Street censorship
Imagine being a writer, or a reader, in Egypt.
More recently, the literary magazine Ibdaa (“Creativity”) had its license revoked over the publication, in 2007, of a poem by the renowned poet Helmy Salem, deemed blasphemous because it personified God with lines such as: “The Lord isn’t a policeman/who catches criminals by the scruff of their necks”…Before Ibdaa was shut down, Salem had already been forced to return a State Award for Achievement in the Arts, honoring his entire body of work. The court that rescinded the award found that “The sin that he committed … against God and against society, challenging its traditions and religious beliefs should fail the sum total of his work, rendering him ineligible for any state honor or prize.”
We need Nicholas Kristof about now, to tell us that yes Islam does crush women and hate gays and forbid people to leave and fuck up literature and art and thought but hey the calligraphy is pretty.
Salem was the victim of a hisba case — what has become the legal weapon of choice in the arsenal of would-be censors. These are cases — based on a principle in Islamic law — in which an individual may sue another on behalf of society, alleging some grave harm has been done it. Several Islamist lawyers specialize in hisba lawsuits and use them with alarming frequency against writers, intellectuals, and professors whose opinions they deem to have denigrated Islam. Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic population also has its self-appointed moral guardians, eager to take novelists to court. And while charges against a book, author, or publisher are being investigated, the book is usually confiscated from the market.
Can you imagine anything more nightmarish? A situation in which any ignorant benighted mindless godbothering fool can take you to court for writing something it doesn’t like, and win? There are a lot of ignorant benighted mindless fools out there, godbotherers and non-godbotherers. Imagine knowing they could shut you down any time they felt like it.
[A]ny one book or film may find itself the center of a public scandal, singled out on the basis of a few lines. The arbitrariness of censorship in Egypt makes publishers (especially the government-run ones) afraid to take risks and leads writers to second-guess themselves. “In Egypt we’re born and we live in a state of constant self-censorship,” the writer Khaled Al Khamissi, whose book Taxi has been an international hit, once told me.
That’s what I mean. Nightmare.
Update: On the other hand – a bit of good news for a change – the last comment on the article linked to a news flash: the prosecutor threw out the case.
Prosecutor Abdel Megid Mahmud threw out the case, saying the epic tales had been published for centuries without problems, and had been an inspiration to countless artists.
Yessss!
After a while, Kristof and the other accommodationists start sounding like defenders of communism: “But you don’t understand – true (Islam/communism) is peaceful and tolerant, really! It’s just a complete coincidence that it’s turned into a violent, repressive dictatorship everywhere it’s gotten hold of the state!”
Sarcasm alert:
But see, the institution of the hisba is based on a time-honored, sacred concept that we should respect: the Qur’anic injunction to “enjoin good and forbid evil,” and which we in the West should learn to respect and even learn from, since it increases community-mindedness and everybody learns to care about everybody else, while we Westerners live atomized existences, detached from family and society…
I can’t keep it up! I feel like vomiting…
This is, after all, the concept that unites busybodies taking the Arabian Nights to court in Egypt, harassing women about their hijab in Iran or Saudi Arabia, blowing up music shops in Pakistan, and enjoining Muslims to pray on pain of death in Somalia. Poking one’s nose in everybody’s business because some divine being says so doesn’t exactly fit with “live and let live” notions of community harmony, and is a large part of the reason why there are such problems with religion — it’s not enough that they are free to believe as they please, their belief system requires that they remake all of society according to their deity’s will, or rather their notions projected as their deity’s wishes.
On this topic, you may find this post interesting:
http://thenewcomer.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/what-are-your-conditions/
Problem is, as Salman Rushdie points out, we’re in it! Only here they don’t take it to a judge; they just threaten to kill you. Just as effective, and it saves on legal bills and the law’s delay.
I know. I found the article because Rushdie linked to it on Facebook. He also linked to a public discussion he was to have with Hitchens last night. They were comrades at the New Statesman once upon a time – now the god damn New Statesman is speaking up for sharia. It makes me want to punch something.
And even more time-honored than that, since one can trace the principle to good ol’ Biblical zealotry, in Hebrew Kanai, which among the ancient Jews, then in Christian communities, enabled “righteous” individuals to take to task their neighbors for not observing all the strictures of religious law, including by violence if need be.
Well, Hebrews thought positively of religious zealotry until the great Zealot revolt against Rome, which brought down on Israel a ferocious retaliation, including the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem…
Christians kept the idea, though, especially once the Roman Empire became Christian and they didn’t have to fear any more persecutions. On the contrary, it permitted them to force others to submit to the rules of their theocracy!
Then the early Muslims, who thought of their religion as fulfilling at last all the Biblical prophecies (the god of Islam is the same as the god of Abraham, and in the Quran, Jesus is a prophet among others), who were engaged in building a religious kingdom of their own, recognized this legal tool as useful, and appropriated it.
As always, dogma + power = tyranny.
People of the Book. Emphasis on the singular.
It’s no accident that Ben Jonson named the Puritan character in Bartholomew Fair “Zeal-of-the-land-busy.”