Blasphemy and the Law
By CHLOE BREYER
NEW YORK — A central charge against the three members of the Pussy Riot punk-rock band who were recently sentenced to two years in prison was “inciting religious hatred.” This they are said to have done by briefly dancing at the front of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and splicing footage of their dance into a video critical of President Vladimir Putin.
A few days after their conviction, police in Pakistan arrested Rimsha Masih, an 11-year-old Christian girl reported to have Down Syndrome, on charges of blasphemy for purportedly burning pages of the Koran. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
In different ways, both these cases raise the question of whether blasphemy should be punishable by law, as it may be in more than 30 historically Christian and Muslim countries, from Poland, Greece and Australia to Indonesia and Pakistan.
As a Christian clergywoman and director of an organization that works with religious leaders from different traditions, I would argue that while the pain caused to believers by the defilement of cherished religious symbols and teachings is real and traumatic, laws that criminalize “defamation” of religion or inciting religious hatred are doctrinally unsound and legally dangerous.
Of the multiple reasons why, from a Christian perspective, blasphemy laws make bad theology, one in particular comes to mind in the context of the Pussy Riot sentences. The basic Christian tenet that all human beings are made in the image of God is undermined by laws against blasphemy and heresy, and especially by their gender-biased application.
More often than not, what has been deemed insulting or offensive to God in history has originated in the body or voice of a woman. The Inquisition and the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries were low points for all Christians, but particularly for the female faithful.
Church fathers like St. Augustine inherited a dualistic understanding of spirit and body from the Greeks and assigned the female half of humanity the role of body, and the male half the spirit or intellect. St. Augustine’s take on Ephesians 5:23 (“For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body”) was that a woman had no head of her own. Her husband was to be her head, and she was to be his body.
Well before the Pussy Riot sentences, my own experience serving at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City showed me — in far paler shades — the gendered character of God-offense as it is understood by many religious people.
Even in this bastion of liberal Christianity, nothing elicited more cries of “blasphemy” than the decision in 1984 of the then dean, James Parks Morton, to install “Christa” — a three-foot bronze sculpture of a woman’s figure hanging on a cross by the British artist Edwina Sandys. Echoes of the controversy could still be heard when I joined the cathedral clergy almost two decades later.
Increasingly, Muslim leaders are arguing that blasphemy laws as currently applied are un-Islamic as well. In a foreword to a recently released book, “Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide,” Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and a strong advocate for interfaith dialogue, wrote, “Nothing could possibly threaten God who is Omnipotent and existing as absolute and eternal truth. … Those who claim to defend God, Islam, or the Prophet are thus either deluding themselves or manipulating religion for their own mundane and political purposes.”
That is as true in Indonesia as it is in Poland, where in 2010 Dorota Rabczewska, better known as the popular singer Doda, was charged with “offending religious sensibilities” and fined the equivalent of $1,450 for saying in a television interview that the Bible was written by “people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”
Beyond bad doctrine, blasphemy codes can be legally dangerous. A 2012 report by Human Rights First — “Blasphemy Laws Exposed: The Consequences of Criminalizing ‘Defamation of Religions”’ [pdf] — outlines several types of problems with the application of blasphemy laws worldwide. In addition to stifling dissent and discussion in the public sphere, such laws can actually spark assaults, murders and mob outbreaks.
In Pakistan, for example, many relatives of Rimsha Masih have fled in fear of Muslim mobs, and Interior Minister officials have urged the Islamabad police to keep the girl in custody for her own safety.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death for his portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses” led to the murder of the book’s Japanese translator and near fatal attacks on its Norwegian publisher and Italian translator, as well as the deaths of 12 people in rioting in Bombay.
Far from protecting religious sensibilities, blasphemy laws are a major source of prejudice and violence against religious minorities, as well as of violations of their religious freedoms.
Since the establishment of current blasphemy laws in Pakistan, at least 38 cases of extrajudicial killings (some of which involved the active involvement or willful neglect of the police) of people alleged to have committed blasphemy have been documented. These killings include the assassination in 1997 of Justice Arif Iqbal Bhatti, who had struck down allegations of blasphemy against two Christians two years earlier. The man who confessed to murdering Bhatti is no longer in custody.
In Indonesia in 2007, 42 Protestants were each sentenced to five years in prison for distributing a “prayer video” that instructed individuals to put the Koran on the ground and pray for the conversion of Muslim political leaders. And in February 2011, a mob of Indonesian Muslims attacked a meeting of members of the Ahmadiyya sect — a reformist Islamic group that had been declared “deviant” by Islamic authorities — and killed three people as police looked on.
The vague language of many blasphemy laws has also led to their misuse as weapons to settle private disputes. In December 2011, for example, a Pakistani man admitted to sending blasphemous text messages to clerics and prayer leaders in the name of his fiancée in order to punish her for breaking their engagement.
The antidote to blasphemy is not blunt and counterproductive law but efforts by civil society — specifically political and religious leaders cooperating across religious and ideological lines — to condemn any curtailing of religious rights or speech that incites violence.
We saw this working in New York City when Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other religious leaders stood with the mayor in August 2010 in support of Muslim leaders who wanted to build an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site.
We are seeing it now as the All Pakistan Ulema Council, an umbrella group of Muslim clerics and scholars, joins with the Pakistan Interfaith League, which includes Christians, Sikhs and members of other religions, to support Rimsha Masih and to call for an end to the “climate of fear” created by “spurious allegations.”
These are small but important steps for which the faithful can give thanks.
The Rev. Chloe Breyer is executive director of the Interfaith Center of New York and an associate priest at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem, New York.