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Which Gets Protection - Belief or Believer? The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Campaign Against the Defamation of Religion

Authors:
Which Gets Protection –
Belief or Believer?
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
and the Campaign against the ‚Defamation of
Religions‘
Claudia Baumgart-Ochse
PRIF Report No. 136
the
Translation: Margaret Clarke
© Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) 2015
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Summary
In the mid-1990s, a number of different actors were seeking to defuse the increasing
tensions between the Western and Muslim worlds. The new Iranian president, Mohammed
Khatami, a moderate reformer, began a process of rapprochement with the West; the
protagonists of the Oslo peace process were working towards a solution to the key conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians; and the United Nations, responding to Samuel P.
Huntington’s warnings of an impending ‘clash of civilizations’, launched an initiative based
instead on the ‘dialogue of civilizations’. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)
took advantage of this situation in order to promote one of its most cherished aims – the
protection of Islam and Muslims from defamation, blasphemy, and discrimination – as a
new human-rights norm within the Western-dominated, largely secular UN system. With
fifty-seven Muslim or Muslim-influenced member-states, the OIC (renamed Organisation
of Islamic Cooperation in 2011) is the second-largest intergovernmental body after the UN
and claims to be the voice of the Muslim world. In 1999, Pakistan, acting on behalf of the
OIC, for the first time brought before the Commission on Human Rights a resolution
calling for a ban on the ‘defamation of Islam’. After negotiations with Western states, this
was adopted for the first time – without a vote – under the title ‘Defamation of Religions’.
The resolution condemns the negative, stereotypical depiction of religions, notably Islam,
and calls on states to outlaw the ‘defamation of religions’. It was adopted by various UN
bodies (Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Council, General Assembly) every
year until 2011.
This report looks at the OIC’s UN initiative in terms of an attempt to get a new norm
established internationally using oppositional means. By opting for this strategy, the OIC set
itself clearly apart from the sort of protests, boycotts, and threats of violence that had
occurred at the end of the 1980s, in the wake of the publication of the novel The Satanic
Verses by Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie. Whereas these protests can be seen
as a form of international dissidence, in the sense of a radical resistance to the Western-
dominated order, the path the OIC chose was one of opposition played out according to the
rules of international institutions. Normatively, the OIC justified its initiative by reference
to its role as one of the interpreters of Islamic tradition as it relates to human rights. In 1990,
it had adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, a document advocating a
notion of human rights bound to, and limited by, sharia – Islamic law.
Having initially prospered, the OIC initiative found itself under increasing criticism
from Western countries in the wake of the terror-attacks of 11 September 2001. Chief
amongst the criticisms was the claim that the concept of the ‘defamation of religions’ was in
direct contradiction to the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Human
rights, it was claimed, afforded protection to individual believers, as repositories of human
dignity; but shared ideas and beliefs, as exemplified in religions, were not exempted from
defamation, satirical attack, or vilification. The OIC was also accused of using the UN
initiative on defamation merely as a way of exporting the sometimes draconian blasphemy-
laws of their member-countries to the international level. The OIC, for its part, argued that
following the New York attacks, the situation of Muslims – particularly Muslim minorities
II
in Western societies – had suffered a massive decline because the ‘war on terror’ meant that
they were now virtually under blanket suspicion. It was therefore necessary, they said, to use
the resolution to provide these minorities with effective protection from discrimination,
hatred, and defamation. But the OIC’s arguments did not cut any ice: after 2002, support for
the resolution declined with each passing year.
Against the background of the gradual demise of the ‘defamation of religions’ resolution
in the UN, the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005/2006 provided the OIC with a welcome
opportunity to raise the matter from a different angle. Working in concert with the
Egyptian government, the OIC played the key part, as an international body, in raising the
status of the cartoon crisis from that of an internal Danish dispute to that of a worldwide
political crisis. Although it cannot be accused of having deliberately endorsed the violent
demonstrations and the arson-attacks on the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon,
nonetheless, with its dogged campaign against the cartoons, the OIC facilitated the shift
from UN-based attempts at opposition to a new phase of radical dissidence. After this, the
protest against what was perceived to be the demeaning and defamation of Islam and its
followers in the name of free speech and freedom of the press was to reignite itself
repeatedly with further events and publications – from Pope Benedict’s supposedly anti-
Islamic speech in Regensburg to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
In the meantime, attempts were being made at the international level to find a
cooperative way to resolve the defamation versus free expression conflict. After phases of
dissidence (Rushdie affair), opposition (OIC’s UN initiative), and renewed dissidence
(cartoon crisis and subsequent events), the OIC, EU, and USA agreed to the introduction of
a new, jointly drafted resolution that dropped the idea of the ‘defamation of religions’ and
operated within the parameters of established human-rights legislation. Adopted by
consensus for the first time in 2011, the new resolution – Resolution 16/18 – has brought
with it the hope that some sort of compromise will be possible, at least at the diplomatic
level, and that this compromise may result in relevant changes in national practice and
legislation. But the consensus is still very fragile: at the various implementation-meetings
relating to the resolution (what has become known as the Istanbul Process), the old
dividing-lines between the OIC member-states and the West have once again opened up.
Whether it will be possible to make any headway in finding an international solution that
both satisfies the OIC and is capable of assuaging the international hostility to what is
perceived as the defamation of Islam is as yet unclear.
As one of the major players in the Istanbul Process, the European Union should use
every available opportunity to fight the latest attempts to reintroduce an anti-defamation
agenda into the debate ‘through the back door’. Attention should in future be directed more
towards getting the action-plan in Resolution 16/18 implemented and moving beyond the
polarized theoretical debate.
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. The OIC and International Human Rights 5
2.1The Voice of the Ummah? The OIC between Religion and Politics 6
2.2 The OIC and Islamic Human Rights 8
2.3 Freedom of Religion and the Laws on Blasphemy in
OIC Member-Countries 12
3. The OIC and the ‘Defamation of Religions’ 15
3.1 The Historical Context of the OIC’s UN Initiative 15
3.2 The Human-Rights Context of the OIC’s UN Initiative 17
3.3 A New Norm: The Protection of Religion against Defamation 19
3.4 The Failure of the OIC Initiative 20
3.5 From Opposition to Dissidence: The Cartoon Controversy 23
4. Is an International Solution Possible? 25
5. References 29
1. Introduction
When the authors of the Paris attack of 7 January 2015 opted for the editorial offices of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as one of their targets,1 this was not a random choice.
Though not a high-circulation periodical, the magazine encapsulates, in a way that few
others do, a culture of free speech in which neither politicians nor religious communities
nor social institutions in general are spared from biting satire and criticism. And that
includes Islam. Extremists had already carried out an arson attack on the offices in 2011,
after the magazine had featured a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed on its front cover.
Refusing to be cowed by threatening letters and hate-mail, the editors had continued to put
out their cartoons and articles, including some critical of Islam. The 7 January attack on the
magazine’s offices claimed the lives of twelve people, including four of France’s best-known
political cartoonists.
In France and far beyond, it was in exactly the symbolic sense suggested above that the
terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo was construed – in other words, as an attack on freedom
of expression and freedom of the press, an attack on the basic rights at the heart of Western
democracies. Previous events such as the ‘Rushdie Affair’ (1988) and the cartoon crisis
(2005), which had also triggered violent protests and attacks, had been interpreted in the
same way. At the funeral processions and solidarity rallies that took place following the acts
of violence in Paris, millions of people demonstrated their determination to defend these
freedoms by identifying themselves with the magazine, declaring ‘Je suis Charlie’ – ‘I am
Charlie’.
But the conflict between, on the one hand, the right to freedom of expression and
freedom of the press and, on the other, the concern to protect religion – particularly Islam2
– from denigration, insult, and blasphemy has not played out only at the level of social
protest and acts of violence. Between 1999 and 2011, the OIC (Organization of the Islamic
Conference – renamed Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 2011) attempted to get the
defamation of religion established as a new norm in the context of the UN human-rights
1 Their second target was a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
2 The conflict affects other religions as well – Christianity, for instance. Recent German examples here
include a controversial cartoon of Jesus that was hung on the façade of the Caricatura Gallery in Kassel to
advertise an exhibition and provoked massive criticism from the Christian churches (Spiegel Online,
August 23, 2012, http://bit.ly/1cRrK4j). Witness also the controversy surrounding the award of the Hesse
Culture Prize (Hessischer Kulturpreis) to Navid Kermani, who was accused by his fellow laureates
Cardinal Karl Lehmann and the then Church President of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, the
late Peter Steinacker, of defaming the Cross (FAZ, April 14, 2009, http://bit.ly/1BfAAyM). Again, in 2012,
Pope Benedict XVI took the satirical magazine Titanic to court for its front-cover depiction of him with a
yellow stain on his white cassock (Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 10, 2012, http://bit.ly/1HQG5w7). None of
these events, however, triggered the same scale of transnational protest.
2 Claudia Baum
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regime.3 The OIC is the world’s second-largest intergovernmental organization after the
United Nations, currently comprising fifty-seven self-declared Muslim countries. In 1999,
Pakistan, acting on behalf of the OIC, for the first time brought before the Commission on
Human Rights a resolution calling for a ban on the ‘defamation of Islam’. After negotiations
with Western states, this was adopted for the first time under the title ‘Defamation of
Religions’. Variations of this resolution, with only minor modifications, were then
introduced, and duly adopted, on an annual basis, initially in the Commission on Human
Rights and later in the latter’s successor, the Human Rights Council, and the UN General
Assembly. Only in 2011 did the OIC give in to growing pressure from Western states and
agree to an alternative draft resolution in which the notion of the ‘defamation of religions’
no longer figured.
What lies at the heart of both the OIC’s UN initiative and the demonstrations, protests,
and violent unrest is the clash between the right to freedom of expression and the demand
that Islam be protected from denigration and blasphemy and that free speech be curtailed to
achieve this. In this report, both forms of contestation will be interpreted as expressions of
resistance by Muslim actors to the dominant Western secular world order and its
underlying norms. In adopting this analytical perspective, the report pursues a line of
argument put forward in a number of recent theoretical accounts in International Relations
which assume that structures of rule exist at the international level as well, in the form of ‘a
structure of institutionalized superordination and subordination’ which ‘determines how
life’s goods and the potential to influence are distributed and stabilizes expectations in
regard to compliance’ (Daase/Deitelhoff 2014: 1). A necessary concomitant of political rule,
irrespective of whether the latter has legitimate foundations and inspires voluntary
allegiance or is imposed through coercion and oppression, is resistance – to particular
policies, to structures and institutions, or to the order as a whole (Daase/Deitelhoff 2014:
11). Daase and Deitelhoff distinguish between two forms of resistance: opposition, which
accepts the rules of the game imposed by the global system of rule; and dissidence, which
operates outside these rules.
In promoting its initiative, the OIC has opted for the oppositional form of resistance. Its
aim is to effect a change in the catalogue of human rights from within the UN system and it
thus operates according to the rules of the established international institutions of global
politics. By contrast, the protests, boycotts, and violent unrest in this area should be seen as
expressions of dissidence, asserting itself outside the prevailing rules and institutions. The
present report explores both forms of resistance but focuses particularly on the oppositional
activities of the OIC, which have so far received little attention in the literature. What were
3 The international human-rights regime that has evolved within the framework of the UN is based
essentially on three documents: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966); and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (1966). In terms of institutions, the bodies chiefly responsible for implementing human-
rights rules and norms are the UN Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights. See Donnelly 2013: 162.
Which Gets Protection – Belie
f
or Believer? 3
the preconditions and motives for the OIC’s anti-defamation campaign? What is the
conflict essentially about? Why did the OIC campaign fail? And is there any interplay
between the OIC opposition and the protests and violent behaviour engaged in by the
dissident actors?
Dissident and Oppositional Forms of Resistance to the Western Secular Order
As mentioned at the outset, the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo was merely the latest
in a series of clashes in which Muslim actors gave expression – on this occasion with lethal
violence – to their disapproval and outrage at what they perceived to be the lack of respect
shown by Western societies towards Islam. It should be noted that those who react to
Western depictions of Islam4 in this way are radicalized minorities. This is demonstrated,
for example, in a study recently conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, which showed,
in the case of Germany, that whilst Islamophobia is on the increase in German majority
society, most Muslims actually place a high value on democracy and are open to the idea of
religious diversity (Religionsmonitor 2015). Even in Muslim majority societies such as
Tunisia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Egypt, the picture is a much more diverse one than many
media-reports suggest. Surveys indicate that there is a very high level of support for
democracy and personal freedoms – and at the same time a desire that Islam should to
some extent inform politics (Pew Research Center 2012).
The first clash between differing normative outlooks on freedom of expression came in
the guise of the ‘Rushdie affair’. 1988 saw the publication, by the Indian-born British writer
Salman Rushdie, of his novel The Satanic Verses, in which, ‘in a piece of ribald satire, [he]
presents an allegorical dream-sequence involving the Prophet Mohammed’ and recounts
how ‘twelve whores in a house of pleasure assume the names of the Prophet’s wives in order
to buck up custom’.5 The book immediately prompted a wave of angry protest amongst
Muslims all over the world, and many countries banned it. The strongest reaction, however,
came from Iran: the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa – an Islamic
legal ruling – condemning Rushdie to death and calling on all Muslims to carry out the
execution.6 For Rushdie there followed years of fear and isolation: he was forced to hide
away and regularly change his place of residence; his publishers received bomb threats; and
the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered. Relations between Iran and the
West sank to an all-time low.
4 Countries such as Egypt and Iran also have political cartoonists. See Karim El-Gawahry, Wenn Bärtige
zeichnen schwierig ist, in: taz online, January 24, 2015, www.taz.de/!5023189/ (January 25, 2015); see also
Iranische Karikaturisten machen sich über IS lustig, in: Zeit Online, May 31, 2015, http://bit.ly/1KSfzTA,
(July 2, 2015).
5 Almut Cieschinger (2009): Der Dichter und sein Henker. 20 Jahre Rushdie-Affäre, in: Spiegel Online,
http://bit.ly/1GjYHDd, (January 16, 2015).
6 Other Islamic scholars – such as those from the Al-Azhar University in Egypt – objected to the fatwa.
4 Claudia Baum
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In the mid-2000s, following the attacks of 11 September 2001, tensions once again arose
between the Muslim and Western worlds, sparked by the issue of free speech. In 2005, the
Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed, provoking a major diplomatic crisis and a series of violent disturbances and
protests. In many Muslim-influenced countries, pictorial depiction of the Prophet is
regarded as taboo. In 2006 in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a
controversial lecture in which he cited a remark made by a Byzantine emperor to the effect
that Mohammed had ‘brought nothing but evil’ because he preached that faith should be
spread by the sword.7 In 2008, the film Fitna, made by the right-wing populist politician
Geert Wilders, caused outrage. In 2012, trailers for an amateur anti-Muslim film called
Innocence of Muslims, made in the USA, appeared on YouTube. Furious protests erupted in
the Muslim world and bomb attacks were carried out on US embassies and consulates in the
Middle East, resulting in over thirty dead.
It was in the period between the Rushdie affair and the events of the mid-2000s that the
OIC launched its initiative to establish a new UN-based norm requiring states to outlaw the
‘defamation of religions’. To begin with, the initiative seemed to be a success for the OIC: in
both 1999 and 2000, the Commission on Human Rights adopted the anti-defamation
resolution without a vote. However, in the wake of the New York attacks, the concept of the
defamation of religions came under increasing criticism, both from non-governmental
organizations and from Western states, most notably the USA. From year to year, support
for the resolution declined. In 2011, it was finally removed from the agenda and replaced
with one entitled ‘Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and
Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons based on Religion or
Belief’,8 which moved away from the concept of the defamation of religions. In 2005, in the
same period during which the OIC was pursuing its internationally largely unremarked UN
initiative, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a collection of cartoons of the
Prophet Mohammed and this marked a turning-point: the dissidence now entered a new
phase of radical resistance in which the denigration of Islam in the name of free speech was
met with protests and violence.
This report begins by describing the special status of the OIC in international relations as
an organization which, since the 1990s, has increasingly intervened in the global human-
rights debate as an exponent of Islamic tradition. Although from 2005 onwards there were
signs that the OIC was aligning itself more closely to internationally codified human rights,
the protection of the Muslim faithful from defamation, insult, and blasphemy and the
struggle against Islamophobia remain amongst its key aims – even where they involve
curtailment of press freedom and freedom of expression9 In the sections that follow, I shall
7 For a verbatim version of the lecture, see http://bit.ly/1GHhqXS (March 7, 2015).
8 United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council, Resolution 16/18, April 12, 2011,
http://bit.ly/1Si1zVc (October 14, 2015)
9 OIC Charter, Art. 1/12, http://bit.ly/1HLe8RY (January 16, 2015).
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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or Believer? 5
analyse the motives and conditions underlying the OIC campaign. In terms of motives:
besides the concern to improve the situation of Muslim minorities beyond the borders of
the Muslim world, the prime factor at work here is the often harsh blasphemy-legislation in
force in many of the organization’s member-states, which serves the governments in
question as a repressive instrument for maintaining power. A new norm prohibiting
defamation would lend these laws international legitimacy. From this point of view, the
initiative in the UN serves to consolidate authoritarian regimes in the member-states. But it
was the historical context in the 1990s – which brought with it an at least partial opening-up
of the UN to dialogue and compromise with the Muslim world – that first enabled the OIC
to express its objections to particular Western secular norms from within the system, using
the tools of opposition. This tends to confirm the hypothesis that where there is increased
opportunity for involvement and increased space for objection, there will be a de-
radicalization of dissidence into opposition (Daase/Deitelhoff 2014: 13).
This process, however, is not irreversible. After only a few years, following some initial
successes in the relevant UN forums, the OIC initiative began to lose support amongst other
UN members. The increasing rejection of the initiative by other states reduced the scope for
involvement. Although the OIC did not itself subsequently become a dissident actor, it
played a decisive stimulatory role in the escalation of events during the 2005 cartoon crisis.
Against this background, the present report reconstructs the course of the OIC’s UN
campaign between 1999 and 2011, examines its political, historical, and human-rights
context, and explores the interplay between the campaign and the international protests and
violent unrest that occurred in the wake of what were perceived to be blasphemous
depictions of Islam in Western societies.
2. The OIC and International Human Rights
Whether modern human rights, as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and subsequent UN conventions, have universal validity is a matter of dispute. For differing
cultural, intellectual, and religious reasons, critics argue that human rights are a product of
Western culture and tradition and therefore cannot simply be transposed onto societies of
different cultural or religious stamp. Thus, in the ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s, Asian
countries claimed to have a culturally determined value-system of their own, in which
collective rights were accorded preference over the individualism of human rights. In Islam
too there are many who advocate a particularist interpretation of human rights, one derived
from Islamic tradition and differing in a number of points from the international human
rights of the UN system. One of the most important human-rights declarations to have
emanated from the Muslim world is the ‘Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,
adopted by the OIC in 1990. In the sections that follow here, I describe the OIC, discuss its
position in the human-rights debate, and, in conclusion, examine the blasphemy-laws in
certain OIC member-states, which have exerted considerable influence on the OIC’s anti-
defamation campaign inside the UN.
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2.1 The Voice of the Ummah? The OIC between Religion and Politics
As an international organization, the OIC is an anomaly. With fifty-seven member-states, it
is the second-largest intergovernmental body after the UN.10 At the same time, in contrast to
regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) and the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), it does not represent a geographically definable area, its
membership being distributed across four continents. Many OIC states, for example, are
also members of the Arab League, a classic regional organization, but a good many are not.
Again, the OIC is not held together by some functional interest, as is, say, a free trade zone.
What is distinctive about the OIC, rather, is that it is defined by the Islamic orientation of its
member-states – though this ranges in degree from constitutional embodiment of Islam as
the state religion to the presence of a substantial Muslim minority and encompasses all the
widely differing trends within Islam. Although in many respects the OIC functions in the
same way that secular intergovernmental organizations do within international relations, its
religious aspect sets it apart from other bodies: ‘[T]he idiosyncrasy of the OIC is categorical,
for whilst adhering to the secular logic of multistate functionalism, its ideological source is
reflected solely in terms of a religious attribute, that of Islam, and its purpose is guided by a
single imperative, that of pan-Islamism’ (Sheikh 2003: 16). Decisions are made by two-
thirds majority of the assembly of member-states, regardless of whether the states that vote
are Islamic by constitution or, like Turkey and Lebanon, explicitly secular. The 1972 OIC
Charter stipulates absolute respect for the sovereignty, independence, and territorial
integrity of member-states, bringing the OIC into line with the standards of the UN, from
which it seeks recognition as a legitimate association of states.
The OIC came into being in the 1960s, at a time when allegiances in the Middle East
were defined, as elsewhere, by the Cold War. From the 1950s, the pro-US Saudi royal house
suffered a marked decline in power by comparison with the pro-Soviet revolutionary
regimes such as those in Egypt and Syria. Towards the end of the 1960s, however, two
events occurred which turned the tide. The defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 June War
against Israel was perceived as a gross humiliation and resulted in a weakening of the
secular pan-Arabism of the pro-Soviet regimes. Then in August 1969, an Australian tourist
carried out an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa mosque in the old quarter of Jerusalem, but
neighbouring Arab countries suspected that Israel itself had masterminded this assault on
one of Islam’s most important holy places.11 Both events seemed to testify to the inability of
secular ideologies to defend the interests of Muslims and to the need to return to a pan-
Islamic vision (Sheikh 2003: 36). Within the societies concerned, conservative inter-
pretations of Islam began to gain in importance during this period, one of their most
prominent exponents being Sayyid Qutb, the guiding light behind the Muslim Brotherhood
10 www.oic-oci.org (October 14, 2015).
11 See Haug von Kuenheim (1969), Die Brandfackel von El-Aqsa, in: Die Zeit, August 29, 1969,
http://bit.ly/1yRAJHE (October 14, 2015).
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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or Believer? 7
in Egypt. On the international stage, it was primarily Saudi Arabia that pushed through the
creation of the OIC, as a way of diminishing the influence of the secular pan-Arabists in the
region.
The first Islamic summit – convened by Saudi Arabia, the Shah’s Iran, Morocco, and
Pakistan – was held in Rabat as early as September 1969. Twenty-four countries plus the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) took part in the meeting, which saw the
foundation of what was then known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The
founding members cherished widely differing national ambitions; the only thing that kept
the OIC together in its founding period was its members’ shared hostility to Israel. As a
result, the issue of the holy places of Islam in Jerusalem – and thus also of the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict – remained core themes of the OIC for decades.
Beyond this, however, the OIC hardly ever managed to speak with one voice. On the
contrary, it was marked by a host of internal tensions and conflicts, reflecting the culturally,
politically, and socially highly diverse nature of the countries that composed it. The early
period was itself marked by internal rifts between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan over the
leadership of the OIC. Later on, member-states repeatedly found themselves on opposing
sides in international events, crises, and (sometimes violent) conflicts. Examples here
include the peace between Egypt and Israel, the conflict between Iran and Iraq, the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait, and the war in Afghanistan (Petersen 2012: 12; Wastnidge 2011). Again,
the very different approaches of individual member-states to Islamist and Jihadist groups
continue, even today, to be a source of tension. Whilst the OIC officially promotes a
tolerant, moderate form of Islam and has vowed to combat terrorism, individual member-
countries such as Sudan and Iran are suspected of lending support to terrorist groups
(Haynes 2012: 54–55).
This lack of unity between member-states means that the OIC has not succeeded in
achieving its goal – that of improving the status of Muslims worldwide – to the extent
suggested by its own claims. As a result, its influence in international relations falls short of
what one would expect from the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the
world – a state of affairs reflected in the paucity of scholarly literature on the OIC (Haynes
2012: 53).
This still low level of visibility in international politics should not, however, blind us to
the fact that since 2005 the OIC has been undergoing a remarkable transformation. In that
year, the foreign ministers of the member-states elected the OIC’s first General Secretary –
the Turkish science historian Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu. A ten-year action-plan was drafted, as
a result of which sustainable development in the member-states, emergency aid, closer
cooperation with other international organizations, and the fight against violent, extremist
ideologies made their way onto the OIC’s agenda.12 The OIC’s charter was also overhauled:13
12 http://bit.ly/1FxcS4E (October 14, 2015).
13 For the new version, see http://bit.ly/1FhQRV1 (October 14, 2015).
8 Claudia Baum
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it now made reference, for the first time, to human rights, to democracy and the rule of law,
to equality before the law, and to women’s rights (Hermann 2013) – though always in the
context of Islamic values and without calling the sovereignty of member-states into
question. It was also during Ihsanoğlu’s tenure that the OIC’s name was changed from
‘Organization of the Islamic Conference’ to ‘Organisation for Islamic Cooperation’ – a
programmatic title signalling the upgrading of the organization from conference to distinct
entity. Since this time, the OIC has increased its humanitarian help for people in regions of
crisis and conflict such as Bangladesh and Somalia. Also remarkable have been its efforts to
mediate between warring parties in conflicts such as those in Palestine, Afghanistan, and
Niger (Hermann 2013). How the OIC will develop from here, under its new General
Secretary Iyad Madani, the former Saudi Minister of Culture and Information, remains to
be seen. Madani is reported to be a good deal more conservative than his predecessor
Ihsanoğlu.
2.2 The OIC and Islamic Human Rights
Whether and to what extent a particular religion, or religion per se, is compatible with
modern human rights as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
follow-up documents has been extensively discussed in the literature.14 The present report,
by contrast, will leave this issue to one side and instead follow the line adopted by Cismas
(2014) in her book Religious Actors and International Law. Cismas makes the criticism that
studies which pose the basic question of the compatibility of religion and human rights tend
overwhelmingly to portray religions as static, monolithic entities. The scriptures of many
religions have indeed remained unchanged over centuries, she says, but the interpretations
and practices of religious communities are ‘dynamic over time and diverse across space’
(Cismas 2014: 2). As a result, religions encompass a broad spectrum of complementary, and
sometimes contradictory, views on specific topics and issues: ‘It is here where the role of
religious actors as interpreters of religion(s) becomes central, because through
interpretation they generate the dynamism and diversity of religions’ (Cismas 2014: 3).
Cismas construes religious actors such as the Holy See or the OIC as interpreters of
religious tradition who also claim validity for their interpretations. Rather than simply
extending the debate over the basic compatibility of religion, law, and politics, this approach
allows one to analyse real actors and their interpretations of religious traditions as they
relate to politics and law.
The OIC has been playing the role of interpreter of Islamic tradition as it relates to
human rights since at least the time of the adoption of the Cairo Declaration on Human
Rights in Islam in 199015 – despite the fact that such a function is not really provided for in
14 See Bucar/Barnett 2005; van der Vyver, Johan D./Witte Jr., John 1996; Runzo et al. 2003; Lerner 2006.
15 Text available at www.oic-oci.org/english/article/human.htm (March 25, 2015).
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its charter (Mayer 2015: 13).16 The phenomenon of Muslim writers taking it upon
themselves to justify human rights from an Islamic perspective is a recent one and can be
seen as a reaction to the formulation of political and civil rights in Western societies. The
various trends within Islam, taken in all their diversity, certainly have the philosophical
concepts, humanistic values, and moral principles needed to construct a set of human-
rights principles. However, the historically determined predominance of conservative
strains of philosophy and theology in Muslim-influenced countries has pushed these
potential sources into the background (Mayer 2013: 44).
In the discourse between Muslim and Western conceptions of human rights, there is, as
in the ‘Asian values’ debate’, disagreement as to whether such rights should be defined
collectively or individually. As currently recognized at the international level, human rights
are founded on the kind of individualism that has been a feature of Western societies since
the dawn of the modern age.17 Of course, this does not mean that such rights do not have an
inherent social, communitarian dimension. The right to religious freedom, for example,
always also encompasses the right to shared worship and the right to establish religious
communities. Again, one of the goals of freedom of expression is, not least, to make it
possible for citizens to engage in public discourse (Bielefeldt 1995: 591–592). Nonetheless,
the assumption is that respect for human rights is something that applies to the individual
and not to a collectivity – whatever its nature. In many Muslim societies, by contrast,
traditional, communally oriented notions of rights held sway for many years (Donnelly
2013: 79–81).18 This fundamental tension continues, even today, to be detectable in the
various blueprints for Islamic human rights:19 ‘[P]roponents of Islamic human rights
schemes have tended to associate the defense of Islamic values with the rejection of
individualism, and they have espoused principles – such as a ban on converting from Islam
– that are designed to protect the collective at the expense of the individual’ (Mayer 2013:
44). The upshot has been a series of documents which, whilst cleaving to the prevailing
16 The claim to be offering an exposition of Islamic tradition that is applicable to present-day problems is, of
course, one that is advanced by many other actors – the Leader of the Revolution in Iran, for example, or
the Al-Azar University in Egypt. On the other hand, there is no central authority of the kind that exists in
Catholicism.
17 Donnelly points out that in view of phenomena such estate-based society, wars of religion, and, at a later
stage, imperialism and slavery, Western culture could not be said to have been particularly predestined to
give birth to human rights: ‘What we think of today as Western culture is largely a result, not a cause, of
human rights ideas and practices’ (Donnelly 2013: 107).
18 Islam is not the only religion in a relationship of tension with modern human rights. It was not until the
Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 that the Catholic Church finally made its peace with human rights,
and particularly with religious freedom. See Heimbach-Steins 2012.
19 Examples are: the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights,
www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/islamic_declaration_HR.html (March 17, 2015), which was published
in 1981 by the Islamic Council of Europe, a private organization based in London; and the legal
provisions contained in the 1979 Draft Islamic Constitution for Egypt drawn up by the Islamic Research
Academy in Cairo and in the 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. See Mayer 2013.
10 Claudia Baum
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orthodox-conservative interpretation of Islamic traditions, embraces and imitates the
language of international human rights.
This is true of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, a non-binding OIC
instrument adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC member-countries in 1990. There is
no challenge to Islamic law or sharia – deriving mainly from the Qur’an and the Sunna20
in the Cairo Declaration. On the contrary, the document cites it as the yardstick that
determines the extent and substance of Islamic human rights (Bielefeldt 1995: 605). The last
two articles (24 and 25) explicitly state that all the rights and freedoms contained in the
Declaration are subject to sharia and that only sharia can serve as the basis for inter-
pretation and exposition. At the same time, the Declaration forgoes any attempt to indicate
exactly what is meant by ‘sharia’ and how the latter should be interpreted. This is a matter
on which Islam’s various schools of legal and theological thought disagree.
The Declaration’s tie-in to sharia means that although many of its provisions seem at
first sight virtually identical to those in the relevant UN human-rights agreements, they turn
out to be limited by various restrictive clauses. By way of example: Article 2 prohibits the
killing of other human beings – except for reasons prescribed by sharia; Article 7 allows
parents a free choice in selecting the education they want for their children – provided this
accords with the principles of sharia; and Article 22 guarantees freedom of expression –
insofar as this does not violate the provisions of sharia, and safeguards freedom of
information – provided this causes no detriment to the sanctity and dignity of the Prophet
(Cismas 2014: 254–265; Mayer 2013: 80–81). A number of provisions present, for example,
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN documents, are simply absent
from the Cairo Declaration.21 Others fall markedly short of international human-rights
standards. This is particularly true of the articles dealing with equality of the sexes and the
protection of the family (Articles 5, 6, and 7). Also problematic from the point of view of
UN human rights is Article 10, which prohibits any attempt to persuade a person to turn
away from Islam (apostasy) and convert to other religions or to atheism. This directly
contradicts the right to freedom of religion. By according absolute priority to sharia, the
Cairo Declaration weakens or negates some of the fundamental provisions of international
human-rights law (Bielefeldt 1995: 606). Although the Declaration itself does not sanction
any human-rights violations, it opens the door to particular interpretations of sharia that
allow for measures such as corporal punishment or the unequal treatment of women
(Cismas 2014: 265).
Although to begin with the Cairo Declaration was enthusiastically promoted by the OIC,
there were very few follow-up initiatives aimed at getting the catalogue of Islamic human
rights implemented in member-states. This is largely explained by the fact that member-
states are by no means agreed as to how sharia should be interpreted for the present age. In
20 Ways of the Prophet.
21 The right of free assembly, for example, or freedom of religion.
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fact, the objections which the OIC countries have expressed in regard to human-rights
conventions in the UN context reveal a wide spectrum of opinions here: ‘[S]haria law
limitation clauses in the Cairo Declaration are not representative of the views and
approaches of all OIC member states’ (Cismas 2014: 274). Whereas some states indicate a
willingness gradually to move closer to the international understanding of human rights,
and regard a new interpretation of sharia as possible and necessary, others stick to a
conservative exposition of sharia that reflects their own systems of justice. Equally, the
regular reports in which the OIC states give details of the measures they have taken to
implement UN human-rights agreements very rarely mention the Cairo Declaration as a
benchmark. As a result, the influence which the Declaration has had on member-states has
been minimal (Cismas 2014: 279).
It was only with the advent of the OIC’s 2005 self-prescribed ‘Ten Year Program of
Action’ that the approach to human rights, along with much else, was revised. One product
of the processes of reform set in train by the action-plan was the creation, in 2011, of the
Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission. It was hoped that the establishment
of the Commission would see the OIC align itself more closely to international human-
rights standards. Although the Preamble to the Commission’s Statutes22 still makes
generalized reference to the Cairo Declaration, the rest of the text promises a new approach:
‘[T]here can be no doubt that the Commission relies on a conception of human rights that
is closer to the UN Declaration on Human Rights than the Cairo Declaration, based as it is
on an understanding of civil, political, cultural and economic right as outlined “in
universally agreed human rights instruments”’ (Petersen 2012: 29). The former General
Secretary of the OIC Ihsanoğlu had already stated, in a 2009 interview, that the Cairo
Declaration needed to be revised ‘in keeping with the current global human rights
discourse’ (quoted in Petersen 2012: 29). According to its Statutes, the new Commission is
to be geared not so much to establishing an alternative system of human rights but more
towards achieving integration into the existing system of human-rights legislation in the
UN (Petersen 2012: 30). Its job, as a consultative body, is to support OIC member-states in
fulfilling their human-rights obligations. The Commission is made up of eighteen
independent human-rights experts from various member-countries. It does not itself have
the power to issue binding directives, but it does have the right to make recommendations
to the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers, who, where applicable, convert these into
resolutions. In addition, it is charged with: overseeing cooperation between member-states
on matters relating to human rights; facilitating the involvement of civil society; and
strengthening cooperation with international institutions. By contrast, it is not mandated to
investigate human-rights violations in OIC member-countries (Petersen 2012: 21).
To date, the Commission has held seven regular sessions. Initial analyses of its work
from the point of view of the UN catalogue of human rights are not reassuring. The hope,
22 Statute of the OIC Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission, OIC/IPCHR/2010/STATUTE,
http://bit.ly/1IncUjo (May 21, 2015).
12 Claudia Baum
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cherished early on, that the establishment of the Commission would result in the OIC’s
aligning itself more closely to international human-rights standards is, it seems, not being
fulfilled. Doubts in this regard are being fuelled, not least, by the changes in personnel at the
top of the OIC and the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission: in 2013,
Ihsanoğlu was replaced by Iyad Madani as the OIC’s General Secretary; and the Nigerian
diplomat Kawu Ibrahim took the place of the Indonesian scientist and women’s rights
campaigner Siti Ruhaini Duhayatin at the head of the Commission. Whereas Ihsanoğlu and
Duhayatin stood for an opening-up of the OIC to international human rights, the two new
chiefs downplay the universality of human rights in favour of Islamic teachings (Kayaoglu
2015). At the opening of a 2014 session of the Commission, for example, Madani criticized
the right to free expression and emphasized the determination of Muslim countries to
ensure respect for the sanctity and integrity of religious values, scriptures, and personages
(Kayaoglu 2015: 14).
Also of note is the Commission’s almost exclusive focus on issues in which non-
member-states are viewed as instigators of human-rights violations: the human-rights
situation in the Israeli-occupied territories; the fight against Islamophobia in Western states;
the effects of sanctions (especially US sanctions) on human rights in affected member-
states; the human-rights violations perpetrated on the Muslim Rohingya minority in
Myanmar as victims of discrimination (Kayaoglu 2015: 16). Meanwhile, the often none too
impressive human-rights records of the OIC’s own member-states have so far elicited only
peripheral interest from the Commission. In addition, many of the Commission’s official
documents lack any reference to the basic UN human-rights conventions. Kayaoglu fears
that this latest phase in the development of the Commission may bring with it a return to
the OIC’s anti-defamation campaign in the UN: ‘The IPHRC’s prioritization of combating
Islamophobia also harkens back to the OIC’s anti-defamation of religions efforts. Revisiting
this campaign will be unhelpful and will also raise skepticism about the OIC’s commitment
to Resolution 16/18’ (Kayaoglu 2015: 16).
2.3 Freedom of Religion and the Laws on Blasphemy in OIC Member-Countries
The OIC’s UN-based campaign against the ‘defamation of religions’ does not spring solely
from OIC ideas and initiatives; it is also rooted in the national legislations of many of its
member-states, under which blasphemy and apostasy – the renunciation of faith – is
prohibited and in some cases subject to draconian penalties. Because of this, the specialist
legal literature on the resolutions relating to defamation of religions often alleges that
influential OIC member-states are merely using the organization to get their own
blasphemy-laws internationally legitimized via the relevant UN bodies (Marshall 2011;
Rehman/Berry 2012; Dobras 2008; Belnap 2011). They are thus choosing the path of
opposition in the UN as a way of bolstering their power at home.
Laws that treat blasphemy as a punishable offence are by no means the preserve of the
Muslim world. Traditionally, it has been mainly Christian countries that have legislated
either to ban blasphemy altogether or to protect the particular religious community or
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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church that was dominant at the time. It is only recently that states such as Britain, Ireland,
Greece, and Sweden have done away with their blasphemy-laws or begun largely to ignore
them (Temperman 2008: 519–521; Siddique/Hayat 2008: 354–357). The German penal code
makes blasphemy a punishable offence in cases where it occasions a breach of the peace.
Convictions, however, are few and far between. By contrast, in India, Russia, and Sri Lanka,
blasphemy-laws continue to be used as a means of preserving the religious monopoly of the
dominant group (Graham 2009: 81).
In many OIC member-states too blasphemy-laws remain in force and are duly applied:
countries such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Afghanistan, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait,
Egypt, and Bangladesh have legal provisions – some of them of constitutional status
which either accord protection against defamation and blasphemy exclusively to Islam or
else accord it de jure to all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) whilst de
facto applying it for the most part only to Islam. Temperman concludes ‘that “the protection
of religion” in some states – most visibly so in states that identify strongly with a single
religion – functions as a ground for limiting fundamental rights, particularly the right to
freedom of expression’ (Temperman 2008: 525). The prohibition of blasphemy has a long
tradition in Muslim countries – just as it does in the European countries previously
mentioned. The traditional schools of jurisprudence within Islam consider both blasphemy
and apostasy to be grave breaches of the law. In their study on the correlation between the
degree to which freedom of religion is either granted or denied by the state and the level of
violent persecution of religious groups across the world, Grim and Finke (2011) identify
apostasy and blasphemy as the areas in which Islamic law typically clashes with the UN
conventions on religious freedom. This is because in the case of blasphemy the spotlight
often falls on other religious minorities, who are accused of blaspheming against or
insulting the dominant religion simply by virtue of practising their own religion. The fact
that blasphemy-laws remain in force, and are regularly applied, in many Muslim countries,
whereas in Europe they now have very little significance, is put down primarily to political
motives. In general, governments across the world mostly place restrictions on the free
exercise of religion when they see their own power or the prevailing social order under
threat: ‘The state, of course, restricts the freedoms of religions perceived to be a threat to the
social order or the ruling regime’ (Grim/Finke 2011: 6). Accusations of blasphemy or
denigration of religion are generally directed against minorities that are perceived to be a
threat to the ruling elite and the dominant religion and culture. As a result, blasphemy-laws
become repressive instruments in the hands of authoritarian regimes (Belnap 2011: 13).
This is illustrated particularly clearly by the case of Pakistan, which has one of the most
stringent blasphemy-laws in the world. It is also the country that first introduced the
resolution on the ‘defamation of religions’ into the UN Commission on Human Rights on
behalf of the OIC in 1999 and is its chief apologist. Like the resolutions on the defamation of
religions, Pakistan’s blasphemy-laws are designed to protect not individual believers but
religion per se – and in fact only Islam. It is not necessary to be able to prove discriminatory
intent on the part of the alleged perpetrators and so, in Pakistan, the simple fact of religious
minorities professing their own faith can be construed as an insult to, and a defamation of,
Islam (Dobras 2008: 355–356). This is in direct contravention of the right to freedom of
religion.
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Blasphemy-legislation was first introduced into pre-partition India in 1927 by the British
colonial authorities as a way of keeping religious tensions – chiefly between Hindus and
Muslims – under control. After the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the newly created
state of Pakistan took over the legislation and incorporated it into its own legal system.
However, during the military dictatorship of Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988), who
sought to Islamize Pakistan and establish a theocracy (Siddique/Hayat 2008: 316), the
legislation was narrowed to cover only the defamation of Islam and was massively tightened
up. One of the paragraphs inserted into the law, for example, stipulates the death penalty for
defamation of the Prophet Mohammed. In addition, since the time of the revision, those
who have found themselves most often in the sights of the justice-system are the members
of the Ahmadiyya community.23 In Pakistan, Ahmadis are not considered to be Muslim and
by describing themselves as such, or making reference to Islamic beliefs, they render
themselves guilty of blasphemy (Rehman/Berry 2012: 460).
Between 1987 and 2012, 426 people were arrested for blasphemy. This figure only
includes officially documented cases: according to press reports, the actual number is much
higher. The majority of those accused are members of minorities (Nafees 2012: 51–52).
Legal proceedings are often delayed, not least because judges and advocates are themselves
afraid to become victims of persecution if they find in favour of the accused. Up to now, no
sentence of death for blasphemy has ever been carried out. However, since 1990, more than
fifty people have been murdered as a result of accusations of blasphemy. In November 2014
in Punjab, for example, an angry mob threw a Christian couple into the furnace of the
brick-factory where they both worked because, so it was claimed, they had desecrated a
copy of the Qur’an.24 Again, in 2011, two high-ranking Pakistani politicians were murdered
after speaking up for Asia Noreen, who was alleged to have insulted the Prophet and in 2009
had become the first Christian woman to be condemned to death in Pakistan, remaining to
this day in prison. When charges of blasphemy are made, this often also leads to displays of
violence against non-Muslim religious minorities in Pakistan – and sometimes also against
Muslim minorities such as Shiites and Sufis. Although the country has ratified the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and is therefore obligated to take
action against this kind of incitement to religious hatred and to violence against minorities,
perpetrators are often not prosecuted. This climate of impunity encourages religious
extremists to make deliberate use of blasphemy charges in order to act against particular
minorities.
One of the ways in which the Pakistani government justifies maintaining its blasphemy-
laws is to point to its constitutionally enshrined right to restrict freedom of expression in
cases where public order, decency, or morality are under threat in the Islamic state (Dobras
23 The Ahmadiyya movement is a trend that emerged within Islam in the late 19th cent. It traces its roots
back to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, self-styled ‘mahdi’ or ‘messiah’ (Schimmel 2010: 127).
24 www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/pakistan-christen-nach-blasphemie-vorwurf-lebendig-verbrannt-a-
1001040.html (September 29, 2015).
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2008: 359). Zia-ul-Haq’s instrumentalization of Islam as a way of legitimizing and bolstering
power is a practice still in use in present-day Pakistan: ‘The legacy of using Islam for
political purposes has persisted into independent Pakistan. [R]eligion – the “leitmotif of an
otherwise variegated culture” – has continued to be used as an instrument for engendering
unity, garnering support for unpopular regimes, and preventing backlashes that invariably
arise against any regime that appears unacceptably un-Islamic’ (Siddique/Hayat 2008: 318).
In their detailed specialist assessment of blasphemy-legislation in Pakistan, Siddique and
Hayat come to the conclusion that this legislation serves the autocratic interests of the
regime, fuels the climate of intolerance and hatred, affords protection to religious zealots
and fanatics, and is used as a means of settling personal scores (Siddique/Hayat 2008: 384).
3. The OIC and the ‘Defamation of Religions’
The OIC’s attempt to establish the ‘defamation of religions’ as a new norm in the UN
human-rights framework cannot be explained without reference to the historical and legal
context. This UN-based initiative occurred at a time when various actors from the Western
and Muslim sides were attempting to calm the increasingly tense situation through dialogue
and cooperation. The UN itself was offering the Muslim states more opportunities to
become involved and help shape outcomes, thus making it possible for the OIC to follow an
oppositional course. Thus, during this phase, the OIC chose the path of resistance from
within UN institutions as its preferred means of dealing with what it regarded as the
rampant problem of Islamophobia and lack of respect for Islam in Western societies.
Within these institutions, however, the resolution it proposed came up against an
established structure of human rights with which the new concept of the ‘defamation of
religions’ was clearly at odds. In what follows here, I shall begin by reviewing the historical
context. After that, I shall describe the existing UN regulations on freedom of speech and
freedom of religion and the new norm aimed at outlawing the ‘defamation of religions’.
3.1 The Historical Context of the OIC’s UN Initiative
The Western perception of particular political and ideological readings of Islamic tradition
as problematic and dangerous did not begin with the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) in
Syria and Iraq – though IS’s geographical spread, brutality, degree of organization, and
power to attract Western recruits25 does represent something qualitatively new amongst
Islamist movements. The real turning-point, and one that marked a re-politicization of
25 On the power of attraction exerted by Salafism in Germany, see Biene/Daphi/Fielitz/Müller/Weipert-
Fenner (2015).
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Islamic traditions, was the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. For the first time ever, a class of
conservative Islamic scholars assumed power, equipped the state with an Islamic-inspired
constitution, and imposed Islamic law and a set of conservative Islamic rules of behaviour
on the population – and this had huge repercussions far beyond the borders of Iran.26 One
particular activity in which the new Iranian leadership engaged was to rail against the
godless, morally depraved West, to which, it claimed, Islam, with its high moral and
religious standards, was far superior. In the Western world, the sentiments mostly evoked
by the Iranian Revolution were those of alienation, fear, and rejection – not just in regard to
the Shiite regime in Teheran but towards Islam in general, which was often portrayed
indiscriminately as monolithic, backward, resistant to development, and inclined to
violence. In neighbouring Arab countries too the Islamic Republic was mostly regarded
with suspicion.
It was in this climate of mistrust and dubiousness between Western liberal and Muslim
societies that the ‘Rushdie affair’ occurred, in the 1980s, and with it came the first
transnational wave of protests and demonstrations by Muslims in response to allegations of
blasphemy. The protests against Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses culminated in the
issuing of a fatwa by the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini – at that time
probably the most high-profile Muslim political figure on the world stage. In Britain in
particular, the uproar surrounding the book and the issuing of the fatwa brought about a
change in relations between Muslims and majority British society. Whereas previously the
tensions between the ‘immigrant’ and ‘mainstream’ sections of the population had been
discussed chiefly under the rubric of ethnic affiliation, religious identity now shifted into the
foreground. Media accounts of the Rushdie affair not infrequently depicted Muslims as
dangerous, irrational fanatics and there was a marked growth in hostility and violence
towards them as a group. Muslims felt themselves increasingly discriminated against on
account of their religious affiliation. At the start of the 1990s, the outbreak of the Second
Gulf War reinforced these tendencies, with many Muslims across Europe demonstrating
against the Western invasion of Iraq. It was during this time that the term ‘Islamophobia’ –
denoting fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims – established itself, first in Britain and then
internationally, and that the phenomenon itself began to be explored as a serious problem
affecting Western societies, on a par with anti-Semitism (Bahçecik 2013; cf. Dobras 2008:
351). The increased tensions between Western states and Muslim-influenced countries
eventually led the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to refer epi-
grammatically to a ‘clash of civilizations’, which he saw as being played out amongst all the
major cultural groupings but above all between Islam and the West (Huntington 1993).27
26 This was also reflected in the sharp increase in scholarly literature on the theme ‘Islam and politics’. See
e.g. Sivan (1985); Ali (1986); Piscatori (1983); Zakaria (1989).
27 Huntington’s simplistic analysis has been (quite rightly) criticized by many writers. For a representative
sample from the German debate, see Müller (1998) and Senghaas (1998).
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During the 1990s, various actors attempted to counter this strained situation through
political negotiation, intergovernmental cooperation, social initiatives, and dialogue. After
the Second Gulf War, the United States initiated a multilateral Middle East peace
conference in Madrid. Stemming from this, secret talks were held between the PLO and
Israel which ultimately led to the Oslo peace process. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Shimon
Peres, was soon talking enthusiastically of a ‘new Middle East’ in which peace and economic
prosperity would prevail (Peres 1993). In Iran, 1997 saw the election to the presidency of the
moderate politician Mohammed Khatami, who was regarded as a reformer and was
promising a change of course in both external and internal affairs. Khatami laid greater
stress on détente and dialogue and made use of the OIC as one of the forums through which
to promote this policy. As a counter to the ‘clash of civilizations’, Khatami proposed a
‘dialogue of civilizations’, an initiative that eventually resulted in a corresponding UN
General Assembly resolution and eventually also, in 2001, to the declaration of a ‘UN Year
of Dialogue among Civilizations’, backed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Wastnidge
2011). The UN gradually opened itself up to involvement and input by Muslim states and
organizations.
However, the ‘dialogue of civilizations’ initiative was not the only project that the OIC
sought to realize within the framework of the UN. At more or less the same time as the
‘dialogue’ initiative was underway, the OIC began to make use of the UN’s forums to raise
the international profile of what it saw as the growing problem of Islamophobia and to try
to secure a ban on blasphemy, discrimination, and defamation in respect of Islam. It
brought before the UN Commission on Human Rights a resolution condemning ‘the
defamation of Islam’ and calling on all states to combat such behaviour. In this way, it gave
expression to its dissent from the dominant Western liberal order but did so by playing
according to the rules of the established political institutions, not by initiating radical
resistance and protest outside this order (Bettiza/Dionigi 2014).
3.2 The Human-Rights Context of the OIC’s UN Initiative
International human rights do not protect religions as such; rather, they uphold the right of
individuals or groups freely to choose their religion or belief and to practise it. The most
important document in which this right is set out is the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Article 18 of the Declaration states that: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief,
and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest
his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.’28 Freedom of religion
and belief are key provisions of the Declaration of Human Rights and are also a core
28 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217 A (III).
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element of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.29 According to
these provisions, an individual is not subject to any legitimate restriction in ‘the inner
sphere of freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief [and this] freedom thus enjoys
absolute sanctuary in its “forum internum”’ (Bielefeldt 2012: 15). But external
manifestations of religion or belief – ‘which encompass both individual and community
practices and may take place either in public or in private’ (Bielefeldt 2012: 15) – are also
protected within the ‘forum internum’, though not to the extent of being entirely free of the
possibility of restriction. In addition, the right to freedom of religion and belief also
encompasses individuals who decide not to belong to any religion or to believe in anything:
both positive and negative freedom of religion are valid – and only the combination of the
two ‘[give] this human right its libertarian character’ (Bielefeldt 2012: 16).
By contrast, there is no right in international human-rights law to have one’s religion or
belief excluded, across the board, from the possibility of criticism, denigration, or insult
(Temperman 2008: 525). Respect for religious feelings and protection against defamation
are not enshrined in the relevant human-rights documents. Although Articles 19 and 20 of
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights contain provisions limiting the
right to freedom of expression, these only take effect in exceptional cases. The level at which
expression of an opinion is defined as unacceptable, and therefore as warranting
prosecution, is pitched extremely high – such an expression would have to constitute a
threat to national security, for example, or infringe the rights of others. Article 20 makes
explicit reference to religious hatred: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred
that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by
law.’30 However, protection of religion is not in itself a legitimate ground for restricting the
right to freedom of expression: ‘The ICCPR does not specifically target defamation of
religion as an operative “carve-out” for protection’ (Foster 2009: 35). The right to freedom
of opinion may only be restricted where there is incitement to religious hatred resulting in
discrimination, hostility, or violence (Graham 2009: 19).
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a non-binding document; the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is binding on those states that have
signed it. However, both the right to freedom of religion and belief and the right to freedom
29 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CCPR/C/3/Rev. 6, Art. 18: ‘1. Everyone shall have
the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to
adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and
in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. 2. No
one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of
his choice. 3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are
prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental
rights and freedoms of others. 4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for
the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of
their children in conformity with their own convictions.’
30 UN General Assembly, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, March 23, 1976,
www.ohchr.org, http://bit.ly/Jz4HwZ (October 14, 2015).
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of expression are deemed part of customary international law, which is binding on all states,
even those that have not ratified the Covenant (Dobras 2008: 342; Cismas 2014: 45–48).31
The provisions relating to freedom of religion and freedom of opinion are based on
philosophical principles that are generally recognized as having guided the course of the
international human-rights regime since the foundation of the United Nations. The historic
task of creating a normative framework for a universal system of human-rights legislation
inevitably came up against the problem of getting the various cultures and religions
represented in the UN to agree which points of reference they could all work to (Foster
2009: 19). Following extensive consultations, the idea of the dignity of the human person
emerged as a viable basis for human rights. In the very first sentence of the UN’s founding
document – the UN Charter – the participating states affirm their ‘faith in fundamental
human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’.32 All subsequent covenants,
protocols, treaties, and declarations in which the concept of human rights is further
developed echo this philosophical affirmation of the principle of personal human dignity.
That the concept of human dignity was able, despite the cultural heterogeneity of the
UN’s member-states, to bridge the differences between them was due not least to the fact
that it was never precisely defined in any of the relevant UN documents (Donnelly 2013:
28–29). As a result, everyone could identify with it. The UN ‘successfully drafted its
formative documents based upon broad, largely undefined principles that member
countries did not disagree with on a philosophical level at the very outset, given the open-
ended nature of the definition’ (Foster 2009: 38). The concept of dignity holds a special
value that enjoins respect. Historically, it was closely tied to particular social positions or
offices, but the shift to human dignity represents a democratization: ‘The claim of human
dignity is that simply being human makes one worthy or deserving of respect; that there is
an inherent worth that demands respect in all of us’ (Donnelly 2013: 29; Foster 2009: 21). A
corollary of this philosophical rationale for human rights is that these rights only ever apply
to the individual: only an individual human being, not a collectivity, can lay claim to them
(Donnelly 2013: 30).
3.3 A New Norm: The Protection of Religion against Defamation
Both the rights involved here – the right to freedom of religion and belief and the right to
freedom of expression – are thus based on the principle that it is the individual, as the
repository of human dignity, that is afforded protection. The OIC’s arguments in favour of
a ban on the defamation of religions diverge from this basic principle: in place of the
31 The great majority of OIC member-countries have signed the Covenant. Amongst the exceptions are
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia, which have neither signed nor ratified it.
32 UN General Assembly, Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945,
www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml (October 14, 2015).
20 Claudia Baum
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individual in need of protection we have an idea or conviction – specifically, religion
(Graham 2009: 78). The earliest draft of the anti-defamation resolution, introduced for the
first time into the Commission on Human Rights by Pakistan in 1999, on behalf of the OIC,
still went by the title ‘Defamation of Islam’. Supporters of the resolution argued that the
Islamophobia now rife in the West necessitated measures to protect Islam from hostile
treatment and insult. On behalf of the European Union (EU), Germany called for attention
to be directed not just at Islam but at other religions as well (Blitt 2011: 353). After tough
negotiations, the resolution – eventually adopted without a vote by the Commission –
emerged bearing the title ‘Defamation of Religions’, but its focus remained very clearly on
Islam. It expressed great concern at the ‘negative stereotyping of religions’ and underlined
the way in which Islam was ‘frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations
and terrorism’. It was worrying, it said, that the media were ‘[being] used to incite acts of
violence, xenophobia or related intolerance and discrimination towards Islam and any other
religion’. It therefore called on states ‘within their national legal framework, in conformity
with international human rights instruments to take all appropriate measures to combat
hatred, discrimination, intolerance and acts of violence, intimidation and coercion
motivated by religious intolerance’.33
Clause 3, with its mention of ‘acts of violence, xenophobia or related intolerance and
discrimination towards Islam and other religions’, uses ideas and phraseology familiar from,
for example, Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which
calls on states to outlaw ‘any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes
incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’.34 The difference is that the defamation
resolution spotlights discrimination and violence towards Islam and other religions – in
other words towards a creed or idea – rather than towards individual people or groups of
people.
3.4 The Failure of the OIC Initiative
The change of title to ‘Defamation of Religions’ deflected the criticisms initially expressed
not only by Western states but also by India and Japan. The resolution, in its various
subsequent permutations, appeared to be a success for the OIC – despite being non-
binding, like all resolutions of the Commission on Human Rights. In 1999 and 2000 it was
adopted by the Commission without a vote, but this event received scant attention
internationally, probably because the Commission’s reputation was already suspect. A
subsidiary organ of the UN General Assembly, the Commission set very low standards for
membership, with the result that even states who were themselves accused of gross human-
33 Full text at E/1999/23E/CN.4/1999/167.
34 UN General Assembly, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, March 23, 1976, Art. 20,
www.ohchr.org (September 29, 2015), http://bit.ly/Jz4HwZ (Septemper 29, 2015).
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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rights violations were admitted as members: ‘Because of these lax standards, the UNCHR
became discredited by the United Nations’ (Dobras 2008: 353). In 2006, in response to
ongoing criticism, the General Assembly dissolved the Commission and established the
Human Rights Council in its stead.35
The attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, carried out by Al-Quaeda-
sponsored terrorists, rekindled the dissension between Muslim and Western countries. The
US administration, led by George W. Bush, declared the ‘War on Terror’, which was then
prosecuted over a period of years using political, intelligence-based, and military means.
Muslims frequently fell under blanket suspicion and many Western societies saw a growth
in anti-Muslim tendencies. In the eyes of many, Huntington appeared to have been right in
his prediction of a clash of civilizations, notably between Muslim societies and the West.
The attacks in New York and Washington, and the increase in violence and discrimination
against Muslims in many Western countries, were reflected in subsequent draft resolutions.
These now made direct reference to the events of 11 September, to the latter’s negative
repercussions on Muslim minorities, the negative media-depiction of Islam and its values
and traditions, and the introduction of laws that discriminated against Muslims
(Rehman/Berry 2012: 436–437). Inside the UN human-rights system itself a number of
high-profile advocates of the ‘defamation of religions’ idea emerged post 9/11. One such
was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Doudou Diène. In his reports, Diène
categorized Islamophobia alongside ‘Christianophobia’ and anti-Semitism as different
forms of defamation of religion on a par with racism and xenophobia (Rehman/Berry 2012:
440; Kayaoglu 2014: 84–85). It was amidst all this tension, in 2001, that the Commission on
Human Rights first subjected the anti-defamation resolution to a vote: 29 states voted for
adoption, 15 against, and 9 abstained.
To start with, therefore, in the shadow of 11 September, there was clear support for the
anti-defamation resolution. But this trend was not to last long:36 because there was much
greater interest in the OIC resolutions following the terror-attacks, they were subjected to
much closer scrutiny and analysed from a human-rights perspective. The USA in particular,
flanked by European countries and other Western states, criticized both the focus on Islam
and the incompatibility with other human rights such as the right to free expression, and
put a question-mark over the whole idea of using anti-defamation legislation to deal with
conflicts involving religion. These criticisms were echoed by a range of non-governmental
organizations, both religious and secular, who likewise underlined the incompatibility of the
anti-defamation resolutions with other human rights and expressed concern that the
blasphemy-laws in force in Muslim countries might be exported elsewhere. The OIC
35 Which, however, continues to attract the kind of criticism levelled at the Commission. See Besant/Malo
(2009).
36 For an overview of the voting results in the various UN forums in the period from 1999 to 2010, see
Kayaoglu (2015: 76–77).
22 Claudia Baum
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responded to these charges by rewording the text of the resolution more inclusively, getting
non-Muslim states on board to boost the supporters’ camp, and stressing that its main
concern was to protect Muslim minorities, not to protect religion per se (Kayaoglu 2015:
80–84).
Despite the OIC’s efforts, however, by 2001, and perhaps even before this, it began to be
clear that the anti-defamation resolution was destined for failure. Support waned, critical
voices grew ever louder, and the OIC found itself increasingly in the position of having to
strike compromises. The potential for involvement by Muslim states, and the prospect that
a new norm would be successfully established, gradually diminished in the face of the
negative attitude of the Western states and NGOs. Although it took until 2011 for the
resolution to be completely removed from the agenda, the balance of power started to shift
in favour of the Western liberal critics as early as the mid-2000s.
Why the OIC failed in its attempt to get a new norm established in human-rights
legislation is a question that has so far received little treatment in the literature. Exceptions
are the studies by Bettiza/Dionigi (2014) and Kayaoglu (2014). Bettiza/Dionigi’s account
draws on Habermasian post-secular theory. Whereas, they say, norm-research in
International Relations has so far concentrated chiefly on the diffusion of Western liberal
norms to the non-Western periphery, they themselves present the OIC initiative on the
anti-defamation resolutions as an example of an attempt by a non-Western, religious actor
to get a new norm established within the liberal international order. But for this attempt to
succeed, they say, there has to be a process of institutional translation of the norm37 that cuts
across differing cultural and institutional contexts. Bettiza/Dionigi pick up on Habermas’s
notion of a translational proviso – in other words, the condition that religious content has
to be translated into generally comprehensible, secular language before it can be included in
formal decision-making processes in parliaments, governments, and judicial systems. They
use this Habermasian condition as an analytical instrument which they can apply generally
to assess translational processes in post-secular world society as processes of norm-
contestation between actors of differing religious and cultural provenance. In the case of the
OIC’s UN initiative, the authors come to the conclusion that the process of translating the
particularist Islamic norm outlawing blasphemy and the denigration of Islam into a norm
comprehensible in secular terms was unsuccessful – and this despite the fact that in the
years of tension following 9/11 it would undoubtedly have been in the West’s interests to try
to improve relations between the Western and the Muslim worlds. The specificity of the
OIC norm enshrined in the resolutions, and the lack of the kind of interpretive leeway that
would have allowed Western secular states also to lend their support, scuppered the process
of translation, say the authors.
37 ‘Translation’ here denotes the migration of ideas and their linkage into a different context, where they
develop a new dynamic (Kaufmann/Rottenburg 2012).
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Kayaoglu’s analysis (2014) also picks up on the translational process. He describes the
UN as a secular organization in which liberal, Western states and civil-society organizations
dominate the discourse on norms and rights: ‘Secular gatekeepers and liberal values
dominate and have forced faith-based voices to shed their partisan religious sentiments and
non-liberal arguments and translate their discourse into liberal values of diversity,
individualism, science, and human rights’ (Kayaoglu 2014: 70). Accordingly, says Kayaoglu,
the OIC increasingly clothed its anti-defamation campaign in the terminology of the
secular, liberal human-rights discourse. Initially, this secured attention for the initiative, but
by adopting this approach, the OIC had ventured onto terrain in which secular, liberal
actors hold sway on matters of interpretation, with the result that these actors retained the
upper hand in the debate. Moreover, the OIC’s main concern, according to Kayaoglu, was
to stem the tide of Islamophobia that was threatening Muslim minorities in Western
countries, but its concessions to the liberal discourse ultimately led to the tables being
turned against it, with Western liberal actors in their turn accusing it of wanting to export
blasphemy-legislation that was contrary to human rights, as practised in a number of its
member-states.
3.5 From Opposition to Dissidence: The Cartoon Controversy
In January and February 2006, there was an undreamt-of escalation in the confrontation
between freedom of expression and the concern to protect religion from defamation.
Transnational protest, some of it violent, saw thousands of Muslims simultaneously take to
the streets across the Muslim world. What triggered the protest was a series of twelve
cartoons that had been published on 30 September 2005 in the Danish daily newspaper
Jyllands-Posten. The cartoons depicted the Prophet Mohammed – in one case with a bomb
in his turban, in another angrily wielding a scimitar, in another as keeper of the heavenly
virgins reserved to the martyrs of the Jihad. Arson attacks were carried out on the Danish
embassies in Syria and Lebanon; governments called for a boycott on Danish goods; and
‘Denmark found itself in the biggest foreign policy crisis since the German occupation
during the Second World War as the crisis rapidly exploded in a conflict of international
dimensions’ (Bonde 2007: 33).
In Denmark, the ‘cartoon controversy’ occurred at a time when the Muslim minority in
this small European country was the butt of hostile rhetoric from right-wing and
conservative politicians (Bonde 2007: 36). Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal
Party was governing in coalition with the Conservative People’s Party and had the tacit
sanction of the populist right-wing Danish People’s Party. When the editors of Jyllands-
Posten commented, in a companion-piece to the cartoons, that some Muslims rejected
modern, secular society and that by insisting on respect for their religious feelings they were
effectively demanding a special status, they were echoing the general mood. Such a demand,
said Jyllands-Posten, was not compatible with secular democracy and the free expression of
opinion, which required you, rather, to be prepared to put up with ‘disdain, mockery, and
ridicule’ (Bonde 2007: 35).
24 Claudia Baum
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The difficulties experienced by Denmark’s Muslim minority do not, however, explain
the transnational eruption of protest and violence that occurred at the start of 2006. In the
first few weeks after the cartoons had been published, the demonstrations and protest-
actions were indeed largely confined to Denmark. The Islamic Society, a Muslim umbrella-
organization in Denmark, led the protest and filed charges of blasphemy and
discrimination. In addition, in mid-October, eleven ambassadors from various Muslim
countries wrote to Prime Minister Rasmussen complaining about the situation of the
Muslim minority in Denmark and condemning the ‘smear campaign’ against Islam and
Muslims in politics and the media. They called on the prime minister to work to promote
dialogue and understanding and requested a meeting with him. But in his reply Rasmussen
pointed to the right of free speech that existed in Denmark and declined the request for a
meeting. This unreceptive attitude on the part of Rasmussen, being interpreted as an insult
not only by the ambassadors but also by many Muslims in Denmark, contributed in no
small measure to the further escalation of the conflict. Not until much later did Rasmussen
attempt to de-escalate the conflict via interviews with Arab broadcasters and in various
speeches.
The extent to which the conflict then spread transnationally was not down to Danish
events alone, however. Drawing on theories of New Social Movements and conflict
dynamics, Olesen (2007) has analysed the shift from the national to the transnational level.
One of the prior conditions which Olesen identifies for the cartoon controversy was the
changed political context after the events of 11 September 2001: political elites both across
the Muslim and Arab world and in Europe and the USA now had much more incentive to
tie their political messages to religious motives. In addition, with the advent of broadcasting
channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, a highly professionalized media landscape had
emerged in which it was possible to reach vast swathes of the population in the Arab and
Muslim world (Olesen 2007: 38).
Without these two preconditions, the cartoon controversy would probably not have
spread with such virulence beyond the Danish borders. Another factor necessary for the
spread, however, was the action of a number of players who – for differing reasons and not
always deliberately – drove the escalation forward. In December and January of 2005/6, a
delegation from the Muslim communities in Denmark undertook a tour of Egypt, Lebanon,
and Turkey. In their suitcases they had copies of the cartoons and an account they had
drawn up of the situation of Muslims in Denmark. This dossier focused on the religious
aspect of the cartoon episode, in other words the blasphemy committed against the Prophet.
The delegates addressed the accompanying letter to anyone ‘who wants to support our fight
to defend and support the holy prophet and with all legal means fight for the passing of a
general law, which ensures respect for all things sacred, particularly the Muslim, in a time
which allows attacks on Muslim sanctuaries using “war against terror” as an excuse’ (quoted
in Bonde 2007: 44).
The Danish delegation’s message fell on fertile ground, both in the countries they visited
and further afield: ‘The cartoon case was a window of opportunity for the Muslim
governments to defend religion upfront without allowing room to the growing religious
opposition within their communities’ (Bonde 2007: 44). Of key significance in the further
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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escalation were Egypt and the OIC: ‘The data indicate that the main force behind the
escalation was the brokerage of institutional actors. Two of these are of critical importance:
Egypt and the OIC’ (Olesen 2007: 47). As early as October 2005, Egypt involved itself in the
attempt by the eleven ambassadors to secure a meeting with the Danish prime minister. The
Egyptian government made deliberate use of the OIC to get the issue into the public eye.
The OIC, in its turn, showed itself more than willing to stoke the cartoon controversy,
dispatching protest-letters to the Danish government, urging the UN to outlaw attacks on
religion, and, in January 2006, calling for a Danish-financed festival of Islamic culture to be
boycotted. This prompted prominent European and American politicians and heads of
government – including former US president Bill Clinton – to make their first critical
comments about the publication of the cartoons.
Thus, the transnational escalation of the protest was preceded by a period of months
during which Egypt and the OIC, as governmental and intergovernmental entities
respectively, had prepared the ground for large-scale resistance to Western societies’
defamation and disparagement of Islam in the name of freedom of expression (Olsen 2007:
48). Inside the UN, the chances of the ‘Defamation of Religions’ initiative succeeding grew
steadily smaller. Faced with this situation, the OIC adopted the alternative strategy of
initiating protests in its member-states. The closing-off of opportunities for involvement by
the OIC was thus a contributing factor in causing the cartoon controversy to escalate to the
extent described here.
Another contributing factor, however, was the large-scale exposure given to the issue by
Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. According to Olesen : ‘The conflict started gathering force in the
last five days of January and . . . this development largely coincided with growing attention
to the conflict by Al-Jazeera’ (Olesen 2007: 48). Shortly after this, demonstrations took place
in Palestine, Yemen, Indonesia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, and the
Philippines. In Lebanon and Syria there were arson attacks on the Danish embassy.
4. Is an International Solution Possible?
In 2011, after twelve years of bitter wrangling over the ‘Defamation of Religions’
resolutions, the OIC, in conjunction with the United States and the European Union, put
forward a new draft resolution. Resolution 16/18, entitled ‘Combating Intolerance, Negative
Stereotyping and Stigmatisation of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence, and
Violence against Persons Based on Religions or Belief’, was adopted for the first time by the
Human Rights Council in 2011, by consensus. It aims, not to protect religions per se, but to
safeguard individuals against discrimination and violence on the grounds of their religion
or belief and to do so without curtailing the right to free speech.
Did this mean that, following the expressions of opposition and dissidence, there was
now to be some kind of concord that would resolve the normative conflict between the right
to freedom of expression and the protection of religions from denigration and blasphemy –
and thus also stem the recurrent tide of violence for the long term?
26 Claudia Baum
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Initial reactions were uniformly positive: critics of the defamation motions lauded the
new resolution as ‘an important breakthrough for human rights and the promotion of
religious tolerance’ (Aswad et al. 2014: 141; Kayaoglu/Petersen 2013); the OIC too presented
the resolution as a success and as proof of positive cooperation with the United States and
Europe. The aspect that came in for the most praise was the inclusion, as one of the
cornerstones of the resolution, of an action-plan designed to help deal on a long-term basis
with intolerance, discrimination, and violence based on religion or belief – for example,
through education, through specialist training for government officials, and through inter-
faith dialogue. Curtailment of the right to freedom of expression by criminal sanction was
specified by the resolution as being permissible only where the opinion expressed
constituted an incitement to imminent violence.
In the sphere of politics too, considerable importance was attached to the new
resolution. This is clear from the invitation issued jointly by the General Secretary of the
OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu, and the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in July 2011,
proposing an initial meeting in Istanbul to work out a coordinated approach to
implementing the action-plan. Participants to this meeting included the EU’s High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, plus foreign
ministers and other representatives from a total of twenty countries. In December of the
same year, the United States convened the first implementation-meeting of what was
dubbed the ‘Istanbul Process’ in Washington. Further meetings took place in London (2012,
convened jointly by Britain and Canada), Geneva (2013, convened by the OIC), Doha
(2014, convened by Qatar), and Saudi Arabia (2015, convened by the OIC). Chile has
announced that it will be hosting a further Istanbul Process meeting in 2015. In autumn
2012, in a complementary move, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) unveiled the ‘Rabat Plan of Action’,38 the product of a process of intensive
worldwide consultation with experts in the field. The plan specifies the duties which Article
20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights imposes on states in regard to
the protection of individuals against ‘any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that
constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’. With this instrument, which
lays down very strict criteria for the criminal sanction of hate speech and at the same time
proposes mechanisms for dialogue, the OHCHR seeks to get past the debate on the
‘defamation of religions’. The plan openly opposes national blasphemy-legislation.
Despite all this, as Elizabeth Cassidy, Deputy Director for Policy and Research at the
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, points out (Cassidy 2013),
consensus on Resolution 16/18 remains fragile. By the third meeting of the Istanbul Process
– for which the OIC was the chief organizer – representatives of the OIC and the Western
states were already dividing along familiar lines. Thus, whilst OIC member-states
38 UN OHCHR, Rabat Plan of Action on the Prohibition of Advocacy of National, Racial or Religious
Hatred that Constitutes Incitement to Discrimination, Hostility or Violence, October 5, 2012,
www.ohchr.org, http://bit.ly/1zk6n2S (October 14, 2015).
Which Gets Protection – Belie
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considered the criminalization of hate speech, intolerance, and discrimination relating to
religion to be the most important tool for getting the resolution enforced, Western states
argued for ‘soft measures’ such as education and cultural exchange, because, they said, the
use of legal means often proved counterproductive. There was also disagreement as to what
should constitute hate speech and incitement to violence: whilst Western states interpreted
these concepts narrowly, OIC countries considered that even public support for hate speech
– and not just direct incitement to actual violence – should be made a criminal offence.
Finally, states were also at odds with one another as to which groups at the present time
were primarily affected by religious intolerance and thus fell within the resolution’s
purview. In the opinion of Pakistan, Algeria, and other OIC countries, Muslims in Western
countries were the chief victims of discrimination. The United States and the EU
acknowledged that these kinds of anti-Muslim trends did indeed exist in Western societies,
but at the same time called for the situation of threatened religious minorities in the OIC
states also to be improved (Kayaoglu/Petersen 2013).
Whether it will be possible, in the long term, for the Istanbul Process to bring about a
political compromise that embraces OIC opposition in the UN and also channels the
dissidence of countless Muslims across the world in a cooperative direction remains to be
seen. Given the latest change of leadership within the OIC and the adoption of a distinctly
more conservative orientation as compared with the period from 2005 to 2013, it seems
increasingly likely that the OIC will keep up its anti-defamation rhetoric – and that many of
its member-states will cleave to their repressive blasphemy-laws.
Even before the June meeting in Saudi Arabia, the non-governmental organization
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) was warning that the OIC might renew
its attempts to push through a global blasphemy-law. In particular, FIDH voiced its concern
that the OIC representatives would try to reopen the discussion as to where prohibited hate
speech ends and permitted free speech begins. The relevant UN agreements, said FIDH, and
documents such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Resolution
16/18, and the Rabat Plan of Action, provided sufficient guidance as to where this
distinction lay: ‘Attempting to go beyond what has been agreed and to criminalize acts that
do not fall under the scope of article 20(2) of the ICCPR would be tantamount to
attempting to criminalize freedom of expression with regard to religious issues’ (FIDH
2015). An attempt of this kind to restrict the right to freedom of expression, said FIDH,
would essentially mark a return to the ‘defamation of religions’ idea. A report by the NGO
Universal Rights similarly concludes, in light of the resurgent conflicts, that the OIC’s
decision not to pursue its ‘defamation of religions’ idea merely indicates its acceptance of
the fact that its selected strategy has not worked; its commitment to its substantive goals,
however, remains unchanged (Limon/Ghanea/Power 2014).
As one of the principal players in the Istanbul Process, the EU should use every available
opportunity to fight these latest attempts to reintroduce an anti-defamation agenda into the
debate ‘through the back door’. To do this, the successes that have already been achieved –
in other words, Resolution 16/18 and the Rabat Plan of Action – need to be firmly
established as a valid framework, adopted, not least, with the concurrence of the OIC. This
approach could succeed if, in future, attention were focused more on the implementation of
28 Claudia Baum
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the very concrete plan of action detailed in Resolution 16/18 (Limon/Ghanea/Power 2014).
At the moment, this kind of focus is lacking. In 2014, only twenty-four states – one of them
being Germany – presented reports on the implementation of the resolution. Future
Istanbul meetings should be used to move beyond theoretical debates and promote the
implementation of the resolution in all its aspects. To achieve this, greater use could be
made of established UN mechanisms and instruments such as the Universal Periodic
Review.
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5. References
Aswad, Evelyn M./Hussain, Rashad/Suleman, M. A. 2014: Why the United States Cannot
Agree to Disagree on Blasphemy Laws, in: Boston University International Law Journal:
32, 119–146.
Bahçecik, Şerif O. 2013: Internationalizing Islamophobia: Anti-Islamophobic Practices from
the Runnymede Trust to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, in: Ortadoğu Etütleri
5: 1, 141–165.
Belnap, Allison G. 2011: Defamation of Religion: A Vague and Overbroad Theory that
Threatens Basic Human Rights, in: Stato, Chiese e Pluralismo Confessionale, Rivista
Telematica April, 1–50.
Besant, Alexander/Malo, Sebastian 2009: Dim Prospects for the United Nations Human
Rights Council, in: Yale Journal of International Affairs 4, 144–148.
Bettiza, Gregorio/Dionigi, Filippo 2014: How Do Religious Norms Diffuse? Institutional
Translation and International Change in a Post-Secular World Society, in: European
Journal of International Relations, 1–26, in: DOI: 10.1177/1354066114542663.
Bielefeldt, Heiner 1995: Muslim Voices in the Human Rights Debate, in: Human Rights
Quarterly: 17, 587–617.
Bielefeldt, Heiner 2012: Streit um die Religionsfreiheit. Aktuelle Facetten der internationalen
Debatte, Erlanger Universitätsreden Nr. 77, 3. Folge.
Biene, Janusz/Daphi, Priska/Fielitz, Maik/Müller, Harald/Weipert-Fenner, Irene 2015: Nicht
nur eine Frage der Sicherheit. Salafismus in Deutschland als gesamtgesellschaftliche
Aufgabe, HSFK Standpunkte, Nr. 1. Frankfurt am Main.
Blitt, Robert C. 2011: Defamation of Religion: Rumors of its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated,
in: Case Western Reserve Law Review 62: 2, 437.
Bonde, Bent N. 2007: How 12 Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were Brought to Trigger
an International Conflict, in: Nordicom Review 28: 1, 33–48.
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