Free Speech as Ethical Speech in Islam: An Essay in Ethnographic Moral Theology

The relationship between Islam and freedom of speech is a topic of intense concern in the world today, not least due to the furious and ongoing controversy over the notorious Danish cartoons published in 2005, which has in many ways replayed that over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in the late 1980s. These controversies, and the violence that they have inspired, play into, and play with, a narrative of a ‘clash of civilisations’, a fundamental divide between Muslim notions of what can and cannot be said, on the one hand, and (primarily Western) liberal secular ones on the other. The intensity and polarisation of these debates is paralysing. Further, they have monopolised discussion over Islam and free speech, channelling it towards questions of blasphemy, insult and intolerance. And yet, freedom of speech transcends the issue of blasphemy, and is as much an issue within Muslim communities as between them and non-Muslim ones. In this chapter, we thus seek to develop the conversation about the ethics of speech in Islam in alternative directions. As will become clear, the distinctive directions that we take flow from what is a wider interdisciplinary research collaboration: one of us (Bhojani) is primarily trained in the field of uṣūl al-fiqh, the other (Clarke) in anthropology.