Category — Freedom of speech

Today’s edition of The Economist has a story about what may be a modest increase in religious freedom in Egypt.

Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government’s highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam’s sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank.

Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.

Hmm. We shall see. These are very small steps and, while they will make life for Egyptian Baha’is somewhat easier, they do not address the basic issue: Baha’i activities were banned by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1960 under Presidential Decree 263. This decree has never been rescinded.

By the way, there is an irony attached to Ali Gomaa’s declaration that apostasy does not need to be punished in this life. Iran is currently contemplating a new penal code that would include a mandatory death sentence for apostasy. So no increase in religious freedom in Iran, then.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, religious freedom, apostasy, Egypt, Iran

Apparently Facebook is a threat to social order - or so one of Canada’s Provincial governments, the authorities at Virginia Tech, and some employers believe. They think their employees are wasting their time and that people shouldn’t be using Facebook to post negative comments about teachers or bosses.

Are authorities and employers right to ban access to Facebook?

Internet law professor Michael Geist believes attempts to block access to social media sites, such as Facebook, are misguided and show a complete misunderstanding of the nature and benefits of social media. He is quoted in this piece on the BBC news website:

The recent backlash against Facebook has generally on centred around two concerns - derogatory comments and workplace productivity - ironically missing the real sources of concern such as the privacy impact of posting deeply personal information.

Many Facebook users openly comment about issues of concern. That naturally includes students posting thoughts about fellow students and teachers or about supervisors at their part-time jobs.

In recent months, an Ottawa grocery chain fired several of its employees after company officials discovered negative comments on Facebook, while several Ontario schools have suspended students for posting “offensive” comments about school officials.

He continues:

The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the internet generation’s equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler - the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip.

Attempts to block such activity are not only bound to fail, but they ultimately cut off decision makers, school officials, and community leaders from their communities.

The answer does not lie in banning Facebook or the other emerging social media sites, but rather in facing up to Facebook fears and learning to use these new tools to engage and educate.

The interesting issue here for me as a Baha’i is the intersection between freedom of speech and the appropriate use of utterance. Language is powerful stuff. It’s our human birthright. Freedom of expression is a universal human right. We are affronted if anyone seeks to abridge that freedom. And yet we have to acknowledge that there must be some restraints on utterance. We cannot be free to libel people or to incite hatred against others with impunity. Rightly so.

So, what are the limits? And who has the right to create and enforce the limits?

There’s much to be said about the whole speech-power-law nexus, but I don’t want to go into that right now.

I shall be co-tutoring a course at the Baha’i summer school in Bath in August on The role of language in creating a new world order. The central question is how do we create a new etiquette of expression, suitable for the age of human maturity. This is the “sales pitch” for the course:

“Speech is a powerful phenomenon. Its freedom is both to be extolled and feared. It calls for an acute exercise of judgment, since both the limitation of speech and the excess of it can lead to dire consequences.” (Universal House of Justice) Speech shapes our relationships with one another; it shapes our cultures and our identities. We must deepen our understanding of the role of language. But beyond understanding, we must strain every sinew to bring our own use of it into conformity with the requirements of the times. As Bah

According to …Or Does It Explode?, Article 19 have launched a new campaign against internet censorship, and in support of freedom of expression and freedom to impart information on the internet in Iran.

Article 19 have included a useful graphic on their website to show how the system of Iranian tyranny works.

Clearly this will be interesting to those who are defending freedom of religion or belief in Iran. There cannot be true freedom of religion unless people are free to teach others about their faith or belief. Baha’is believe very strongly that everyone has a right (and, indeed, a duty) to seek out truth for themselves. To prevent people from making this search is a terrible form of oppression. Since the Internet is now one of the major sources of information in the world, Internet censorship is an unconscionable form of oppression.

Technorati Tags: censorship, freedom of expression, Iran, freedom of religion or belief, Baha’i

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

This post by Nick Seddon on the Civitas website makes some interesting points about the debate about the veil worn by some Muslim women.

First of all, some Muslims have welcomed Jack Straw’s intervention:

…by expressing concerns about the potential divisiveness of the niqab, Mr Straw has evidently spoken on behalf of a wide range of people identifying themselves as moderate Muslims. Notably, on Monday, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, endorsed the intervention, saying: ?Mr Straw has opened a debate within the Muslim community and encouraged interaction. Muslims themselves have failed to create a mechanism to discuss these issues. That is why they have had to be discussed out in the open.?

Seddon refers to the article in The Times by Saira Khan (see my post of 11 October) and says:

Saira Khan argued that the veil is not a religious obligation but a symbol of the subjugation by men of their wives and daughters. She contends that the growing number of women veiling their faces in Britain is a sign of radicalisation ? or Talebanisation ? because it is an extreme practice based on culture not creed. For her, the veil should not even be a matter of choice. ?It is never right for a woman to hide behind a veil and shut herself off from people in the community,? she states. ?But it is particularly wrong in Britain, where it alien to the mainstream culture for someone to walk around wearing a mask.?

“But,” Seddon continues

perhaps the most illuminating comments have come from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, not a person I always find myself agreeing with. In the Independent on Monday she declared that she found herself ‘agreeing with his [Jack Straw's] every word. It is time to speak out against this objectionable garment and face down the Islamicists.’

Seddon says (and I agree) that Alibhai-Brown’s reasons for supporting Mr Straw, as outlined in an article for Time magazine, “warrant” closer inspection. In summary, they are:

1. practicality (and I would add humanity)
2. non-Muslims have a right to object to Muslim principles
3. the veil is divisive and its removal promotes integration
4. Britain should be a place where Muslim women are genuinely free from pressure to cover up

Do read the Time article to get the full flavour of Alibhai-Brown’s objection to the veil.

Says Alibhai-Brown:

But the most important reason for opposing the veil is one of principle. So long as it ensures genuinely equal standards for all, a liberal nation has no obligation to extend its liberalism to condone the most illiberal practices. State institutions as well as private companies should have the right to stipulate that a person whose face cannot be seen need not be served. That would not discriminate against Muslims; it would, for example, also affect men whose faces were obscured by motorcycle helmets. The principle expressed, in other words, would not be anti-Muslim, but one in favor of communication.

The niqab rejects human commonalities. The women who wear it want to observe fellow citizens, but remain unseen, as if they were cctv cameras.

Alibhai-Brown refers to herself as a modern Muslim woman who fasts and prays, but rejects the hijab “or to an opaque black shroud”. But in Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia women are forced to cover up to a greater or lesser degree:

In Iran, educated women who fail some sort of veil test are being imprisoned by their oppressors. Saudi women under their body sheets long to show themselves and share the world equally with men.

Alibhai-Brown concludes:

Exiles who fled such practices to seek refuge in Europe now find the evil is following them. As a female lawyer from Saudi Arabia once said to me: “The Koran does not ask us to bury ourselves. We must be modest. These fools who are taking niqab will one day suffocate like I did, but they will not be allowed to leave the coffin.” Millions of progressive Muslims want to halt this Islamicist project to take us back to the Dark Ages. Straw is right to start a debate about what we wear.

As Seddon makes clear in his Civitas article, this is not about banning the veil, but it is about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Some Muslim commentators have thanked Mr Straw for opening up the debate in the Muslim community itself, and non-Muslims clearly should be able to discuss these things too, since they affect all of us in various ways.

Seddon’s conclusion is this:

To say that a practice is alienating or makes you uncomfortable is not unreasonable ? but to close down the debate is. Closing down the debate will enforce the very separatism that Mr Straw is trying to avert, and the fuss created by his comments shows how timely they were. In a democracy rights operate in a dynamic tension: the freedom to ask someone to remove the veil is surely the correlative of the freedom to wear it.

Technorati Tags: Civitas, veil, Muslim, niqab, freedom of speech