Official: You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of the Lord and so as a blasphemer you are to be stoned to death.
Matthias: Look, I’d had a lovely supper and all I said to my wife was, “That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.”
Official: Blasphemy! He’s said it again.
— Monty Python’s Life of Brian
You may be delighted to know that the common law crime of blasphemy is still technically in force in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia — part of our residual colonial inheritance. Every law reform commission ever created has recommended its abolition, but that’s never quite happened. Not that anyone’s been prosecuted for blasphemy for a very long time but, these days, such hangovers make me a little nervous.
Interestingly, in English law, blasphemy was only a crime if the religion that one insulted was the Church of England. Someone once tried to prosecute Salman Rushdie for blaspheming Islam in his book The Satanic Verses. It was knocked out by the courts on the basis that, to extend the crime to all religions rather than just protecting the state church of which the English monarch is head, would open a can of worms nobody wants to eat. In 2008, the UK abolished the crime altogether. It still exists in plenty of other countries.
The former governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, is today in an Indonesian prison kicking off a two-year sentence for breaching Indonesia’s extant criminal offence of blasphemy. Indonesia being the feted paragon of the modern, moderate majority-Muslim nation, the prosecution of a prominent Christian (and ethnically Chinese) politician for blaspheming against Islam is not to be lightly ignored.
Indonesia introduced its blasphemy law in 1965, shortly after independence. It prohibits people from attempting to gain public support for interpretations of or activities within a religion, which are in deviation of the basic teachings of that religion. It applies to any religion which is “embraced by the people of Indonesia”. Technically, that could mean religions other than Islam. Practically, it means Islam.
Ahok copped a conviction and two years’ prison as a result of something he said during the recent campaign in which he was trying to be re-elected governor of Jakarta in the face of an aggressive and openly bigoted campaign by some Muslim groups to vote him out. On the way to losing the election, Ahok was explicitly targeted by advocates at the less tolerant end of Islamic interpretation who were loudly saying that the Koran prohibits Muslims from voting for a non-Muslim.
Ahok’s mistake (according to the court) was to say, publicly, that those who were arguing that Muslims couldn’t vote for him were deceiving Muslims (on the basis that the Koran says no such thing). That match to the bonfire did its work, and he was repeatedly misquoted as saying that the Koran itself is wrong.
Obviously, the confusion might have been sorted out in the cool-headed environs of the North Jakarta District Court, where five judges could sift the politics and religious/racial vilification from the actual law. But, no. He’s been slotted.
The Indonesian justice system is admittedly labyrinthine and difficult to interpret. It’s possible that Ahok will be released on appeal, re-imprisoned on further appeal and eventually convicted of something entirely different for purely political reasons.
[Islamic blasphemy trial threatens Indonesian democracy]
However it ends legally, politically Ahok’s career is finished and it’s finished because he got on the wrong side of the dominant religion in his country. I’d love to add that Stephen Fry is facing the same fate by virtue of being investigated by Irish police for blasphemy because he said some particularly mean things about God recently, but the Irish authorities decided not to lay charges and pretty much ruined my narrative.
Ahok will do. His case neatly illustrates the role that blasphemy plays at the intersection between law and state-sponsored religion. Every nation state has grappled with the problem of how to reconcile government and faith; those who maintain that the very foundation of their nationhood is a gift from God have the most difficulty with this.
The United States has perhaps the world’s strongest constitutional enshrinement of separation of church from state, protected by its Supreme Court to the extent that Bible readings in public schools are prohibited as violating the First Amendment. However, the Declaration of Independence, holding certain truths to be self-evident, immediately says that the people’s rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are “endowed by their Creator”. It’s a tricky balance to maintain, keeping God out of government when you believe that he created it in the first place — presumably meaning that it’s also his to take away.
Likewise, modern-day Turkey was established as a strictly secular state, albeit one whose population is over 99% Muslim. It’s shifting progressively back to re-instating Islam as the state religion. Indonesia is in a similar political/demographic position, but with a more explicit acceptance that religion has a direct role to play in civil society and needs protection from anti-religious attack.
The same foundation has blasphemy lingering as part of our own law. The Queen of Australia retains as one of her titles “Defender of the Faith”, granted originally to King Henry VIII by the Pope for being an excellent Roman Catholic, and adapted without apparent irony to his role as head of the schismatic Church of England. Each English sovereign since has been the head of the church, and consequently Australia’s head of state is also, in religious doctrine and law, directly responsible to God.
[Should freedom of speech extend to God? A blasphemous debate]
Mere historical oddity this may seem to our modern democracy (one that still has a foreign hereditary monarch as its ultimate chief, so modern it’s post-modern), in many countries it’s a genuine deal. Just ask Ahok.
Whether Ahok actually committed blasphemy isn’t the point; it’s a crime of infinite subjectivity, because religious faith and belief are not capable of definition to an extent that can allow identification of which words will cause them to be undermined. Faith, no matter how encoded a religion becomes, is a personal matter. Law simply can’t deal with it.
Ahok is also not an anomaly. He’s a high-profile victim of a developing trend that is most pronounced in some Muslim countries but of which signs are appearing in several Buddhist, Hindu and Christian nations as well. It’s the re-assertion by organised religion of its pre-Enlightenment place at the centre of secular authority.
As the world walks further down the path of faith-based conflict, religion will tend to move more towards the levers of governmental power. Blasphemy is an obscure relic today, but it’s making a comeback. It’s interesting in that context to reflect that we never got around to killing it off.
How many million more years have to go by before humans get over this ridiculous special imaginary sky daddy bullshit?
Thousands of years of educational development and scientific advancement and billions of people still don’t have the intellectual capacity to realise they have been and are being conned.
First giant leap to rationality was the European Enlightenment when the Age of Faith was superseded by the Age of Reason. Yet a WA MHR, the Federal Member for Cowan, was reported to have proposed (unsuccessfully) to the ALP that it support blasphemy law by protecting religions (no prizes for guessing which one) from public opprobrium. The ACT already has laws mirroring that under which the Indos are gaoling the politician Ahok.
The British, anticipating moves to turn racial vilification law into blasphemy law, have adopted a Section 29J:
“Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.”
We in Australia need to adopt something like that to protect freedom from religion along with freedom of religion.
Just in case people have forgotten, Chucky BigEars told the few who give a flying some years ago that when/if he ascends the throne, he wants to be known as the “Defender of Faith” – none in particular, just delusions of adequacy in general.
As Samuel Clemens wrote, “Faith is what you need to believe something which you know to be untrue”.
Religion has precipitated, amongst other things, wars, mistrust, persecution, genocide & abuse of children. An abhorrent scorecard. All gods should be called out.
Too true
Indonesia is NOT in the same 99% Muslim position as Turkey:
According to Wikipedia, “In the 2010 Indonesian census, 87.18% of Indonesians identified themselves as Muslim.”
Some areas, like Bali and West Papua, are not Muslim.
I feel the government should beware of a separatist backlash to this latest move.
I.
Bring on the separatist backlash. Indonesia was cobbled together between Jap occupiers and local quislings, has a history of racist genocide and no real legitimacy.
Bit ignorant of history are we?
It’s all on public record including Soekarno’s offer to the Jap occupiers to help extend their reach to the many islands of the NEI.
And before that with 350y of Dutch colonisation? And Sukarno’s Non-aligned Movement and the opening to Soviet and Chinese communists flowing from it?
The Konfrontasi and British meddling in Sarawak for 150y? And after that with CIA/MI6/ASIO/DGSE putting Soeharto in place? And Portuguese colonisation? And Australia’s meddling in Papua?
The sprawling Indo-Chinese archipelago from Sumatera to Luzon, and its overlapping with Melanesian/Polynesian settlers at its edges is and always will be a messy proposition – pointing to a single event on a history of 40-50,000 years is inane.
My experience in living for many decades is strongly religious countries is that it was very little to do with intellectual consent to ideas and almost all to do with identity. It shouldn’t then be surprising that as inequality increases, so that the majority populations in many countries are made to feel inferior from a secular point of view, that they turn to every increasing commitment to religious values that provide them with a sense of belonging and worth. If you want people to primarily accept secular values, you have to make secularism value people – monetary discrimination does nothing of the sort.
Secularism isn’t an imposition, it is the absence of the imposition of theocracy. It doesn’t have to value people, it’s up to us people to do that. Theocracy forbids us to do so. Its absence allows us.
No social construct occurs in a vacuum – secularism is founded in extant values, whether they are out of humanism or utilitarianism or some other ism. And the values they place on people, and the relative value of the individual and collective flow out of those values. Because I don’t believe in supernatural reasons for religion, its popularity must be driven by strong inherent needs of societies – it certainly does a good job in justifying ethnic cleansing!
As an Aussie Muslim, when Indonesian friends ask me about conditions in Australia I tell them Australians are free to do whatever they want within the law provided that they don’t harm others. I believe this is a good model for a secular state of all its citizens. We do see now the rise in Australia of explicitly religious based political parties like the Christian Democrats, the Australian Conservatives and its newly absorbed partner Family First. One Notion also claims a “Judeo-Christian” basis for its bigotry. There are other even more extreme groups that have not, so far, won seats in Parliament. Australians concerned about events in Indonesia could concern themselves as well with local issues such as these.
Well said Rais.
well said Rais. But we also need to keep in mind that these groups are usually only very small groups of people, with an axe to grind. When the Neo Nazi’s have their protests generally only 2 men & a dog turn up to them. The Q society aren’t great in numbers, & neither are any of the more extreme groups, most Australian’s are smart enough to not let religious & political interests become to entangled, at heart this is a country where as you said “as long as you do no harm to others,” kind of mentality is ingrained as there is an all pervading attitude in general of live & let live. Also we need to keep in mind the more these groups splinter (stay small) the better, look at One notion, they are going to end up falling apart because they can’t get their act together, this is their second shot at it & they still can’t get it right.
Exactly!, and well said!