Stupid Games, Stupid Prizes

Salman Rushdie and the less known blasphemers

Safoora Bibi’s throat was slit after students and a colleague at the school where she taught accused her of blasphemy. Nigerian college student Deborah Samuel was beaten to death and set on fire after sending a group message her classmates found offensive to their faith. Free Saudi Liberals blogger Raif Badawi was finally set free from prison after a decade but is banned from leaving Saudi Arabia to see his family. Mohsin Abbas was threatened with death after working on a BBC documentary about Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. These are just some of the blasphemy stories from the past eight months.

And then last week, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage by a man — now charged with attempted murder — who was not even alive when The Satanic Verses was published and the fatwā issued.

Most of the immediate reactions appropriately expressed revulsion at this attack on Rushdie and rightfully raised alarms about what it portends for basic principles of free expression. But not everyone was troubled. Once again, a noxious but popular view, one widely shared after the Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty murders, reared its ugly head. As it turns out, some think it’s fair game for an author to be stabbed if people are still angry over a decades-old book of his that they likely haven’t even read. Or, at minimum, they believe the victim is an equal participant in the attack. After all, can you really blame Rushdie’s attacker for bringing a knife to a word fight?

You can find plenty of comments like these if you look — this man, for example, so sagely suggested that people “in the West” who “don’t want to be stabbed” should “refrain from doing things that would make it likely someone stabs them” — but at their basic level, they say the same thing. This tweet from Emirati royal Hend bint Faisal Al-Qasimi (an apparently proud adherent of the “free speech for me but not for thee” philosophy) is a good representative of the genre: 

Free speech does not authorize you to insult, condescend, & mock other religious figures & religions. Some people don’t care about their religion but some do. Play a stupid game – you will win a stupid prize. Your call. Some people only want fame no matter the cost/sacrifice.

I’ll leave the obviously false claim that free speech does not protect religious criticism or insult for another time, because the condescension dripping from the rest of the tweet deserves special attention: “Play a stupid game – you will win a stupid prize.” Most people would perhaps phrase it a bit more delicately than Al-Qasimi did here, but what she said isn’t so different from what the Spokesperson of the High Representative for the UN Alliance of Civilization said, for example, after school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in 2020.

The High Representative is following with deep concern the growing tensions and instances of intolerance triggered by the publication of the satirical caricatures depicting Prophet Muhammed, which Muslims consider insulting and deeply offensive. The inflammatory caricatures have also provoked acts of violence against innocent civilians who were attacked for their sheer religion, belief or ethnicity. The High Representative stresses that insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarization and fragmentation of the society.

The suggestion here is that when there is violence against blasphemers, it is the blasphemers’ fault for provoking such a response. If they didn’t want violence, they should’ve avoided the expression that caused offense. Only the blasphemers, it’s insinuated, have agency: They can choose whether or not to offend. Their attackers have no choice how they respond to the offense.

This view may seem attractive to people who considered Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons to be deeply offensive examples of “punching down” or Rushdie’s writing unnecessarily divisive. They are, critics suggest, just fame seekers looking to monetize offense and hurt for their own gain. It’s other people who need to be protected from them. 

But this is not the sophisticated balancing act between rights its adherents seem to think it is. If anything, it’s quite ignorant. In reality, the victims of blasphemy-related violence and prosecution are rarely French cartoonists or award-winning novelists living in the United States. Most of the victims are religious minorities, political dissidents, LGBT activists, teachers, students, secularists, artists, feminists, lawyers, children, and otherwise non-famous individuals (sometimes falsely) accused of insulting or offending religious figures or groups. Are these all fame seekers looking for wealth? Are they just provocateurs punching down? 

If you’ve been convinced that Charlie Hebdo’s staff and Salman Rushdie played a stupid game and won a stupid prize, and that as a rule provocative blasphemers get what they deserve, I want you to tell me exactly how far that principle goes: Did Raif Badawi and Mohsin Abbas — two men seeking to shed light on human rights abuses and improve their societies — play a “stupid game”? Did Safoora Bibi and Deborah Samuel — two women violently murdered after being accused of transgressing the religious views of their peers — win a “stupid prize”? What is the principle you believe that distinguishes these individuals from those murdered in Paris, or the attack in Chautauqua?

It should be obvious that Charlie Hebdo’s staff, Salman Rushdie, Raif Badawi, Mohsin Abbas, Safoora Bibi, Deborah Samuel and the many other victims of blasphemy-related violence bore no responsibility for the attacks or threats against them. No amount of perceived or intended religious offense justifies a knife or a bullet, and it is irrelevant how deeply believers felt the insult. But if that doesn’t convince you, know that the arguments you cite to dismiss what happened to Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo can just as readily be used to justify violence against a college student guilty of nothing other than sending a message in a group chat or a secular activist advocating for human rights. These are not just stupid games.