| | | ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
o.cengiz@todayszaman.com | ![]() |
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| | | On Feb. 14, 1989, when the whole world was celebrating St. Valentine's Day, a death decree was being read on Tehran Radio. | |
With this decree, Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invited all Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of “Satanic Verses,” wherever they might find him. The decree attracted attention all over the world. Huge demonstrations were held in India and Pakistan. Hundreds of people were wounded and tens died in the violent incidents. Britain, Rushdie's second homeland, was also affected by protests. The British were surprised to see that many Muslims who had been silent for a long time in their country took to the streets to express their anger and called for Rushdie's murder. The British government, which at the beginning referred to freedom of expression, was unable to bear the protests any further after violent demonstrations that lasted for seven days. One week after the decree, the British foreign office declared in a statement on the BBC that they found the book pretty offensive and disturbing.
At the beginning, Salman Rushdie acted cool. In his initial statements, he defended his book and art. The British secret service realized that the threat was serious. Rushdie went underground in Britain with the support of British intelligence. He constantly changed his location to hide his whereabouts. When he realized the seriousness of the case, Rushdie issued an apology in a very literary style. Khomeini responded to this apology on the same day. He said that Muslims should send Rushdie to hell the moment they spotted him. In the end, Rushdie appeared on TV to announce that he had become a true Muslim. Iran, however, confirmed that the decree was still in effect and Rushdie went into hiding again.
Of course, not all Muslims endorsed the decree, but it was hard to oppose to it. A religious cleric in Belgium declared that such decrees were not appropriate in Islam. A few days after this declaration, he and his deputy were killed in the mosque.
The decree that had such a stupendous effect could only be abolished after extended bargaining between the new Iranian government and the British 10 years later.
The Muslim image in the West created by the decree was further reinforced by a number of incidents, including the infamous caricature crisis in Denmark. The West reacted to these developments in an extremely hypocritical manner. Islamophobia started to skyrocket and discriminatory practices targeting Muslims spread like an epidemic to all of Europe on the one hand and legal arrangements were made in an effort to contain similar incidents, on the other.
Many years passed and Rushdie kept running and receiving threats. Those who translated the book into the Japanese and Italian languages were stabbed. A Norwegian publisher barely survived an assassination attempt. This frenzy also affected Turkey. When it was said that Aziz Nesin would translate the book into Turkish, a group of people were provoked by this rumor and they set the Madımak Hotel on fire, killing 37 people.
The US and Europe reintroduced the “blasphemy laws” which had been shelved since the Middle Ages. A number of international organizations, including the United Nations and the Council of Europe (CoE) concluded that freedom of expression cannot be wielded as a defense in the case of blasphemy. Even the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) followed suit.
Without knowing this background, you cannot make sense of how the Strasbourg court didn't find Turkey in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights for sentencing the applicant on charges of insulting the Prophet in I.E. v. Turkey. Of course, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the judgment was made with the approval of four members and the dissent of three members, as well as to the fact that the name of the applicant was abbreviated.
I personally find any insult against religion or religious people to be primitive. But I also believe that it is risky to treat even the sentence, "There is no God," as blasphemous libel and to take legal action against the one who utters it. It is my conviction that the process of continually lowering the bar on freedom of expression due to the extreme sensitivities of some religious people will not do anyone any good.
To try and sentence Fazıl Say for some of his tweets and Sevan Nişanyan for a blog article on charges of insulting religious values is dangerous, I guess. These lawsuits are justified with reference to some ECtHR judgments, but the background of these decisions is ignored. In Turkey, any sentence given to a person on charges of insulting God or the Prophet may function as a license to kill, like Khomeini's decree. If something bad happens to Say or Nişanyan, God forbid, in connection with the sentences served on them, wouldn't this be the gravest insult to religion and religious people? |
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