Aided by social networking sites, blogs, and popular YouTube videos (found here and here), Pussy Riot’s plight became something of an international media sensation. Amnesty International and Madonna took up the cause, and British Prime Minister David Cameron questioned Putin about it in a face-to-face meeting. Indeed, as some commentators noted there did seem something almost pre-packaged about the whole event, as though it were designed for western consumption.

Fascinatingly, however, religion played a central role within this media event. Many orthodox clergy were quick to label the performance blasphemous, noting its “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; claiming that the women’s “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping…cause[ed] a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; and describing the performance as “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”

The Orthodox Church occupies an odd space in relationship to the secular power of the state. Historically aligned with the czars, it was driven largely underground during the Soviet era, thus becoming one site of opposition to politics as usual. In recent years it has emerged as a potent political force in Russia, one largely aligned with Putin’s hold on power. In her closing statement, Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, positioned their performance in precisely this way. The cozy relationship between church and state in contemporary Russia, she claimed, “has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national television for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would…help the faithful make the correct political choice during a difficult time for Putin preceding the election….Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity.”

So far, the performance feels like a classic punk gesture: a mixture of aesthetic, political, and religious dissidence inserted deliberately into spaces of order and control. Perhaps its most obvious precursor is the intervention staged by several young lettrist poets at Notre Dame Cathedral, on Easter Sunday, 1950. In the middle of the service Michel Mourre, dressed as a Dominican monk, climbed into a pulpit and began to read a sermon/poem that condemned the Catholic Church for “infecting the world with its funeral morality,” and announced that God was dead “so that Man may live at last.” As Greil Marcus details in Lipstick Traces, the response was dramatic: the Cathedral’s guards attacked the four with their swords, and the crowd chased them out of the Cathedral and down to the Seine, where they were apprehended by the police.

The afterlife of these two events, however, is remarkably different. Though the Notre Dame incident was much more shocking and disruptive, it drew a light response from the authorities: of the conspirators, only Mourre was held for 11 days and then released, and the event itself quickly faded away. By contrast, the disruption caused by Pussy Riot, though more modest in every sense, has had the more dramatic afterlife: the two-year sentences, the international attention, and the clear belief on the part of the authorities that, the accusation of blasphemy notwithstanding, the real stakes are political. As one of the prosecution lawyers put it in a remarkable example of official paranoia: “Lurching behind [Pussy Riot] are the real enemies of our state and of the Orthodox Christianity; those who instigated this multipurpose provocation are hiding behind Tolokonnikova’s group, and [there are also others] hiding behind those who are hiding behind them.”

While there are doubtless many reasons for the divergent responses, the really striking difference is that while Mourre’s group had conceived its gesture as boldly and simple-mindedly anti-religious, in the spirit of French atheist anti-clericalism stretching back to the Revolution and the philosophes, Pussy Riot categorically refused the government’s claim that they were motivated by religious hatred. Indeed, all three women used their closing statements to engage in a debate over the meaning of the gospels themselves. In Catholic France, even in 1950, blasphemy was apparently separable from a threat to the state. Not so, apparently, in the Russia of the twenty-first century.

Maria Alyokhina, for example, asserted that for the Orthodox Church “[t]he Gospels are no longer understood as revelation, which they have been from the very beginning, but rather as a monolithic chunk that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wherever necessary.” Noting that Jesus himself had been accused of blasphemy, Alyokhina goes on: “I think that religious truth should not be static, that it is essential to understand the instances and paths of spiritual development, the trials of a human being, his duplicity, his splintering. That for one’s self to form it is essential to experience these things.” And she makes the link to contemporary art explicit: “all of these processes—they acquire meaning in art and in philosophy. Including contemporary art. An artistic situation can and, in my opinion, must contain its own internal conflict.” Here Alyokhina mounts a defense of dissidence, intervention, rupture, and conflict—the aesthetics of punk, to be sure, but not far removed from the language of “contradiction” favored by critics like Theodor Adorno—by aligning them with what she calls “religious truth:” namely, the splintering and the spiritual development that become manifest only when the Gospel is treated as a process of revelation rather than a “monolithic chunk.” Moreover, Alyokhina’s distinction between process and monolith implicitly reflects back upon the long history of doctrine in the history of Western Christianity. Historians have noted, for example, that questions of doctrine and belief achieve a new importance during the early modern period, or what is sometimes called the “confessional period,” when the chaotic politics of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Renaissance and Reformation led to an emphasis on religious uniformity. Some scholars have further proposed that this process of reform and uniformity is a secular development, insofar as its real goal is not religion per se but the consolidation of state power and control over its subjects. When she aligns monolithic doctrine with state power, Alyokhina implicitly offers a similar diagnosis.

The radical power of that diagnosis becomes most clear in Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement: “In our performance,” she writes, “we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.” Most striking here, perhaps, is the language of “uniting” orthodox and protest culture, rather than setting them against each other. This is done, Samutsevich suggests, in the name of a democratic ideal: both orthodox and protest culture are properties of the people rather than of one group or another. The performance, on this analysis, becomes a visual and aural demonstration of what Alyokhina had called “internal conflict,” something posed by all three women as the space in which religious revelation happens. Thus art, religion, and the state are not conceptually separated here but deliberately mixed up, in the name of religious truth.

The sincerity of these various statements is of course an open question. While the women were careful to acknowledge their “respect” for what they called “Orthodox culture,” their words came far short of a confession of faith. Perhaps they also hoped that the repudiation of anti-clericalism would help their legal case. Moreover the statements themselves, which draw on a series of iconoclastic heroes from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn but return, again and again, to the figure of Jesus, might seem over-cooked. Was Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” really analogous to Socrates’ risky performances in ancient Athens, or to Jesus’ confrontations with worldly authorities? For his part, the theologian Harvey Cox, writing in the Boston Globe, is happy to place Pussy Riot in a prophetic tradition; “The prophet Isaiah walked through the streets naked and barefoot for three years to warn his people of their impending captivity. Hosea married a prostitute to shame people into recognizing their infidelity to God. Ezekiel baked and ate bread he made of cow dung. These prophets often chose the temple area in which to act out their warnings and denunciations. Jesus followed suit. He overturned the tables of the profiteers in the temple courtyard itself.…Protests and reforms often begin in religious venues. When an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted his complaints against the papacy…, he tacked them up on the door of the cathedral itself. The Scottish Reformation started in Edinburgh when an angry woman hurled a stool at the head of a preacher…”

Emphasizing that Christianity does not have a patent on such religious innovators, Cox also references Gandhi, who “led nonviolent bands of “untouchables” into the Hindu temple precincts from which the higher castes banned them.

It may seem a bit much to compare thirty seconds of amateurish dancing and shouting with such heroes of the faith. In most cases, the dramatic interventions of true religious revolutionaries are the result of long-standing oppositional practices. Though the stool-throwing woman in Edinburgh might be a distant ancestor of Pussy Riot, Cox is closer to the mark when he notes that the group stands within the Orthodox tradition of the yurodivy, or “holy fools.” “Orthodox theologians for centuries have recognized this as an authentic from of asceticism. Holy fools are not dismissed as crazy or criminal, but as people who, in using annoying or provocative acts, are saying something people need to hear.”

Does Pussy Riot hate religion or love it? Or merely respect it? Are they threats to the state or its victims? Is their Gospel-inflected self-defense opportunistic or genuine? Are they punks, prophets or holy fools? Is the event itself an example of a resurgent secularism or a resurgent religion? These questions and—to use Alyokhina’s word—conflicts are playing out simultaneously in a Russia lurching toward modernity and in a media sphere that exists (almost) everywhere but nowhere in particular. This suggests how much we need a truly global analysis of both secularism and religion.

[Thanks to Anahid Nersessian for first calling my attention to the religious and secular dimensions of this event.]

The issue I would like to raise relates mainly to the third objective. Whether or not one agrees with the notion of an internally cohesive concept of secularism—and whether or not one agrees that this concept is more limited than we have come to think it is—one might still ask if secularism should assert itself through a lexical ordering like the one envisioned by Bilgrami. Will a prioritization of political ideals seem fair to members of a secular society, and, perhaps more importantly, does it capture the challenges that face the kind of democracies we currently characterize as governed by secularism? My suspicion is that the answer is no as long as we don’t supplement the theory of secularism with a more robust account of what Bilgrami refers to as “political sociology” and the “democratization of communities.” Although Bilgrami is right to suggest that these domains of research are central to the politics of secularism, I suspect that they lead us in a different direction than the one anticipated by his argument. Rather than securing the normative foundation for the lexical ordering of political ideals, the domains identified by Bilgrami encourage us to supplement his emphasis on justification and reason-giving with something else: a cultivation and affirmation of the plurality that subsists within experience itself.

Elsewhere I have suggested that the best way to consider the politics of secularism is by examining it in relation to cases such as the Danish cartoon controversy. Bilgrami favors a similar approach, using the Salman Rushdie case to illustrate why a secular society committed to the ideal of free speech should not censor books like the Satanic Verses, even if it means exposing some but not all religions to the threat, not to mention harm, of blasphemy. If I understand Bilgrami correctly, the argument for this ordering is that secularism is best defined as a political doctrine, which doesn’t seek to undermine practices of belief and faith, but nonetheless must take an adversarial stance vis-à-vis religion in the realm of the polity (what others might call the “public”). It is, Bilgrami suggests, part of secularism’s conceptual nature to put its own ideals first in the polity. Moreover, since the ideals in question are embedded in the reasons that justify secularism (more about that later), the ideals are in an important sense always already shared by the various members of the polity. For a person who accepts secularism, it would quite possibly be inconsistent to cherish its conceptual meaning and, upon further reflection, not think that its political ideals should be prioritized in the case of a conflict between secularism and a religious practice.

On my reading of it, the Danish cartoon controversy challenges this argument in a number of important ways. Most obvious perhaps is that although the controversy initially was characterized by a plurality of expressions and identities, it gradually grew into a stark opposition between two parties, each of which did not contest the right to free speech, but nonetheless interpreted it in radically different ways. The cartoon controversy suggests in other words that a lexical ordering like the one envisioned by Bilgrami does not always or necessarily generate the kind of normative consistency his conceptualization of secularism hopes to achieve. Quite simply, there might be too many ways of interpreting the right to free speech to make the ordering seem compelling, not to mention legitimate, to all the affected parties. This point was evident in the Danish cartoon controversy: whereas the majority of ethnic Danes did not see an inconsistency between their privileged position and the right to ridicule a religious minority, the majority of Muslims claimed the exact opposite in their defense of the need for censoring expressions of blasphemy.

Unless we are satisfied with secularism being a form of decisionism, or another name for majority rule, the challenge thus seems to be one of supplementing the lexical ordering of political ideals with a fuller account of how communities and individuals might open themselves up to contestation, and how such opening in turn might inform the way they change and develop over time (and how even their conception of secularism might change over time). Acknowledging this challenge, Bilgrami points to two sets of resources: (a) a focus on “internal reasons” understood as reasons that can motivate an overlapping consensus without disavowing the “moral psychologies” of individuals or communities; and (b) a reading of Hegel that focuses in particular on the “idea that Reason…does its work in a human subject by bringing about changes of value via deliberation on her part to overcome internal conflicts among values.”

While both resources enrich our conception of secularism, I wonder whether they answer the challenges that face the kind of societies we currently think of as governed by that concept. First of all, it is not obvious that an overlapping consensus will emerge from exploiting the conflicts and tensions that characterize the internal reasons motivating an individual’s or group’s commitment to the political ideals associated with secularism. As the Danish cartoon controversy suggests, there may be contextual forces that foreclose such exploitation, and/or there may be too much of a gap between the various internal reasons that underpin how different constituents motivate their commitment to ideals such as free speech. At the same time, it is not clear what the Hegelian conception of history and subjectivity accomplishes in terms of including a plurality of viewpoints, especially since Bilgrami acknowledges that we have no reason to believe that it necessarily leads to an overlapping consensus among internal reasons. The idea here seems to be that the Hegelian conception of history and subjectivity, rather than simply being a philosophical argument, also is an “evaluative stance,” which in the case of secularism takes up the values of “humanism” and “inclusiveness.” But this begs the question: Why reserve humanism and inclusiveness for secularism? Why, in the name of both religious and secular pluralism, insist on a set of values that invoke a sameness as general and as abstract as the “human”? Does such an appeal not run the risk of either disavowing the conditions of possibility for acting politically, representing a doctrine which is both empty and apolitical, or being so contentious that it undermines its own invitation to deliberation across the differences within any given society?

I raise these questions, not to suggest that one should avoid taking a stance, but to suggest that to take a stance with regard to pluralism means something else. Whether one sees oneself as a secularist or as a believer—whether one proceeds in a philosophical or an activist mode—to take a stance with regard to pluralism is to channel the plurality that subsists within all experiences, and to enable its shining-forth even more powerfully than if one did not take a stance. The pluralist’s stance, we might say, is to immerse oneself in a plurality that includes the “one” as well as the “many.”

To illustrate what I mean by this, consider here an alternative dialectic based on what Merleau-Ponty calls the “tolerance of the incomplete,” which he develops by suggesting that the “accomplished work is…not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it.” While the dialectic invoked here speaks to Bilgrami’s interest in political sociology and democratization of communities, it changes our approach because it has a different starting-point than the one envisioned by Bilgrami: rather than beginning with the issue of how to order political ideals, Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic begins in the midst of lived experience, where perceptions, judgments, and ideals have not yet reached the threshold of conceptual clarity, and where experience itself is so open-ended that it appears as a plurality of possibilities and outcomes. “Tolerance of the incomplete” is a way of maintaining this experience of plurality, affirming the incompleteness of one’s own expressions in order to allow for other expressions to emerge. The idea is to “take up the gesture,” and to engage it pluralistically without believing that it ever can or should be completed, or subjected to lexical ordering.

There are both theoretical and pragmatic reasons to consider this dialectical approach to the politics of secularism. Most attractively, the approach replaces the invocation of abstract universals such as “humanism” with an avowedly political approach to reason-giving, leading to what we might call “sensorial reasoning.” Sensorial reasoning gives reasons that resonate with the context to which they apply, and that stress the plurality of experience itself.” Pragmatically, the dialectic approach envisioned by Merleau-Ponty alerts us to the importance of maintaining the inherent plurality in all experiences, and to develop ways of seeing and feeling that augment this sense of inherent plurality. In this regard, as I argue elsewhere, the Danish cartoon controversy has some unsung heroes: a subset of cartoonists who turned the invitation to ridicule a religious minority into a reason to challenge their sponsor (i.e., the editors of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten). Several of the cartoons made fun of the idea of mocking Mohammad rather than yield to it, and they even explored the reasons why one would want to encourage such mockery in the context of nationalism, ignorance, and xenophobia. Taking a pluralistic stance, bracketing the need for a lexical ordering of political ideals, these cartoonists were thus among the few who saw the controversy as a reason to rethink secularism rather than insist on its unchanging requirements. That is why, in my view, they ably represent the prospect of a new politics of tolerance and citizenship in the 21^st century.

I conclude by noting that a new politics of tolerance and citizenship may not sit easily with secularism as it is defined by Bilgrami. Does this mean that the outcome is not a form of secularism? The answer to this question will vary, depending on whether one thinks that secularism is less cohesive as a concept than Bilgrami argues it is, or whether one thinks that we have moved into an age of post-secularism.

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at a panel on Akeel Bilgrami’s paper organized by the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University’s School of Communication, October 21, 2011.—ed.

“Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?” Judith Butler recently asked. Here I will explore these issues in light of recent developments concerning the freedom of speech in Norway. I will argue that applying a cosmopolitan liberal approach to freedom of speech (i.e., along U. S. First Amendment lines) in a European context in which anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourses are becoming ever more poisonous and pervasive risks underestimating the power dynamics inherent to the practice of free speech in contemporary Europe as well as overestimating the “mainstream” political and intellectual will to mobilize against the populist right-wing’s instrumentalized Islamophobia.

In an op-ed for The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recently argued that “for reasons both of free speech principle and political prudence,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders “should not be on trial for what he says about Islam.” Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), is being prosecuted under Dutch hate speech regulations for his comparison of the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and for referring to the former as “a fascist book.” In opting to indict Wilders, Dutch prosecutors, according to Garton Ash, are “guilty of blurring the line between attacking the believers and criticizing [their] beliefs.” He argues for instead moving the struggle against contemporary European populist articulations of xenophobia from “the court of law” to “the court of public opinion,” calling upon “mainstream politicians and intellectuals” to mobilize in defense of the liberal rule of law and equal rights of citizenship for all individuals.

Similarly, Andrew March has argued that in a Europe that is often discriminatory and imbalanced in its approach to Muslims citizens, “Muslim minorities in particular have a strong interest in “securing a more fundamentalist and formalist culture of defense of free speech.” Garton Ash’s and March’s motivations for advocating more free speech in response to hate speech are not identical. Whereas Garton Ash invokes the “slippery slope” argument (by which “a purpose to protect individual human beings” turns into a ban on criticizing “any belief”), March makes the valid point that religiously motivated speech has the same innate capacity to injure as non-religiously motivated speech, and that the religious therefore cannot claim any special privileges in regard to protection against injurious speech. The slippery slope argument, most famously articulated by Ronald Dworkin, holds that since free expression is a necessary condition of political legitimacy in any democratic society, we risk unduly interfering with political legitimacy and ultimately undermining democracy if free expression is curtailed. Dworkin is a strong and articulate defender of what may be characterized as contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of freedom of speech in their most absolutist incarnations. Yet the available evidence from liberal and democratic countries with hate speech legislation quite simply does not support the contention that such legislation paves the way for more wide-ranging restrictions on speech.

March and Garton Ash do, however, share certain basic assumptions. The first is that the distinction between speech directed against religion or belief of any sort and speech directed at individuals professing a particular religion or belief is easily identifiable. The second is what can be broadly defined as a desire to universalize, or at least to “Europeanize,” an understanding of the freedom of speech rooted in the U.S. First Amendment. Under U.S. First Amendment principles, as elaborated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the course of the twentieth century, the only legitimate restriction of speech pertains to any utterance functioning as an incitement to “immediate” violence against particular individuals, if and when the listening audience is in fact liable to act upon such speech. This interpretation of the constitutional protection of free speech is an outlier in global and comparative terms. But in light of legal, societal, and political developments in the past decade, on the national as well as the supra-national level, European states, and Scandinavian states in particular, seem more and more to be turning toward contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of the freedom of speech. For now, formal legal protections against various forms of racist, hateful, or discriminatory speech instituted as a result of international conventions remain in the statutes of numerous countries. Under these conventions, certain restrictions on free speech are permitted under the condition that they are “prescribed by law” and “necessary in a democratic society.” In Denmark, for instance, The Free Press Society’s Lars Hedegaard was recently prosecuted successfully for racist speech. In France, TV personality Éric Zummour was convicted under similar laws. But in Norway, hate speech legislation is more or less a dead letter. For laws that are merely symbolic and seldom, if ever, applied soon lose both their effectiveness and their legitimacy.

The character of racism in Norway shifted significantly in the course of the 1990s, in line with developments elsewhere in Western Europe. The racism of biological markers was replaced by various forms of cultural racism, and overt anti-Semitism became anathema while more or less subtle forms of Islamophobia became palatable. It is noteworthy in this context that the figure of “the Muslim” as an embodied threat to everything from freedom of speech to gender equality and from gay rights to the sustainability of the welfare state means that Islamophobia in contemporary Norway has wide cross-sectional and cross-political purchase. Even overtly xenophobic and racist organizations in Norway now claim on their websites to be opposed to all forms of racism and xenophobia, and merely to be engaged, rather, in a “critique of Islam” and efforts to ‘stop the “Islamization of Norway.” With the tacit support of Norway’s political, legal, and intellectual elites, racism is narrowly construed as relating only to biological markers of difference.

In principle, more free speech and more open access to various media means an increased potential for Muslims to respond to popular stereotypes and stigmatization. And it is, in fact, by no means unusual for young Norwegian Muslims to do so. But to do so under current circumstances requires very thick skin indeed. In interviews with me, young Norwegian Muslims active in the mediated public sphere very often report receiving abusive and threatening letters and emails. At the same time, mainstream liberal editors, who act as gatekeepers to major media outlets, often have their own scripts requiring those who get privileged access to visible positions in the mediascape to play particular roles—specifically the heroic “secular feminist Muslim” and the vilified “conservative Muslim,” or, in other words, the Muslim woman in need of freedom (from “Islam”), and the Muslim man denying her freedom (in the name of “Islam”). “Power speaks only to power,” in J.M. Coetzee’s words, and to be able and permitted to express oneself in public does not entail actually being heard.

Furthermore, many Norwegian mainstream—and supposedly liberal—editors cast themselves as “critics of Islam”—some to the extent of regularly recommending Islamophobic “Eurabia literature” of various kinds to their readers. Their Kulturkampf against the threats to freedom of speech emanating from ‘Islam’ often invoke the 3.0 percent of Norway’s population that is of Muslim background as a stand-in for this generalized other. In these editors’ constant clamor to be at the forefront of the heroic struggle for the freedom of speech, the editorial restraint of mainstream media in the U.S. is often virtually absent. In a reversal of Enlightenment creeds, it is now the powerful rather than the powerless that the freedom of speech is expected to protect. Many of these editors have also expended much energy on attempts to publicly discredit and discourage use of the term Islamophobia in Norway in recent years. It was not entirely coincidental, then, that, in 2009, Norway’s technocratic and influential Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, described the very concept of Islamophobia as “substanceless rant.”

In early January, 2011, the secular feminist Hege Storhaug, of Human Rights Service (HRS), in an op-ed in the mainstream liberal-conservative newspaper Aftenposten, by far the most influential newspaper in Norway, compared Muslims in prayer during a demonstration at Oslo’s University Square the previous year to “quislings.” Not to be outdone, Kent Andersen, a board member of the Oslo section of the populist-right wing Progress Party (PP), on a personal blog some weeks later, compared Islam to Nazism, and rhetorically asked his readers whether they thought that there could be “moderate Muslims”—as if there were ever “moderate Nazis.” The implication of such analogies, as Ian Buruma suggested in a 2009 New York Times op-ed, is that those who happen to believe in the Qur’an are like Nazis, and that an “all-out war against them” would therefore be legitimate. This is where Garton Ash’s approach would seem to run into some difficulties, for it is hard to see Storhaug and Andersen’s declamations as anything other than speech that deliberately blurs the line between a legitimate critique of Islam and hateful speech targeting individual Muslims. Andersen works in marketing, and, like Storhaug, has close links to some of the Progress Party’s most influential MPs. Once the Progress Party was on the fringes of Norwegian politics, but since 2003 it has governed the capital, Oslo, in a two-party alliance. In the parliamentary elections of 2009, the PP got a record 22.9 percent of the vote. Established in 1973 as an anti-taxation and anti-bureaucratic party, the PP first discovered the popular appeal of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric in 1987.

Anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourse has long been part of the political mainstream in Norway—effectuating what the late Tony Judt described as a “social democracy of fear.” Norway’s governing Labor Party has managed to remain in power, in a tripartite alliance of the center-left, by taking ever more stringent measures on immigration and integration, thus echoing the PP’s policies, if not their rhetoric, in recent years.

As a direct result of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) of 1966, Norway introduced a racism paragraph (135 (a)) into its penal code in 1970. In its current formulation, the racism paragraph may be used to penalize public utterances or symbols of a hateful or discriminatory nature based on attributes such as skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, or homosexual orientation and lifestyle. In spite of numerous racist incidents during the 1970s and ’80s, the paragraph was never much used. As a result of public utterances he made during a march in the small Norwegian town of Askim, in 2000, Terje Sjølie, a Norwegian member of Boot Boys, a neo-Nazi gang, was charged under the racism paragraph. In his speech, Sjølie proclaimed that “every day, immigrants rob, rape and kill Norwegians.” One year later, a gang of Boot Boys brutally stabbed to death Benjamin Hermansen, a fifteen-year old boy of mixed Norwegian-African parentage, in a southeastern suburb of Oslo. Hermansen’s murderer had been present at the march in Askim the previous year. On an extremely cold winter evening 40,000, Norwegians took part in a commemorative anti-racism march dedicated to Hermansen and his family; it was the largest demonstration ever held in the Norwegian capital. Nevertheless, in 2002, a divided Norwegian Supreme Court acquitted Sjølie of the charges brought under the racism paragraph. The Court’s majority argued that the freedom of speech overrode the right to protection from hateful and discriminatory speech. Various Norwegian civil society organizations appealed the Supreme Court’s verdict to the UN’s ICERD Committee. In 2006, the ICERD Committee found the verdict in the Sjølie case to be in violation of ICERD articles 4 and 6. Norwegian state officials have repeatedly asserted to the European Commision against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) that the Sjølie verdict would now be inconceivable. Yet, with the exception of the Norwegian Supreme Court’s 2008 conviction of Norwegian Neo-Nazi Tore Tvedt for having declared in a 2003 tabloid newspaper interview that Jews were “parasites whom we must cleanse,” there have been no successful legal prosecutions under the racism paragraph in Norway in recent years. Charging and prosecuting Norwegian citizens on the basis of hate speech against Muslims—as the Dutch and the Danish have recently done in the Wilders and Hedegaard cases—now seems relatively inconceivable.

Freedom of speech debates are often construed by free speech proponents and opponents as a zero-sum game—that is, it is assumed that one either is, or ought to be, for or against free speech. Here I must make clear that I am inclined neither to support blasphemy laws nor to defend the dubious concept of “defamation of religion.” Exempting the beliefs and practices of people whose beliefs and practices happen to differ from my own is not a way of demonstrating respect or treating others as equals. The public sphere is an impure place, and so it must be. The current “fetishism of law” makes many attribute the most magical of effects to the mere letter of the law. It is an open question, however, whether the law is an appropriate instrument in the regulation of expression. For, in plural and heterogeneous societies, it is doubtful that any Rawlsian “duty of civility” can be instilled through law, and the emergence of various largely unregulated social media on the web makes it even less likely.

When restrictions on racist, discriminatory, and hate speech were introduced in Europe, in the aftermath of World War II, it was because European political and intellectual elites had come to the conclusion that there had to be some such restrictions in place in order to prevent “fighting words” from turning into “fighting actions.” It is hard to see that when Islam is compared to Nazism, and ordinary Muslims to Nazis, it constitutes a mere “critique of religion” rather than hate speech. The last racially motivated murder in Norway took place in 2008, when a Norwegian-Somali Muslim father of six, Mahmed Jamal Shirwac, was killed. There is solid evidence from Germany to India and from Rwanda to Bosnia that fighting actions are usually preceded by fighting words. Even though history does not repeat itself, in the current circumstances, it would be prudent to uphold a modest defense of European restrictions on hate speech.

Last week, one of the two activists, Emdadur Choudhury, was found guilty under Section 5 of the Public Order Act of burning the poppies in a way that was likely to cause “harassment, harm or distress” to those who witnessed it, and was fined £50. The symbolic nature of the punishment aside, the Choudhury verdict invites immediate comparison with incidents of offense to Muslim religious sensibilities (from Rushdie to the Danish Cartoons and beyond), which, by and large, have not been suppressed by European legal institutions. While it is very tempting for Muslims, and those sympathetic to the situation of Muslims in Europe, to see a case like this as evidence of double-standards—Muslim speech is suppressed on grounds of injury to non-Muslims, while the reverse is not; speech injurious to secular affect is suppressed, while speech injurious to religious affect is not—this might also be an occasion for some general reflection on the problem of injurious speech in morally pluralist contexts. A case like this invites such reflection both for its similarities with and for its differences from the Jyllands-Posten and Lars Vilks cartoon affairs.

1) Europeans appreciate the concept of “moral injury.”

For some analysts, often writing on this blog, the critical lesson to draw from the Danish cartoon controversy concerns how certain ethical and semiotic norms “fail to translate” across civilizational, ideological, and religious divides. Saba Mahmood, most notably, suggests “several reasons why the idea of moral injury I have analyzed remained mute and silent in the public debate over the Danish cartoons, key among them the inability to translate across different semiotic and ethical norms.” What idea of moral injury was at stake, for Mahmood, in the case of the Danish cartoons? It was about a

violation [that] emanates not from the judgment that the law has been transgressed but that one’s being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken. For many Muslims, the offense the cartoons committed was not against a moral interdiction but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels wounded. This wound requires moral action, but the language of this wound is neither juridical nor that of street protest because it does not belong to an economy of blame, accountability, and reparations. The action that it requires is internal to the structure of affect, relations, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a violation in the first place.

The idea of a satisfactory “translation” of the ethical norms is left conveniently vague. What would be evidence of a successful translation of ethical and semiotic norms? That Muslims are able to have speech they don’t like suppressed by European courts? Or that more people in the media and broader public sympathize with their injury and describe it accurately?

Either way, the “poppy case” casts some serious doubt on this analysis. The witnesses and judge in the Choudhury case employ, in fact, a language almost identical to that employed by Mahmood. Judge Riddle argued that, because the November 11, 1918, ceasefire has “huge significance” for Britons, burning poppies is “is behaviour that is bound to be seen as insulting.” (Read: many Britons have a “structure of affect, relations, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a violation in the first place.”) A witness, the grandson of a World War II soldier, reportedly “felt sick inside. It is something that means so much to me and to see what I believed to be a wreath of poppies fall to the ground—it is just despicable.” (Read: for this witness, “the offense the cartoons the burning of poppies committed was not against a moral interdiction but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels wounded. . . . His being has been shaken.”)

Thus, it seems that those invested in the idea that conflicts over speech and the sacred reveal some deep and troubling incommensurability—not over whether “blasphemous” speech ought to be prohibited by the law (Mahmood does not argue for this, unlike, say, Peter Danchin), but rather over the background presuppositions about what kinds of speech can injure, how they injure, and why—are not looking broadly or carefully enough at public and legal discourse in Europe. I cannot see much difference at all between how Mahmood characterizes the injury felt by (some) pious Muslims at the defamation of the Prophet and how Judge Riddle and his witness describe the injury felt by “typical, mild-mannered” Britons at the burning of poppies during a commemorative ceremony. Thus, Mahmood seems overhasty when she writes:

Muslims who want to turn this form of injury into a litigable offense must reckon with the performative character of the law. To subject an injury predicated upon distinctly different conceptions of the subject, religiosity, harm, and semiosis to the logic of civil law is to promulgate its demise (rather than to protect it). Mechanisms of the law are not neutral but are encoded with an entire set of cultural and epistemological presuppositions that are not indifferent to how religion is practiced and experienced in different traditions. Muslims committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation must contend with the transformative power of the law and disciplines of subjectivity on which the law rests.

Let’s grant Mahmood, for the moment, the idea that Muslims are only interested in using the law to prevent or punish scandalous speech about Muhammad because they are “committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation.” (I find this overly restrictive of the many motivations and moral reasons Muslims have voiced—at least since the Rushdie Affair—and quite artificial in its construction.) It seems that, at least if they were arguing before Judge Riddle, they would have no problem at all articulating their “conceptions of the subject, religiosity, harm, and semiosis,” for the language Mahmood uses is, in this case, the same as that of the secular court.

2) Is it “religious pain,” or merely “Muslim pain,” about which Europeans are insufficiently concerned?

Poppies are not Prophets, though. Is the Choudhury case, perhaps, evidence that, after all, the “secular nomos” of Europe is unfairly and arbitrarily biased against religious habitus, insofar as it protects citizens from the exact same kind of moral injury only when it is performed against secular signs and not religious ones? As Talal Asad has written, because Western societies do impose some restrictions on speech, “it seems probable that the intolerable character of blasphemy accusations in this kind of society derives not so much from their attempt to constrain as from the theological language in which the constraint is articulated.”

Perhaps. This would require some direct apples-to-apples comparison, though. For example, have there been attempts to use Section 5 of the Public Order Act (leaving aside even the “Incitement to Religious Hatred” section) to prosecute acts of desecration of religious symbols combined with “persistently shouting abuse or obscenities at passers-by . . . within the sight or hearing of the suspect who is likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by the conduct in question” that have been summarily dismissed by similar courts on the grounds that the desecration of religious symbols cannot cause “harassment, harm or distress,” or that any that is caused is either inconsequential or deserved? Certainly, there is nothing in the language of the ordinance that would exclude religious pain from consideration, and, in fact, the law includes special consideration for “religiously aggravated offence.”

I do not mean to suggest that there is no problem of imbalance or discrimination in Europe. Far from it. Rather, I mean to ask: When does a public or a legal discourse that does not accord Muslims all the protection or consideration they want evince a problem related to the distinctly secular nature of European public norms and discourses? Those interested in exploring whether secularism is part of the problem have not only to give a better account of what a successful translation of norms would be, or what Muslims and other religious subjects are due in a pluralist society, but also, and primarily, to consider how much of what is going on in public debates about offensive speech is evidence of a particular antipathy or anxiety surrounding Muslims. Before insisting that in cases like the Danish cartoons there is a distinct kind of pain that modern secular societies simply can’t wrap their heads (or hearts) around (an explanation made quite unlikely by the language in the Choudhury case), we would do well to remember that Western publics these days often have a hard time taking seriously Muslim pain of any kind.

This phenomenon is widely appreciated, and I do not need to belabor it here. But I do want to suggest that, while Europeans’ anxieties about Muslims are often bound up in their anxieties about religion in the public sphere, and while Europeans often misuse the secular license to insult religion as an alibi for creating a hostile environment for citizens of Muslim cultural backgrounds, not every act of exclusion or hostility towards Muslims in Europe is evidence of a secular failure to provide sufficient space for multiple ethical norms to thrive. To see only secular failures (while refusing to imagine the space that secularism leaves open for the resolution of ethical conflicts) is no less a piece of dogmatism than the insistence of those who regard “secular failure” as a contradiction in terms.

3) The materiality of utterances matters.

But let us concede that in the British court’s willingness to punish a Muslim for injuring patriotic Britons, we have prima facie evidence of secular hypocrisy. Still, we must be careful. At stake was a not a general ban against burning poppies, or a ban against printing cartoons of burned poppies (or of soldiers burning in hell), but a direct physical encounter. As a fairly unimaginative American liberal habituated into a stringent defense of political speech, I would have preferred not to see Choudhury fined for this form of political expression, even if fairness and decency would permit the police to remove him from the scene at the time. However, not only is a £50 fine a relatively symbolic punishment; it is a fine, not for some general transgression against a sacred national symbol, but rather for a public disturbance.

A surprising lacuna in much academic writing, outside of legal studies, about popular incidents such as the controversy around Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoon affair is the failure to explore the materiality of speech. It is more common to explore interpretations of the utterances as such—what they mean, why they injure, why they were produced—rather than the ways in which the same utterance, in terms of brute content, can take on quite different ethical and social meanings when uttered in different material forms and in different physical contexts. Obviously, I do not flatter myself by thinking that I am correcting a general mistake on our part. Of course, we know that the “N-word,” when spoken by whites, is not the same as when spoken by blacks, and that the word spoken by a white actor on a stage is not the same as the word spoken by a white schoolteacher to a black student, and so on.

But this obvious category of ethical analysis in the realm of speech acts is too often overlooked by those broadly sympathetic to the idea of religious injury. Speech acts are, of course, always acts. They always do something. But some are more act-like than others; some do what they do more immediately and physically, with much less dependence on the agency of their recipient or target. Most obvious are instances of direct harassment or intimidation. Here, the political concern is first with public space and how it can be transformed into a zone of hostility or menace. Furthermore, it is important here to analyze the different kinds of public space available as sites of speech: schools, walls in ethnic neighborhoods, highway overpasses, bus stops, public squares, etc.

The same act can thus vary wildly, not only in terms of threat and intimidation, but also in terms of political statement, when performed in different spaces. Claiming a common space like a school through hostile speech should be considered a more aggressive act than spray-painting the identical message on a wall. Both are acts of hostility towards a group, but the first goes out of its way to “claim” a space that is not only supposed to be safe and common to all members, but that is also supposed to be dedicated to the mission of advancing inclusion and guaranteeing the acquisition of primary skills and resources. Hate speech towards Jews, Muslims, or African-Americans is vile everywhere, but it is easy to see how it is even worse in schools or Congressional hearing rooms than at lunch counters. Along these lines, for me, the Swiss minaret referendum poster portraying niqabed women and missile-like minarets disrupting the Swiss flag—plastered over walls and bus stops throughout the common public space—was a much more aggressive and hostile form of political speech than, say, the ostensibly more “blasphemous” Satanic Verses or Danish cartoons.

Because of the more physical nature of these kinds of speech, it is probably not as crucial what the subjective content of the utterance is. Whether or not Rushdie’s use of the name “Mahound” in a dream sequence in a postmodern novel is a direct assault on the Prophet Muhammad, spray-painting this over walls in a Muslim neighborhood, or at a school with many Muslim children, is clearly an act of hostility, if not intimidation. Unlike dense novels or obscure right-wing Danish newspapers, this is an act that seeks to force itself into the physical world of a target, giving him or her no choice to ignore it.

Thus, take a blasphemous cartoon in the culture section of a newspaper. It is clear that this kind of physical context could have been less offensive, but also much more so. A cartoon produced by journalists writing for a private paper is clearly much more public than one on an obscure website or in some arcane niche magazine. But in terms of a distinctly public statement, it is clearly less odious than when it was reproduced and worn by an Italian minister on a t-shirt. As a physical act, it is clearly more intrusive and insidious than words which one has to rummage through a novel in a language one understands to find, but far less so than the Swiss minaret poster. Similarly, a threat to burn the Qur’an as a media event on your own private church property is doubtless a less-than-welcome intervention into national and global multi-cultural politics, but it is also slightly less of an affront to public order than would be threatening to do so outside of a mosque after Friday prayers. And so on.

I doubt very much that I am saying anything original or insightful here, and, needless to say, I am not insisting than all pious Muslims adopt the distinctions I am drawing. But the weakness of many arguments, in my opinion, for even voluntary self-restraint in such cases as the Rushdie and Danish cartoon affairs is not that they fail to show why Muslims may have been injured, but that they fail to show why the relationship between the authors of this injury and all persons liable to be injured—all Muslim fellow citizens of a country, all Muslims of Europe, and Muslims anywhere on the globe—commands a generalized ethics of self-restraint.

This is not to say that understanding the ethico-religious imaginaries of our fellow citizens is not a crucial component of responsible citizenship. But it is to say that attaining this understanding does much less work for us than some have suggested. Given the capacity of speech about the Virgin Mary or the Prophet Muhammad to injure, what we need is not an ethos of speaking in public but many such ethoi. Speaking as a novelist, as an artist, as a cartoonist, as a government minister, as a public school teacher, as a candidate for Congress, as a professor at a private university, as a guest in someone’s home or place of worship, as a friend, as a doctor, or as a newspaper editor are all quite different roles, and each will require a different ethics of speech.

What focusing on the possible conflict between secular and religious moral imaginaries fails to advance is this understanding of reasonable ethical obligations arising from how we speak in different contexts of power and moral responsibility. The authors of moral injury are usually not unaware of the capacity of speech to injure. The Danish cartoons were not accidental acts of injury; the protagonists deliberately set out to make a statement about religious attachments (not beliefs) being fair game. Would they have gone after the Prophet Muhammad if they were unaware that this was a soft spot? Exploring the genealogy of some so-called “non-Protestant” religious subject does not actually fill in any gaps in such cases. Thus, what those interested in “fostering greater understanding across lines of religious difference” need to show is not why Muslims are injured by this but not that, but rather why and when not injuring Muslims qua pious religious subjects is a moral desideratum regardless of what other views about the social world we want to express.

4) Muslims, as much as any social group, have a strong interest in robust protections for speech.

Suppose, though, that there is a seriously skewed playing field for European Muslims in the area of offensive speech. Whether anti-Muslim or anti-religious sentiment is to blame for the differential protection of Muslim speech and non-Muslim speech in Europe, instances like the Choudhury case remind us that advocating for more stringent protections for speech (pace Stanley Fish and others who have drunk the oil) is not evidence of some embarrassingly “non-neutral” or civilizationally particularist ideological prejudice, but something in which the religious generally, and Muslim minorities in particular, have a strong interest.

To put it most bluntly: while there is no denying that Muslims and other religious subjects are often injured by speech (whether intentionally and gratuitously or merely as collateral damage from some form of social commentary), there is also no denying that the religious often wish to injure through speech. Two recent cases—the Westboro Baptist Church case in the U.S. and the burning poppy case in the UK—provide timely examples of this. And this, more than any genealogy of the subject (religious or otherwise) or archaic conception of the public/private divide, is what grounds the right to blaspheme or injure the religious: that the religious, too, often wish to injure through speech. We should be consistent and defend their right to do so, limiting ourselves to narrow, restrained, and equitable uses of public order justifications for restrictions on speech (which ought to include harassment, intimidation, and threats).

But beyond the fact that certain fundamental interests shared in equal measure by the religious and the secular generally—what Joshua Cohen has identified as the expressive, deliberative, and informational interests—are secured by stringent protections of expressive liberty, I believe that Muslim minorities in particular have a strong interest in securing a more fundamentalist and formalist culture of defense of free speech. For which community, in present times, is more likely than Muslims to be the victim of courts and legislatures that see political expression as a luxury that can give way to any political or security expediency? It is, above all, Muslim speech that is liable to be labeled dangerous, harmful, and excitable—whether through the widening restrictions on “material support for terrorism” supported by the US Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the shameful manufactured outrage over the Park 51 cultural center, or the Choudhury poppy burning case.

The idea that free speech, even when “abused” to transgress against the sacred (whether secular or religious), is some arbitrary, sectarian value that is unjustified to the religious is a piece of sophistry that masquerades as a defense of an embattled religious minority but, in fact, undermines their long-term interests in Western societies. Of course, we often wish to suppress the speech of others, and, of course, we often believe that some symbols or entities really are sacred and ought not to be violated (unlike those fake idols that others hold sacred). But the fact that people are often unhappy with the protections they get in this or that case proves absolutely nothing. It is a strange exercise in hollow, content-free formalism, which holds up mere disagreement or dissatisfaction as evidence of profound arbitrariness or ideological bias. Of all thriving religious communities in the West, the most pious segments of the Muslim community seem as interested as any and more interested than most in their expressive liberties—to preach Islam (da‘wa), to bear witness to Muslim truths and values, to denounce Western imperialism, to protest against sexual moralities and theories of human origins that they oppose, and to construct new material and virtual moral communities. Some of what issues from these quarters injures me immediately and offends me profoundly. That is exactly as it should be.