Sarajevo: Religion and offensive speech

In Sarajevo over the weekend, I attended a conference on Balancing between the Freedom of Speech and the Right to Religion in the 21st Century, arranged by the Inter-Religious Institute (Međureligijski institut). I was there to give an introductory plenary talk, “Religion and Offensive Speech: Framing the Issue.”

I’m really pleased to note that the Inter-Religious Institute, a new institution that is still finding its feet, is staffed by students of the country’s first MA program in religious studies, where I had the pleasure of teaching “religion and human rights” last summer.

They succeeded in bringing together a number of interesting, young intellectuals from all the major religious communities as well as non-believers. Inter-group tensions surfaced all the time, but the culture of discussion was high, though the content was often very tenuously connected to the conference theme. All in all rather promising, I thought.

This is more or less what I had to say:

In historical and comparative perspective, the religious and legal understandings of speech offenses have differed between the Abrahamic religions and have changed over time. Existing legal remedies (whether secular or religious) do not yet seem adequate to the modern, global situation, in which insult to religion has a proven conflict potential. In handling affairs such as the “Muhammad cartoons,” one important approach is to frame the issue in terms of basic rights balanced in a legal framework. In this regard, one should focus on how hate speech legislation can address incitement to religious persecution, rather than on any alleged broader conflict between free speech and the right to religion. Legal strategies, prohibitionist ones in particular, can be counter-productive. They can be complemented with a broader range of social responses, framing the problem as one of politics, morals, and manners, while recognizing and exploiting the synergies between freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

– My abstract

I stuck with the Danish cartoon affair as an illustrative case, and didn’t attempt to go into the special problems of B&H. There’s no rule that when in Sarajevo, you should pick over the bones of the country’s recent past rather than focus on the shared concerns of European democracies.

In the concluding plenary, sparks flew anyway: over Srebrenica, Jasenovac, and Palestine. There is lots of fodder for more dialogue… One problem area we could usefully have focused on, I think, is how to distinguish when terms such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are warranted, and when they are used as devices to silence legitimate criticism.