In vain

The Future of Blasphemy

Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights

By Austin Dacey

Continuum

After decades of being regarded an obscure, if not discarded, concept, blasphemy has made a spectacular comeback as a hot issue. Efforts to criminalize blasphemy are well advanced in the United Nations, with talks of an international treaty. The Organization of Islamic Conference and the Vatican have become partners in lobbying for such a treaty.

In its convoluted style, the European Court of Human Rights also has endorsed the concept.

In recent years, blasphemy has also been at the center of court cases in France based on lawsuits brought by Catholic and Muslim clerics.

But what constitutes blasphemy? American philosopher and human-rights campaigner Austin Dacey begins his journey into this labyrinthine subject by tackling that question.

In its Judeo-Christian form, blasphemy meant taking the name of the Lord in vain and, more generally, failing to respect the divine.

The Hebrew Bible uses the words nakob (speaking distinctly) and qillel (to curse) to describe two different but ultimately linked transgressions against the divine. Nakob meant uttering the forbidden name of God while qillel was insulting the divine. The Greek translated the two words as blasphemein, or injuring by speech. Punishment was death by stoning.

Some Christian scholars were more relaxed about the whole thing. Aquinas quipped that an injurious word would not scratch the Godhead.

The Islamic version of blasphemy, tajdif, never attracted as much attention as kufr, or rejection of “the Divine Truth,” an unforgivable sin.

Blasphemy today is a child of political correctness. The UN and various European courts that have ruled on it see it as “failure to respect a person’s or a group’s religious beliefs.” It is as if the divine has been scripted out of the debate.

Dacey shows that blasphemy is no longer the exclusive concern of Abrahamic religions. Some Hindus and Sikhs have also adopted the concept in its politically correct version.

For example, the Indian Muslim-born painter F.M. Husain was hounded out of his homeland by “over a decade of harassment and lawsuits by Hindu conservatives outraged by his nude portraits of Hindu goddesses.”

In exile, Husain’s travails continued; even in democratic England, he was hounded by fanatics. An exhibition of his work in London was closed after only days amid threats of violence.

Sikh militants have stopped the staging of a play by a British Sikh playwright in London, and leftists joined Islamists to force the cancellation in Berlin of the performance of a modern interpretation of an opera by Mozart, in which the severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed were on display.

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