The right to free speech is also the right to freely listen

BY SAMIDHA SATAPATHY

24 February 2006
HYDERABAD, INDIA

An article on the Danish cartoon controversy on Tehelka makes an interesting point. Jesus can be parodied, but not anti-Semitism. Because Jesus is not under threat, but the Jews were. This points out an interesting parallel with the free speech argument against 'Muslim protests.' It also sheds a perhaps more serious light on this controversy, which is gathering with it, among other things, an increasing death toll.

To sum up quickly, the free speech argument that frames the controversy in the media runs thus: the particular controversy was created by the opponents of 'free speech' (defined as, 'where anything can be said') and the 'fanatics' (the description of this 'mob' seems open-ended, but has a general sense of referring to crazy narrow minded unreasonable Muslims) who are offended by ridiculous things (like a dog that doesn't even exist).

The problem with such a perspective is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. It rants about the right to freely say anything, and it ridicules any attempt to limit that freedom, but it forgets a necessary corollary to the right to freely say anything, which is, the right to freely listen, and the right to be freely heard.

Is this article on this site hearing' what the (Mid-Day will insist) 'mob' is trying to say? The answer has to be: No. The article is busy demonstrating the ridiculousness of concepts like 'blasphemy' and 'religious sentiment.'

The list of questions towards the end of the article all reiterate a single point: to what ridiculous extremes will the fanatic opponents of free speech go?

Such a position takes as a cause something obvious – should people have the right to express themselves? Yes, of course. Nobody is contesting that. Does the article move beyond that question? Unfortunately, no.

If 'free speech' was such a simple matter, then there would be no need of a democracy at all. Everyone agrees the right to express oneself, and nobody wants to hear what one hasn't already heard and agreed with. The Tehelkha article pointed out that "If the issue is one of free speech, there is no necessary reason why Christian Europe should be seen to be a principled defender of free speech, and Muslim Europe in disagreement in principle. But if the issue is recast as one of enlightenment versus barbarism by Europeans, then surely there is hardly a Muslim who would be in doubt as to which side of the contest he or she is supposed to represent." 

Democratic contestation is important because we need to look at the reasons why people take a position so that we don't blindly generalize an event, and forget what is at stake for the people involved.

An article which takes for granted what these 'reasons' are, one set of reasons being legitimate, and the other illegitimate, one set of reasons being fair, just and rational, and the other simply 'crazy' ends up obfuscating, not clarifying the issue. The Danish cartoon controversy has already been portrayed by several reports as being a 'problem' of free speech versus Muslim fanaticism. The Mid-Day news report seemed to consider it a matter of course to refer to protestors as a 'mob' of 'Muslim fundamentalists.' Would the same terminology be applied to a 50-member group protesting against the suspension of the two policewomen in Meerut for roughing up 'lovebirds' in public parks? It may well be an issue that many Muslims might identify with, but the use of words like 'mob' and 'fundamentalists' color any protest that a Muslim might make.

How sensitively can we read the Danish cartoons as a critique of terrorism without stereotyping Muslims as terrorists? That is the democratic challenge of the right to free speech, not to reinforce a framework of thinking about the issue that only silences (now we even have a way of reading suicide bombers; at one point, suicide was, if nothing else, a silence scream that made some noise).