Summer magazine 2015: Is academic freedom being eroded?

9 Jun 2015 | Academic Freedom, Magazine, Volume 44.02 Summer 2015

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”What is the state of academic freedom in 2015? Index on Censorship magazine’s summer 2015 issue takes a global vantage point to explore all the current threats – governmental, economic and social – faced by students, teachers and academics. “][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2”][vc_column_text]

In the UK and US, offence and extremism are being used to shut down debates, prompting the adoption of “no-platforming” and “trigger-warnings”.  In Turkey, an exam question relating to the Kurdish movement led to death threats for one historian. In Ireland, there are concerns over the restraints of corporate-sponsored research. In Mexico, students are being abducted and protests quashed.

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Plus we have reports on Ukraine, China and Belarus, on how education is expected to toe an official line. Also in this issue: Sir Harold Evans, AC Grayling, Tom Holland and Xinran present their free-speech heroes. Ken Saro-Wiwa Junior introduces a previously unpublished letter from his activist father, 20 years after he was executed by the Nigerian state, and Raymond Joseph reports on the dangers faced by Africa’s environmental journalists today. Comedian Samm Farai Monro, aka Comrade Fatso, looks at the rise of Zimbabwean satire; Matthew Parris interviews former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve; Italian journalist Cristina Marconi speaks to Marina Litvinienko, wife of the murdered KGB agent Alexander; and Konstanty Gebert looks at why the Polish Catholic church is upset by Winnie the Pooh and his non-specific gender.

Our culture section presents exclusive new short stories by exiled writers Hamid Ismailov (Uzbekistan) and Ak Welaspar (Turkmenistan), and poetry by Musa Okwonga and Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais.  Plus there’s artwork from Martin Rowson, Bangladeshi cartoonist Tanmoy and Eva Bee, and a cover by Ben Jennings.

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Is academic freedom being eroded?

Silence on campus – Kaya Genç explores why a Turkish historian received death threats for writing an exam question

Universities under fire in Ukraine’s war – Tatyana Malyarenko unveils how Ukrainian scholars have to prove their patriotism in front of a special committee

Industrious academics – Michael Foley looks at how the commercial pressures on Ireland’s universities and students is narrowing research

Stifling freedom – Mark Frary’s take on 1oo years of attacks on US academic freedom

Ideas under review – Lawyer and journalist Suhrith Parthasarathy looks at how the Indian government interfering with universities’ autonomy. Also Meena Vari asks if India’s most creative artistic minds are being stifled

Girls standing up for education – Three young women from Pakistan, Uganda and Nigeria on why they are fighting for equality in classrooms

Open-door policy – Professor Thomas Docherty examines the threats to free speech in UK universities. Plus the student’s view, via the editor of Cambridge’s The Tab new site

Mexican stand-off – After the abduction of 43 students, Guadalajara-based journalist Duncan Tucker looks at the aftermath and the wider picture

Return of the red guards – Jemimah Steinfeld reports on the risks faced by students and teachers who criticise the government in China

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Pride and principles – Matthew Parris in conversation with the former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve

A letter from Ken Saro-Wiwa – A moving tribute from the son of one of the Ogoni nine and a previously unpublished letter from his father who was killed in Nigeria 20 years ago

Hunt and trap – Raymond Joseph reports on the dangers currently being faced by Africa’s environmental journalists

Litvinienko’s legacy – Italian journalist Cristina Marconi speaks to Marina Litvinienko, wife of the murdered KGB agent Alexander

God complex – Konstanty Gebert looks at why the Polish Catholic church is so worried about Winnie the Pooh’s gender

Zuma calls media ‘unpatriotic’ – Professor Anton Harber speaks to Natasha Joseph about the increasing political pressure on South African journalism

Dangers of blogging in Bangladesh – Vicky Baker on the recent murders of Bangladeshi bloggers by fundamentalists, plus a cartoon by Dhaka Tribune’s Tanmoy

Comedy of terrors – Samm Farai Monro, aka Comrade Fatso, on the power of Zimbabwe’s comedians to take on longstanding political taboos

Print under pressure – Miriam Mannak reports on the difficulties facing the media in Botswana, as the president tightens his grip on power

On forgotten free speech heroes – Sir Harold Evans, AC Grayling, Tom Holland and Xinran each pick an individual who has made a telling contribution to free speech today

Head to head – Lawyer Emily Grannis debates with Michael Halpern on whether academic’s emails should be in the public domain

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The pain of exile – Exclusive new fiction from Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, who has not only had all his books banned back in his homeland, but every mention of his name

Eye of the storm – A poem by Musa Okwonga on the importance of allowing offensive views to be heard and debated on university campuses

The butterfly effect – The lesser known poetry of Index award-winner Rafael Marques De Morais

Listening to a beating heart – A new short story from Ak Welsapar, an author forced to flee his native Turkmenistan after being declared an enemy of the people

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”COLUMNS” css=”.vc_custom_1481732124093{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Global view – Index’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg on the difficulties of measuring silenced voices

Index around the world – An update on Index’s latest work

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”END NOTE” css=”.vc_custom_1481880278935{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Battle of the bots – Vicky Baker reports on the fake social media accounts trying to silence online protest

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”SUBSCRIBE” css=”.vc_custom_1481736449684{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship magazine was started in 1972 and remains the only global magazine dedicated to free expression. Past contributors include Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Marquéz, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and many more.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”76572″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]In print or online. Order a print edition here or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions.

Copies are also available at the BFI, the Serpentine Gallery, MagCulture, (London), News from Nowhere (Liverpool), Home (Manchester), Calton Books (Glasgow) and on Amazon. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship continue its fight for free expression worldwide.

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July 2: Fighting Machetes with Pens – The Voltaire Lecture 2015 (partner event)

31 May 2015 | Events

Voltaire Lecture

On 26 February this year, Bonya Ahmed and her husband Avijit Roy, both humanist bloggers, were visiting the national book fair of Bangladesh. Just outside Dhaka University, they were attacked with machetes by Islamic fundamentalists. Ahmed was severely wounded and Roy himself was killed.

In the British Humanist Association’s 2015 Voltaire Lecture, Ahmed will make her first public appearance since her husband’s murder to speak about her life with Roy and their struggle for humanism and secularism in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Although shaken, Ahmed has sworn to continue the struggle against censorship and violence. She recognises her husband’s murder as “a crime not only against a person, but against freedom of speech and humanity”, and she is determined that those behind the attack do not succeed.

Hosted by BHA President Jim Al-Khalili.

When: Thursday 2nd July, 7:30pm (doors 7:00pm)
Where: Hilton London Metropole Hotel, W2 1JU (nearest tube Edgware Rd)
Tickets: £9 (Index supporters eligible for BHA member rate). Book here.

Presented by

bhalogofull

Padraig Reidy: Sentenced to death for not believing in God

16 Apr 2015 | Asia and Pacific, Bangladesh, mobile, News and features

Blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death in (Photo: Avijit Roy/Facebook)

Blogger Avijit Roy was murdered in February. (Photo: Avijit Roy/Facebook)

Washiqur Rahman was murdered because he didn’t believe in God.

On the morning of 30 March 2015, the 27-year-old was set upon by three machete-wielding attackers and hacked to death because he did not believe in God.

The previous month, 42-year-old Avijit Roy was murdered because he didn’t believe in God.

One of the accusations most often levelled at self-proclaimed atheists is that they go on about it too much. What is there even to talk about? Why join, say the British Humanist Association or a university atheist group? What do you do? Go to meetings and drone on about not believing in God? And someone should just get that Richard Dawkins off Twitter, right?

Rahman and Roy were the kind of vocal atheist that tends to prompt eye-rolling in liberal secular countries.

Roy was a frontrunner, a star. He was the creator of Mukto-Mona, which claimed to be the first secular humanist web portal in South Asia. He described Mukto-Mona’s mission as “to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science.”

Based in the US, Roy had returned to Bangladesh to visit his sick mother, despite warnings that the country was no longer safe for him. He was well-known enough to be stopped in the street for autographs. An appearance at a book fair in Dhaka had alerted Islamist extremists to his presence in the country.

Rahman was an up and coming blogger with a big Facebook following. He wrote under the name Kutshit Hasher Chhana (The Ugly Duckling), satirising religion and believers. Like many online activists, he had been horrified by the murder of Roy, and had lent support to a campaign calling for the prosecution of his killers, posting to the #IAmAvijit hashtag.

This, it seems, was enough to get him killed. Suspicion for the killings of both bloggers lies with the Ansarullah Bangla Team, an extremist organisation said to take inspiration from Anwar al-Awlaki, the American preacher killed by a US drone attack in 2011. The group, which was formed in 2013, has been implicated in the murder of atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in February of that year. The organisation recently hit the headlines in Bangladesh after it called for a jailbreak to free prisoners tied to Jamaat-e-Islami, who are on trial for war crimes that took place during Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan.

The International Crimes Tribunal has been the backdrop for a fraught few years in Bangladesh. The tribunal has been criticised for lacking impartiality, particularly after leaked Skype conversations between the presiding judge, Mohammed Nizamul Huq, and a war crimes activist were published by The Economist, via Oliullah Noman, a journalist for opposition newspaper Amardesh in December 2012.

Increasing divisions were exacerbated by the governing Awami League’s decision to abandon the usual protocol of making way for an interim government to oversee the January 2014 election. The main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the election in protest, and the Commonwealth, the EU and the US declined to send monitors, calling the legitimacy of the result into question. The political division in Bangladesh operates roughly on a secular/religious line, with the Awami League seen as more secular and the BNP representing a more religious viewpoint.

Amidst all this upheaval, online atheists are under pressure. The two murders this year followed the attacks in 2013. Meanwhile, in spring 2013 four secularist bloggers were arrested for “offending religious sentiment” by denigrating the Prophet Mohammed, a colonial era law which is the closest Bangladesh comes to an official blasphemy statute.

Bangladesh is not Pakistan. It retains a secular identity that is fast slipping (it’s hard now to imagine a Pakistani atheist blogger operating for 13 years, as Roy did). But it cannot be entirely immune to the cross-border influences of extremist Islamism and jihadism unless it protects the free expression of non believers.

That is why the reaction to the murder of Washiqur Rahman from the deputy commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan police made depressing reading:

“Those who killed him differed on his ideologies about religion. He was not an atheist. He was a believer. But the way he followed religion was different from the way radical groups insist,” Biplob Kumar Sarkar told the Guardian.

Though Sarkar may have been attempting to calm the situation, the statement is a gross display of disrespect to the murder victim and his views.

Moreover, it’s a refusal to confront the prime motivation for his killing, and that of Ajivit Roy. They were killed because they were atheists who refused to keep quiet about their beliefs.

Washiqur Rahman was murdered because he didn’t believe in God.

Avijit Roy was murdered because he didn’t believe in God.

This column was posted on 16 April 2015 at indexoncensorship.org

Index on Censorship condemns brutal murder of blogger Avijit Roy

27 Feb 2015 | Bangladesh, Campaigns, Statements

Index on Censorship condemns the brutal murder of US-Bangladeshi blogger Avijit Roy. Roy, an atheist who advocated secularism, was hacked to death by a knife-wielding mob in Dhaka as he walked back from a book fair.

Index CEO Jodie Ginsberg said: “Our sympathies are with the family of Avijit Roy. Roy was targeted simply for expressing his own beliefs and we are appalled by his death and condemn all such killings.”

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