The post Escaping Ideology with Jonathan Church: Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp in conversation appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

This article was originally published on the NSS’s website on 23 July 2024.

It’s easy to see how the idea of being saved by an act of ‘divine intervention’ might well appeal to a narcissist like Donald Trump. But his claim that he had ‘God on his side’ during the recent failed assassination attempt is more likely to be the sentiment of a grifter exploiting religion for political gain.

But sincere belief in the supernatural isn’t necessary for Trump and his cronies to dismantle America’s wall of separation between church and state. His nomination of conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his previous term of office paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade—a significant win for evangelicals. With a return to the White House looking distinctly possible, more laws to enforce the doctrines of his Christian support base could be on the cards.

The rise of Christian nationalism in the US is another indicator of a backsliding of secular liberal democratic values, the foundation upon which many successful modern societies are built.

Right across the world, wherever religion and political power are entwined, the chips are down for liberalism. Whether it’s Protestant evangelicalism in the US, Hindu nationalism in India, or Islamism in the Middle East, the closer clerics are to governance, the lower the likelihood that individual rights and freedoms can flourish.

Europe, too, is facing testing times.

American Christian Right organisations are pouring millions of dollars into the continent to fuel campaigns aimed at diminishing the rights of women and sexual minorities. Christian identity politics has become intertwined with nationalist ideologies, shaping the political landscape and contributing to the growth of far-right movements across the continent.

Meanwhile, mass migration and a failure to integrate sizeable Muslim populations have contributed to the undermining and challenging of fundamental liberal values like free speech, equality, and state neutrality.

One of secularism’s most important roles in protecting liberal values is in preserving freedom of expression—making sure that individuals are free to voice their ideas, beliefs, criticisms, and scorn of religious ideas without the threat of censorship or punishment.

Here in the UK, an incident at a Batley school starkly illustrated the erosion of this freedom. A teacher who used a cartoon of Muhammad to teach pupils about debates on free expression faced immediate and credible death threats and now must live under a new identity.

The writing has been on the wall ever since the Rushdie affair. But a spate of violent protests and murders across Europe since has sent the clear message to European citizens that, even if blasphemy laws have been abolished (and not all have been), they remain in place for Islam, and will be enforced by intimidation and violence.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of women and young girls on the continent are compelled to obey sexist religious modesty codes and thousands of children from minority backgrounds are attending illegal schools run by religious extremists.

Meaningful debates on these matters have become increasingly challenging due to the pervasive influence of ‘Islamophobia’, a term once noted by Christopher Hitchens as strategically employed to insinuate a ‘foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible message’. The language of Islamophobia has fostered a fear of being labelled ‘racist’ or bigoted, causing many liberals to refrain from criticising any manifestation of Islam, however worthy of disdain. This has created a void that is exploited by extremists on the far right.

Meanwhile, a crisis in confidence that secular liberalism can counter the ascendancy of radical Islam and ‘wokery’ has led some public intellectuals to be lured by the notion that Christianity is somehow indispensable in safeguarding the Western way of life. Daniel James Sharp and Matt Johnson have presented compelling critiques of this ‘New Theism’ and its defence of Christian privilege. But entrusting the preservation of liberal democracy to a belief one considers untrue yet expedient seems precarious at best.

All this is to say that the current climate for liberal values and human rights is challenging.

Amidst the ongoing threat posed by religious fundamentalism, a renewed embrace of the Enlightenment concept of separation of religion and state is sorely needed to safeguard individual rights and freedoms.

These are the issues we’ll be addressing at Secularism 2024, the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on October 19th. A diverse range of expert speakers will shed light on some of the contemporary challenges faced by liberal societies and explore the role of secularism in protecting liberal values and social cohesion.

To be part of this important conversation about democracy, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the rule of law, join us at Secularism 2024. Tickets are on sale now.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together, by Megan Manson

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

The post An upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a time of crisis appeared first on The Freethinker.

Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will reverberate for a long time, and in ways that nobody can now predict. Have the photos of a bloodied but unbowed Trump defiantly raising his fist as he was ushered off-stage won him the presidential election? Quite possibly. Such iconic images appear only very rarely, and even the staunchest of Trump’s critics (of which I am one) cannot but admire the man’s vigour in this instance.

Plus, Joe Biden’s cognitive state is no longer the centre of attention, which might mean that the pressure among Democrats for him to stand down and allow a more able candidate to contest the election will dissipate. I was sceptical that Biden would step down anyway, but now I think it a certainty that he will face Trump in November. Both these things—the sympathy, outrage, and defiance and the retaining of Biden as the Democratic candidate—mean almost certain victory for Trump.

This would be a disaster. I need not enumerate all the reasons why—or not at length, anyway. That Trump is a fascistic, racist, criminal lunatic; that he is openly antagonistic to democracy and the peaceful transition of power; that he is contemptuous of the American Constitution; that he is the darling of the Christian theocrats; that a Trump win would likely mean defeat for Ukraine and NATO, and perhaps even the liberal democratic world as a whole—all these things are known to everybody. And still, I fear, he will triumph.

Worse, the Supreme Court recently granted him, and all other presidents, some immunity for actions taken in office—so whatever restraints there may once have been are now gone, and Trump, if he wins, will be able to act as ‘a king above the law’, in the words of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Contrast this sorry state of affairs with the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776 that in America, ‘so far as we approve of monarchy…the law is King.’)

Concern over a Trump victory being one of the consequences of the assassination attempt might seem cold. It is not. Political violence in a liberal democracy is to be deplored, no matter the target, and I am glad that Trump is okay. Conspiracy theories from Trump opponents, and the glee evinced by some at the attempt (all the while regretting only that the would-be assassin missed), are foolish and disgusting. I also feel for the man who was killed saving his family and the two people injured by the shooter. The former, Corey Comperatore, was a hero, and I have no compunction about saying that.

But the view of many Trump supporters that the shooting happened as a direct result of the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy is misplaced, if not outright absurd. The only person responsible for the shooting is the shooter, not the words of others. It is possible—and necessary—to name and oppose anti-democratic politicians without calling for violence. Trump really is a threat to American democracy, and shooting him is not the answer. People like Trump are best beaten by arguments and ballots. If the Democrats and other opponents of Trump now shy away from telling the truth about him, they will do their country, and the world, a disservice.

Besides, Trump and other Republicans’ long history of promoting violence and using genuinely extreme rhetoric (which is still, I hasten to add, legitimate free speech) against Democrats shows this claim to be the shameless piece of hypocritical opportunism that it is. Contrast, for example, Trump’s vile public mockery of Nancy and Paul Pelosi after the latter’s skull was nearly caved in by a far-right fantasist in 2022 with Biden’s humane response to the Trump shooting (not to mention the decency of the Pelosis themselves). Accurately describing Trump and the threat he represents to America and the world is free speech, not inciting violence.

On the other hand, January 6 2021 was the climax of a months-long campaign conducted by Trump to cling to power and overturn the result of a free and fair election. The shoddy gunmanship of a lone attacker, whatever his motives, should not obscure the far more dangerous actions of Trump in 2020/21. A sitting president, using all the state, party, and personal resources at hand, attempted to destroy American democracy—and when this failed, he sat by for hours before calling his supporters, busy ravaging the Capitol, to heel. The attempted assassination of Trump was awful. Trump’s anti-democratic campaign and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol was awful. But one was much worse than the other: the two things are simply not comparable. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are the proponents and champions of political violence in America today.

This article is not an editorial, but it strikes me that the ideals of the Freethinker are more important than ever. Reason and argument, not political violence. Democracy, free speech, and secularism, not tyranny. As for those, like Tomi Lahren, who are praising ‘divine intervention’ for the delivery of Donald Trump and who were spouting conspiracy theories within minutes of the shooting, it can never be said enough: they really are irredeemably stupid—and, precisely for that reason, extremely dangerous. And they are the people who will cheer in November as Trump takes the White House. (I am no fan of Biden and the Democrats, either, by the way, but I recognise a genuine threat when I see one.)

I hope the people of the United States, the world’s first secular democratic republic, take these words of warning in the spirit of friendship with which they are offered. And I hope I am being overly pessimistic about Trump’s chances. Only time will tell, and perhaps there is still time for the American experiment to save itself.

The author republished this piece and added some additional reflections on new developments on his Substack on 1 August 2024. See here.

The post Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America appeared first on The Freethinker.

Although elaborate hate speech laws can make it extremely difficult, we have the right to freedom of expression in Britain. Generally speaking, musicians are free to express their opinions. Morrissey can voice his opposition to mass immigration and concerns about the erosion of English identity while Stormzy can take the stage at Glastonbury and get his audience of over 200,000 people to yell ‘fuck the government’, both with impunity. The ability of artists to hold those in positions of power accountable is a fundamental civil liberty that ensures the maintenance of political equilibrium in a liberal democracy.

While our system has many flaws—cough, Scotland—we have never executed a musician for speaking their mind, as far as I can recall. And yet the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi must face the horrifying reality of that exact situation. Salehi was given a death sentence in April this year after the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Isfahan accused him of ‘waging war against god’.

Salehi is a vocal opponent of the Islamic Republic. The right to free speech is guaranteed to well-known socially conscious rappers in the West, such as Talib Kweli and Immortal Technique, but Salehi was not accorded the same protection to express himself. In Iran, hip-hop is strictly forbidden. Artists typically use pseudonyms to get around the regime; Salehi, on the other hand, has always gone by his real name. 

The 33-year-old is at the forefront of socially conscious hip-hop in Iran and was a pioneer of the Rap-e Farsi (Persian-language rap) movement. His lyrics advocate for greater rights for women and workers while addressing injustice and inequality. In tracks like ‘Pomegranate’, he sings ‘Human (life) is cheap, the labourer is a pomegranate, Iran is a wealthy, fertile land,’ alluding to workers as nothing more than fruit to be squeezed. However, the majority of his vitriol is aimed at the Islamic Republic itself. In his most well-known song, ‘Soorakh Moosh’ (‘Rat Hole’), he condemns all those who support the corrupt regime and turn a blind eye to oppression and injustice. 

It was songs like this that initially drew the state’s attention to him. Iran’s security forces detained Salehi on September 13 2021 and accused him of ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ and ‘propaganda against the regime’. He was granted a six-month suspended sentence and released from prison after serving more than a week. 

Salehi’s case serves as a microcosm of the fractures that exist in Iranian society more than 40 years after the revolution of 1979. Since the overthrow of the Shah, the country has been ruled as an Islamic republic, with women required to cover their hair in strict compliance with Islamic modesty laws. The ageing clerical elite—Ayatollah Khamenei is 85— is at variance with the majority of its citizens, who were born after the revolution. Many of them are concerned with personal freedoms and financial security—50% of Iranians are living in absolute poverty—rather than religious purity. Salehi speaks for a generation of disillusioned youth. 

His activism extends beyond words: he has supported a number of social causes, most notably the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and the September 2022 protests, which were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was detained by the police after she was accused of wearing an ‘improper’ hijab. Subsequent anti-hijab demonstrations, which saw thousands of people take to the streets calling for women’s rights and the dissolution of the Islamic Republic, with many of them burning hijabs, spread across the country and resulted in over 22,000 arrests and over 530 deaths.

To support the women-led uprising, Salehi released two songs. ‘Battlefield’, which was released in early October 2022, contains the lyrics, ‘Woman, life, freedom, we will fight to the death/ Shoulder to shoulder like a defensive wall/ I believe in solidarity like divine faith/…We are thirsty for freedom’. A few weeks later, he released a song containing the lines, ‘44 years of your government, it is the year of failure/… Someone’s crime was dancing with her hair in the wind / Someone’s crime was that he or she was brave and criticised [the government]’.

On October 30, 2022, Salehi was detained once more and charged with spreading ‘propagandistic activity against the government’. He received a prison sentence of six years and three months in July 2023. The Supreme Court granted him bail in November after he had been imprisoned for more than a year, including 252 days in solitary confinement. When he was free, he posted a video to his official YouTube account from outside the jail where he had been held, claiming he had been tortured—having his arms and legs broken and given shots of adrenaline to keep him awake. He was swiftly reimprisoned.

For the crime of talking, or, in the words of the Isfahan court, ‘spreading corruption on earth’, Salehi was sentenced to death on 24 April 2024. As of writing, the case is awaiting appeal.

This is not an isolated case. Saman Yasin is another musician who suffered a similar fate. The Supreme Court commuted the Kurdish rapper’s death sentence, which had been imposed after his arrest during the 2022 protests, to five years in prison. Yasin has allegedly been tortured and prohibited from interacting with others.

Under the iron fist of Khamenei, Iran crushes dissent. Amnesty International reports that 853 people were executed in Iran in 2023—the highest number since 2015 and a 48% increase from the year before. 74% of executions reported globally in 2023 occurred in the Islamic Republic. 

Women who violate the dress code have also been severely punished. Ironically, a few weeks prior to World Hijab Day this year, an Iranian woman and activist by the name of Roya Heshmati was detained for 11 days, fined $300, and whipped 74 times after she was caught on social media without a headscarf. Salehi is right to use his platform to expose the violent misogyny that permeates totalitarian Islamic societies like Iran. The hijab is, quite simply, a symbol of oppression, not liberation, whatever some in the West might think. 

Freedom of expression is essential for musicians. All artists must be free to question, challenge, and criticise authority. The tyrant’s empire is built on a foundation of censorship. Words mean little when no one can hear them. Salehi’s three million Instagram followers have contributed to the attention his case has received in the West. While we can all lament the loss of meaningful conversation on social media, we cannot deny its power to instantly connect millions of people. 

Music is a powerful medium for telling stories. And we can spread that message by using the internet. A new wave of youthful, politically engaged musicians is emerging thanks to social media, as shown by Salehi and many others. See also the rise of dissident rappers in Russia such as Oxxxymiron and FACE—the latter of whom Putin has designated as a foreign agent. 

Nobody should ever be sentenced to death or even arrested for speaking their mind. Those who foolishly believe they can use violence to counter the pen do so because they understand that most people will be intimidated into silence. His extraordinary bravery and conviction bear witness to the principles that Salehi has upheld throughout his life. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, ‘Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.’ 

While we in the West take the right to free speech for granted, we should praise courageous people like Saman Yasin and Toomaj Salehi—people who are prepared to risk their lives in order to challenge the hegemony of the Ayatollah and his despotic, theocratic regime. 

Related reading

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Image of the week: celebrating the death of Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Faith Watch, November 2023, by Daniel James Sharp

When does a religious ideology become a political one? The case of Islam, by Niko Alm

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

The post Rap versus theocracy: Toomaj Salehi and the fight for a free Iran appeared first on The Freethinker.

Humans are a very disagreeable species.

Therefore, it is important when speaking about the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ to separate these two things:

1. The material reality that any society formed of humans will be a society in which a variety of ideas will proliferate, humans will perpetually try to convince others of their ideas, disagreement about these ideas will nonetheless persist, factions will form around those disagreements, and conflict between these factions will ensue, resulting in constant cultural change and, often, bloodshed.
2. The liberal system for managing that conflict, minimising the bloodshed, and steering inevitable cultural change through pluralistic (live and let live) norms and democratic systems by protecting freedom of belief and speech, disallowing authoritarian coercion, and encouraging open debate with an expectation that arguments will be honest, civil, reasoned, and evidenced.

It is important to distinguish these two concepts because there are always some people who believe that, if they do away with the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas, they will also somehow do away with viewpoint diversity itself. This is utterly false. Unless homo sapiens somehow changes radically from the big-brained, combative, cooperative, tribal, territorial, social mammals that we are, we are stuck with the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. From school children negotiating the scope of an imaginary game to leaders of political parties trying to win voters, we will always be in the business of selling ideas and deciding which ideas to buy into. We cannot help ourselves. I’m doing it right now and so are you.

The liberal system of the Marketplace of Ideas can, of course, be changed. It has not been in operation at all for most of recorded history, is not in operation in many places even now, and has never been upheld perfectly anywhere. Liberal democracies that seek, in principle, to protect freedom of belief and speech, value viewpoint diversity, and actively encourage the free exchange and critique of ideas with an expectation of rationality and the use of evidence are relatively new developments of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies. WEIRD countries have always struggled to do this fully in practice, although their attempts have resulted in greater advances in knowledge and human rights than were known previously or that exist in countries that have not attempted any such system. It has been much more common for a dominant ruling power to decide what may or may not be said and by whom and to penalise disobedience under concepts like ‘treason’, ‘heresy’, ‘apostasy’, and ‘blasphemy’.

It may well be that it is fundamentally counterintuitive for us to allow other people to be morally or factually wrong or to see anything to be gained from having a variety of contradictory viewpoints or having these viewpoints do battle with each other when we think we know what is true and good. Even when well-established liberal democracies are doing comparatively well at remaining open to viewpoint diversity, we are always having to fight against people who want to make some things unspeakable and some truth claims unquestionable. They often do so with the best of intentions: to eradicate ideas that are hurtful or untrue and to stop them from being circulated in society and doing harm to people.

If you are a compassionate human being who is absolutely sure that God exists and that the consequences for being wrong about that are an eternity in Hell, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop the contrary from being argued? You will be saving lives—more, you will be saving immortal souls. Alternatively, if you see absolutely no reason to consider the proposition that God exists as a serious one and much evidence of harm being done by people who think otherwise, why allow them to continue spreading that belief? Surely trying to stamp out the conviction that one knows the divine will of the creator of the universe is what will really save lives?

Or: ‘Why allow people to misgender a trans person when it is so easy to just use their stated pronouns and could make all the difference to the emotional wellbeing of a vulnerable minority group and even reduce suicide? It costs so little to the speaker to use certain words, while having one’s gender identity recognised means so much to the trans individual,’ a trans activist will argue. Alternatively, a gender critical feminist may ask, ‘Why let people use wrong sex pronouns when it is this very failure to consistently recognise biological sex classes that underlies very real threats to women’s spaces and sports and children’s mental and physical health? Protecting people’s right to choose their own words comes at the cost of protecting safety and fairness for women and obtaining evidence-based treatment for gender-confused kids.’

‘Fine’, some dogmatic materialists will argue, ‘but the whole God thing has never been definitively established and the sex/gender issue includes political disagreements about whether to acknowledge a self-professed gender identity or insist on identifying people by biological sex. To some extent these can be considered open questions or matters of opinion. What about when people are saying things that are just straightforwardly untrue? What is there to be gained from letting people deny the Holocaust? We know that happened and remembering it is essential to ensuring it never happens again. Why let people claim the world is 6,000 years old and humans were created as humans when we know it is far older and that we evolved from earlier species as surely as we can know anything? Vital fields of science rely on these basic realities about the physical world and biological organisms. Why let people claim that vaccines cause autism when the problems with that original study have been demonstrated so clearly and further evidence refutes this claim as decisively as it is possible to refute anything? Why should freedom of belief and speech include the freedom to misinform others in ways that put children’s lives at risk?’

There are three reasons to protect freedom of speech and belief and keep the liberal system known as the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ open to ideas that are subversive, hurtful, and untrue.

Firstly, we can never be entirely certain that we know what is true. Even when something is supported by mountains of evidence so vast that it is incredibly unlikely that it will ever be falsified, we must always keep open the opportunity for someone to falsify it, because every so often, they do. In an example contributed to my and James Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories by Alan Sokal, we cite John Stuart Mill making the argument that we can only be so confident of the truth of Newtonian physics because it has withstood so many attempts to find flaws in it. Less than 50 years after Mill made this argument, Albert Einstein found flaws in Newtonianism and introduced us to special relativity (soon followed by general relativity). We must leave that door open, on principle.

Secondly, we can never know how the power to make exceptions to laws and social norms for freedom of belief and speech will be used in the future as different governments take power and different ideologies rise and fall. The only way you can protect yourself from censorship if a shift occurs in which your own ideas are considered appalling and deemed unspeakable by those with legal or social power is to consistently protect the right to express ideas that you find appalling. Atheists and religious and sexual minorities are among those whose expressions of views or attractions have been deemed most appalling and penalised most severely, so it is particularly disappointing when they justify censorship on the grounds of offence.

Thirdly, even if it were ethical to shut down freedom of belief and speech in this way (it isn’t) and even if wannabe censors could be trusted to identify, correctly and consistently, bad or false ideas (they can’t), this simply won’t work. No attempts to regulate free thought have ever been successful. That is why we have 45,000 denominations of Christianity even though Christian authorities have been among the most stringent in enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. Having ideas and disagreeing about them is what humans do. I repeat: we cannot close down the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. We can only close down the liberal system for managing it in ways that make it maximally productive and minimally violent. When people attempt to shut down certain ideas by making them unspeakable, either socially or legally, we see the emergence of alternative marketplaces of ideas, including black markets where the ugliest and most hateful ideas can fester unchecked.

When attempts to ‘cancel’ certain ideas from mainstream society and make them unspeakable or ‘not up for debate’ are imposed socially rather than legally and there are enough people who hold them, we will see the growth of alternative media. We saw this with the Critical Social Justice ‘woke’ phenomenon. As those who held views that ran counter to Critical Social Justice were removed from mainstream institutions and platforms for airing opinions and debating ideas, a complex network of alternative media began to form and grow—an Alternative Marketplace of Ideas. Podcasts, talk shows, think tanks, magazines, and even an academic journal and a university all dedicated to airing the ideas that could not be discussed in mainstream outlets proliferated at an astonishing rate.

While some of these were and are very good and provide thoughtful and balanced coverage of issues and attempt to include a wide variety of ideas, including Critical Social Justice ones, the cultural problem that drove their formation resulted in serious limitations. Fear of being ‘cancelled’ or of ‘guilt by association’ limited the range of guests such alternative outlets could attract and consequently the conversations they could have. Critical Social Justice activists who took a ‘not up for debate’ stance would certainly not come. With the best will in the world, echo chambers formed as various clusters of alternative media could only attract certain ideological subsets of guests and had great difficulty in including enough viewpoint diversity to balance and challenge each others’ ideas effectively.

In addition to this problem, many platforms did not operate with the best will in the world but deliberately chose highly biased and partisan speakers who would reinforce and escalate each other’s ideas to new extremes. Much of this was exacerbated by the funding structure required to operate this kind of alternative media, which incentivised ‘audience capture’ as platforms needed to feed increasingly biased and partisan audiences what they wanted to hear so they could remain solvent. All the ideas that had existed in society still existed and were still accessible, but now they were siloed and people with different views were not speaking to each other. Without checks and balances, political polarisation, tribalism, paranoia, and extremism could only grow. (I recently discussed this problem in some detail with John Cleese.)

When attempts to silence ideas are imposed legally, so as to eradicate them from society, what will then form is a Black Market of Ideas. Historically, these have sometimes been very positive as when gay men, atheists, or religious minorities have used systems of codes and secret meeting places to connect and find solidarity, friendship, or romance. (Suppression was entirely useless at making any ideas or sexualities go away.) However, sometimes the ideas found on the Black Market can be genuinely dark and being forced underground can make them both more twisted and more enticing. The best description of this process, I would argue, is to be found in Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen’s article asking whether censorship would have stopped the Nazis from gaining power. Lukianoff and Strossen track the effect of government censorship on the rise of Nazism, showing how crackdowns on publications and speech enabled the leaders of the fascist movement to use the (failed) attempts to censor them to their advantage:

‘[I]t is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them.’

We can see how this mentality manifests in the thinking of extremist groups that exist today, which can find each other much more easily via social media. Very Online conspiracy theorists who post that they are being silenced by global elites who do not want the people to know The Truth and who express radical suspicion of governments and expertise can take this paranoia into existential threat mode in the real world. There, they combine it with pre-existing prejudices to produce a volatile and violent mix of hatefulness, including anti-Semitism and ethnonationalism. Here is just one nasty example of this sort of thing, from a tweet: ‘Actually many Jews are behind the decline of western civilisation through their cultural marxist [sic] degeneracy like promoting Transgenderism [sic] etc. Jews love it when black [sic] & whites are at war with one another.’

We can also see how the least principled and balanced corners of the Alternative Marketplace of Ideas can tip into the Black Market of Ideas. This is a toxic brew of multiple, divided, and polarised marketplaces that is causing significant social dysfunction and escalating tribal tensions to a dangerous degree. It must be noted that attempts to remove ‘problematic’ ideas that run counter to those of Critical Social Justice from mainstream discourse have not caused any of them to go away. Instead, it has forced them into alternative forums where, in some cases, they have morphed into dark, extreme, and twisted variations of themselves due to the lack of productive, collaborative critique (as, in some ways, has happened to Critical Social Justice itself—see, for example, the embrace of Hamas terrorism by some of its advocates).

Those who believe we can somehow ever be without some form of a marketplace of ideas should look outside their ideological bubble and reacquaint themselves with our species. The only choice we have is how to manage the sheer range of different ideas and the need to argue about them that characterises homo sapiens. We could make the same mistake humans have made for most of history and allow a dominant moral orthodoxy to try to dictate an acceptable range of speaking points and socially or legally penalise all others out of existence. This will enable the proliferation of many mini-marketplaces of different groups speaking only among themselves, some proportion of which, without the benefit of counterviews and critiques, will surely go mad and generate highly biased, partisan, and polarising narratives. Meanwhile, extremist groups will be driven underground where they will paint themselves as the brave speakers of truth to oppressive power and attract increasing numbers of those who have gone mad due to being alienated from mainstream society. They will then become a danger to it.

Alternatively, we can decide to uphold the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas that has acted as the best system of conflict resolution and knowledge production that the world has ever known. We can keep a mainstream Marketplace of Ideas open to as many widely held views as possible to act as checks and balances to each other in a spirit of civil but robust debate. Society will benefit from the knowledge generated by this process, a process conducted with an expectation of evidenced and reasoned argument and through which institutions can be reformed via democratic processes and human rights and freedoms can be protected and advanced. Alternative media for special interests will still always exist but, without the pressure of cancel culture or guilt-by-association, it will also be able to attract and benefit from a wider range of views and thus be of additional value. At the same time, we can keep fringe and extreme views legally expressible where we can see them, get at them, counter them, and deny their advocates the glamour of claiming to be censored for speaking the truth that the powerful don’t want you to know. We can arrest those who threaten or commit violence and allow the rest to be clearly recognisable as pitiful fringe lunatics.

I strongly recommend we take the liberal route.

Further reading

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

The return of blasphemy in Ireland and Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman, by Emma Park

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing, by Tony Howe

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

The post The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it. appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘What you have made will long endure.’ This is how Salman Rushdie signed off one of his last emails to his friend Martin Amis. Amis was dying from oesophageal cancer (the same cancer that killed his and Rushdie’s old comrade Christopher Hitchens) and Rushdie was still recovering from the savage attack against him in Chautauqua, New York when those words were written. Amis had previously written to Rushdie, of seeing him for the first time since the attack, that ‘I expected you to be altered, diminished in some way. Not a bit of it: you were and are intact and entire. And I thought with amazement, He’s EQUAL to it.’

Simple expressions of love and solidarity between two men all too well acquainted with the destroying angel: the perfect riposte to death, and to the bigotry and fanaticism of those, like Rushdie’s attacker, who worship it. This is just one of many life-affirming moments in Rushdie’s account of what Amis so appropriately calls ‘the atrocity’ of August 2022 and its aftermath, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Like the late Amis (who died last May), what Rushdie has made will long endure. His contributions to literature will endure for their power and beauty and truth, not because of the horrors inflicted upon their author. Still, and though he would prefer not to be defined by those horrors, his courage and his unswerving commitment to the defence of free expression in the face of them—this example, too, will long endure.

In August 2022, on the very day of the atrocity, I wrote a response, concluding with these words: ‘Pull through, Salman. Pull through.’ And pull through he did. He was equal to it, all right. The sheer strength of the man is nothing less than astounding: a 74-year-old asthmatic, who had endured through a COVID-19 infection, is stabbed and slashed over and over by a would-be assassin, and he pulls through, even though the doctors thought his survival a near-impossibility. No, he more than pulled through: he won. He has lost an eye and suffered horrifically, but his mind remains, and he has written a brave and beautiful book to ‘answer violence with art.’

‘I wasn’t well enough to take in clearly the scale of what was happening outside my hospital room, but I felt it,’ Rushdie writes of the thousands of outpourings of solidarity he received. ‘I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.’ It is heartening to know that the tsunami of love heartened Rushdie in his hospital bed; whether or not he knew of my own outpouring I do not know, but it is nice to think of it as a small undulation in the tsunami.

Knife is not just a personal narrative. It is also a reaffirmation of Rushdie’s commitment to the fight for ‘the idea of freedom—Thomas Paine’s idea, the Enlightenment idea, John Stuart Mill’s idea’ against its many enemies, whether left or right, progressive or reactionary. He also reaffirms his secularism and his atheism: ‘My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.’

But the genius of the book is that it is not a horror story, or not merely a horror story. It is, ultimately, a love story. Rushdie tells us how he met and fell in love with the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he married in 2021, and how Griffiths helped him through the horror: ‘The woman I loved and who loved me was by my side. We would win this battle. I would live.’

As against this, Rushdie’s attacker is not named at all. He is referred to only as ‘the A.’, ‘[m]y Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation . . .’ In one powerful chapter, Rushdie imagines a conversation between himself and the A., and the A. is revealed as the nameless loser he undoubtedly is. Later, Rushdie tells us what he would like to say to the A. in court, and he concludes that:

‘Your intrusion into my life was violent and damaging, but now my life has resumed, and it is a life filled with love… I don’t forgive you. I don’t not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me. And from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I’m glad I have my life, and not yours. And my life will go on.’

But Rushdie also tells us that he no longer really cares about getting to face his attacker; the A. truly has become irrelevant. And life and love go on: ‘After the angel of death, the angel of life.’

Like Rushdie’s latest novel Victory City, Knife is a humanist triumph. Referring to the former, I wrote that ‘Rushdie shows us the triumph of love, life and literature against philistinism, death and fanaticism.’ And so he continues to do. Knife, despite it all, has a happy ending. Rushdie and Griffiths return to the scene of the crime, more than a year later, and Rushdie realises his triumph:

‘Yes, we had reconstructed our happiness, even if imperfectly. Even on this blue-sky day, I knew it was not the cloudless thing we had known before. It was a wounded happiness, and there was, and perhaps always would be, a shadow in the corner of it. But it was a strong happiness nevertheless, and as we embraced, I knew it would be enough.’

In Knife, Salman Rushdie shows us that he has lost none of his power. The horror is subsumed and conquered by love. It is a work of genius, another testament, like his memoir Joseph Anton, to what Rushdie has called ‘the liberty instinct’: the indestructible human desire for freedom. In the end, Knife is Rushdie’s greatest victory.

Knife can be purchased here. Note that, when you use this link to purchase the book, we earn from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a compendium of relevant articles by Emma Park

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Rushdie’s victory appeared first on The Freethinker.

If the Scottish Government is to be believed, a roving band of bigoted individuals is attacking its citizens. In an attempt to deprogram the hate-filled hoi polloi from their rabid bigotry, the Hate Monster has been let loose. In an 80-second video, a character eerily reminiscent of Captain Caveman grows larger, fuelled by hate: ‘When ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon.’ Since this online periodical’s editor is Scottish, I made sure to quote the proper vernacular to avoid committing a hate crime. [Och aye! Very wise! – Ed.]

Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act went into effect on 1 April. It was created to consolidate existing hate crime legislation and safeguard minorities who were thought to be particularly vulnerable. In 2020, after the George Floyd murder, then-Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf stated that ‘We cannot, and will not, tolerate hate crime, prejudice or discrimination of any kind.’ This came just a couple of months after he introduced the Hate Crime Bill in the Scottish Parliament. More recently, the First Minister has called for a ‘zero-tolerance approach to hatred.’ In addition to a long list of protected characteristics, including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity, the Act establishes a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’.

According to Police Scotland, a hate crime is defined as ‘Any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will towards a social group.’ Put another way, it is a perception-based crime: the alleged victim’s—or witnesses’—subjective assessment alone is sufficient to classify an incident as a hate crime, without the need for any additional evidence. 

The Act’s defenders contend that this is an incorrect interpretation of the law. They argue that it is necessary for a ‘reasonable person’ to agree that an incident is threatening or abusive enough to constitute a hate crime. But there were already laws pertaining to death threats and every liberal democracy is based on laws that protect people from physical harm. So what of abuse? Words are not violence. This law conflates physical and verbal abuse. When someone verbally attacks you, the worst you will suffer is a bruised ego. It does not put a restriction on your freedom. 

And what of the effects on the alleged transgressors? You might be recorded as having participated in a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), even if you have not broken the law. If this occurs, you are unlikely to be informed, but it could become apparent when your employer conducts a disclosure check on you. Although NCHIs were not introduced as part of the new Hate Crime Act, it is a reasonable suspicion that more of them will be recorded now. The Court of Appeal (England and Wales) declared in 2021 that the recording of NCHIs as it had been done until then was unlawful. Despite this, police in England and Wales persisted, issuing 6,489 of them between June and November of last year, many of which involved ‘petty rows’. The Scottish police are merely doing the same.

It appears that elite paranoia about the general population is the motivation behind the Hate Crime Act. Hundreds of sites have been made available by Police Scotland for the public to report hate crimes, which range from a Glaswegian sex shop to a mushroom farm in North Berwick. You can visit one of these snitching centres located across the length and breadth of the nation and submit an anonymous report about someone. What could possibly go wrong?

If Harold Wilson’s oft-quoted observation that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ is correct, then the Hate Crime Act’s first one has been an unmitigated disaster. In the seven days since the Act’s enactment, Police Scotland logged over 6,000 reports. The police are wasting valuable resources on overtime due to the unceasing influx of incidents, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, while actual crimes like burglary remain unsolved. 

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Act is that the dwelling defence has been removed, so people now face the possibility of prosecution for remarks they make while at home. Fines and jail terms of up to seven years are among the available forms of punishment.

And the Act is a hostage to the law of unintended consequences. As a senior Scottish police officer said, people might ‘use the legislation to score points against people who sit on the other side of a particularly controversial debate’. Thus, police might be forced to adjudicate between warring parties seeking revenge.

Meanwhile, Thomas Ross KC suggested that football fans might report rival supporters using the Act. Given the fierce rivalry and sectarian history of Old Firm football, this could prove a real headache for the police. Indeed, a number of reports regarding hate crimes were made after a match on 7 April according to The Times, including from people who overheard Rangers fans’ singing on the TV and radio, though the precise figure has not been verified. 

Like all laws that aim to outlaw offence, this one appears to have been thrown together on the fly. The best example of the ad hoc nature of the Act was provided by Siobhan Brown, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety, who stated that individuals may be subject to investigation if they misgender someone. J.K. Rowling chose to test the new law on April Fool’s Day, which, ironically, was also the day the Act went into effect. The gender critical feminist posted on Twitter/X about a number of men convicted of sex crimes now identifying as women. She said, ‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.’

Thankfully, the police declared that the Harry Potter author’s tweets were not criminal. Additionally, they ignored reports against Humza Yousaf, who became a target for his now-infamous speech in 2020 in which he effectively criticised Scotland for being too white. Naturally, this has led to accusations that the police are selectively enforcing the new law. Take the Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, who had an NCHI recorded against him for tweeting that identifying as non-binary was like identifying as a cat. Fraser now intends to challenge this in court. 

I write a lot about culture, so let me share a humorous example that encapsulates our submission to political correctness. Scot Squad was a Scottish mockumentary series about a fictional police force, and one episode was incredibly prescient. In it, the chief repeatedly digs himself into a bigger hole in an effort to make up for a relatively trivial comment. Feeling he is always offending someone, his long apology never ends. 

A recent poll indicates that 45% of Scots support the repeal of the law, while 21% support it. This is a heartening indication that the spirit of liberty in Scotland is not dead yet. The more people learn about it, the more resistance they seem to be putting up. We owe a debt of gratitude to J.K. Rowling for making the general public aware of the ridiculousness of this law. Ironically, it took a woman with a big set of balls to show up this illiberal legislation.

Further reading

From Satan to the Hate Monster, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The return of blasphemy in Ireland, by Noel Yaxley

The post Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? appeared first on The Freethinker.

As revealed in the new review by the Independent Advisor on Social Cohesion and Resilience Sara Khan, the teacher was utterly failed by the school, police, and political authorities. Their response exposed a severe lack of understanding of the seriousness of blasphemy accusations, and only succeeded in validating and encouraging the demands of the mob.

This is particularly true of Batley Grammar School (BGS), which decided to issue an apology to the parents of every pupil after a single menacing phone call. The apology provided no context or explanation for the lesson’s content, and leaders did not consult the religious studies (RS) teacher before sending it.

This attempt at appeasement actually invited further pressure, legitimising religious outrage by accepting there was something that required an apology. Now faced with agitators outside the school gates, and the sharing of the teacher’s image and personal details online, the school capitulated. Senior leaders denounced the use of the image at a televised press conference, and met several self-appointed ‘community leaders’ – none of whom were parents. They also suspended the teacher, isolating him by preventing communication with his colleagues.

The effect of this ordeal upon the teacher and his family has been severe. He remains in hiding, unable to return home, and living with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal thoughts. His children missed months of education, and had to sleep on the floor of squalid temporary accommodation.

Galling as it is to see Batley Multi Academy Trust stand by its actions in the Khan review, schools are under-equipped and under-qualified to manage situations like those faced by BGS. Far less forgivable are the failures of those responsible for defending our democratic freedoms: the local authority Kirklees Council, local MP Tracy Brabin, and West Yorkshire Police.

Kirklees Council, which issued no public statement of any kind during the protests, told the Khan review that they took this decision to maintain their relationship with the local Muslim community. This illustrates an alarmingly ignorant view of Muslims as a homogenous group, with a single viewpoint to which one must defer in the interests of cohesion. In reality, a plurality of views exists amongst British Muslims on every issue and, as the Khan review makes clear, many Muslim parents at Batley did not support the protests.

Brabin’s statement at the time describing protestors’ ‘upset and offence’ as ‘understandable’ and ‘predictable’ betrayed the same ignorance, and a bigotry of low expectations towards British Muslims. Though she issued a meekly worded criticism of the threats and intimidation directed towards the RS teacher some days after her first statement, it was tempered by a simultaneous welcome of the school’s apology and ‘recognition of the offence caused’. Like the council, Brabin validated religious hysteria about a drawing of a human being and sold out the right to free expression in the hope of a quiet life.

The police’s appalling response to the protests is only comprehensible in light of comments made by one anonymous officer to the Khan review, describing how police inadvertently support extremist preachers in the misguided belief that they have a positive relationship with a minority community. Even so, one would have thought the murder of Samuel Paty—beheaded in Paris for teaching a very similar lesson to the one delivered in Batley just six months earlier— would have led police to take the threat to the RS teacher very seriously. Instead, they treated the protests as a low-risk ‘neighbourhood incident’, a baffling decision given the blasphemy-motivated murders of Asad Shah in Glasgow and Jalal Uddin in Rochdale in 2016.

In the Khan review, experienced police officers also criticised the failure to make clear that any threatening, harassing, or intimidatory behaviour against the RS teacher and other school staff would not be tolerated, and that perpetrators would be subject to the full force of the law. To date, no arrests have been made for the harassment the Batley RS teacher experienced.

The events at Batley are not unique. In 2023, a pupil received death threats after a Quran was lightly damaged at a Wakefield school. Once again so-called community leaders used this as an opportunity to whip up tension, leading to representatives from the school, West Yorkshire Police, and the boy’s mother appearing at a local mosque in order to ease tensions. As with Batley, every effort was made to accommodate, appease, and defuse, with very little made to challenge.

In these responses, we see the success of dogmatic religious activists in convincing public bodies that they represent the wider Muslim community, and how the privileging of religious sentiments throughout public life makes it more difficult to challenge fundamentalism.

Only now do some of the lessons of these events finally seem to be sinking in. Action to challenge the fundamentalist threat to our schools is long overdue, and the Khan review’s recommendation to form a specialist unit to support schools which find themselves targeted by religious thugs is a step in the right direction.

But it is not enough. Until we succeed in denying the concept of blasphemy as one which should have any force in our society, or indeed worldwide, events like those in Batley will continue. Yet instead of challenging blasphemy-related extremism, political parties, local government, universities, and civil society promote the nebulous and authoritarian concept of ‘Islamophobia’, which opens the door to criticism and discussion of religion being portrayed as attacks upon individuals. This is little more than a blasphemy law disguised as a diversity and inclusion initiative.

There are signs UK society is coming to terms with the danger and scale of anti-blasphemy violence. Let us hope we can wake up to this threat before any more innocent teachers are left living with post-traumatic stress, or any more individuals are beheaded for asserting their right to freedom of speech.

Editorial note: this piece was originally published on the National Secular Society website on 4 April 2024 and is republished here with permission.

Further reading

Blasphemy in the classroom, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, November 2023 and Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The Michaela School and religious exceptionalism, by Khadija Khan

The post Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned appeared first on The Freethinker.

Since their earliest origins, Christian cultures have been preoccupied with the temptations of the Devil, and humanity’s susceptibility to them. ‘Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ (James 1: 14-15)

The popularity of Satan, the arch-tempter, may be on the wane, but Police Scotland, in preparing to implement the Scottish Hate Crime Act, have found a contemporary devil to replace him: the Hate Monster. ‘When yer feeling insecure, when ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon [sic].’

Beware, anyone who has ever felt any heated disagreement with someone or something, especially where a ‘protected characteristic’ is involved: you may be possessed by the Hate Monster and anything you say or do, especially on social media, may be used by righteous informers and priests – sorry, police – as evidence of your sinful mind.

As far as the protected characteristic of religion is concerned, the unbeliever may be glad that, under section 9(b) of the Act, expressions of ‘antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult’ are not, on their own, automatically deemed to constitute ‘threatening or abusive’ behaviour, which is the first element in the section 4(2) offence of ‘stirring up hatred’. (The second element of the offence is the intent to ‘stir up hatred against a group of persons’ on the basis of their protected characteristic.)

Yet to advocates of open debate, this carve-out for free expression about religion offers tepid comfort. Not only is it apparently confined to certain categories of expression, but it does not apply to any of the other protected characteristics, including, most controversially, ‘transgender identity’.

As a criterion of judging whether apparently threatening or abusive behaviour is ‘reasonable’ and therefore defensible, section 4(5) invokes the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of ‘ideas that offend, shock or disturb’. However, under section 9, while ‘discussion or criticism’ of protected characteristics is not automatically deemed threatening or abusive, antipathy, ridicule and the like presumably would be in the case of any characteristic except religion.

Altogether, the wording of the Act raises several questions about how it will function in practice, and how sections 4 and 9 will relate to each other.

If someone is gauche enough, for instance, to criticise the claim that a man can change into a woman, how is he or she to know whether doing so will be deemed mere discussion or an act that a ‘reasonable’ person would consider threatening or abusive – and if the latter, whether it will itself still be judged ‘reasonable’ on the basis of the ECHR right to freedom of expression, or will be held an unreasonable, impermissible act of stirring up hatred against trans people? Who should decide what is ‘reasonable’ in such fraught debates? You might as well ask a lay court to adjudicate on the relative merits of con- and transubstantiation.

Moreover, if it is a question of intent, how is the court to determine, as a second and distinct test, what the defendant intended the effect of their words to be, other than by the words themselves?

The overall thrust of the ‘stirring-up’ offences is to imply that the expression of disagreement about characteristics specially defined and sanctioned by the Scottish state is always potentially criminal. This is a short step from criminalising thought itself. And that is what the Hate Monster is all about.

The idea that thought can be sinful goes right back to the Old Testament: ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Leviticus 18: 28)

From next week in Scotland, therefore, who knows how mild an expression of doubtful or dissenting views, in particular ‘gender critical’ ones, may be sufficient to saddle a person with a criminal record – or whether most dissenters will be too afraid to speak at all, because they do not want to risk it. No wonder the Act has been so heavily criticised by women’s rights campaigners, as well as free speech advocates more generally.

Of course, if you are inclined to express antipathy to women, no need to worry – biological sex, unlike transgender identity, is not on the protected list.

Section 12 does contain a power for the Ministers to add ‘the characteristic of sex’ to the list. So in theory, if supporters of women’s rights ever won a majority at Holyrood, they could implement this section, and then sit back and watch the police and the courts tearing their hair out as trans women denounced women for misgendering, and women denounced trans women for misogyny.

In the long term, though, slapping more restrictions on speech about ever more categories of protected groups will benefit no one, except perhaps those who happen to be in power for the time being. If we want a society which is not a dictatorship, if we believe in intellectual and moral progress rather than stagnation, then we have to be prepared for give and take: to be offended, insulted, made uncomfortable and even upset by the views of people who disagree with us, even on the most sensitive subjects of all.

As Jonathan Rauch put it, ‘To appeal to a country’s conscience, you need an antagonist.’ If you demonise your antagonists, if you label anyone who disagrees with you an agent of Satan or the Hate Monster, then you as a country are depriving yourselves of the opportunity for moral doubt and conflict, which is the essence of a conscience.

Plato once defined thinking as the soul’s dialogue with itself. Take away a country’s opportunity for dialogue and disagreement, and you might as well kill its soul.

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