Can a novel be blasphemous?

19 comments on “Can a novel be blasphemous?”

1. Biblibio says:
   May 28th, 2009 at 1:36 am

   It’s too bad that freedom of speech doesn’t exist in this case. This author may have to get a specific endorsement from the religious leaders… Oh, how I wait for the day when these things won’t matter.

2. Roland says:
   May 28th, 2009 at 7:14 am

   “Mr. Gursel noted the damage such trials could cause Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.”

   This is rather the point, isn’t it? The factions that mount this sort of pers/prosecution have no desire ever to find themselves under legally empowered EU invigilation.

3. Franklin Carter says:
   May 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm

   I think some Turks just have a problem with literature. They get upset when a author commits “blasphemy” in fiction. They get upset when an author criticizes Kemal Ataturk. They get upset when an author writes accurately about the Armenian holocaust. If Turkey were a free country, Turkish authors would be able to express their views about all these subjects without facing legal sanctions.

4. Roland says:
   May 28th, 2009 at 7:56 pm

   Are Turkish free-speech norms so different from those of Europe? Novelists can end up in court for “inciting religious hatred” in the EU. It happened to Michel Houellebecq in France, and surely it’s happened to others.

   Turkey has some problems which put it outside EU standards, such as (as FC mentions) an official genocide denial problem, a stateless minority problem, an unassailable dear leader problem, but, to reconsider my previous post, perhaps the free speech thing is a distinction without much of a difference.

5. Franklin Carter says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 7:07 am

   Roland asks: “Are Turkish free speech norms so different from those of Europe?”

   Good question. If I had been asked 30 years ago, I would have answered yes: “Countries such as France and Britain enjoy much more freedom of expression than Turkey.” I also would have guessed that Turkey permitted more free expression than the communist states.

   But today, I think several Western European countries are more censorious than they were 30 years ago. Dutch prosecutors are chasing after Geert Wilders for denouncing Islam. Donald Thomas just published a major work on censorship in modern Britain. I have the book (called Freedom’s Frontier), and Thomas clearly thinks free expression is under attack. The Eastern European states, although no longer communist, still practise censorship.

   So if Turkish free speech norms today are similar to those of Europe, the reason might be that European — especially Western European — protection for free speech is deteriorating. If that’s true, then I cannot applaud the trend. And, of course, the new European norms do not excuse Turkish censorship.

6. George says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 7:29 am

   Just to stoke this a bit: isn’t the practical problem more in how the laws are enforced than how they’re written, as well as what/who’s included? EU talks about “religious hatred”. Turkey talks about “blasphemy against Islam”. There’s a pretty steep difference there.

7. Roland says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 8:54 am

   George, could you pick apart the “steep difference” you refer to? I suspect it may be another distinction without much of a difference, or a merely-semantic difference based on lawmakers’ notions of which linguistic red flags a given group is prepared to dive at.

8. Michael says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am

   @ Roland: You can’t see it? One charter protects the right to many religions to exist and express themselves free from abuse in a multicultural society, while the other protects one form of expression in a supposed democracy dominated by religious dogma, in a state that has engaged in religious persecution to the point of genocide yet refuses to acknowledge it.

   Steep.

9. Roland says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 11:48 am

   Michael:

   In the article above we read that, “Mr. Gursel noted the damage such trials could cause Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.” But there’s no reason why they should, since in this instance, Turkey and the EU are on common ground.

   Michael, Turkey is not “dominated by religious dogma.” Islam and Islamism are strong horses there of course, but they are balanced against the pervasive (and officially secular) military. You make it sound like an Islamic republic, which it isn’t.

   It is worth noting that Gursel’s case is somewhat unusual, in that he hasn’t been accused (as many Turkish writers have) of “insulting Turkishness” by mentioning Kurds or Armenians, or of transgressing against Ataturk, the military, or any of Turkey’s national-chauvinist sore spots. He has been accused of “inciting religious hatred,” by (presumably) challenging Islam’s official narrative. The charge sounds more European than Turkish to my ear. (I was wrong in my first post, when I lazily confused his case with the more common Turkish type).

   Michel Houellebecq was tried for inciting religious hatred in France, and Gursel can be tried on the same charge in Turkey (despite what sounds like a considerable amount of preliminary grovelling to the mosques on his part). Therefore, there’s no reason Gursel’s case should affect Turkey’s EU prospects.

   P.S. Please try to answer these questions, upon which so much hinges: When you write of the right of religions “to exist and express themselves free from abuse,” what exactly do you mean my “abuse,” and what so you see as the threats to their existence?

10. Franklin Carter says:
    May 29th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    Michael writes: “One charter protects the right to many religions to exist and express themselves free from abuse in a multicultural society …”

    I challenge this assertion. First, religions are just collections of ideas, beliefs and behaviours. They may be popular and sincerely held, but they do not have rights.

    Second, some religions promote retrograde ideas about women, gays and other things. People should be free to peacefully criticize, ridicule, attack and even abuse religious ideas if people think such criticism is merited.

    In Western societies, some governments punish group defamation -– through fines, imprisonment and censorship — to secure public order and social peace. But such censure isn’t needed to achieve these goals. Other laws that protect the person and property do the job.

    The prosecution of people who advance unpopular or offensive opinions about religion merely degrades individual liberty and encourages ideological conformity. The Europeans (and the Turks!) can dispense with such censure.

11. Roland says:
    May 29th, 2009 at 1:41 pm

    The Turkish and EU approaches to speech also share a common motivator: shame.

    In the Turkish case, an unconfronted shame over what they have done to the Armenians and Kurds. As regards Islam, shame perhaps for adhering to a religion which the official culture regards as not entirely serious, something that should be limited lest it render the state backward; or, alternatively, shame over embracing the secular state rather than “true” Islamic roots (try counting the number of times the words “shame” and “ashamed” come up in Orhan Pamuk’s political novel, Snow).

    As for Europe, they are justly ashamed that they turned their continent into an abattoir by failing to adequately confront the pseudo-religions of group chauvinism, collective self-pity, and anti-Semitism. Europe is now just about ready to fight the battles of the 1930’s. They want another chance to get the just-treatment-of-minorities thing right, and some of them seem to think they can grab the chance by intellectually shoehorning European Muslims into a pageant in which they caricature Europe’s 1930s Jewish population, and today’s liberals bravely defend them. If scripted, this pageant would surely be a (shameful) farce, not least because there would be an insufficient supply of willing villains available from central casting.

12. Roland says:
    May 31st, 2009 at 9:21 am

    Another parallel between Turkey and France specifically: coercive secularism in the form of proscribing the hijab from public institutions. This is itself a restriction of free expression, so when Muslim factions in those countries seek to silence what they see as challenges to Islam, they can quite rightly say that they’re working within a rationale already credited by those states.

13. Franklin Carter says:
    May 31st, 2009 at 9:27 am

    French officials goofed when they placed restrictions on religious dress.

14. Roland says:
    May 31st, 2009 at 11:46 am

    It’s not just a matter of an isolated, mistaken, decision. It comes from a whole different institutional mentality. It’s not one I find appealing, but when I discussed related matters with a French teacher recently, he told me that my attitudes are “typically Anglo-Saxon.”
    There are quid pro quos built into the French system which allow the state to suppress expressions of group animosity like a big daddy maintaining peace at the dinner table. My “Anglo-Saxon” view is that those suppressions postpone and exacerbate problems rather than solve them.

15. michel says:
    May 31st, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    yeah, ’cause you know how to solve them. For a culture not yours.

16. Roland says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 8:02 am

    Damn, you try to defend Michel Houellebecq and then he directs assy comments at you on Bookninja. Everyone has a stake in the legacy of the French Revolution, M. Houellebecq.

17. michel says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    your misindentification leaves me puzzled.

18. George says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    I can’t figure out which one of you is playing straight man.

19. michel says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    must be me.

Discuss