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Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitations

In response to reactions following the 2005 Danish cartoon scandal in which cartoonists drew the Prophet Muhammad, this piece looks at the concepts of freedom of speech and blasphemy in Islamic scholarship. Asad questions the differences between limitations on speech in secular societies and blasphemy, which has an inherent religious connotation. The idea of seduction is central to traditional Islamic thought because it is prohibited as a form of coercion, unlike in liberal thought. In this context, seduction need not be sexual in nature, but is merely the manipulation and coercion of one’s actions. Blasphemy in the history of Christianity is quite different from its role in Islam, where there are quite a few words in Arabic that resonate with its English counterpart. In Islam, freedom of belief and thought exists; however, that freedom changes when it is brought to the public and may influence the actions of others through seduction, harming the social order. In liberal thought, there is a larger distinction between seduction and forcible subjection. Thinking through the concept of seduction in Islam allows for challenging the market mindset of capitalism, which relies on coercion and capturing material desires. Similarly, the use of technology and media to seduce our minds into buying certain things and believing certain things is protected in a secular state as freedom of speech but may be considered a form of seduction in Islamic thought. This piece poses thoughtful questions about our normative judgments of aggression based on religion versus the secular state and how we can rethink harm created by supposed freedoms.[1]

Asad, Talal. “Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitations” in Calhoun, Craig J., Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. Rethinking Secularism. Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2011.
 
[1] This text is a chapter from a larger book, Rethinking Secularism, which challenges the dominant, rigid Western Enlightenment notion of secularism as the absence of all religion.

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