ETHICS OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM

I argue that under normal circumstances a state that is liberal and secular should not use its legal apparatus to suppress the publication of cartoons like those that triggered the deadly terrorist attack on the premises of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, if it is determined to abide by its core values. These values, which include religious neutrality, religious freedom, and unhindered freedom of criticism, imply that individual citizens are prima facie legally free to express their disapproval of particular religions or religious faith in general, through any non-violent means they consider appropriate, including parody and ridicule. This idea is open to various objections. Those focusing on the protection of religion as such can be easily dismissed, but the charge that defamation of religion causes offence to believers has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, I defend the view that we need something stronger than taking offense to justifiably ban harsh religious criticism. In particular, I argue that, if the above sort of criticism prevents its recipients from exercising their basic rights or it incites third parties to engage in criminal activities against the above individuals, it should be subject to legal sanctions. However, this is not the case with the cartoons that appeared in Charlie Hebdo, since, as far as I can tell, no basic rights of French Muslims were violated, and no violent actions were committed against them as a result of their publication.

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The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

International Journal of Middle East Studies ◽

10.1017/s0020743820000781 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 52 (4) ◽

pp. 623-642

Author(s):

Yasmin Moll

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Mass Communication ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Television Channel ◽

Political Economies ◽

History Of ◽

Religious Criticism ◽

Arab Middle East

AbstractThe emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

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