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote John Milton in Areopagitica, his famous “speech for the liberty of unlicenc’d printing”, adding that “He who destroys a good book destroys reason itself.” All progressive political strands that grew out of the Enlightenment were wedded to the principle of free speech.

Of course, few liberals advocated absolute freedom of expression. Most accepted that in certain circumstances speech could cause harm and so had to be restricted. The most celebrated expression of such a view came in a judgment given by the American Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes who in 1919 pointed out, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

What actually constitutes the political and social equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theatre has been the matter of fierce debate. Politicians and policy makers have, over the years, cited a whole host of harms as reasons to curtail speech — threat to national security, incitement to violence, promotion of blasphemy, the undermining of morality or the spread of slander or libel. Milton himself opposed the extension of free speech to Catholics on the grounds that the Catholic Church was the biggest obstacle to the extension of freedom and liberty.

Yet, however hypocritical liberal arguments may sometimes have seemed, and notwithstanding the fact that most free speech advocates accepted that the line had to be drawn somewhere, there was nevertheless an acceptance that speech was an inherent good, the fullest extension of which was a necessary condition for the elucidation of truth, the expression of moral autonomy, the maintenance of social progress and the development of other liberties. Restrictions on free speech were seen as the exception rather than the norm.

It is this idea of speech as intrinsically good that has been transformed. Today, in liberal eyes, free speech is as likely to be seen as a threat to liberty as its shield. “Speech is not free,” as the lawyer Simon Lee put it in his book The Cost of Free Speech, written in the wake of the Rushdie affair. “It is costly.” By its very nature, many argue, speech damages basic freedoms. Hate speech undermines the freedom to live free from fear. The giving of offence diminishes the freedom to have one’s beliefs and values recognised and respected.

In the post-Rushdie world, speech has come to be seen not as intrinsically good, but as inherently a problem, because it can offend as well as harm, and speech that offends can be as socially damaging as speech that harms. Speech, therefore, has to be restrained by custom, especially in a diverse society with a variety of deeply held views and beliefs, and censorship (and self-censorship) has to become the norm.

“Self-censorship,” as the philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s — not least every Muslim’s — business.” Increasingly, western liberals have come to agree.

Whatever may be right in principle, many now argue, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. We live in a world, so the argument runs, in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values, many of which are incommensurate, but all of which are valid in their own context. The controversy
over The Satanic Verses was one such conflict.

For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints. Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but also that their cultural beliefs are given equal recognition and respect. The avoidance of cultural pain has therefore come to be regarded as more important than what is often seen as an abstract right to freedom of expression.

As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each other’s fundamental beliefs to criticism.” In a plural society, it is both inevitable and important that people offend others In fact, the lesson that we should draw from the Rushdie affair is the very opposite.

Critics of Rushdie no more spoke for the Muslim community than Rushdie himself did. Both represented different strands of opinion within Muslim communities. These days the radical, secular clamour, which found an echo in The Satanic Verses, has been reduced to a whisper. In the 1980s, however, it beat out a loud and distinctive rhythm within the Babel of British Islam. Rushdie’s critics spoke for some of the most conservative strands.

The campaign against The Satanic Verses was not to protect the Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from anti-Muslim bigots, but to protect their own privileged position within those communities from political attack from radical critics, to assert their right to be the true voice of Islam by denying legitimacy to such critics. They succeeded at least in part, because secular liberals embraced them as the authentic voice of the Muslim community.

Far from mutually limiting the extent to which we subject each other’s beliefs to criticism, we have to recognise that in a plural society it is both inevitable and important that people offend others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes in the open rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social progress requires one to offend some deeply held sensibilities.

“If liberty means anything,” as George Orwell once put it, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The trouble with multicultural censorship, and self-censorship, is not just that it silences dissenting voices. It is also that it often creates the very problems to which it is supposedly a response. Take the furore over The Jewel of Medina. Not a single Muslim had objected before Random House pulled the book. It is quite possible that none would have, had the publishers gone ahead as planned. But once Random House had made an issue of the book’s offensiveness, then it was inevitable that some Muslims at least would feel offended.

The problem was exacerbated by the actions of Denise Spellberg. Not only did she describe the novel as a “very ugly stupid piece of work” that amounted to “soft-core pornography”, she also went out of her way to draw attention to the book among sections of the Muslim community. In April, she informed Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer on one of her courses and an editor of a popular Muslim website, about a new book that “made fun of Muslims and their history”. Amanullah sent emails to various student forums claiming that he had “just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel Jewel of Medina — she said she found it incredibly offensive”. It was almost as if Spellberg was trying to incite a controversy.

Amanullah himself has insisted that The Jewel of Medina should not be withdrawn and has pointed out that “no one has the absolute right not to be offended, nor does anyone have the right to live without the uncomfortable opinions of others . . . we all need to develop thicker skins, more open minds, and a common understanding of the principles of free speech,” he suggested.

But by then the damage had already been done. ”I am disgusted by the inflammatory language Denise Spellberg used,” Sherry Jones told me. “If Random House had simply published my book, I don’t think there would have been any trouble. The real problem is not that Muslims are offended but that people think they will be. It is a veiled form of racism to assume that all Muslims would be offended and that an offended Muslim would be a violent Muslim.”

On Saturday 27 September, just weeks before Gibson Square was due to publish The Jewel of Medina in Britain, the publisher’s London headquarters were firebombed. By an eerie coincidence, the attack took place almost 20 years to the day The Satanic Verses had originally been published. Whether the perpetrators knew the significance of the date no one knows.

Nor is it possible to know whether such an attack would have happened had Random House simply gone ahead with publication without any fuss. There will always be extremists who respond as the Gibson Square firebombers did. There is little we can do about them. The real problem is that their actions are given a spurious legitimacy by liberals who proclaim it morally unacceptable to give offence and are terrified at the thought of doing so.

Shabbir Akhtar was right: what Salman Rushdie or Sherry Jones says is everybody’s business. It is everybody’s business to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to say what they wish, even if it is deemed by some to be offensive. If we want the pleasures of pluralism, we have to accept the pain of being offended. Twenty years on from the Rushdie affair, it is time we learnt this lesson.

Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He is the author of Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate (Weidenfeld/Reuters). His new book From Fatwa to Jihad is published in the spring by Atlantic Books.

Kenan Malik

Index on Censorship has in recent years chronicled many instances of what we’ve called “pre-emptive censorship”: the willingness to censor material because of fear either of causing offence or of unleashing violence. From the Deutsche Oper cancelling a production of Idomeneo to Random House dropping The Jewel of Medina to Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the cartoons in Jytte Klausen’s book, the list is depressingly long. It is a development that, writing in the magazine last year, I described as “the internalisation of the fatwa”.

It is both disturbing and distressing to find Index on Censorship itself now on that list. I profoundly disagree not just with the decision to censor the cartoons but also with the reasons for doing so: that publication may have endangered staff and was “unnecessary” and, indeed, would have been “gratuitous”.

The safety of Index’s staff is, of course, hugely important. But where was the threat? Index certainly received none because no one knew that we were going to publish. Nor is there any reason to believe that there would have been danger had the cartoons not been pre-emptively censored. Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, describing Yale’s original decision as “idiotic”, pointed out that he has “written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction”. And, as Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship, observed in an article in the Guardian earlier this year critical of Random House, pre-emptive censorship often creates a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. In assuming that an “offensive” work will invite violence one both entrenches the idea that the work is offensive and helps create a culture that makes violence more likely.

The question that now arises is this: what should Index do when the next Jewel of Medina comes along? After all, we cannot in good conscience criticise others for taking decisions that we ourselves have taken and for the same reasons. So, does Index now believe that it was right for Deutsche Oper, Random House, Yale University Press (and myriad others) to censor?

As for the suggestion that publication would have been “unnecessary” or “gratuitous”, I cannot see what could be less unnecessary or gratuitous than using cartoons to illustrate an interview with the author of a book that was censored by a refusal to publish those very cartoons. Almost every case of pre-emptive censorship, including that of Yale University Press, has been rationalised on the grounds that the censored material was not necessary anyway. Once we accept that it is legitimate to censor that which is “unnecessary” or “gratuitous”, then we have effectively lost the argument for free speech.

Index on Censorship is involved in many important campaigns, from libel reform to the defence of threatened journalists. Its authority in these campaigns rests largely upon its moral integrity. As a long-standing board member, I am deeply committed both to the cause of free speech and to the success of Index in pursuing that cause. What I fear is that in refusing to publish the cartoons, Index is not only helping strengthen the culture of censorship, it is also weakening its authority to challenge that culture.

Jonathan Dimbleby

It was a straightforward choice but not an easy decision. By tradition — and properly — the board does not readily interfere in the day-to-day editorial decisions taken by the Index on Censorship staff. Our job is to define the strategic objectives and the framework within which these are delivered. Of course matters that are likely to prove controversial will be brought to our attention and we may express a view about the wisdom of this or that proposed course of action. But beyond that, our commitment to freedom of expression applies as much to Index as anywhere else.

But this case was different. When John Kampfner alerted me to the prospective publication of an interview with Jytte Klausen and to our editor’s wish to illustrate it with the “offending” cartoons, it was plainly a matter for the board to determine. Any other course would have been irresponsible and a neglect of our fiduciary responsibility.

A year earlier, in September 2008, four men had been arrested for allegedly fire-bombing the North London home of the publisher of Gibson Books who had proposed publishing The Jewel of Medina. Only the most cavalier attitude towards the safety and security of those directly and indirectly involved in the publication of the Index interview would have failed to note that outrage.

The board’s main concern was both for individual members of the Index staff and those who worked for the seven other organisations which share our Free Word premises in Farringdon Road, and who would have been equally on the receiving end of any attack aimed at Index. Nonetheless, a decision to prevent the re-publication of the cartoons (Index had decided against their publication in the magazine when the worldwide protests erupted in 2005) could not be taken lightly by those responsible for leading an organisation whose very essence is to protect and enhance freedom of expression in a world where the rich and powerful are busy eroding what ought to be a fundamental right in any civilised society.

For this reason I consulted the Index editor and established that, in her view, publication of the cartoons — though very desirable — was not crucial to an interview which did not focus on the cartoons themselves but on the process by which Yale decided against their publication.

Against that background, I consulted every colleague (including those who had not been able to attend the relevant board meeting). With the exception of two board members (one of whom was content to abide by the overwhelming majority view) my colleagues argued strongly against publication. To summarise our common view: re-publication of the cartoons would put at risk the security of our staff and others which, on balance, could not be justified on “freedom of expression” grounds alone. The idea that no one except a handful of like-minded anoraks would notice their appearance in Index seemed to us to be at best naïve.

Index is not a coterie of fundamentalists who enjoy preaching to the converted in a vacuum of purist invisibility. We have a greater vision and purpose, which is to reach out to those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere who are not yet aware of how vital freedom of expression is to an open society and how easily and rapidly it can be eroded.

For myself, I hope that by taking the unusual step of sharing publicly what would normally be a matter for confidential debate we will get beyond a narrow obsession with those Danish cartoons and engage a much bigger audience in this great debate.

Jonathan Dimbleby (Chair, Index On Censorship)